FoA no longer grateful for Café Gratitude and Gracias Madres

Jeer to Matthew and Terces Englehart, owners of multiple locations of popular California vegan restaurants Café Gratitude and Gracias Madre, who have shockingly started slaughtering animals on their now ironically titled Be Love Farm in northern California.

For more than a decade Friends of Animals has promoted the Café Gratitude locations and Gracias Madre in our vegan restaurant guides. But owners cannot expect the vegan community, nor Friends of Animals, to continue to support their businesses.

Even if their restaurants continue to have a vegan menu, they have betrayed the principles vegan restaurants stand upon and they no longer deserve to be patronized. We are removing them from our vegan restaurant guides.

Be Love Farm, which supplies organic produce and food products to the Café Gratitude locations in Southern California, is now processing cheeses, bone broth and beef. How could the owners of the vegan mecca Café Gratitude have abandoned their ethical vegan principles upon which they were founded?

A blog post by the Englehart’s in February of 2015 explains: “It was a big week as we begin to make the transition into our own meat products after nearly 40 years of vegetarianism. While I would clearly say we are in transition and that transition is happening deep within our beings, we know it is a necessary and important part of our own growth as well as the sustainability of our farm. Certainly a part of us wants to either deny the inevitability of death or simply not let ourselves get present to the reality of it, for our animals as well as ourselves. But we know that while we die a little bit each day as we open our hearts further to the presence of love, and as we are the caretakers of our farm animals the responsibility for their health and well being lies with us. This is clearly a longer discussion and we invite you to one of our upcoming farm dinners over the next nine months, where we share more about this process..”

Join the discussion and let Matthew and Terces Englehart know you are disgusted by them turning the farm where they grow plants that supply their vegan restaurants will also be the site of animal slaughter. Call them at 415.501.9678 or send them an e-mail: belovefarm@gmail.com.

We have a big cheer today for the news that major pesticide manufacturer Scotts Miracle-Gro announced that it will immediately start phasing out dangerous neonicotinoid insecticides from its outdoor-use Ortho brand by 2017.

Ortho will stop using neonicotinoids in three products for roses, trees, and shrubs by next year and modify other products later, said Tim Martin, vice president and general manager of Ortho, reported the Associated Press. The lawn-care company is a division of the Ohio-based Scotts Miracle-Gro.

The use of neonicotinoid-containing pesticides is one of several factors believed to contribute to rapid declines in the bee population, along with poor nutrition, mites and disease.

When the neonicotinoid-bearing pesticides are sprayed on some crops – such as cotton or citrus – and spread to pollen or nectar, the bees can develop an addictive craving for the substances, similar to a human addiction to nicotine.

As they keep coming back for more, the chemicals can damage bees’ central nervous systems, ultimately impacting their ability to pollinate flowers, one study found last month.

This decision by Miracle-Gro is an example of how since it has become aesthetically pleasing and no longer cost prohibitive, organic lawn care is continuing to go mainstream as evidence of the health risks of pesticides—to human and non-human animals—piles up. Learn more about the pros of organic lawn care in our Action Line article “Organic Lawn Care Takes Root” and check back with us all week for more updates and news about this important issue!