About us and additional websites of interest

This website provides information related to Veganism and Jainism. It contains resources related to health, community, and spiritual/religious debate. Jainism is an ancient Indian religion with an ethic and practice that places paramount value on ahimsa, which can be translated as nonviolence, harmlessness, and in its positive aspect, is also associated with karuna or jivdaya, compassion for all life. On this site, we explore veganism, renouncing the use and abuse of animals in all forms,  and especially in food, as a modern expression for ahimsa.

Who are we? Jina was raised in a Gujarati (Indian) Jain family in the US and grew up in a culture rich with opportunities to learn Jainism and meet Jain friends locally, nationally and internationally.  She has been vegetarian all her life.  She turned vegan in college after learning about the ways that the dairy industry is connected to the meat industry and inextricably linked to animal suffering and death. She became a family doctor and trained in general preventive medicine. She found that her nutrition education in medical school was quite minimal , but  sought out opportunities to learn more about nutrition, both in the public health classroom and outside of it, as she left the academic world and needed to stay informed about nutrition to navigate the real-world choices that she makes as a vegan person and a doctor. Christian is  a European energy efficiency scientist and self-avowed tech nerd who has become vegetarian as an adult, supported by a mindfulness meditation practice and a veg friendly community including many vegan friends in the Bay area. While Jina  posts more nutrition and Jain related content, Christian does the heavy technical lifting. They live in Northern California and much of the early content focuses on events in the area, especially the Jain Center of Northern California  (JCNC) in Milpitas, CA.  We started this site after participating in the 10th Anniversary Celebration at JCNC in August, 2010,  and you’ll see that many of the posts expand on the veganism related programming that was part of that event. As time has passed we’ve included content from India, where we lived for a year, and other parts of the US and world.

After we started this site, we discovered a largely UK-based list serv, in which like-minded participants discuss issues, which is  www.jainvegans.org,  and goes directly  to an egroup that is moderated by others.   A long time Jain vegan friend also reminded us of www.jivdaya.org, another site originating in CA, USA with well established categories for posts not limited to CA based events,  and  with references to newsletters published over many years. The originator of that website brings his experiences as a frequent traveler to India, a first generation immigrant to the US, and an organizer of Jain vegan activities over years and across generations to his rich site.

Our most recent find is https://www.urimpact.org/ by a young person in Northern California. It is very well researched and beautifully presented.

We are happy whenever we see more resources being posted. How sweet it is that  that we have Jain vegan resources based in the UK, India and the US, with  contributors across a variety of ages and cultural experiences within our very small and spread out Jain community!

We will try to point people to links of relevance in these and other sites, rather than duplicating the material.

We welcome guest posts.

To contact us,  leave a comment on a post, or e-mail us (this website name without www or .com)@gmail.com.  You can also email us  to suggest topics that you would like us to address, or topics that you could like to write about and consider having us post on this site.