A good place to start when you’re thinking about Thanksgiving in America.
History
‘Why are people malnourished in the richest country on earth?’ ∞
Tracie McMillan writes a thoughtful and difficult piece for National Geographic:
Chances are good that if you picture what hunger looks like, you don’t summon an image of someone like Christina Dreier: white, married, clothed, and housed, even a bit overweight. The image of hunger in America today differs markedly from Depression-era images of the gaunt-faced unemployed scavenging for food on urban streets. […]
In the United States more than half of hungry households are white, and two-thirds of those with children have at least one working adult—typically in a full-time job. With this new image comes a new lexicon: In 2006 the U.S. government replaced “hunger” with the term “food insecure” to describe any household where, sometime during the previous year, people didn’t have enough food to eat. By whatever name, the number of people going hungry has grown dramatically in the U.S., increasing to 48 million by 2012—a fivefold jump since the late 1960s, including an increase of 57 percent since the late 1990s.
And these numbers will keep growing as the divide between the poor and the wealthy grows wider.
It can be tempting to ask families receiving food assistance, If you’re really hungry, then how can you be—as many of them are—overweight? The answer is “this paradox that hunger and obesity are two sides of the same coin,” says Melissa Boteach, vice president of the Poverty and Prosperity Program of the Center for American Progress, “people making trade-offs between food that’s filling but not nutritious and may actually contribute to obesity.”
It’s terrible that obesity would be an indicator of hunger or malnourishment. It could be a different picture if the government would subsidize the right things. This part, with emphasis mine, speaks to that:
These are the very crops that end up on Christina Dreier’s kitchen table in the form of hot dogs made of corn-raised beef, Mountain Dew sweetened with corn syrup, and chicken nuggets fried in soybean oil. They’re also the foods that the U.S. government supports the most. In 2012 it spent roughly $11 billion to subsidize and insure commodity crops like corn and soy, with Iowa among the states receiving the highest subsidies. The government spends much less to bolster the production of the fruits and vegetables its own nutrition guidelines say should make up half the food on our plates. In 2011 it spent only $1.6 billion to subsidize and insure “specialty crops”—the bureaucratic term for fruits and vegetables.
The USA needs to subsidize produce with a focus on health. Every dollar that goes against that is a dollar squandered, and it’s easy to see this in our population. The government is the reason fast food is cheaper than vegetables. The general health of the people should be considered our government’s problem, because it starts with what crops they subsidize.
‘The village that’s been vegan for 50 years’ ∞
Abigail Klein Leichman for ISRAEL21c:
Everyone knows that Tel Aviv is the vegan capital of Israel, right? After all, it’s home to scores of vegan restaurants and many of the 5 percent of Israelis who eat a plant-based diet.
Well, here’s a surprise: Long before you could get veggie shawarma in Tel Aviv, a community in the desert town of Dimona pioneered the vegan lifestyle in Israel.
They’re called the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem and they live in a compound called Neve Shalom (Village of Peace). The original 138 members of the community, mostly natives of Chicago, arrived in Israel in 1969.
I found many parts of their veganism fascinating. For them, it stems from specific Bible verses:
They are not Jewish, but they consider the Bible their history and guidebook.
In Genesis 1:29-30, a plant-based diet is prescribed for Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden: “And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree on which is the fruit yielding seed; to you it shall be for food. … everything that has the breath of life in it, I give every green herb for food.”
[…]
“We eat foods in season and no foods that are seedless. For example, no seedless grapes or watermelon. That goes back to the biblical verse about ‘every herb bearing seed.’ There’s something about the seed that makes it the proper food for our consumption and if you tamper with that it would have a negative effect,” says Ben Yehuda.
And I love this bit showing their dedication:
In the early days, the Hebrew Israelites could not find vegan staples like tofu and soymilk in Israel. So one community member was sent to Japan to learn how to manufacture them.
“When he came back, we invested in a factory producing tofu and that led to an entire range of foods that [we] began to develop from soy and other sources,” says Ben Yehuda.
