VEGETARIAN MISCELLANY
I don't eat enough tofu. I realized this yesterday when I purchased a small tub of this Thai Tofu Salad and almost died from its deliciousness.
I don't know why it's called a salad. And I don't care, really. Just keep it coming: chunks of tofu marinated in soy sauce, cilantro, ginger, onion and sweet peppers — some sesame oil? — then roasted to tangy perfection.
I was really hungry when I bought the tofu, so I started eating it in the car. And I started doing something I don't ever remember doing, but which I've heard others who live alone say they do: talking to myself. This is so good! God, I have to get some more of this. Oh man, I'm talking to myself! Out loud. Alone in the car. Not even a dog is here. Yeah, but so what, this is so good! Let's eat this piece with all the cilantro on it!
I have to get this recipe. It's made me totally excited about being a vegetarian. And it's not that I didn't like tofu. I have always liked it more or less. I was just never super excited about it. I never craved it. I think part of that was because I grew up thinking tofu was a second-rate meat substitute, and I never really shook that notion, even when I knew better. But now that thought is completely, utterly, eternally banished from my brain.
Something else that made me excited about being a vegetarian — usually I just feel blase about it — is that as I was leaving the public library I noticed a sizeable PETA display by the children's section. Not something that would normally attract my attention, but I thought it was really interesting that the city library was providing a forum for a group that our milque-toast citizenry tends to think of as "radical." So I looked at some of the display items and left with a "Vegetarian Starter Kit," which is a little magazine explaining all the major myths about vegetarianism — like you won't get enough protein — and why celebrities like Clint Eastwood and Carl Lewis are vegans. (The reason why Josh Hartnett gave up meat is fantastically gross).
I imagined some little kid at the library picking up one of these magazines (they have a very kid-friendly design) and assaulting her parents with a blistering critique of the family's diet. What could be a better crusade for vegetarianism than some 9-year-old-super-annoying-fundamentalist-vegan-convert harping at every meal about ethical treatment of animals? You'd give up meat just to get some peace and quiet.
posted by kc @ 12:51 AM
27 comments
27 Comments:
That tofu "salad" sounds fantastic! I want to try that sometime.
I got one of those PETA "starter kits" when Ben was dabbling in vegetarianism. I was disappointed with it because it should rightfully be called a Vegetarian Convincer Kit. It didn't offer much help in the way of "starting," and I was already convinced.
The magazine I have has a section, with photos, on how animals raised for food in this country are treated. It's really sickening. I read about two paragraphs and decided I either had to become a vegan instantly or triple my grocery bill by buying all organic, free-range, cage-free eggs, milk, etc. (That was what this post was originally about, and I lacked the coherence at 2 a.m. to think it through, so I just deleted that part for another day).
The big mistake in the magazine, I think, was to follow the animal cruelty section with a bunch of recipes. The last thing I felt like doing was eating — anything.
Ooh, yeah, I know what you mean.
What could be a better crusade for vegetarianism than some 9-year-old-super-annoying-fundamentalist-vegan-convert harping at every meal about ethical treatment of animals?
Like Lisa Simpson.
I thought it was really interesting that the city library was providing a forum for a group that our milque-toast citizenry tends to think of as "radical."
Are there people who don't think of PETA as radical? I would think they would fit any definition of radical, even if you believe some of the stuff they say.
I don't think PETA is radical. I think they make a lot of sense, and I think if it weren't for groups like them, there'd be a lot more cruelty and needless experimentation on animals than there is.
Do you not believe what PETA says, even if you disagree with some of their tactics?
I guess they are radical in the sense that they sometimes go outside the law to rescue animals, like by breaking into a lab.
I guess what I meant to say is that they're not the whacked out fringe group they're often portrayed as being. They don't use violence against people (if you exclude the occasional fake blood throwing). Their ideas, when examined, are rational and compassionate.
I think of radical groups as people like the KKK, the SLA, the Weather Underground and such — people who use violence against other people to support an untenable agenda.
The same could be said for people who try to blockade abortion clinics. Their belief in what they are doing is just as sincere and their tactics are comparable. I consider them radical, just as I consider PETA radical. And I don't believe everything I read in their materials any more or less than I believe PETA. If the things PETA claim were true, they would be reported by other outlets. I can't believe that there could be a conspiracy of silence in the media about animal cruelty.
