Vote: The Ethics of Eating Meat

Don’t forget to vote in the NY Times essay contest, “The Ethical Case for Eating Meat.”

I voted for the first one, “I’m About to Eat Meat for the First Time in 40 Years.”  The deadline is tomorrow night.

2011 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 20,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 7 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Kitchen Painted

Before

After

We painted our kitchen.  It’s a high-traffic area and my kids can’t seem to walk through the house without putting their hands everywhere.  After eight years it was grungy and banged up.  We decided to make it more colorful, too, like the rest of the rooms are.  Our region has snow on the ground a good part of the year, so it is a treat for the eyes to have color inside.  I love before-after pictures, so here are two pair.

After

Before

The whole story of this kitchen’s design is in the finale of my Kitchen Saga: 1 | 2 | 3.

Recipe Copyright

Over time, several people have asked if I have permission to post the recipes I have here.  The answer is no, I have no permission for a single recipe posted at this site.  I don’t need it.  It is not required by law or even by etiquette.

This is a pretty good explanation based on case law.  And here is the original law for your reference.

In sum, authors cannot copyright a list of ingredients.  I’m not allowed to exactly copy their recipe text or photos without permission, but I do not do that.  In most cases etiquette says I should give credit, and I do.

Here’s what I do.  I use someone’s recipe to make something, taking note of changes I make.  Then I write out what I did, in my own words.  I also take a picture of what I made and use that.  And then as a matter of courtesy and honesty I give credit to their inspiration.  If I didn’t change anything (except write it in my own words), I say the recipe is “from” them.  But I almost always change something, and I don’t even use the “three ingredients” rule they mention in that above posting.  I’m not stingy – their recipe inspired me; unless the recipe bears almost no resemblance to the original, I give credit.

So if you want to see the author’s original ingredients, tested directions, variations, and professional photos, you’ll have to buy or borrow their book or visit their web site.  My web site is about what I made, and that’s what you get.

Kwanzaa Angel Food Cake

Stefon

This cooking video reminded me of Stefon from Saturday Night Live Weekend Update, who gushes over the creepy smorgasbord of weirdness at “New York’s hottest club.  This place has everything!”

Sandra Lee's Kwanzaa Cake

This cake has everything! But as with nightclubs, that might not be a good thing.

I was OK with the store-bought Angel Food cake (though angel food is not vegan), I began to question adding cocoa and cinnamon to canned frosting, and it didn’t look very good, sort of gray.  I became more concerned when canned apple pie filling was dumped in the middle, horrified when pumpkin seeds and corn nuts (she calls them acorns) were sprinkled on, and the laughter began when the enormous candles were jammed into the top.  When the candles are bigger than the cake, it’s time to rethink things.

It was like something my kids would come up with unsupervised!

Here’s an article written by a woman confessing to having invented this cake.

Chocolate Showdown

Last week I bought a bar of Ghirardelli 72% and Lindt 70% to do a dark chocolate taste test.  Most of these companies’ product line are non-vegan but these are exceptions.  Note that cocoa butter is vegan.

My husband and I have had the Ghirardelli before (as baking chips, which I don’t think they make any more), and we started with that, then trying the Lindt.  We both agreed the Lindt had a very strange flavor.  The ingredients were the same, but I thought it was almost as if it had rum in it or something.  But I thought perhaps it was just not what we were used to, so gave it another chance: We only eat one or two pieces per night (if any), and as the week progressed we ate up first the Ghirardelli and then moved to the Lindt, and when we were eating the Lindt by itself it was fine.

So I was in the store today and saw that the Lindt was marked “New Recipe” and “Smooth Dark” instead of “Intense Dark.”  We still had two pieces of the old kind left, so we did another taste test.  We started with the old and moved to the new, not looking at the ingredients or nutrition info until we had finished tasting.  The new Lindt is very different, smoother, lighter, creamier, softer, sweeter… and less chocolatey.  I think my husband might have liked it better, since he only eats the dark because it is what I bring home.  But not me – I have grown to like the intense flavor of dark chocolate, and this isn’t it.  After the old version, it tasted like vaguely chocolatey Crisco.

