Power Plate: Great idea and recipes.

Another very user-friendly site from the Physicians' Committee For Responsible Medicine:

Power Plate dot org

Simple, diverse, non-overwhelming sampling of recipes, with ingredients you are likely to have.

It's this easy.

Quitting Tofu

Finally watched Food Inc. It's not as if I didn't know this, but I really, really... really have to stop eating tofu.

For real.

I know that over 90% of American soybeans are Monsanto soybeans. Why do I act as if I don't know it? Do I feel better if I buy something that says "non-GMO" on the package? Then I'm just as dumb as the sanctimonious liberal who buys the cow that says "grass fed." Do I really think I'm smart enough to find that less than 10% of soybeans that are real beans? Really?

Watching a farmer who didn't choose to grow Monsanto beans talk about watching his legal costs grow because his neighbors' soybeans contaminate his crop and once that happens, Monsanto owns the patent to his crops. Monsanto sending goons - thugs in big black cars - out to his farm at 4:30 in the morning to spook him. Watching him say, "How can they do this?" And then he gives advice to a young farmer: "Just try to get out of this thing with your skin intact. Roll over. You can't fight it." How can they do this? Just like that. If everyone stood up, they couldn't do it. That's why organizing - on any level but theirs - is their enemy.

Damn it.

And a lot of organic soybeans come from China. Great. There's something I feel safe about. Eating crap from China.

Fortunately, I have my protein-rich and versatile quinoa and of course, my good old-fashioned pinto beans and kidney beans. And, as I learned recently, I can buy local kale in a blizzard if I don't mind the cold! In most of the recipes I did use tofu in, I've already replaced it with mushrooms, which act very similar and taste better.

So, what the hell. Let's quit tofu.

Jonathan Safran Foer!

Has a book coming out November 2nd called Eating Animals. And he wrote an article in the New York Times Magazine recently entitled Against Meat. In which he tells about having a babysitter who one night declined to eat chicken with him and his brother, and they asked her why she wasn't eating chicken. She said because she didn't want to hurt anything. They didn't understand. Hurt anything? So she explained about animals and how they become food. From there:

My brother and I looked at each other, our mouths full of hurt chickens, and had simultaneous how-in-the-world-could-I-have-never-thought-of-that-before-and-why-on-earth-didn’t-someone-tell-me? moments. I put down my fork. Frank finished the meal and is probably eating a chicken as I type these words.

What our baby sitter said made sense to me, not only because it seemed so self-evidently true, but also because it was the extension to food of everything my parents had taught me. We don’t hurt family members. We don’t hurt friends or strangers. We don’t even hurt upholstered furniture. My not having thought to include farmed animals in that list didn’t make them the exceptions to it. It just made me a child, ignorant of the world’s workings. Until I wasn’t. At which point I had to change my life.

You know Jonathan Safran Foer, right? Of Everything Is Illuminated fame?


One of the reasons I love that passage so much is that that is exactly the reason my sweetheart gave me when I asked him why he was vegan. He didn't want cruelty to be part of his life. (I was instantly smitten... and nearly instantly vegan.)

Foer tells how he oscillated between not eating meat and eating meat during most of his growing-up years from that time on. He goes through many familiar stories, including going veg in high school to meet activist girls, eating meat in college to resist the vegetarian culture on campus, going veg again upon taking a philosophy course and doing some self-described "pretentious" thinking about reason, eating meat again upon graduating and telling himself it was because he was only human, going veg again upon getting married out of a grand idea of improving himself and his new life with his bride... and then, well, oscillating again:

Of course our wedding wasn’t vegetarian, because we persuaded ourselves that it was only fair to offer animal protein to our guests, some of whom traveled from great distances to share our joy. (Find that logic hard to follow?) And we ate fish on our honeymoon, but we were in Japan, and when in Japan. . . . And back in our new home, we did occasionally eat burgers and chicken soup and smoked salmon and tuna steaks. But only whenever we felt like it.

And then going veg again when his first son was born:

Feeding my children is not like feeding myself: it matters more. It matters because food matters (their physical health matters, the pleasure they take in eating matters), and because the stories that are served with food matter.

Foer is not vegan. I guess the desire not to hurt anything doesn't always extend to chickens, and it doesn't extend to baby cows and their mothers. Wait, that's not right. The desire not to hurt anything, I'm sure, extends to everything. The reason doesn't follow through for him, though. The practice doesn't follow. His actions are not in line with his thoughts, knowledge, and ideals.