Hmmm. I don't consider abortion protesters radical. Protesting abortion is, in fact, a fairly mainstream idea. Radical, to me, would be the ones who kill abortion providers in the interest of saving "unborn" children.
The media ROUTINELY reports on PETA concerns.
PETA's notion is that it's cruel to keep an animal in a tiny cage where it can't move around or see daylight or have ANY quality of life, to just fatten it up and then slaughter it. That's how many food-animals are treated. That is not a lie. It is demonstrably true. It's not something the media is going to report on day in and day out unless there's a development, though. And, frankly, many people do not consider that kind of treatment cruel. They don't give a flying rat's ass where the meat in their fast-food hamburger came from. Many of the animal abuse stories you hear about in the media, you hear about because peole like PETA brought attention to them.
I'd like you to give an example of something that PETA has said that you KNOW to be untrue.
Will you still do your post on changing your eating habits? And have you read “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” by Michael Pollan? I was stumping for this book around here last fall as I’m sure you will remember. One thing he does really well is show that the ethics of food choice are surprising complex and that “all organic, free-range, cage-free eggs, milk, etc.” are often not what we think they are once they are produced on an industrial scale. Pollan is an advocate of local, small scale food production, but he admits that it is hard to see how that can grow beyond just a fringe.
Oh, and on tofu. Once in the mid-nineties when I was down in Bisbee, Arizona, I bought some spicy, baked tofu at the food co-op that was really yummy. After that trip was over, I tried to track the product down but couldn’t remember the name of the company. So I tried off and on over a few years to create my own with rather dismal results. I wish you better luck with your tofu salad.
Yeah, I'll try to do that post, DW. I think it's an important issue to sort through. I'd like to read that book. I am increasingly becoming a fan of LOCAL, LOCAL, LOCAL, even though it tends to be expensive. I can buy a gallon of Dillons whole milk for $1.99 and a gallon of local, organic milk for just over $6. If I were wealthy, it would be a no-brainer, but as it is, it's hard sometimes to put ethics above economics.
I just feel better knowing that an egg I'm eating came from a chicken that got to walk around out in the sunlight and be a chicken, and not from some creature that spends its whole miserable life in a tiny cage.
We have a restaurant here called Local Burger, and virtually everything they sell is produced by local growers and ranchers (or at least in the region). The emphasis is on supporting local farmers and on health and environmentally sound farming practices. We had a story in the paper about a local guy who's doing a 30-day diet at this restaurant (eating healthy hamburgers and potatoes cooked in healthier oils) and he's lost a ton of weight, etc. I don't know how anyone could afford to eat three meals a day there, but I admire what they're about. (I assume there a ton of places like this in California and that they're probably cheaper?)
There should be. I’m not really that plugged into the restaurant scene out here. There is a Thai place I go to, a locally owned pizza place that makes a killer veggie on whole wheat pizza, and a grill type place that has good salads if I don’t want to buy salad fixings from the store. (Strangely, none of the grocery stores have salad bars—perhaps regulations don’t allow them.) Other than that, I don’t eat out much except for the shop on the way to Yosemite that has great burritos really cheap. However, I know who to ask about your local food restaurant. I’ll get back to you.
One way to think about this is not that the local organic food is expensive, but that the corporate factory food is unrealistically cheap. There is a concept in economics called “externality” where some of the real costs are not part of the monetary price. A simple example is a factory that dumps a lot of nasty chemicals into a river. All the downstream users have to pay for expensive treatment plants to remove the pollution. However, this cost isn’t born by the factory: it is external to their production and sales. So our corporate food has some real costs that are likewise external and that you don’t pay cash for in the store or restaurant. These include the moral cost of brutal animal practices, but they also include the environmental damage of the industrial food system. And there are also health care costs such as antibiotic resistant bacteria that breed at the factory farms. And then there are the subsidies where our tax dollars are used to encourage excess production of under priced food. Too much food that is too cheap contributes to obesity which is a rapidly growing health care cost. If these costs were internalized, food would cost more, but would still be far far cheaper than it was fifty years ago.
I think more expensive food leads to less waste, too. If I pay $5 for a bottle of organic orange juice, I'm going to drink the last drop and not let it go to waste on the theory that it only cost $1.99.
