July 4, 2007
On grilling out veggie style
If you’re like me, you’re making the rounds at various barbecues during this Fourth of July holiday. Although this is a perfect opportunity to have your occasional foray into meat eating if you’re a part-timer or dabbler, veggies have to give it a little more thought.
If you’re a lazy vegan like me, you probably just pop into your grocery and snag a pack of veggie burgers or “Not Dogs” to take along so you can grill out along with your meat-eating comrades. Just slap them on the grill and then slather with fixings as usual. (If you don’t want juices from meat-based burgers to “contaminate” yours, wrap them individually in tin foil first or have the host do yours first, before the others.)
If you’re a little more creative, try a tofu-based shish kebab; take it with and have your host grill it for you. (You’ll likely have meat-eating friends salivating over your plate if you do this, too.) Simply prepare a block of tofu for grilling by freezing solid, thawing completely, then rinsing. Squeeze the water out, then cube the tofu into kebab-sized pieces. Skewer with veggies like onion, green pepper, cherry tomatoes, and fresh mushrooms, then sear on the grill. Delish.
If you’re vegetarian and can eat dairy and/or eggs, you don’t have to do anything special to get your fill, unless you want to. There are likely plenty of potato salad and bean-based dishes that pack a protein punch, and vegans, too, can indulge in vegetarian baked beans even if the potato or macaroni salad is off limits.
If you’re the host, you can be a vegetarian’s delight and provide the veggie burgers, hummus, etc., for those who want them. For guests who eat meat, ask them to bring their own (unless you know what to buy) and grill it themselves. (I’ve never trusted my own meat-cooking skills on the grill, since I never do it; better to leave that to experienced folks.) They’ll be happy to do so. And you as the host can rustle up a spread any veggie’d be proud of. You might just surprise a few meat-eating friends, too.
June 29, 2007
Before you “go veggie” (or try to), get rid of the junk
Maybe you’ve put on a few pounds and want to see if going vegetarian part time will help you pare down a bit, or have just decided that you want to be healthier.
Whatever your reason, you might want to take this in stages and get rid of the junk food first, before you go veggie. Why? In my opinion, if veganism isn’t quite for you and you’re one of those folks who needs “just a little meat” to feel satisfied, you might end up reaching for the chips to help take care of increased hunger pangs. And it’s also often true (as it was in my case) that even if being vegetarian *is* for you, you’ll feel “hungrier” at first on a vegetarian diet than you do on one with some meat in it. In that case, it’s not really true that you feel “hungrier,” only that it’s a lighter way of eating and that feeling full feels different as a veggie than it does as a meat eater. Until you get used to it, though, you’ll likely be eating more, so it should be healthy food and not junk.
Finally, junk just isn’t good for anyone no matter how you slice it, whether you’re a veggie or a meat eater. Occasional sweets, or chips and soda, are fine as treats once in awhile, but more and more Americans are eating them in vast quantities. (And yep, veggies, that goes for soy ice cream, too. It’s as “bad” for you and as high in sugar/refined carbs and fat as the real stuff, the only difference being the dairy vs. soy base, so moderation is still the key, just like with the non-veggie stuff. Terribly disappointing, I know. 
)
While it’s true that going vegan or vegetarian likely lowers your overall calorie intake and increases your fiber intake so that you can probably “get away” with cheating on junk food or refined carbohydrates more than you would otherwise, it’s still not a good idea to do so a lot. Health is the key either way, so drop the junk. You’ll feel better for it, whether you decide being veggie is ultimately for you or not.
Getting along in a non-veggie world: “Eat before you go”
Let’s face it, we veggies are in the minority when it comes to society in most parts of the US, if not other parts of the world. Whether you’re a lazy vegan like me or are a bit more stringent in your views, it usually comes to pass that at some point, you’re going to be in a situation where you’re flying solo as a veggie; some of your comrades probably won’t even know that “vegetarianism” does not embrace chicken as a food (ever have someone say, “Oh, you don’t eat meat? Okay. Well, we have chicken. Do you eat chicken?” Um …).