Maybe someday he'll get there. And retreat, and get there again, and retreat, and hopefully get there again.

Even while contributing to factory farming, Foer can help raise awareness of it in people who might not otherwise pay attention but who like Foer as a writer. He points out in the article the fallacy many meat-eaters use as a defense. Which is: I know factory farming is bad, but that doesn't mean I have to cut out all meat. In their minds, there are little farms that probably maybe just might have produced the meat they ordered last night at a restaurant. It's just not so, though:

According to an analysis of U.S.D.A. data by the advocacy group Farm Forward, factory farms now produce more than 99 percent of the animals eaten in this country. And despite labels that suggest otherwise, genuine alternatives — which do exist, and make many of the ethical questions about meat moot — are very difficult for even an educated eater to find. I don’t have the ability to do so with regularity and confidence. (“Free range,” “cage free,” “natural” and “organic” are nearly meaningless when it comes to animal welfare.)

According to reports by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.N. and others, factory farming has made animal agriculture the No. 1 contributor to global warming (it is significantly more destructive than transportation alone), and one of the Top 2 or 3 causes of all of the most serious environmental problems, both global and local: air and water pollution, deforestation, loss of biodiversity. . . . Eating factory-farmed animals — which is to say virtually every piece of meat sold in supermarkets and prepared in restaurants — is almost certainly the single worst thing that humans do to the environment.

Safran still needs to do the research on animal testing:

This isn’t animal experimentation, where you can imagine some proportionate good at the other end of the suffering.

What? Wow.

But what he lacks in consistency (by his own admission), he makes up for with skill in drawing comparisons that make sense and illustrating them in a way that matters:

This is what we feel like eating. Yet taste, the crudest of our senses, has been exempted from the ethical rules that govern our other senses. Why? Why doesn’t a horny person have as strong a claim to raping an animal as a hungry one does to confining, killing and eating it? It’s easy to dismiss that question but hard to respond to it. Try to imagine any end other than taste for which it would be justifiable to do what we do to farmed animals.

Foer doesn't mention dairy, the lives of cows, eggs, or the lives of chickens in this excerpt from his book, but he does describe himself and his family as vegetarians, and I assume that doesn't mean vegan.

I am looking forward immensely to the new book, Eating Animals, and I plan to stop resisting all the people who have told me to read Everything Is Illuminated. I shall read it. Hopefully, one day, for Foer, everything finally will be.

Falafel in the rain, with light activism

I found this 1923 Russian galoshes ad on Wikipedia's entry for galoshes. It says, Rainy rain, you cannot hurt me. I would not go out without galoshes. A good mantra.

Here in Philadelphia, we're having a bit of a Nor'easter... or two. Yesterday, the weather turned cold and rainy. Today it turned colder, continued raining, and turned windy.

In response, did I bring a nice hot bowl of soup for lunch, so that I can stay warm in my office building and eat my soup and look out the windows at rainy Philadelphia? Nope. That's what I did the first three days of this week, when it was nice out.

Yesterday, out of soup, out of fresh butter beans, and momentarily tired of okra, I decided to buy lunch. There is an Au Bon Pain in my building, so I could have gone there. But I wanted something hot, something filling, something delicious... and that was on 20th Street.

I went out in the rain to Mama's. Got a small falafel and eggplant and brought it back here under my hoodie. Ate the delicious, still-hot falafel in the breakroom while chatting with folks on Daily Kos about PETA and the merits of adopting cats and dogs.

A well-meaning diarist had posted a diary about the damaging effects of purchasing exotic pets, such as snakes, and then letting them go when you're tired of them. I recommended the diary and tipped the writer. But the diary also included that all-too-familiar disclaimer: I'm Not A Member Of PETA Or Anything.

Being "a member of PETA or anything" is the new gay, circa 1995, apparently. You can sympathize with animal-rights activists from time to time, but you need to acknowledge publicly that you are not affiliated.

I advised the diarist that it would actually be OK if he or she were a member of PETA. Someone else advised me that, no, it would not be OK for anyone ever to be a member of PETA.

Someone suggested that PETA thinks we should use human breast milk in Ben & Jerry's ice cream. I explained that, no, PETA was just using high-impact language to point out that there is breast milk in Ben & Jerry's ice cream. Then someone wanted me to provide a source for that information.

Did you get that? They wanted a source showing that ice cream has milk in it. (This is where you end up when you bring up PETA.) That's a little out-of-touch, is it not? To not realize immediately that ice cream has breast milk in it?

