IS THIS A GREAT COUNTRY OR WHAT?

Vegan Vixens bite beef eaters (Tony Allen-Mills, The Sunday Times, August 7th, 2005)

Carrot lovers have never seen anything like them. The fastidious and hitherto not glamorous world of strict vegetarianism has been transformed into the sexiest story on American television.

Meet the Vegan Vixens, a group of scantily clad California models and actresses who have joined forces to titillate, tantalise and ultimately transform the beef-loving American male and his traditional dependence on a diet of burgers, steaks and ribs.

After years of listening to somnolent vegetarians drearily denouncing the horrors of the slaughterhouse and promoting the virtues of cabbage, an aspiring actress with the improbable name of Sky Valencia felt the vegan message — of total abstinence from all animal products — was not getting through.

She decided that it was time to try cleavage and bawdy jokes about cucumbers, not to mention a party at the Playboy mansion and the key ingredient in the modern American media diet, a row about a naked breast.

What started as a light-hearted attempt to portray the vegan lifestyle has turned into a television phenomenon. After only five episodes on a Californian cable channel, the Vegan Vixens are attracting national attention. One New York newspaper dubbed them “the soy of sex”.

So far they have had no discernible impact on US meat consumption, which still weighs in at more than 65lb per capita per year, but men who would never dream of ordering a veggie burger are suddenly searching for the Vegan Vixens website.

“Party with the world’s sexiest vegan girls while they arouse your senses and put you under their spell,” promises a trailer for the series. “It’s like no other show you’ve ever seen.”

“The image of vegans is that they are pale, dress badly and aren’t very much fun,” said Valencia, who previously belonged to an all-girl rock group called Shock Baby and who now runs a shelter for abandoned pit bull terriers. “That’s so not true. You should see the girls who came out of the woodwork when we started auditioning for true vegans.”

WANTED: Attractive, free-spirited Republican women with a VERY strong commitment to privatizing social security.