[Editor's Note: The following is a guest post from friend of vegaroo, Zarah, about her experience with the Vegan Speed Dating event at this weekend's Cruelty Free Festival. We'll have more event highlights coming soon!]

So you have a great boyfriend. He’s really good at fixing things, he cooks you yummy vegan meals all the time, and he has a pretty impressive beard. But then he dumps you. He’s not so great anymore. (Oh and he still eats cheese, yes that definitely removes him from the category of ‘greatness’).

Finding yourself suddenly single after a long stint of monogamous relations is pretty rough for most people. It can be hard re-entering the comparatively unstable and confronting world of dating. But when that world is reduced dramatically by your preference for a likeminded vegan partner, you’ve got yourself quite a challenge on your hands.

Thank goodness for the first appearance of Vegan Speed Dating at the 2010 Sydney Cruelty Free Festival!!! This could be quite fun. However you have noticed that vegan females seem to do a pretty good job at outnumbering vegan males and suspect that this may be the case in this scenario. You’re not wrong. The ratio is definitely not in your favour; your side is outnumbering the other by about three to one. An announcement is made on the main stage in front of a crowd of hundreds in the hope of attracting some more gentlemen to the mix. Come on men, there’s an abundance of single women by the rotunda, get over there! At one point it seems there are more people gathered to observe the spectacle than to participate in it. People even come to take photos to capture your desperation (thank you Matt).

As one male speed dater put it “there’s an imbalance of resources”. Single vegan men are indeed a resource. (However if the turnout for the later same sex session was any indication, you should be thankful you are not here to find a same-sex vegan dating partner.)

So we’re underway, with a total of 5 eligible vegan men on offer, but wait, there’s a late entry, taking the total to 6! (You later discover a third of them are not really vegan.) You do feel for them, all this attention, an inundation of eager ladies, having to answer “how long have you been vegan?” twenty times over. No wonder one guy makes an early exit (he “has to be somewhere” he explains).

There is definitely more to uncover about people than the three minutes allows. Hmm and you sense a reluctance on the ladies’ part to stick to the time limit and move onto the next gentleman when time’s up. Not one to muck around, you’ve got a date lined up this week with a renegade contender who didn’t want to play by the “we’ll email you your matches” rule. Success story maybe, let’s see if we can cut it on a ‘real’ date where we can’t conveniently just get up and move to the right when we’ve got nothing left to say to one another.

I have to admit, I thoroughly enjoyed the addition of speed dating at this year’s Cruelty Free Festival (it didn’t quite top Suzy Spoon’s cooking demo, but it was definitely up there!) Making superficial judgements about potential dates in a short period of time and being left wondering what else there is beneath the surface does have a weird attraction about it. Short of waiting a year for the opportunity to try my luck again at the next CFF, I think I might sneak into the realm of ‘non-vegan specific’ speed dating. We don’t all start out as vegans, right?

(Thank you to Sarah and Animal Liberation for once again putting on a super awesome festival, and for Sundara and Co for making the trek up from Canberra to introduce Sydney’s vegans to speed dating!)

[Editor's Note: The following is a guest post by Paul Goodsell, who will be embarking on an epic bushwalk along the Te Araroa Track in New Zealand in a few months to raise awareness about the capabilities of vegans. He's showing the world the vegans kick some serious arse and we wish him the best of luck on his journey! Here he explains more about his motivations.]

Going vegan. Several years ago I would have laughed at the prospect. You see, I was one of those typical people that didn’t think too much about the wellbeing of non-humans, and thought of vegans as these anti-social salad-munchers that looked in need of a good blood transfusion, or steak.

In 2007 I started an Arts degree with a major in philosophy. In Intro to Philosophy, one of my first subjects, we were required to read a chapter of Animal Liberation by Peter Singer. By the time I put the paper down I was converted. I had been naive. I couldn’t justify eating meat any longer. I went vegetarian immediately.

When I made this choice I did so with the intention of turning vegan. Dairy and eggs, I thought, didn’t directly lead to the killing of animals. And there was a lot of effort being put into making these two industries, at least, more humane. I had trouble reconciling this argument and started to research the abolitionist movement, reading the likes of Francione and Yates.

Abolitionists, it seemed, didn’t much like Singer and his utilitarian / welfarist position. I started to see why. I went vegan immediately after reading a number of papers by Francione and emailed him, thanking him for shining the light. I disagree with Francione on a lot of things, I don’t worship him the one some do, but I think his core argument is essentially right and hard to rebuke.

I’ve been vegan for just over 6 months. I was vegetarian for 3 or so years. As much as I would like not to alienate myself I find myself, more often than not, engaging in discourse with people about why I am vegan and why using animals is wrong. I find the majority of people to be extremely curious, and have rarely faced hostility. Ignorance and irrationality, yes. Hostility, not so much.

As much as I have tried to keep a low profile, it’s not for me; I’d like to make a difference.

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Woo-hoo! We’ve got a guest post from an awesome lady named Leigh Drew (who you know better as ZuckerBaby and the awesome co-owner of Naked Espresso and Basil in Newtown.) She teaches an Introduction to Vegan Cuisine class at Sydney Community College, which I totally recommend for any vegan noobs, or your squirrelly friends who think vegan cooking is hard and confusing.  In her own words, here’s some background on Leigh and how she came to teach this course!

One of the hardest things I found when first going vegan was a dearth of Australian vegan resources – cookbooks, blogs, websites, cooking classes – any of these that I could find seemed to be US or Canadian.  The first vegan cookbook I bought confused the heck out of me, with its references to “Braggs” and “nutritional yeast” and “Earth Balance” – what were these things?

As time went on I found my feet and started making some good vegan food. I’ve been cooking since I was 9 and have done part of a chef’s apprenticeship, so once I started thinking about it, making delicious vegan food was not hard.  And once I found some of those magical ingredients, Braggs and nutritional yeast and Nuttelex (the Earth Balance of Oz), I really hit my stride exploring vegan cuisine.

Strangely it was the further constraints put upon me by being diagnosed, a few years into being vegan, with “Syndrome X” or insulin resistance – a pre-Type 2 Diabetes state – and having to cut out processed foods and sugars from my diet and really concentrate on whole foods that kicked my food creation into high gear.

Then one magical day almost 4 years ago, at my first ever Vegan Expo, I found myself helping out in a food demonstration.  I was inspired by this experience to contact the Sydney Community College – through whom I had done a vegan Yum Cha course – and ask if they were interested in my running a vegan cooking course.  Turns out that they were, and so it started.

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