The meat and dairy industries bombard Americans daily with aggressive, often-misleading messaging to convince people to consume more animal foods – a tactic discussed at length in Meatonomics. Now, in a refreshing counterpunch, advocacy group Animal Protection & Rescue League (APRL) has launched two “GO VEGAN” billboards next to a busy freeway in Los Angeles. It’s not cheap to design, create and run them – $13,500 for the first month, to be exact, but the economics make sense.

Together, the billboards are getting two million impressions per week – or eight million impressions over their four-week run. That’s about $0.002 per impression, or less than 1/35^th the cost of vegan literature (which runs $60 per 1,000 fliers). While a flier in hand might provide a more detailed message than a “GO VEGAN” slogan glimpsed in passing, advertising lore says a message must reach a viewer nine times before…

This year winter has very slowly crept in but it now it’s definitely in full form. In fact, it’s so cold here that it’s painful when the air first hits your face! As a result, we are in full comfort food mode, with warm soups on top of our list. Pasta Fagioli soup in particular has a special place in my heart. It was the first Italian soup I ever had when I first moved to the United States. It is one of those dishes I felt I had to re-create when I went back home, and re-create I did!