Vegan Thanksgiving Round-Up ∞

November 15, 2019

Lots of sites have started posting their recipes for a plant-based Thanksgiving. I’m sad to report that the glorious recipes I use from Spork Foods aren’t anywhere online. I took a Thanksgiving class with them years ago and it’s the best investment I’ve made. All in all, I make an herbed-tofu carmelized wellington, lemon-maple sourdough stuffing, and garlic-shallot gravy.

Though fairly different, I did find a different set of recipes from from 2011 that Jenny and Heather put together.

Mezcal and Mole: A Year in Oaxaca with Jesse Mullenix ∞

November 13, 2019

Episode 5 of the Vegan-Carne Alliance podcast is live.

In this episode, vegan-food lover C.W. Moss (aka me) talks with carnivorous chef Jesse Mullenix about his time in Oaxaca, Mexico. Jesse talks about drinking the finest mezcal from a gas can (1:10:50), radish festivals (53:25), exploring the massive food markets to find the best food (1:18:08), and how to barely survive the Day of the Dead festival (1:27:20).

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Find it on:

‘The rise of natural winemaking means more accidentally vegan vintages’ ∞

November 12, 2019

Janet Forgrieve for SmartBrief:

Vegans out for a meal pay attention to the ingredients in each dish to make sure there aren’t animal products but, until fairly recently, few thought to ask about the wine.

That’s changing as more people learn about the animal products that can be used in winemaking and seek out vegan vintages. Wine, though made from plants, is often processed using ingredients derived from animals to remove sediments and fine particles.

[…]

In the world of wine, more winemakers aren’t necessarily focused on the vegan aspect, but a growing number are opting for natural methods, which means eschewing straining and fining in favor of letting sediments separate naturally and, sometimes, accepting that there will be fine particles present, Jacoby said.

“I think the natural wine movement has been great for us, but I don’t think they [winemakers] have a vegan agenda in that choice,” Jacoby said. “It’s just a nice overlap for us.”

It’s lovely when popular things just happen to be vegan. I sometimes think about how excited I would have been, if I were vegan in the mid-90s, to learn that Oreos were accidentally vegan. Being able to participate in the minutiae of society (like buying things that are advertised) and talk about the foods that surround us, it’s a big deal. It’s a form of representation, albeit small. And this is the same sort of thing.

I hadn’t realized that natural wines were more likely to be vegan. I’ll have to pick up an extra bottle of orange to celebrate.

If you’re looking for the best way to check if your wine is vegan, Barnivore is what you’re looking for. It doesn’t have an app yet, but one is in the works.

‘Dean Foods, America’s biggest milk producer, files for bankruptcy’ ∞

November 12, 2019

Dean Foods’ business has struggled as more consumers turn to nondairy milk or buy private-label products. Americans’ per capita consumption of fluid milk has fallen 26% in the last two decades, according to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Great news. I can’t believe alternative milks have taken a 1/4 of the market. Now, one of the nutmilk companies just needs to make a campaign as fun and ridiculous as this.

‘A Mexican Vegan and The Five Stages of Food Grief’ ∞

November 7, 2019

Nicole Valadez with a personal reflection on being Mexican and going vegan:

My biggest problem was waiting for me back in Houston where I’d have to face my very traditional Mexican family and tell them that I could no longer indulge in our Thanksgiving feast. I wondered if I should just skip the holidays all together – postpone my big news until the new year and hide out in D.C., far away from judging eyes. But missing a Mexican holiday, let alone two, would be even worse than becoming the family’s first vegan.

And then she follows with the 5 stages of what I call “hungr-ief” and the discussion that ensues. For anyone out there afraid to explore, every year it gets a little better. The same thing happened with my family and if we all give a little it goes a long way. I try to make extra food and share it with as many people as I can. After all, Thanksgiving is about gathering together—with whatever food feels right for you.

‘Why are people malnourished in the richest country on earth?’ ∞

November 6, 2019

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.

‘Czech Lab Grows Mustard Plants for Mars’ ∞

November 6, 2019

Reuters via the NYTimes:

Czech scientists have opened a lab to experiment growing food for environments with extreme conditions and lack of water, such as Mars.

The “Marsonaut” experiment by scientist Jan Lukacevic, 29, and his team at the Prague University of Life Sciences is based on aeroponics – growing plants in the air, without soil, and limiting water use to a minimum.

[…]

The team has already succeeded in growing mustard plants, salad leaves, radishes and herbs like basil and mint.

That’s interesting, but the last sentence of the article is what astounded me:

The main benefit of the growing method is that it uses 95 percent less water than normal plant cultivation and also saves space, which could boost agricultural yields in areas hit by urbanisation and climate change.

95 percent less. How is that possible? Can most produce be reduced like this? I want to know more.

‘The village that’s been vegan for 50 years’ ∞

November 6, 2019

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.

‘The Deceptive Simplicity of Peanuts’ ∞

November 5, 2019

Ivan Brunetti writing about Charles Schulz’s comic strip Peanuts is a perfect reflection of any culture, be it food or comic strips.

I especially liked this bit:

Peanuts has no discernible scale, because it exists simultaneously as small increments and a fifty-year totality, an epic poem made up entirely of haikus. Then again, maybe that’s also what life is: short, packed moments of intense, concentrated awareness, minuscule epiphanies that accrete as we age, an accumulation of efforts, some meaningful and some meaningless, moments all too real that unsettlingly feel somehow also not real, jottings taking note of everything, within and without. One life, all life. An isolated four-panel comic strip of Charlie Brown and Linus debating a philosophical point can be appreciated just as it is, humorous, insightful, compact, and perfect; one strip a day documenting one man’s thoughts for half a century has the weight of a full life. Peanuts endures, both from the closest micro-view and the farthest macro–vantage point.

Good meals exist forever. A perfect evening never fades. We’re all Marcel Proust falling through our memories with our version of a Madeliene cookies dipped in tea. Each bite can be much more than a bite. A bite can feel like a whole meal, make a restaurant, melt a city, build a culture, and create a new version of ourselves. Food is another wonderful opportunity to be ourselves, find ourselves, and change ourselves.

✏️ by C. W. Moss