A term for it

I've written that I don't like the term "Vegan" because it implies a whole culture that I find pompous, self-satisfied, and negative. But it has left me without a good label for the way in which I wish to eat and I don't want that to lead to an identity crisis.

Dr. Colin Campbell in his book, The China Study called what he recommends plant-eating, which is accurate but lacks appeal for me.

The term herbivore is accurate, and although I am certainly a direct competitor with ground-hogs, it is too clinical for me.

So, I've decided to say I mostly eat produce.

The Produce Diet has a nice ring to it, doesn't it?

The free dictionary says that produce is "Farm products, especially fresh fruits and vegetables, considered as a group". Maybe that doesn't include grains. Maybe that doesn't include labratory-tofu products. But, a good name for something should evoke an emotion and an idea at the same time.

Have you ever watched people shopping for produce?

They pick stuff up. They pinch it. They smell it. They slow down. I think there are good vibes there and I like that about this name.

Why do it?

If you are looking for justifications to adopt an herbivore's diet, then consider this...

Michael Pollan, in this articled titled "Why Bother?", says that giving up meat is, "an act that would reduce your carbon footprint by as much as a quarter."

An herbivore's diet helps reduce greenhouse gases.

If you, in addition, plant your own garden then you will also reduce your fossil-fuel-calorie to food-calorie ratio too (which typically requires 10 fossil fuel calories per calorie of food).

The more I learn about my new diet, the better I feel about adopting it.

Vegetarian's Dilemma

I came across a passage in Michael Pollan's "The Omnivore's Dilemma" that I thought captured the essence of what I have been advocating here, which is eat a healthy plant-based diet, but don't employ a martyr's fanaticism. In a chapter called, "The Ethics of Eating Animals", he writes...

"Even if the vegetarian is a more highly evolved human being (???), it seems to me he has lost something along the way, something I'm not prepared to dismiss as trivial. Healthy and virtuous as I may feel these days, I also feel alienated from traditions I value: cultural traditions like the Thanksgiving turkey, or even franks at the ballpark, and family traditions like my mother's beef brisket at Passover. These ritual meals link us to our history along multiple lines - family, religion, landscape, nation, and, if you want to go back much further, biology. For although humans no longer need meat in order to survive (now that we can get our B-12 from fermented foods or supplements), we have been meat eaters for most of our time on earth. This fact of evolutionary history is reflected in the design of our teeth, the structure of our digestion, and, quite possibly, in the way my mouth still waters at the sight of a steak cooked medium rare. Meat eating helped make us what we are in a physical as well as social sense. Under the pressure of the hunt, anthropologists tell us, the human brain grew in size and complexity, and around the hearth where the spoils of the hunt were cooked and then apportioned, human culture first flourished."

The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
Michael Pollan
Penguin Books
p. 314

I would argue that Passover is once a year and there are worse moral failings than eating your mother's cooking. Also, think of how much more powerful the ritual will become when you give it a place of honor in your own diet. And finally, learn from this by creating rituals centered on a Vegan meal for your friends and family. You might celebrate October 4th (feast day of St. Francis of Assisi) with a vegetarian, candlelit supper. You might instead choose Arbor day, or Earth day, but whatever you choose stick with it and make it a tradition.

You might be slightly less healthy than the pure vegan, but perhaps slightly more happy.

Pizza

I have always liked pizza and was trying to resign myself to avoiding it as often as possible when I discovered I could make very good, in fact better, pizza without floating all the ingredients in cheese.

I started out by frying a few cloves of garlic in a 4-6 tbs of good-quality olive oil. Then I removed the browned garlic and added greens (like spinach or arugula) to the oil and cooked it until good and wilted. When done I mixed in the brown garlic bits and spread it on top of a prepared pizza dough (precook for 5 mins in a 375 degree oven).

Next I added a bunch of vegetables, and I mean a pile. I added carmelized onions, brine-cured olives, roasted red bell peppers, thinly sliced tomatoes (with their seeds removed), leftover grilled zucchini and/or eggplant, and mushrooms toasted to remove their water.

