Bengaluru: In celebration of India’s historic first south pole moon landing and in recognition of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) for taking a stand against animal testing by opting to send a humanoid robot to space instead of animals for the Gaganyaan project, today People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) India delivered the agency a rocket-shaped vegan cake inspired by the Chandrayaan-3 mission and made with chocolate truffle and blue buttercream that’s entirely vegan (vegetarian and free of eggs and dairy). The cake was made by vegan bakery Crave by Leena in Bengaluru.
Photos of the cake can be found here.
“India is the first to land on the moon’s south pole, and vegetarian eating also originated in India. Our nation now has the largest population of vegetarians in the world and has seen an astounding 360% increase in the number of vegans in 10 years, so there’s a lot for us to be proud of,” says PETA India Manager of Fashion, Media, and Celebrity Projects Monica Chopra. “In celebration of all this, PETA India was proud to deliver a vegan cake to ISRO today.”
PETA India points out that the use of animals for eggs and dairy causes suffering on a massive scale. In the egg industry, chickens are kept in filthy cages so small that they can’t spread a single wing and newborn male chicks are ground up, burned, or buried alive since they can’t lay eggs, along with other unwanted chicks. Male calves in the dairy industry are commonly abandoned, left to starve, or killed since they can’t produce milk, and the beef industry is largely able to exist because the dairy sector supplies it with cattle to kill.
In addition, eating meat and other animal-derived foods has been linked to heart disease, strokes, diabetes, cancer, and obesity, while rearing and killing animals for food has been linked to a multitude of zoonotic diseases, including SARS, bird flu, swine flu, Ebola, HIV, and likely COVID-19. A United Nations report concluded that a global shift towards vegan eating is necessary to combat the worst effects of the climate catastrophe.
PETA India – whose motto reads in, in part, that “animals are not ours to eat” – opposes speciesism, a human-supremacist worldview. For more information, please visit PETAIndia.com or follow the group on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.
