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.