Aug 19 2008
Eating Vegan AGAIN
Michael has decided he wants to go vegan again. He’s working mostly off of a food pyramid from wikipedia. We realized, upon studying the pyramid, that we went about veganism all wrong previously. All carbs and veggies, hardly any protein. Even still, I frequently cook meals that contain almost no protein whatsoever.
I hate to identify myself by what I eat, because I try to be an open-minded and thoughtful person. If someone offers me a homemade dish that contains cow and pig, I will eat the dish and gush about it, if not eating it would be judged rude. If I get a dish in a restaurant that suddenly contains meat, I will eat it because if I don’t, that food will go to waste.
I also hate to identify myself by what I eat because, I’ll be honest here, I miss fish. I don’t think it’s moral to eat fish, but I love fish. Every time I’ve gone vegan in the past, I have craved fish. I don’t crave chicken, I don’t crave beef or pork, but I positively salivate just thinking about tuna or salmon nigiri. There is no substitute for that delightfully soft and fatty tissue, there is no way to imitate that mouth-feel. Maybe this makes me an awful person, but as much as I think it is immoral to kill fish, I want to. I am a selfish human being and I want my dang sushi.
That being said, I don’t find eating vegan in the day to day hard except for my reaction to uncooked soy milk. I’m currently sticking with slim-fast which means a dairy-heavy diet, until I’m comfortable enough with limiting my calories to move towards replacing my meal replacer with a real, no-fooling meal. Probably the lunch will go first, in favor of a much more veggie-heavy lunch.
Anyway, Michael cooked an amazingly tasty dish last night that seemed pretty easy to make. He found a recipe on vegweb and then made a load of changes to it. We calculated the whole thing to be about 1100 calories. 1100 very filling calories, since Michael had a little less than half and I ate a quarter. But I did clean my plate, which is unusual.
And he made some ginger cookies from this recipe. They’re rather tasty, although the recipe was confusing and instead of adding the intended 3 tablespoons of prepared Ener-G Egg Replacer, he added 3 tablespoons of the powder. Still, the texture and flavor are pretty good. Vegan baked goods are always better after they sit a day - this applies to cornbread, cookies, cake, banana bread, etc.
Tea and Cookies
So I’ve managed to resist the ginger cookies and save them for an after-dinner snack with a cup of jasmine green tea, courtesy of our Zojirushi water dispenser.
We visited David’s Natural Market in Gambrills last night for tofutti better than cream cheese, earth balance margarine and a variety of other goodies we didn’t necessarily need. I bought a crap-load of Stonyfield farm yogurt because I’m not vegan and they had a million different varieties there (mocha? raspberry? lemon fruit on the bottom? Count me in). Michael bought their brand of soy yogurt and said the mouth-feel was quite good even if the flavor was a bit off. Technically their soy yogurt isn’t vegan since they derive the bacteria cultures from milk. I also picked up some sun-dried tomatoes in oil for a pasta dish this week. As soon as I dream up a good marinade for some tofu.
And we spent some time outside, admiring the cows that reside next to the market. The sun was setting, the sky was pink and the cows were nom nommin’ their grain for the evening.
I love the stonyfield lemon fruit on the bottom yogurt (a bit more sugars in it than I like though). When I was vegetarian, I was pretty good about eating a lot of protein which helped a lot (since I still ate eggs/dairy, it was easier though).
So, it’s immoral when I go fishing for food?
In my moral system, I have issues with killing an animal for food. and I get that bugs die by kajillions when wheat and veggies and everything else are processed. But eating fish still makes me uncomfortable ethically in my own system.
Eating animals is one of those ethical decisions I really don’t care what other people choose to do. Certainly if you catch your own fish, you’re making a better ethical decision in my grading system than me going out and ordering sushi where the fish comes from who knows where.
I probably shouldn’t use the term immoral because I don’t think of there being one concrete moral system as regards the morals/ethics of eating animals. I have qualms about killing and eating animals. And doing the local, free-range thing makes me feel better but it doesn’t eliminate those qualms for me. So immoral is not a precise term.