Most of the time, family and friends are probably perfectly willing to prepare something special or you can bring your own, but if you’re at a company gathering or someplace you can’t check ahead to make sure you can get something substantial for dinner, eat before you go (at least for me, half a baked potato and some canned green beans just won’t fly for an entire evening). Not so much that you’re stuffed full and not at all hungry, but enough so that if all you’re going to get is some lettuce, you’re fine until you get home and can finish filling up. That way, you can eat your salad without wanting to rudely devour the wax fruit on the table, and even enjoy the evening without worrying that you’ll faint from hunger.
June 26, 2007
Hate cooking and want convenience? Try a bread machine and crockpot
Even if you hate cooking, you can still do largely “from-scratch” cooking, depending on your particular set-up, and rely only occasionally on convenience foods. Although convenience foods are wonderful, they do produce a lot of garbage and can be hard on the environment because of this. To balance things out and rely on packaged foods less often, invest in a crockpot.
I hate to cook myself, but I’ve gotten around this by using my crockpot and bread machine to keep me in homemade, “whole foods” dinners on what boils down to about four hours’ work a month. Whether you’re a full-time or part time veggie, the crockpot can be your best friend. For vegetarian folks, bean and legume-based soups and stews make a hearty meal with very little work. If you’re a meat-eater, you can also plop in some beef chunks in there or even do a pork roast and potatoes. Many sites online now have specifically crockpot-based recipes.
Another machine I can’t do without as a lazy vegan is my bread machine. In this case, it’s just because I don’t want to pay whole-grain bread prices at the store, but it’s also wonderful to have fresh hot bread at the touch of a button for pennies. It’s also a lot cheaper to eat “from scratch” than it is to rely on convenience foods. My own grocery budget runs at about $40 a month right now (up from about $30 before the gas hikes). I’m also lucky enough to have the room for a 13-cu-foot freezer, so I bulk cook about once a month and eat off of the results the rest of it. Even if you don’t have this advantage, though, you’ll still cut down on your time in the kitchen and ease up on your budget (as well as help the environment) with this kind of cooking.
June 25, 2007
Want to cut back on sugar and still be “sweet”? Try stevia
Even if you watch your diet religiously, you might still have a sweet tooth. I do, and try to fulfill it with healthy foods instead of ignoring it altogether. I used saccharin for several years, but of course it leaves a funny aftertaste and there are doubts about its safety, so I switched back to using sugar and just tried to be as sparing with it as possible.
Then I discovered stevia. This wonderful herb is actually slightly caloric rather than completely non-caloric, but is something like 600 times sweeter than sugar so that you can use very little. It does not promote tooth decay and in its unrefined form can even help stabilize blood sugar and act as an anti-fungal. Its unrefined (liquid) extract tastes very much like black licorice, so I only use it in coffee and tea, not in cooking.
The refined stevia has no health benefits to speak of but tastes exactly like sugar, in my opinion. It’s very, very sweet, so must be used sparingly and mixed very well in whatever you’re using it in, but I use it in baking and cooking as well as to sweeten beverages. Its only drawback (if it has one) is that it leaves baked sweetened goods like cookies slightly rubbery and a little sugar seems to help the texture, so I use about one-eighth the sugar called for just to help the browning and then sweeten to taste with stevia. It’s available at any health food store or online. I generally get my unrefined stevia at Vitaminshoppe.com and my refined at Puritan’s Pride (puritan.com or puritansale.com), as they’ve generally had the best prices for each kind.
June 22, 2007
Are you really vegan (or should you be) if you crave a lot of fake “meat”?