The company they started has gone on to produce over 200 products, including the cheese for Domino’s vegan pizza in Israel. It shows what a little dedication and time will do.
‘Why do People Hate Vegans?’ ∞
George Reynolds has a thorough and thoughtful piece for the Guardian about where veganism started, currently is, and it’s future. I liked this bit that shows that vegans have always been dreamers:
Early attempts to establish a vegan utopia did not go well. In the 1840s, the transcendentalist philosopher Amos Bronson Alcott (father of the author of Little Women, Louisa May) founded Fruitlands in Harvard, Massachusetts – a vegan community intended to be nothing less than a second Eden. But Alcott’s insistence that crops had to be planted and fields tilled by hand meant that not enough food could be grown for all of the members (even though the population peaked at just 13); a diet of fruit and grains, typically consumed raw, left participants severely malnourished. Just seven months after opening, Fruitlands closed – derided, in the words of one biographer, as “one of history’s most unsuccessful utopias”.
In a universal setting, veganism has to be plausible. It’s easy to dream that nothing and no one will suffer for a meal, but controlling those conditions is nearly impossible. It doesn’t mean that shouldn’t be an ambition. It means there needs to be a realistic understanding of what can be done. Being vegan can never exist under perfect conditions. Heaven has to meet earth at some point.
One thing that veganism rarely approaches is what meat means to the people who consume it and where that approach came from:
There is no justification for the amount of meat we eat in western society. The resources that go into humanely rearing and butchering an animal should make its flesh a borderline-unattainable luxury – and, indeed, in the past, it was. Meat always used to be the preserve of the wealthy, a symbol of prosperity: “A chicken in every pot” remained an aspirational but impractical promise across the best part of a millennium, from the days of Henry IV of France (when the term was invented) all the way through to Herbert Hoover’s 1928 presidential campaign.
It was only through the technological advances of modern agriculture that meat became attainable and available at supermarket prices. From the mid-1800s onwards, farmers could raise animals bigger, better and faster than in the past; kill them quicker; treat their flesh to prevent it from spoiling; transport it further and store it longer. A commonly cited psychological turning point was the second world war, which engendered what Russell Baker, writing in the New York Times, later described as a kind of “beef madness”. GIs were sent to the front with rations of tinned meat; once peace had been declared, there was no better symbol of the brave new world than a sizzling celebratory steak. In the course of just over a century, meat went from unattainable luxury to dietary cornerstone; these days, we feel entitled to eat meat every day.
And it’s been interesting to see how meat-eating has become a part of politics and in some ways performative:
But “they’re taking our meat” is as evocative a rallying cry as “they’re taking our jobs” or “they’re taking our guns” – it conveys the same sense of individual freedoms being menaced by external forces, a birthright under attack. Ted Cruz (wrongly) alleged that his Democrat rival Beto O’Rourke planned to ban Texas barbecue if elected senator in his place: like the personal firearm, animal flesh has become an emblem of resistance against the encroachments of progressivism, something to be prised from your cold, dead hand. Men’s rights advocate Jordan Peterson is famed for following a beef and salt diet; Donald Trump is renowned for his love of fast food and well-done steak with ketchup; there is even a subset of libertarian cryptocurrency enthusiasts who call themselves Bitcoin carnivores.
With the massive inroads that veganism has made in the last few years, it’s important to recognize it still has a long way to go:
Sales may be growing fast, but they are barely making a dent in the $1.7tr global market for animal-derived protein. Certainly, a change of culture will not happen without the involvement of government, industry and science; as the past few years have shown, widespread change is also unlikely to happen without a fight. This makes the current field of conflict an unfortunate one – in the real world, we can practise moderation, emotional flexitarianism.
Emotional flexitarianism is a beautiful turn of phrase and absolutely the way we all must approach each other.
