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Vitasoy has a delicious soy milk flavored with green tea (one gram of powdered green tea per 240 ml serving.) I got mine at Whole Foods. Something I never thought would happen occurred today. I was eating my bean-burrito-hold-the-cheese while working, and I finally paid attention to a little voice speaking in the back of my mind. The voice said, "There is something disgusting in this burrito." I stopped chewing: yes, I realized, there was. I opened the burrito to examine the contents. It was loaded with cheese. Granted, cheap road-paving-grade drive-through cheese, but cheese nonetheless, and it set off my 'disgusting' detectors. Alas, what have I become? ("A vegan?" you reply....) I've confirmed it with their customer service department: Starbucks mocha syrup (used, logically, to make their cafe mochas) is just cocoa powder, sugar, and water. If you don't obsess about sweeteners, a cafe mocha is therefore vegan-friendly when ordered with soy milk and no whipped cream. Not health food, mind you, but vegan. As would be expected, the Frappuccino powder and the caramel syrup are not vegan. Dissolve 1 level scoop of Nutritional Yeast Flakes and 1 - 1½ teaspoons of Bragg Liquid Aminos in 8 ounces of boiling water for a rich, satisfying, salty-tasting broth containing 9 grams of protein and only 200 - 300 mg of sodium (both of these ingredients should be in every vegan's pantry.) It is loaded with B vitamins, including more than a day's supply of B-12, which must be supplemented in the vegan diet. At around $0.50 per cup, this broth is reasonably priced, delicious, and quite good for you. Culinarily adventurous non-vegans might also like to try it. Fairganic Goods, a vegan-owned fair trade mail-order company, is going out of business on 31 August, and they are offering a clearance sale until then. Pick up Hemp Trifold Wallets for $7.00 apiece and Batik Table Runners for $13.00. Items are disappearing quickly, so act soon if you want to take advantage of these bargains. Don't give up veganism for a cheese craving until you try Joanne Stepaniak's amazing Gee Whiz sauce from The Uncheese Cookbook. It's really worth the price of the whole book just for that recipe: a convincing, good old American cheese-style sauce to put on sandwiches or crackers, stir into soup, or just eat with a spoon. It's good for you, too. For variety, try making it with different varieties of beans, or add garlic granules to the recipe. Trust me. Find this book. It's enough to make you cry. Just when ethical shopping looked like it was getting easier, we see a wave of buyouts of lefty companies by huge multinationals. Odwalla has been purchased by Coca-Cola. Near East (makers of couscous and falafel mix) and Mother's Natural Foods have been purchased by PepsiCo. White Wave, maker of "Silk", is now owned by dairy conglomerate Dean Foods. Kashi is owned by Kellogg's, Lightlife by meat giant ConAgra. Balance Bar and Boca Burger are … get ready … owned by Philip Morris! These previously small and responsible producers saw some success in the market, which seemed a blessing: but this seems to have caught the eye of corporate giants. How can you buy Boca Burgers now knowing where your money goes? Some might argue that it is more important now than ever to continue supporting the vegetarian brands of these giants to send the message that a market exists for them. But I didn't want to just be making a statement: I wanted my money to support companies I respected. For you Southern Californians, I would like to recommend the restaurant Bombay Cafe in West Los Angeles as an extremely vegetarian- and vegan-friendly restaurant. Bombay Cafe serves California-influenced "Bombay street food" in a trendy, attractive dining room. An impressive hardwood bar, with a strong colonial feel, lines one wall. While the restaurant does serve meat (lamb, chicken, fish, and shrimp), more than half the entrees are vegetarian. Many of these contain paneer, a fresh cheese. I am a vegan, and went hoping that they would be able to accomodate me. I explained to the server (a very attentive young woman named Alyson) that I was vegan, and began to explain what that meant. She stopped me and told me that she understood, and without hesitation confidently went down the list of entrees and side dishes pointing out which were acceptable to a vegan. The food is spectacular. The table is automatically set with crisp crackers made of rice and a spicy, Mexican salsa-like sauce, both of which are vegan. Bombay Cafe is famous for their chutneys, the selection of which rotates daily. We (my wife, my father, and I) ordered a chutney sampler, featuring three vegan chutneys: sweet tomato, red onion, and green