Back when I became vegan more than 20 years ago, Vegetarian Times had articles in it all the time about what it “really” meant to be a vegan, asking questions like, “If you think meat is so terrible, then why do you even want the ‘pretend’ stuff?” There were kind of two camps: the “purists,” who thought it was silly and made one a bit of a traitor to squash soy-based, artificially flavored, ultra-processed gelatinous mush into the shapes of the very “dead animal” foods one purported to disdain, and the folks who just wanted guilt-free burgers as close to the real thing as possible without having to think of the poor dead cow who might otherwise have sacrificed its life for that burger.
I have to admit, this has never been a particular quandary for me. I never liked meat (actually, it made me rather ill) and was very relieved to find out that I didn’t have to have it. So eating an artificially flavored soy-based substitute has never held particular attraction and I’m fine with unadulterated beans and rice, tomato-y cabbage stirfries with chickpeas, that sort of thing, with an occasional nod to fake burgers and whatnot if I’m going to a cookout (never have been able to find a burger recipe that’ll hold together on a grill).
Therefore, I don’t really know the experience of craving meat and thus needing a fake meat substitute to satisfy that craving. However, I suspect that if I did, I’d have a touch of the real thing now and then instead of lots of the fake thing.
First of all, I think it would likely be a healthier option; as I’ve said previously, I think we’re all just a bit different and need different things, so if we crave just a touch of meat, are we doing ourselves any favors by ignoring it? I’m not saying you should go ahead and just give yourself over every night to a 16-oz. porterhouse; that’s not healthy for anyone (as our burgeoning waistlines can attest), but just a touch now and then.
Second of all, I think we might very well be doing the environment a favor by doing the occasional nod to meat vs. eating lots of processed, overly packaged fake meat. It takes a lot of energy and resources to super-process and then package soy into the stuff that looks like meat. It takes a lot of energy to produce the meat itself, too, but I’d still think the resources are fewer for the meat you’d eat a bit of once a week versus the soy stuff you eat a lot of every day in the attempt to squelch cravings.
Certainly, the animal cruelty of the meat industry is enough to make anyone with even a hint of compassion want to turn away from it forever, physical needs notwithstanding. For myself, I’ve had no trouble doing that, since I already had an aversion to meat even before I found out the true conditions therein. Even so, I can still somewhat identify with the struggles vegans who still crave meat face when they try to avoid it, because I have my own guilty tugs when I pluck my kits’ chicken wings out of the freezer to thaw for their dinner. But I do it anyway, because I think it’s best for them. So I’d wonder whether we should all do ourselves the same favor, if we need it, and give our energies to changing the meat industry instead of perhaps wasting them trying to “willpower” ourselves into complete veganism, if it’s unnatural to us.
Are you really vegan (or should you be) if you crave a lot of fake “meat”?
Back when I became vegan more than 20 years ago, Vegetarian Times had articles in it all the time about what it “really” meant to be a vegan, asking questions like, “If you think meat is so terrible, then why do you even want the ‘pretend’ stuff?” There were kind of two camps: the “purists,” who thought it was silly and made one a bit of a traitor to squash soy-based, artificially flavored, ultra-processed gelatinous mush into the shapes of the very “dead animal” foods one purported to disdain, and the folks who just wanted guilt-free burgers as close to the real thing as possible without having to think of the poor dead cow who might otherwise have sacrificed its life for that burger.
I have to admit, this has never been a particular quandary for me. I never liked meat (actually, it made me rather ill) and was very relieved to find out that I didn’t have to have it. So eating an artificially flavored soy-based substitute has never held particular attraction and I’m fine with unadulterated beans and rice, tomato-y cabbage stirfries with chickpeas, that sort of thing, with an occasional nod to fake burgers and whatnot if I’m going to a cookout (never have been able to find a burger recipe that’ll hold together on a grill).
Therefore, I don’t really know the experience of craving meat and thus needing a fake meat substitute to satisfy that craving. However, I suspect that if I did, I’d have a touch of the real thing now and then instead of lots of the fake thing.
First of all, I think it would likely be a healthier option; as I’ve said previously, I think we’re all just a bit different and need different things, so if we crave just a touch of meat, are we doing ourselves any favors by ignoring it? I’m not saying you should go ahead and just give yourself over every night to a 16-oz. porterhouse; that’s not healthy for anyone (as our burgeoning waistlines can attest), but just a touch now and then.