‘Veggie-First Eating, and Thinking’ ∞
Alexandra Weiss for the NYTimes:
Veggie Mijas is a collective of over 300 nonbinary, female-identifying people and women of color in 12 chapters across the United States, and the group — originally founded by Amy Quichiz and Mariah Bermeo — facilitates community building through vegan potlucks, cleaning up community gardens and hosting youth seminars to teach children about the importance of growing their own food.
“Veggie Mijas is about reclaiming what a plant-based lifestyle looks like, which isn’t just about not eating meat,” said Ms. Quichiz, 24, a native of Queens, N.Y., who is Peruvian and Colombian. “It’s about what we can do for our communities, and about reflecting on the systems around us that impact the choices that we make.”
I’ve written about Veggie Mijas before, but I wanted to post this larger and longer story. This has some nice tips for new vegans from queer and people-of-color communities.
‘The First Thing That Ever Sold Online Was Pizza’ ∞
Jay Hoffman writing for the History of the Web:
If you happened to live in Santa Cruz in 1994 you could sit down at your computer, open up your favorite browser, and then go ahead and order a pizza online.
You could do all of this on PizzaNet, owned and operated by Pizza Hut. PizzaNet was an experiment that launched in the early 90’s, a way for Pizza Hut to test the waters and see if this World Wide Web thing had a real shot at a future. It was proposed by a particularly ambitious Pizza Hut owner in Santa Cruz, and developed by a few folks at a development shop known as Santa Cruz Operation (SCO).
This being something of a trial run, the site itself was kept pretty basic. Yet it bursted with possibility. Any web user could go online, visit pizza.net, fill out a form that included their pizza choice, address, and phone number and just like that, get a pizza delivered straight to their door. The web may not have been exactly designed for this purpose, but that didn’t stop it from being pretty incredible.
The minimalism of old websites is beautiful. I hope they bring this back when Pizza Hut expands their first (!) vegan trial in the USA.
‘Pasta Grannies’ ∞
I love older folks and pasta, so these videos are hugging my heart. Check out Neda and Renata making their (accidentally vegan) lunghetti pasta, which is what folks from Tuscany call pici pasta. Skip the sausage and the whole thing goes vegan.
‘How to Make the Oldest Recipe in the World: A Recipe for Nettle Pudding Dating Back 6,000 BC’ ∞
Look at this thought-provoking recipe from Ayun Halliday at Open Culture. They say this is the oldest recipe in the world, clocking in at 8000 years old:
NETTLE PUDDING
Ingredients
• 1 bunch of sorrel
• 1 bunch of watercress
• 1 bunch of dandelion leaves
• 2 bunches of young nettle leaves
• Some chives
• 1 cup of barley flour
• 1 teaspoon of saltINSTRUCTIONS
• Chop the herbs finely and mix in the barley flour and salt.
• Add enough water to bind it together and place in the center of a linen or muslin cloth.
• Tie the cloth securely and add to a pot of simmering venison or wild boar (a pork joint will do just as well). Make sure the string is long enough to pull the pudding from the pot.
• Cook the pudding until the meat is done (at least two hours).
• Leave the pudding to cool slightly, remove the muslin, then cut the pudding into thick slices with a knife.
• Serve the pudding with chunks of barley bread.
And this little bit from Ruth Fairchild made it even more interesting to consider:
You have to think how much more is wasted now than then.
Food waste today is huge. A third of the food in our fridges is thrown away every week without being eaten.
But they wouldn’t have wasted anything, even hooves would have been used for something.
They had to eat what was grown within a few miles, because it would have taken so long to collect everything, and even collecting water would have been a bit of a trial.
Yet today, so many people don’t want to cook because they think of it as a chore.
‘Go on, EU, ban the ‘veggie burger’ – it will be a blessing for vegans’ ∞
Tony Naylor writing for the Guardian had this interesting note when we’re talking about how we label our food:
Steak is not a cut of meat. Not an animal. Not a synonym for beef. It derives from the Old Norse, steikja, meaning to roast on a spit. It is happenstance that steijk came to be associated with Vikings roasting beef (new Nordic cookery is all about roasting celeriac, instead), and, being pedantic, unless a restaurant spit-roasts its ribeyes, you could equally accuse it of misselling.