apple. All three were excellent, and it is hard to choose which I liked best, but if pressed I would probably say the red onion. The Puri crackers are vegan and can be used to eat the chutney. We also ordered aloo-ki-tikki, described as "potato pancakes". These are squat cylinders of warm, deliciously seasoned potato, very much like the inside of a samosa. One order provides three, and they are very tasty. The vegan entrees include green beans (the variety of bean and cooking method varies day to day), eggplant bharta (a mashed eggplant dish), sambar (toor dal, lentils, with tomatoes, green chilies, and coconut), gobi sabzi (a cauliflower dish), and aloo mattar (a dish made with potatoes and peas). Relatively small dishes are brought out and eaten "family style". All were excellent, with the sambar the clear winner in each of our opinions, and the eggplant bharta, while still quite good, probably being the least impressive: it comes across as under-seasoned. For a vegan, these dishes can be eaten with plain basmati rice and chapatis, which resemble whole wheat tortillas. To further dress the food, I strongly recommend the kuchumber (diced cucumber with red onion, tomato, and green chilies, tossed with lemon and cilantro) and their fantastic spicy, oily pickles consisting of various different vegetables in a tiny dish. Three hungry adults consumed all but a few bites of all this food, so the serving sizes are not enormous. They are, however, certainly satisfactory, if enough are ordered. Without drinks, dinner for three ran to $56 before tip, or about $19 per person; this isn't especially cheap, especially for L.A., but it is not exorbitant either. If one is not concerned about sugar, they offer a delicious ginger-lemon soda tasting like a mix of ginger beer and lemonade. This is available in a large glass for $2.50, or as a cocktail in a smaller glass with a generous amount of top-shelf vodka for $7. I had one of the cocktails, then switched to the soda. Bombay Cafe is located at 12021 West Pico Blvd. Heading west on the 10 Freeway, take the Bundy exit, turn north (right), then make an immediate right onto Pico. The restaurant will be immediately on your left. Go around back (turn left at the next street then left again into the parking lot) and valet parking is available for $3. The telephone number is (310) 473-3388; reservations are recommended. This made me laugh out loud. From a reader-submitted review of Joanne Stepaniak's The Uncheese Cookbook: Creating Amazing Dairy-Free Cheese Substitutes and Classic "Uncheese" Dishes at Amazon.com: I'm not a "health" minded person. In fact, if there was a vegan alternative to cheese composed entirely of cancer, I would probably try to eat it, and my friends would need to have an intervention to get me to stop consuming my "cancer-cheese." He goes on to say that "I don't care how healthy it is, I'm a moral vegan, not a "health vegan" and when I want cheese, I want something that tastes good, and not just cheese-like, but profoundly cheezy, and this book is that." This is just one of many glowing 5-star reviews of this book. A new, updated edition, The Ultimate Uncheese Cookbook, is due to be released fall of 2003. If you don't have the book yet you might want to wait for the second edition. I'm not sure I can wait: these cheese cravings seem potentially deadly. :-/ Without an acceptable substitute, I expect to end up writhing on the floor of my kitchen like an emaciated heroin addict. (OK, it's not really that bad. But I love cheese, and it is turning out to be the hardest thing to give up.) If you live in the L.A. area check out the Vegetarians in Paradise web magazine. Especially valuable is their restaurant reviews page: in addition to the short summaries, there are detailed reviews available for most restaurants. Accidentally had two bites of non-vegan food today. I had purchased some "Spinach and Pesto Hummus" from among Whole Foods' many hummus offering; in my experience all had been vegan. I took a bite, thought that it tasted very cheesy, and checked the ingredients. Sure enough, packed with parmesan. After lunch I popped a ginger candy into my mouth. Only it turned out I had grabbed similarly-wrapped milk candy instead of ginger candy. Oh well. I obviously wasn't paying very close attention. Josh's Vegan Triple Ginger Triticale Bread