Second of all, I think we might very well be doing the environment a favor by doing the occasional nod to meat vs. eating lots of processed, overly packaged fake meat. It takes a lot of energy and resources to super-process and then package soy into the stuff that looks like meat. It takes a lot of energy to produce the meat itself, too, but I’d still think the resources are fewer for the meat you’d eat a bit of once a week versus the soy stuff you eat a lot of every day in the attempt to squelch cravings.
Certainly, the animal cruelty of the meat industry is enough to make anyone with even a hint of compassion want to turn away from it forever, physical needs notwithstanding. For myself, I’ve had no trouble doing that, since I already had an aversion to meat even before I found out the true conditions therein. Even so, I can still somewhat identify with the struggles vegans who still crave meat face when they try to avoid it, because I have my own guilty tugs when I pluck my kits’ chicken wings out of the freezer to thaw for their dinner. But I do it anyway, because I think it’s best for them. So I’d wonder whether we should all do ourselves the same favor, if we need it, and give our energies to changing the meat industry instead of perhaps wasting them trying to “willpower” ourselves into complete veganism, if it’s unnatural to us.
June 21, 2007
If you’re vegan, you can’t be overweight … right?
I read something the other day online that declared, to paraphrase, “It’s impossible to be overweight if you’re vegan!”
Now, I’m as keen as anyone to get someone to go vegan if they can, but I had to laugh at that. As much as I would like to woo someone with this phrase, it’s not quite true. Plain and simple, you absolutely can make poor (vegan) food choices that will render you overweight. And yes, you still have to exercise even if you chow down on beans and rice instead of steak
It’s true that it’s probably a little harder to be overweight if you’re vegan; after all, if you eat even a moderately healthy diet, you’re getting a lot more fruits, veggies, and fiber, and a lot less fat, than someone who eats a meat-centered one with few fruits and veggies. One of the reasons it’s easier to gain weight in general with the typical meat-based diet is because meat has no fiber at all, so this makes it much more calorie dense than a veggie-based one. The fiber in the veggie-based one also forgives a few calories, since some of them pass on through undigested. Serving for serving, veggie-based meals also just have fewer calories in general than meat-based ones, so you can load your plate up and eat to fullness without worrying that what you’re eating is going to end up on your behind in quite the same way.
Even if you’re vegan, though, you still have to pay attention to what you’re putting in your mouth. If your favorite forms of subsistence are soy ice cream, peanut butter, and grilled (soy) cheese sandwiches but you skimp on the fruits, veggies, legumes and beans, you’re eating a relatively nutrient poor, very calorie dense diet.
To make eating as effortless as possible (meaning that you eat when you’re hungry, stop when you’re full, and ignore food the rest of the time), limit sweet treats like soy ice cream and high-sugar refined flour baked goods to occasional treats. Stock the fridge and cupboards with whole grains, fruits and veggies. And unfortunately, vegans also have to exercise just like anyone, so shoot for that 30 minutes a day experts recommend.
Just a note that as healthy as I like to eat, I have a definite sweet tooth. I’ve developed some very easy, healthy low sugar “treats” that are still truly good for you, like oatmeal cookies and pumpkin pie, so I rarely am even tempted by junk food anymore. If you’re interested, stop by http://home.earthlink.net/~kimcof/lazyvegan.htm, which is the website I have. Lots of good, very easy recipes there for the “kitchen-challenged” among us. 
June 20, 2007
Vegan is as vegan does … and then there are our pets
Okay, here’s a conundrum I bet any pet owning, animal loving vegan or vegetarian goes through. If you’re like me, you live a life as free as possible of animal products, do the vegan diet, keep a watch on animal cruelty and try to avoid products that do animal testing, etc. You just don’t want to support that kind of thing, so you don’t. You’re feeling pretty proud of yourself for your anti-cruelty, anti-meat position. Yep, doing just fine. Until …
“Meow.” Your beloved feline baby wants dinner, so you reach into the closet for some Meow Mix, or get a can of food out of the cupboard.