Similarly, not only have hamburgers never contained ham (the word is 19th-century US slang for a Hamburg-style minced beef steak), but, in trying to fence off “burger” for beef now, Europe is 50 years too late. In Britain, 1970s vegetarianism and, later, Linda McCartney’s ready-meals, popularised the concept that burgers and sausages could be made without beef or pork. Eating a falafel or beetroot burger is no stranger than eating one made out of chicken. No one in Europe is making a fuss about that.
‘Shalt thou eat an Impossible Burger? Religious doctrine scrambles to catch up to new food technology.’ ∞
Laura Reiley with an incredibly interesting piece for the Washington Post:
This month, Tyson announced it is investing in a company that will launch plant-based shrimp early next year, raising a curious question. Will it be kosher? The short answer is its ingredients — which mimic the verboten crustacean with a proprietary algae blend — could well be both kosher and halal. Once the product launches, the company will seek certification so that Jews who keep kosher and Muslims — certain Muslim groups avoid shellfish — can enjoy a shrimp cocktail, scampi, a po’ boy or ceviche.
And yet. In this era of plenitude and choice and disruptive technology, what is permissible, what is forbidden and what is flouting the letter of religious law? The food system is in flux, the rise of plant-based meats and the promise of cell-cultured meats bending categories such that legislation, ideology and theology are scrambling to keep up.
If God says no pork, how does He feel about a very persuasive forgery? And if only beef from the forequarter is permitted, how will observant Jews parse meat grown in a lab, no bones and no quarters at all? How do you bleed an animal with no blood or slaughter an animal humanely if there’s no slaughter? And if you give up meat for Lent, what constitutes a cheat?
This bit from Rabbi Eli Lando, the chief customer relations officer with OK Kosher, is an interesting question:
“Is it a violation of the spirit of the law? That becomes a realm that you can never end.”
[…]
The prohibitions, he said, are about the actual creatures (pigs, shellfish, rabbits and reptiles), not a plant-based facsimile, however uncanny the likeness. Strictly kosher Jews, he notes, are frequently big fans of fake crab made of finely pulverized white fish. Lando sees plant-based meat as a revolution of sorts.
“A person today knows that being kosher does not mean you have to go to the back of the store and look for something like a second-class citizen. Having those products commonly available is achieving a great milestone,” he said.
And I didn’t know this was part of the Muslim tradition of Halal:
The inspection and certification process is similar for halal foods. For plant-based products designed to imitate haram products (pork and other foods forbidden by Islamic law), Roger Othman, director of consumer relations for Islamic Food and Nutrition Council of America, said words matter.
“Plant-based bacon bits, for example. The product would qualify to be halal but may be repugnant to halal consumers if the word bacon appeared in the name,” Othman said. “Halal consumers would not know what pork chews like, maybe not even what it smells or looks like. If plant-based, it could qualify to be halal, but the naming should not contain any pork-related words.”
Which ties slightly back into to the recent legal flare-up between many states’ meat-industries and free-speech advocates that would allow plant-based foods to call themselves “meat”, “sausage”, or even a “burger”. It would be interesting to see if certain products might be repackaged or relabeled depending on what stores they end up in — so that they might be allowed into Halal shops or supermarkets in certain states that deem meat-related labeling illegal.
It’d be interesting if many vegan products, once fully mainstream and with widespread use, moved to welcome religious or more niche audiences by changing parts of their products to appeal to those needs. Maybe we’ll see the same product packaged twice: one named to reference a similar flavor or product (i.e. Tofurkey or things labeled “Chik’n”), and then another where the words give the impression of an entirely new category of product (e.g. seitan, tofu, tempeh). Or if Impossible developed another heme product that they didn’t test on rats to try to entice a certain group of strict vegans. All of these things are possible, but I don’t know what it would take to be cost-effective.