Preheat oven to 350°. Grease and flour a 8 1/2 x 4 1/2 inch loaf pan. Add lemon or lime juice to soymilk and set aside to curdle. Sift together flour, gluten, baking soda, spices, and salt. Add half of the crystallized ginger. Set aside. Combine margarine, oil, and Sucanat in a large bowl. Add tofu and beat until smooth. Mix in fresh ginger. Add dry ingredients and soymilk and mix to form a batter. Transfer to pan. Sprinkle remaining crystallized ginger on top of batter. Bake 45 to 50 minutes, until an inserted chopstick comes out clean. Cool for 10 minutes in pan, then transfer to rack. Makes 1 loaf The recipe is pretty good. The loaf collapses a bit in the center, but it has a nice moist crumb. If you try it, send me an email and let me know how it turned out. OK, the sweeteners issue. Vegans, as you may know, get very touchy about their sweeteners. That's why so many vegan products you see are sweetened with fruit juice, and that in turn is why so many vegan desserts are sickly sweet. There are two sweeteners that bother some vegans: white cane sugar and honey. First, the easy one: white cane sugar. To get that pure white appearance to granulated white cane sugar, the sugar is filtered through charcoal. Sometimes it's bone charcoal, made from the charred bones of cows. Thing is, no cows are killed specifically for their bones, nor is bone charcoal even a slaughterhouse byproduct. It all comes from India and surrounding areas, from cows that died of natural causes (or are roadkill, but that's a separable problem.) Think about this for a moment: India is mainly Hindu. Hindus are not going to go around killing cows to get their bones. And I'm not a vegan for personal purity reasons: my veganism is not so that "I will never eat anything that has touched a part of an animal," it's for reduction of suffering. If people stopped collecting sun-bleached cow bones it wouldn't help the cows at all (If people stopped hitting cows with their cars, however, that would help the cows, but my refusal to eat white sugar is not going to stop that. Better driver training is going to stop that.) It's similar to the reason I don't get hot and bothered about secondary animal ingredients in car tires, asphalt, and film, the miniscule amounts of animal by-products used in fining some beer and wine, and even beeswax. The reason animal by-products are used in these cases is that they are cheap. If primary animal products such as meat, eggs, and milk were to disappear from the market, the producers would be prompted to find another source. It's just the glut of these products that makes their use economical. Yes, some of my veganism is largely symbolic: whey is a by-product of the cheese industry and gelatin is a by-product of the slaughterhouse industry, so there is, strictly speaking, no reason why I should avoid these secondary products. But I don't see a symbolic need for me to stop taking pictures (or going to movies!), or stop buying tires for my bicycle, or stop eating white sugar. There are plenty of good reasons for not eating white sugar: sugar consists of empty calories with a high glycemic index, for starters, and sugar plantation workers are frequently exploited. But veganism is not one of the good reasons to avoid white sugar. Honey is the harder one. The Vegetus website makes a vehement argument as to why honey should not be considered vegan, dealing with bee enslavement, ecology, and other issues. And they do a pretty good job with presenting an only-sometimes-inconsistent argument. But I'm unconvinced. Underneath the hyperbole, these are the main objections:
Skipping [1] for the moment, let's consider [2]. I don't eat mass-produced honey, I eat varietal honey (grapefruit, ironwood, manuka, etc) from small producers. Small producers are much less likely to burn hives at the end of a growing season, so [2] doesn't especially bother me. [3] is indeed a concern, but as far as I can gather, amidst the conflicting information, it would be impossible to maintain current agriculture levels without the domesticated honeybee. Yes, we are over-producing vegetables and crops, yes this will come back to bite us at some point, and yes the world would be better off if it contained a quarter of the people it does now. But the fact of the matter is that people are here and we need to feed them. And I can't really say "now everyone eat plants" and then argue for abandoning the species that makes this possible. True, we could still use honeybees and not take their honey from them. But it's not like the small honey producers allow the bees to starve: they replace the honey taken with other sugars to carry the bees through the winter. And if a few bees, the ones that are not sedated, end up stinging the honey gatherer and dying during honey retrieval, we are still dealing with an animal whose lifespan is measured in weeks (two to five during the production season.) We're not talking about a cow that can live over 20 years, or an orange roughy that can live 150 years (People, stop eating orange roughy! They don't begin to breed until they are 30 years old, and we are quickly killing off the species by