Then I compared the backs of the packages.   I’m not sure I understand how they did this.  In a 40 g (4 squares) serving they added 2 g of fat (saturated), 1 g of fiber, and 1 g of sugar, while keeping the cocoa at 70%.  4 g is 10% of the product.  The total fat (19 g) carbs (17 g) and protein (3 g) comes to 39 of the 40 g of product.  Clearly I don’t understand how the 70% works in, though I can understand that original cocoa itself may very well have fat or carbohydrate in it.   They added the ingredient soya lecithin, which has fat.

I’m just now eating another piece of the new Lindt, with a fresh palate, all in the name of fair testing, and it still tastes like nothing.  I won’t buy this again.  I’m going back to Ghirardelli or possibly Wegman’s.  You can probably save money by looking for the Ghirardelli baking bar in the baking section.  I presume it’s similar – do a taste test!

Farm Sanctuary

We visited Farm Sanctuary this afternoon.  I made the mistake for a couple of years of going on hot sunny days – we were baked and the animals were shagged out in the shade of the barns.  Today was perfect, temperate and so overcast it looked like it might rain.

As members or animal sponsors, I forget which, we have the option of wandering around on our own, off-tour, so we usually do that and really take our time, but that means we can’t go inside the pens unless we glom onto a handy tourgroup happening to be going in.  Last year we were not allowed into the pig barn due to the risk of our giving the pigs swine flu, but that ban has been lifted, so we tagged along with a group going in there.  But the huge adult pigs were sound asleep in the big hay nests they build.  There were a couple of younger pigs outside who came over to see us, so we gave them a pat.  This was the first time I had ever seen a pig on his/her feet.

We spent a lot of time with two roosters (one of them pictured to the right) and a turkey who were in a separate pen.  I don’t know them well enough to know whether they were being friendly  or not, but they were certainly interested in us.

We spent even more time watching the ducks and geese – it is fun to watch their social lives, both friendships and squabbles, and see what interesting things they find to do around their pond.

The cows were way off in a field, as usual, but we saw goats and sheep and the friendly cat Sirella who last summer escorted us all around the farm, but this summer just saw us off with a few minutes of playing before we left.

We stopped for dinner at the Stonecat Cafe in Hector, NY, as suggested in a brochure at Farm Sanctuary.  It was very nice, one of the best meals I’ve gotten in the area.  I think they said everything was fresh and organic.  My daughter ordered two sides as her meal, focaccia and vegetables.  The $2.50 focaccia was OK but nothing special, indistinguishable from Italian bread, but came with some nice olive oil, and the seasonal veggies were overpriced at $6 for a small side dish, but they were very good, very fresh, organic summer squashes sauted in olive oil with salt and pepper.

Stonecat Cafe

I ordered a falafel wrap, which was excellent.  It was a green tortilla shell wrapped around fresh matchsticked carrots, a mesclun salad mix that they might have gathered from the beautiful herb and flower garden the patio overlooked, falafel which was green with herbs, and a lovely tahini sauce.  It came with interesting potato chips and a pickle for $8.50, and I thought that was pretty good.

We had a couple of other vegan choices: a half or full salad, a falafel salad, and a grilled tofu steak that sounded very good but was unaccountably $22, when the next highest entree, among several steaks and fish dishes, was I think $12.  Maybe it was coated in gold, or they hate cooking it, I don’t know.  There were more sides that might have been vegan.  The menu had a key for both vegetarian and vegan items (thanks for making the distinction) but the sides were not marked.  None of the kids meals was vegan, though none were the crappy usual kids meal fare, and at least two were vegetarian, if cheese-heavy.

Reading, Listening, and Watching

I read a bunch of stuff for my Food Psychology class today, and then watched the fourth lecture.  This Time article is an amusing account of a journalist fasting for two days.