That's OK. Someday, it will become normal to say: I'm Not A Member Of PETA Or Anything... "Not that there's anything wrong with that." And we'll work from there, just like we have with gay rights and other civil liberties, until eventually members of PETA will be allowed to intermarry. Er... Did I confuse the issues? Ah, yes, I meant to say we'll become familiar enough with our food that we'll know right up front that there is breast milk in ice cream.

Anyhoo. I was talking, not eating, so I ran out of time and had to get back to work. I stashed the eggplant at my desk and ate it cold at 3:00. It was perfect.

Today, I'm going back. In the rain. In my rainboots. For falafel and eggplant.

A co-worker of mine is going to join me today. She's not vegan, but I can reassure her that if a non-vegan eats something vegan and enjoys it, it doesn't mean they're vegan, too.

[beat]

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Woody Harrelson loves Twinkies and, apparently, animals

I guess I have to see this movie now, since it stars both a vegan and Vegan Twinkies.

This is news to me. Woody Harrelson is vegan (yay!) and was in need of some Vegan Twinkies while filming Zombieland.

The fake Twinkie they made of cornmeal to shoot the scene doesn't sound all that appetizing to me. Thank goodness for the folks at Vegan Lunch Box for coming to the rescue.

I don't see me actually attempting to make Vegan Twinkies, but I love the exposure, nonetheless.

I knew I liked Woody Harrelson.

"We're not telling you what to eat. We're telling you what you're eating."

I can't think of a better way to begin this blog than with a post about this brilliant article by Ari Soloman. There is only one sentence in it that I wouldn't have said myself if I had thought of it. That sentence is "Veganism is a philosophy." It might be. I don't know or care if it is. As described a few sentences later, here's what veganism is for me: "In dietary terms it denotes the practice of dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals." There you go. Simple. No need to strain the brain, just don't eat the animals.

I appreciate this article for paragraphs like this one:

There is a video making rounds on YouTube that shows a lone cow shaking in terror as she contemplates walking down the kill chute. She walks forward, then back. Animals can hear and smell the violence and death that awaits them. Their last moments are ones of abject horror and suffering. If you wouldn't condemn your dog or cat to such a fate, how can you pay for others do it to these poor animals?

There were several pages of comments to this article, but no one answered that question.

But I think the main point of the article comes next:

So. When a vegan is talking to a meat-eater about these issues, he or she is not "preaching", "trying to convert", or any such thing. We're not telling you what to eat. We're telling you what you're eating.

Since animals can't speak a language humans can understand (though I think the screams and terrified moans that fill slaughterhouses should be pretty much universal -- all living beings want to live) it's up to us to tell their stories and inform people of the suffering that goes on conveniently out of the public eye.

If, as a meat-eater, being exposed to this reality bothers you, it is not the fault of the vegan.

There it is. And I can't really add to it. It's perfect.

Hang around, because here at Campfire 30, Saturday is shopping day. That's day after tomorrow. We shop at the Clark Park Farmer's Market in West Philadelphia. It is held Saturdays 10am-3pm and Thursdays 3-7pm. We always shop for the week on Saturday and sometimes supplement with a few items picked up on Thursday. (The hours might change for winter, but the market is open year-round.) Each week, I'm going to post our shopping list complete with prices and often pictures. I will also be providing some recipes - I make them up, some are good, some are not-so-much good. Most will be illustrated.

I've only been eating a vegan diet since May of 2008. Back when I was eating animals, I couldn't imagine what vegans ate. I remember offering a girl a marshmellow at a bonfire at the WV Writer's Conference at Cedar Lakes a decade ago, and she said, "Ooooh, not on my stick." I asked her why and she explained something about gelatin and how she didn't eat anything derived from animals. Marshmellows were out? Somehow, at nineteen or twenty, that put the idea into my head that not eating animals is complicated. Now, understand: It wasn't that young writer's fault that I didn't go vegan sooner. Not at all. I couldn't wrap my head around the concept of not eating these marshmellows? I couldn't think of what people ate if they didn't eat marshmellows? (By the way, there are vegan marshmellows.) Who knows what I was thinking. I was nineteen or twenty years old. The point is, there is food besides marshmellows. Honest. And, so....

While I love the quote I used for the title of this post, it isn't really what this blog will be about. I'm not telling you what to eat. I will try to help meat-eaters see what they're eating. But mostly, I'm going to tell you what I eat.

Maybe that will help.

Cheers.