catching fish that haven't bred yet.) Some dogmatic vegans would say "Does it make a difference?" Well, yes, I think it does make a difference (I will cover the "you kill fewer animals" argument later.) And [4]? They are mites. I'm not going to get worked up about an infestation of mites. (I was going to preface that with "I'm sorry, but", but I'm not sorry. They're mites.) I skipped [1]. That's the one that you will have to let your conscience decide: Are you comfortable with people keeping honeybees, even if it causes them some minimal harm? I think I am. Now to the arguments for why you should eat honey. The pollination one is very strong, I think. And even though I excoriated my father on the discussion page over his economic argument for meat consumption, note that honey subsidizes the price of crops. I admit that's only relevant if you decide a priori that beekeeping is not a big deal. But beyond that (and I cannot get any real numbers for this) it seems that harvesting sugarcane would cause more suffering to animals than raising honeybees: pesticides are used on non-organic sugarcane, insects are killed during harvesting, and rodents, other small mammals, and birds are likely displaced or killed when the heavy machinery drives across the fields. (If you are really perceptive you will notice a possible inconsistency here: I wrote that beekeepers replace honey taken from bees with other sugars. These other sweeteners would indeed have to be harvested. But since modern beekeeping focuses on the overproduction of honey, the sugar replaced would be less than the honey taken, so I would expect the net suffering reduction to still be favorable.) Insects and other animals would also be killed in the harvesting of sugar beets, sorghum, fruit used to make fruit sweeteners, and so on. I could stop eating sweet things, yes, but I'm not going to do that. The Vegetus writeup on honey says: If you are thinking to yourself … "I'm a vegan for environmental reasons," please reconsider how you label yourself. Unlike the word vegetarian, the word vegan specifically implies moral concern for animals, and this concern extends to all areas of life, not just diet. If you do not believe in animal equality, please consider referring to yourself as someone who doesn't eat animal products or as one who follows a plant-based diet. My first reaction to this is "bite me," but admittedly that's not terribly productive. Eating honey doesn't mean that I don't have a moral concern for animals (well, OK, maybe it implies that I don't have a moral concern for a mite infestation. But, again, they're mites.) Vegsource says that "the vegan position on honey is definitive," but 'veganism' is not a creed, it's a convenient label. If you think I'm a "bad vegan", or a nonvegan, or a hypocrite, that's fine. If you want to play the "I'm a purer vegan than you" game, go ahead. I've thought about the issue, I've decided to eat honey, and I'm still comfortable calling myself a vegan. I recognize that my position could make life difficult for a vegan who does avoid honey by suggesting to people that vegans do eat honey. So in deference, I'll be a quiet honey eater, and if anyone brings up the issue specifically I'll note that many vegans reject honey. Think I'm missing something essential? I love to be proved wrong. Really. Join the discussion and tell me. I thought I'd throw some links and short pointers out here in case they are useful to anyone:
It would be nice if alt.food.vegan and alt.food.vegan.science were good sources of information, exchange, and debate. It would be very nice. But that's not the case. I know there are rude people in the world, and people who have nothing better to do than to exchange in flame wars 24 hours per day, but this is insane. Really, folks, get a life! Between the hateful people foaming at the mouth to disparage veganism to the complicit vegans who play along and fight with these people, there is no room for any actual information. A junior high school bus is the only environment I have ever been in that is even remotely as uncivil as this. I don't understand the appeal of it all. Why the hell do people bother to spend time there? I'm completely at a loss. Grrrr. Why can't Whole Foods be as squeaky-clean as their image? I learned today of Whole Foods' support of factory farms for ducks, where the birds are raised in deplorable conditions including lack of access to proper swimming water. When protesters raised this concern, they were allegedly met with derision and dismissal. Then there is Whole Foods' union-busting (although they must be doing something right: they were listed as #32 on Fortune's "100 Best Companies to Work For.) And their agressive business practices, including