I think I will experiment with buying more local organic.
Another thing is, if you get into the habit of buying that sort of stuff, you probably get OUT of the habit of spending a lot of money at restaurants and on convenience eating.
I think nothing about paying $3 for a latte at a coffee shop or $7 for a martini, so why would I balk at paying $6 for a gallon of good organic milk that will last me a week?
For me, eating out -- or going to coffee shops or bars -- is about being social. I love the food Mary and I make at home, but if we go too long without going out, I start having almost a sort of cabin fever. For me, trying to eat better is as much about health as morals, although I'm all for the morals of eating better food, too. But it's very hard to distance myself from that "restaurant culture."
Oh yeah, I LOVE going out to eat. I wouldn't want to give it up, but I can cut back. And actually, I eat out a lot less now, living by myself, than I did before, because of the social thing you mentioned. When you're in a couple, it's easy to say we don't feel like cooking, let's go have someone wait on us, make an evening of it ...
Part of the problem with eating out is that the food is so amazingly bad for you. One reason for that is again that the food stuffs are too cheap. Restaurants have a lot of costs, but buying the food isn’t such a major one. Thus they can give a heaping plateful to make you feel like you are getting a better deal. I just read that Ruby Tuesday now has a 2000-calorie double deck hamburger (and that doesn’t count the fries that come with it). So that one burger has as many calories as most people should eat all day. It probably also has as much saturated fat and sodium as you should consume in a week.
To be social, you could go out with your friends and have a simple cup of coffee. But here too, the establishment tempts you with excessive food. Instead of just a cup of coffee, they would like you to buy a coffee-cum-milkshake that hits you up with another thousand calories and the better part of another weeks ration of saturated fat.
It's true that as I've been eating healthier I find that what I most often get in a lot of restaurants is the grilled chicken with rice and a salad. But here again, it probably has three times the sodium of the grilled chicken I fix at home, and I guarantee you I can fix a better salad than most restaurants. Not to mention, why should I pay so much for something I can fix at home for a tenth of the cost. It's all about wanting to "go out."
Yeah, I'm not exactly a health nut (hehe), but there are a few things I used to eat all the time that I just don't touch now, like the cheese soup at the local brewery and a fried mushroom sandwich. They started serving their tuna salad on focaccia, which is much fattier (and not as good!) than regular bread, so I don't eat that either. And I rarely eat fries anymore — maybe half a dozen times a year.
Sharon, when you come visit we can go to the healthy burger place. They have veggie burgs (if Mary's not eating meat).
You've sworn off the cheese soup? You're kidding.
I shudder to think how much fat is in that soup! You can turn the spoon upside down and have it stick! I suppose it's no worse than eating an ice cream sundae, though.
I could give up the ice-cream sundae a thousand times easier than I could give up cheese, though. And potatoes. See, my cravings aren't sweets; they're fats!
Yes, kc, Mary has been meatless for, oh, nearly three years now I guess, so a healthy/veggie burger place sounds appealing. Do they have meat, too, though, or should I begin preparing myself? :)
They have every kind of meat! Beef burgers, pork burgers, elk burgers, buffalo burgers ... All the meat is locally raised, very lean and there aren't any hormones, etc.
What’s the name of this place? Was there a write-up about it in your paper that would be in the on-line archives?
Local Burger. Yes, there have been a few stories about it.
OK, I’ll have a look. Is most of the content stashed behind fee walls, or are they more civic minded than that?
*****
We acknowledged the new earlier start of Daylight Savings Time today by grilling fish. And with wonderful weather too. By the way, did you know that the Brits call it Summer Time? Why didn’t Americans come up with a punchy and direct coinage like that?
Okay, so I know ya'll finished talking about days ago but I just opened my most recent issue of "Emory magazine" which is all about everything you have blogged here--local, organic, sustainable, simple food.
I was reading an article on obesity and about fell out of my chair when I read that "for the first time, more people globally are overweight than underweight--nearly half a billion people worldwide are considered overwieght or obese."
That's related to sedentary lifesytles but I think even more to what and how much we eat--are tempted to eat--are offerred to eat.
Yikes.
DW, I like "Summer Time."
AEL, that IS an astounding statistic!
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