Stop. Now, think about this for a minute. Just *where* do you think this stuff comes from? Pressed tofu and dried carrots? Nope, folks, it’s MEAT (or more accurately the leftover junk thereof euphemistically called “byproducts” on the label), that nasty stuff you thought you’d so carefully (and maybe with just a touch of superiority) excised from your life. Well, think again.
Plain and simple, even if you’re vegan in your own diet, if you’ve got a pet, you’re not entirely so (unless you want to cram Fido or Fluff into a diet so unnatural to them as a species that you’ll actually have to feed them supplements to try to keep them alive, never mind truly healthy). You have to buy pet food (or make your own). Therefore, you are a meat consumer, whether you like it or not.
Now, I’d do anything for my babies. I am, after all, an animal loving vegan. My babies are animals … and so are the poor chickens and cows, et al, *they* eat. It is in part because of this continual tug between values that I will always be a lazy vegan. I cannot judge someone else’s desire or need for some meat in their diet while I lecture them on the evils of meat, *and* hold my nose while I boil chicken for my kits’ dinner at the same time. I’m just not that ambidextrous, nor do I want to be.
June 19, 2007
More on “to be or not to be” vegan
There was a comment posted this morning on yesterday’s blog that got me thinking, and I thought I should give the “to be or not to be … vegan” question a bit more attention.
First, let me make it clear that I would positively love it if every human on the planet could jump on the vegan bandwagon tomorrow. It’s better for the environment, it saves massive energy resources, it’s kinder to animals, etc. If any of us here have been vegan or vegetarian for any length of time, we know our own reasons for doing it and one or more of them are likely at least a variation of those. (Of course, this raises other issues, such as how we animal-loving vegans would feed our carnivorous – and domesticated – kitties especially without the meat industry to help us, but let that be a topic for another post at some point.)
But it’s not just that I think it’s unrealistic to think that everyone will become vegan with some education and perhaps a little pushing. I do think it’s unrealistic, actually, but that’s really another issue. It’s that I don’t think everyone *can* be completely vegan. Here’s why.
I used to think that everyone could be vegan if they wanted to be. I still think it’s true that *most* people could probably be vegan if they wanted to (which is yet another issue), but not everyone anymore. This is a conclusion I reached after a lot of years spent watching and learning in this lifestyle. Like I’ve said before, I know one person who has to have animal products in his diet regularly or he’d literally die because he can’t make his own cholesterol like most of us can. Two more have more subtle discomfort, but nonetheless they feel they do best with just a little meat. I don’t think this is a mistake, or greed, or misdiagnosis, whatever. I think it’s simply a fact that some people need a little meat to be healthy.
Why? Because the human species has been the most adaptive on the planet, and in evolutionary terms, our ancestors had to adapt to the food sources they had around them. Some had mostly fruit, beans, veggies and grains, while others had a lot more meat. You ate what you got, period, or you didn’t survive. So I think it stands to reason that we’ve come through history with traces of those diets embedded in our genes, depending. Some of us can’t stand the sight of meat, some of us need just a little, some of us can adapt either way.
Given that the medical community can’t agree across the board whether or not veganism is healthy (Dean Ornish supports it, for example, but I can’t tell you how many lectures I’ve heard other docs give about the need for dairy in the diet to get calcium still … and they’re not uncommon), I think this is probably an illustration of needing different strokes for different folks, not an endorsement of “one size fits all,” even if we’d like it to happen for veganism.
Again, what I most hope is that those who eat a meat-centered diet now switch to one that’s plant-centered with some meat in it if they need it. This would be no small change. After all, if three die-hard meat eaters drop their meat consumption by about 30% (for starters), that’s the same as if one person goes completely vegetarian. Still a huge impact.