absorption of their competitors. Wild Oats, on the other hand, was ranked #19 on Business Ethics' "100 Best Corporate Citizens" list. Their programs include extensive support of local nonprofits including "5% days" wherein 5% of gross sales are donated to a local nonprofit. Also, Wild Oats will pay its employees for up to 52 hours per year for time spent volunteering with local nonprofits. And last year they purchased more than 100,000 seedlings for the National Arbor Day foundation to plant trees in wildfire-devastated areas. Maybe I need to change where I shop. Today marks the beginning of week four of my switch to veganism. Since going vegan, I have noticed several physiological changes. I want to stress that it is very difficult to establish causation here. I made several changes at the same time: I switched to veganism, I began taking a multivitamin supplement, and I began taking omega-3 supplements. Additionally, any or all of these changes may be due to coincidence, or may be psychosomatic (however, if the positive changes are lasting and psychosomatic, I have no problem with that.) That being said, here are the positive and negative changes: Pros: Improved mood, increased alertness, decreased daytime fatigue, decreased anxiety, disappearance of the phenomenon of lethargy after meals, increased concentration, more regular bowel movements, weight loss (I am significantly overweight), improvement of sensation in the fourth and fifth fingers of my right hand (I have wrist problems), increased ease in falling sleep, and general feeling of well-being. Cons: Greatly increased intestinal gas, back and neck pain, increased hand and head tremor (I have a condition known as essential tremor), decreased libido, pain when swallowing, and nightmares. I mentioned VeganEssentials in a previous post, but I wanted to plug them again. They carry hemp and faux-leather footwear, hats, gloves, and wallets; vegan message tee shirts and sweatshirts; vegan food items (including donuts, chocolate truffles, jerky, and "gelatin"), vitamins, and supplements; bath and body care and cosmetic products; and more. They are based out of Wisconsin and ship via UPS. I have changed the name of this blog from "veganblog" to "veganism blog", in deference to Richard Kahn of Vegan Blog: The (Eco) Logical Weblog. It's not quite as catchy, but in all fairness he had the name first. OK, more information on omega-3 fatty acids. While it is true that the human body can convert LNA (short chain) to EPA (longer chain), the conversion is quite inefficient, around 5%, and conversion efficiency to DHA (long chain) is even less efficient (for a scientific paper on this topic, click here.) DHA is essential in formation of the human brain and retina, among other tasks. If it cannot be synthesized from precursors, as the research suggests, it must be supplied in the diet (note that DHA consumption is especially critical for pregnant and lactating mothers.) DHA intake is usually through consumption of oily fish, but fortunately there is a vegan source for DHA, and it's where fish get the DHA in the first place: microalgae. While plant-sourced DHA has been available in supplement form for some years now, it has until recently only been available in gelatin capsules. VeganEssentials, however, is now producing vegan DHA capsules, the only source for vegan DHA as of this writing. It is called O-Mega-Zen3 and is available from their website (look under "Vitamins & Therapeutics".) On a per-mg basis, O-Mega-Zen3, when purchased from the VeganEssentials website, is half the price of the Whole Foods store brand of non-vegan DHA supplements. I cannot find any evidence to support this, but thought I would pass it on for consideration: the supplements department manager of the local Whole Foods said that the problem with vegan capsules, compared with gelatin capsules, is that they do not always dissolve in the correct place in the digestive tract. Therefore, if you are concerned about this, a sound practice might be to break open a capsule of O-Mega-Zen3, squeeze out the oil, and add it to the flaxseed oil you should be taking already. If you have a citation that supports or refutes the claim of non-dissolvability, please send it to me and I'll pass it on. You may be wondering "If DHA consumption is necessary for life, and DHA consumption is normally through fish, what about all the peoples of the world who did not have access to fish?" That's a good question, and the answer seems to be the consumption of insects. This is almost certainly the case for India, for example. This is one of the ways that our modern hygiene practices actually rob us of valuable nutrients: if you eat insects with your fruit and vegetables, you're getting DHA, but