Finally, I drizzle everything with olive oil and shake on some garlic powder, salt, and brewer's yeast. Then I stick it in the oven and cook it until the crust is browned on the bottom. Afterwards it goes under the broiler to roast the vegetables a bit. When it comes out of the oven I add oregano and red pepper flakes and some finishing salt.

Now, when I grill I often toss on extra vegetables with a fridge-clearing pizza in mind. I also try to keep frozen whole-wheat doughs on-hand.

Other good additions are...

tapenade, marinated artichokes (I like those made by Pastene), marinated and grilled eggplant, hot peppers, grilled until soft fennel, small-cut lightly pre-cooked broccoli, and maybe one of those imitation meat products.

When you hit the right combination of ingredients your pizza will look, smell, and taste fantastic and that is the way food should be.

And the winner is...

I went grocery shopping over the weekend and was on the lookout for negative food advertising. The winner, which surprised me, was not a vegetarian or vegan convenience food (although they did prove competitive).

The winner was Ian's chicken nuggets which doesn't have this impressive list....

NO Artificial Flavors
NO Artificial Colors
NO Preservatives
NO Wheat!
NO Gluten!
NO Casein!
NO Milk!
NO Eggs!
NO Nuts!
NO Soy!


The product is at-bottom dryly described as, "Nugget Shaped, Breaded, Skinless Chicken Patties". Words like "juicy", "delicious", "tempting", "satisfying", or "savory" are absent.

This must mean that as consumers we care too little about flavor, and waste too much energy on the negative.

Negative advertising

I have noticed while browsing health-food stores that nutritional marketing is almost universally negative. There you will find bread "without gluten", chips "without salt or potatos", milk "without artificial growth hormones", soup "with less sodium", pasta with "no genetically engineered ingredients", Chixxen nuggets with "61% less fat", and so on.

If you have enough exposure to this type of message, you will soon wind up thinking about your food in terms of what it doesn't have to offer, and spend too much of your time scanning ingredient lists looking for things you don't want to eat.

Is that a healthy way to view food and the act of eating?

I don't think so and that is the primary reason why I have never warmed to the word "vegan". A vegan is a person that "doesn't eat" meat and dairy, rather than a person that "does eat" whole grains, fruit, and vegetables. A vegan is a person that rejects animal protein instead of a person that embraces a plant-based diet.

This might seem the same but it isn't. When you eat, say, a wild mushroom ravioli because it tastes delicious and promotes health you are performing a positive act. When you eat that same meal because of something it isn't you are performing a negative act, adopting the martyrs approach to suicide bombing or eating.

Food should be enjoyed and it is time to diverge from these tofu and sprout prophets and redefine healthy food positively.

Food should be one of life's pleasures and delicious, savory, satisfying, and nutritious instead of gluten-free and their ilk.

Why do it?

Since committing myself, mostly, to a plant-based diet I have noticed some unexpected benefits that you might be interested in:

1. As wardens at CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations) debate whether they can inject enough drugs into collapsed animals to make them healthy enough for human consumption, you can look on your plant diet as an act of self preservation and kindness rolled into one.

2. If you are Jewish and the Kosher meat/milk rules are driving you to the kitchen-supply store with more regularity than you would like, you can skip the whole conundrum when your diet is plant-based.

3. Since I must now spend more time thinking about food it has rekindled my interest in both preparing and eating food.

4. There is no mad lettuce disease, and when vegetables are recalled it is often for being contaminated with animal matter.

5. I have seen many people treat their food not as a source of nourishment and enjoyment, but as a neurotic homework exercise which leads to certain death with incorrect choices. Anxiety and stress are bad things for human health and it is simple to eat healthily this way. If you eat a variety of plants and take a supplement with vitamins B12 and D then you can calm your food anxieties and go back to focusing on enjoyment.

6. Understanding that it's not the "bad cholesterol" it's the animal protein, it's not the "fat" it's the animal protein, it's not the "lactose" it's the animal protein, it's not the "casein" it's the animal protein simplifies a lot of confusing nutritional advice.

7. Likewise, knowing that it's not the "lycopene", "Vitamin C", "crytoxanthins" or "beta-carotene" it's the plants simplifies a lot.