this is something that Westerners rarely engage in. Another example is vitamin B-12 consumption among vegetarian peoples: if you don't wash your vegetables (especially root vegetables) very well, they will be coated with bacteria that provide vitamin B-12. That's why, with modern Western hygiene practices, it is absolutely essential for vegans to take a vitamin B-12 supplement. Anyone who tells you otherwise is simply wrong. If an adult goes vegan after a life of being omnivore, his internal stores of B-12 will carry him for a while, but sooner or later the absence of B-12 in the diet will cause significant damage. B-12 deficiency in children can cause mental retardation. A great discussion on veganism is ongoing at the mcgees.org discussion page. I'll excerpt a portion of what I wrote: Eric Marcus's Vegan: The New Ethics of Eating has strong arguments in favor of a vegetarian diet. It's a published book, but can be downloaded for free from his website. It's a book in three acts, respectively entitled "To Your Health", "The Truth About Food Animals", and "Beyond the Dinner Table", the latter dealing with the ecological impact of raising livestock, and "The Truth About Food Animals" dealing with the conditions under which the animals are kept and slaughtered. I find the second act most compelling. He writes: It is hard to deny that animals deserve some measure of compassion, and the technology for raising and slaughtering farm animals has grown increasingly inhumane over the past two decades. Modern "factory farming" methods mean that many of today's food animals never see sunlight or soil. They live under conditions of intense crowding in a world of cages, conveyor belts, and artificial light. I have been particularly careful not to exaggerate any of the facts presented in this book, especially those relating to animal production. The plain truth is enough to appeal to most people's sense of ethics. The stories and photos in this section are intended to help you make the mental link between the miserable lives and deaths of animals raised for your consumption, and what you eat for dinner.Note that he properly takes animal rights as an axiom rather than a theorem: if you disagree with the opinion that animals have rights, the opinion that animals deserve compassion, the argument of the second section ceases to hold. With a nod to David Cross, that's the "best, slash worst, slash best again" part of ethics outside a religious framework: the axioms are up for grabs. Jeremy Bentham wrote of animals: "The question is not, Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but Can they suffer?" And yet I have very strong humanist leanings, which hard-core animal rights activists would probably criticize as speciesism in fancy clothes. The fact is, I do value human life more than animal life. The whole argument hinges on one's definition of necessity: while I can justify the necessary suffering of animals for the sake of human welfare, I cannot grant the necessity of meat consumption. Well-supervised, metered animal experimentation for pharmaceuticals, on the other hand, I do see as necessary. Chris De Rose of Last Chance for Animals writes: "If the death of one rat cured all diseases, it wouldn't make any difference to me." And Michael Fox of the Humane Society writes: "The life of an ant and that of my child should be granted equal consideration." I have intense antipathy at these statements. They strike me as absurd for humanist reasons (and the former for utilitarian reasons as well.) But yet I am a vegan. Why? Because I feel that eating meat, eggs, and dairy strictly increase the suffering in the world. There is a good page on animal welfare at the British Humanist Association website. I have received a request from Richard Kahn of Vegan Blog: The (Eco) Logical Weblog to consider changing the name of this blog. When I named this blog "veganblog", I checked to see if veganblog.com, veganblog.net, etc., were registered. None were. I didn't think to do a Google search for "veganblog". So, any suggestions for a new name for this blog? Post ideas at the mcgees.org discussion page, or email them to me. I've started taking flaxseed oil as a source of omega-3s, since I won't be consuming seafood any more. Actually most people, including omnivores, could benefit from the addition of flaxseed oil to their diets. Omega-3s have a 5:1 ratio of omega-3 to omega-6, and many other oils are in the 1:4 to 1:10 range. The ideal balance is supposed to be 1:2, so the addition of flaxseed oil to your diet would ameliorate the imbalance. But how much flaxseed oil should be consumed? In researching this online I ran across numerous inconsistent statements. Big surprise, right? This sort of thing is extremely prevalent in health food literature. But while I expected externally inconsistent statements, such as a factor of three difference in recommended dose, I was still surprised to find the following widespread internally inconsistent statement: "The suggested dose is 1 Tablespoon (Tbsp), or 1000 mg." Problem is, 1 Tbsp of flaxseed oil does not weigh 1000 mg. I checked it on a digital balance at work. It weighs 10,000 mg. So someone, somewhere, got a decimal place error, and scores of people have just parroted the number without bothering to check it out. Extremely frustrating. So now the question is which, if either, number is correct? Is it 1 Tbsp of oil, or 1000 mg of oil? Let's look at some numbers. Take a "best case" assumption, and assume that a vegan is eating healthfully, with all her fat coming from "good oils": half of her fat comes from olive oil, half from canola oil. U.S. dietary guidelines say that no more than 30% of your calories should come from fat, but vegan fat consumption is usually lower, so let's say the vegan is consuming 25% of 2,000 calories per day as fat. That's 500 calories from fat. Fat is 9 calories per gram (g), so that's around 56 g of fat. Flaxseed oil weighs 10 g per Tbsp, and I'll assume this is relatively constant across other vegetable oils. So the vegan in question consumes 2.8 Tbsp of canola oil and 2.8 Tbsp of olive oil per day. A Tbsp of canola oil contains 1.3 g of omega-3s and 2.8 g of omega-6s. A Tbsp of olive oil contains 0.08 g of omega-3s and 1.1 g of omega-6s. This means that our vegan consumes 3.86 g of omega-3s and 10.9 g of of omega-3s per day, for an overall ratio of 0.35. But we are trying to get to a ratio of 0.5. How much flaxseed oil do we need? Well, one Tbsp of flaxseed oil contains 7.2 g of omega-3s and 1.4 g of omega-6s. So we need to solve the following equation: (3.86 + (7.2 * X)) ------------------ = 0.5 (10.9 + (1.4 * X)) Solving for X, we get 0.24 Tbsp of flaxseed oil as the recommended dosage per day. That's 2.4 g (2400 mg of oil) as a daily dose. That's an extra 21.6 calories from oil, bringing our daily total to 25.8% of calories from fat. But the vegan is probably not eating that well. Let's say that the vegan consumes half the fat as "vegetable" (safflower) oil, a quarter as canola oil, and a quarter as olive oil. That's 2.8 Tbsp of safflower, 1.4 Tbsp of canola, and 1.4 Tbsp of olive oil. Safflower oil is really bad: it's all omega-6 and no omega-3. So the person is consuming (I'll skip the math) 1.9 g of omega-3s and 34 g of omega-6s, for an overall ratio of 0.05. That person would need to add (I'll skip the math again) 2.3 Tbsp of flaxseed oil to her diet to get the ratio back to 0.5, which is 23 g (23,000 mg) of oil. This means that the person will be consuming 200 extra calories and would be consuming 32% of his or her calories from fat. OK, that was long and convoluted. But if the best case scenario suggests 0.24 Tbsp of oil and a worse case scenario suggests 2.3 Tbsp of oil, 1 Tbsp is a reasonable number. 1,000 mg, on the other hand, is an order of magnitude too low. Does this get even more complicated? Well, yes. Some sources recommend a Tbsp of oil per 100 pounds of body weight, rather than a flat 1 Tbsp of oil. This seems reasonable since calorie consumption will scale accordingly. So, to summarize:
Most of the information for this post came from the Vegan Outreach Fats Table, which was in turn sourced from the USDA nutrient database. The last three days were spent with Jennifer's family in Hemet, California, planning for and attending a funeral. The food was all to be provided: scores of people dropped by bearing food of all sorts. A vegan diet is not difficult if you plan ahead, so I quietly brought a grocery bag of food with me with which to prepare meals. I am very pleased with how well the weekend's food turned out. I made hummus and moong dal beforehand. I also took some tempeh strips, tomato, and Veganaise to make vegan BLTs for one meal. I took some fruits and vegetables. And when the others were eating buffet-style from the donated food I would quietly make a plate for myself. The one meal where I couldn't do this was the actual funeral luncheon, which was a potluck. No problem: I made a fine meal of pasta salad, bean salad, fruit salad, olives, and iced tea. Complete protein there, too. One great story: I made a vegan chocolate raspberry pie, slightly modified from a recipe on veganoutreach.org. I was taking it into the house, and Jennifer's meat-and-potatoes uncle looked at it and said, "That looks great!" "You should try some," I responded. "I made it." I saw him a few minutes later, and he had a wonderful expression on his face. "That pie is really great. I love really rich, chocolatey things." So it passed the carnivore test. I went into the kitchen and Jennifer's young cousin (perhaps nine years old) was cutting herself a piece. I got a piece for myself and went to sit down at the table. Jenn's cousin took a bite, her eyes widened, she stared at the piece of pie and gestured a couple of times with her fork, the way people do when they are very pleased with something. She looked up, eyes still wide, and saw I was eating the same thing. "This is good stuff!" she said. I smiled. "Thanks. I made it," I said. "Really? Wow!" She enthusiastically dug into the pie again. So it passed the kid test. I have to admit I felt a bit like Hannibal Lecter in the film version of Red Dragon: "If I told you what it was," I heard in my head, "I'm afraid you wouldn't even try it." So here is the fantastic recipe for vegan chocolate pie: Vegan Chocolate Pie
Melt the chocolate chips in a double boiler. Puree the tofu in a blender. Add the melted chocolate and puree until smooth. Pour mixture into pie crust. In pie crust, mix in raspberries or other fruit/nuts. It works well if they are all covered with the tofu mixture but at different depths, leaving a bumpy surface to the pie. Chill in the refrigerator for at least two hours. And that's it! I swear this is absolutely delicious. Not in the "vegan moussaka is delicious" sense, which really means "you kind of have to be a wacky hippie to find it delicious", but honest-to-goodness take-it-to-a-party-or-sell-it-at-a-bake-sale delicious. If you still have some of the pie filling left over, pour in a milk substitute (Pacific Foods' Hazelnut milk works very well) and make a milkshake to reward yourself for your five minutes of grueling work. ;-) I'm past the one week mark. What delicious food is available as a vegan! ("Who am I trying to convince, me or you....") But really, quite tasty. Yesterday morning I left some moong dal (dried split mung beans) to soak in the morning, after "picking and cleaning" them. It's actually quite relaxing to go through lentils looking for small stones. For lunch I had artisan-style sourdough bread with hummus and some more of the vegan moussaka. Then when I arrived home I cooked the moong dal, added some curry powder, white pepper, salt, and garlic powder, and had a very simple, very tasty meal. Today I went out to lunch with my co-workers to celebrate Administrative Professionals' Day, or whatever they're calling it now. Normally this would have been a bit tricky, but my manager delegated planning of the luncheon to me, and I specifically chose a place in town where I knew I could get vegan pasta (Stuft Pizza, as I discussed a couple years ago.) They initially brought out my pasta with cheese on it. This was not described in the menu, so I felt comfortable sending it back. No cravings yet. Yesterday I went out and purchased two books: Becoming Vegan by Melina and Davis, and Vegan Planet, a cookbook, by Robin Robertson. Both look to be promising books. Last night I made a vegan moussaka from Vegan Planet which was quite tasty once you got past the initial unfamiliarity. The recipe seemed to call for too little liquid, oil, and seasoning, and I adjusted all of these ingredients upwards in my preparation. Turned out it could have used even more liquid, oil, and seasoning, as well as (as my mother suggested) marinara sauce to ladle over it. I made enough for several days, and I've taken some to work today. The rest of my lunch consists of blood orange, asian pear, half-sour pickle, and a tonic water. I have some whole grain, multigrain bread here from last week, along with some cashew butter and a couple of jams. This serves as my breakfast (when I have breakfast) and snack (when I have a snack). The bread has a small amount of dairy in it, but I can't rationalize throwing it away at this point, so I will finish this loaf and then find a vegan replacement. I'm a bit hungry. I'm going to go have my lunch. Welcome to the new veganblog. I am on my second day of a switch to veganism. This is the third time I have gone vegan in the past couple of years. The first time lasted for a month, the second time three months. It was the inevitable difficulties that sounded the death knell the last two times, plus my insistance on rigorous adherence. When I slipped off the diet it became a slippery slope, and soon I was back to ordering the "garbage pail lid" combo at Robin's Restaurant in Pasadena, which consists of perhaps 1.5 kilos of meat. Ugh. I thought that by setting up a blog it would help me talk through the issues that will surely come up, and maybe this will be able to help others who are trying to make the same change in their lives. Thanks for reading. |
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