I’m enjoying Michael Pollan’s book In Defense of Food, though I find things to disagree with.  For instance, a major point he tries to make is that most of what you find in the supermarket is not food but what he calls edible foodlike substances.  This is amusing enough and makes for a succinct tagline (“Eat food.  Not too much.  Mostly plants.”), but I’m not sure it’s worth arguing about a definition of food – let’s stick to arguing about how much of certain types we should eat – more, less, or none?  We can make exactly the same point (stop eating processed food) without arguing over semantics.  Just make it “Eat whole food. etc.”  He has written elsewhere that redefining food will make it easier to kick junk “food” off of food stamps and out of schools and remove their sales-tax exempt status.  IMHO, those are policy decisions that we can decide to make without having to convince Webster’s dictionary to redefine a common word.  Can you imagine processed food manufacturers sitting still while their product is defined as non-food?  But everyone already knows it’s junk food; have the government officially classify “junk food” and then implement those changes.

And do we need to argue about whether shoving food in our mouths while we watch TV is “eating” or “feeding”?  Can we just say that if the food is making it down your throat, you’re eating, and maybe there are better and worse ways to accomplish it for mental and social health?  Maybe I will agree with him when I have finished the book.

Michael Pollan

This book is a response to questions Pollan received from readers of his earlier book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma.  People wanted to know what they should eat, and what he eats.  In the introduction Pollan wonders why people would want a journalist to tell them what to eat.  (I wonder the same thing as I write my blog.)  He answers his own question that people are confused about what to eat because the topic has been taken away from our mothers and handed over to scientists, who have made it very confusing.  He cites a study from the early twentieth century in which doctors and medical workers stationed overseas noticed that as people in that area abandoned their traditional diet for a Western diet, predictable disease patterns followed, but even more interesting, the original diet was incredibly varied from place to place.  Some populations thrived on “high fat, some on low fat, some on high carb, all meat, or all plant; indeed there have been traditional diets based on just about any kind of whole food you can imagine.”  This suggests that humans can be healthy on a wide variety of diets, but the Western diet is not one of them.  [p.11]  Interesting.

I want to say, I really like Michael Pollan when he stays out of the topic of meat.  He has a lot of smart and insightful things to say.  I’ve read The Botany of Desire and several pieces he’s written for the NY Times, such as this open letter to the incoming President Obama, “Farmer in Chief.”  This article, “Unhappy Meals,” seems to be a summary of In Defense of Food. But whenever he gets on the topic of animals, he has a brain freeze.  I didn’t read The Omnivore’s Dilemma because I didn’t want to put myself through reading about the calf he buys and then eventually has slaughtered.  I understand that is a small part of the book, and I should probably give it a read, though at this point I think I’ve heard most of what he has to say on the topic of where our food comes from through other media.  But it’s not just that I disagree with him on animals, it’s that he doesn’t make logical sense.  This review from the Atlantic Monthly, “Hard to Swallow,” does a great job of skewering T.O.D. (and here’s my take on it), but I’ve seen Pollan fall apart over meat in other essays as well.  He’s OK when he just touches on meat – he usually recommends reducing our consumption and getting animals out of intensive confinement, but when he goes in depth, he is just pumping out excuses.

John Cawley

I also enjoyed listening to this podcast from the Rudd Center, an interview of John H. Cawley, PhD, an economist at Cornell who studies food economics full time.  He had some very interesting observations, beginning with a discussion about research he is doing into deceptively advertised weight loss products.  He says there is no law saying weight loss products, such as pills, have to work or even be safe, and they can make any claims in their ads that they wish.  He was really interesting.

I think it’s wonderful that this Rudd Center series of interviews on obesity includes lawyers, economists, nutritionists, epidemiologists, psychologists, journalists – you get such a diverse view of the issues.

You know, all this reading and watching about obesity and junk food makes me crave foods I normally do not want, such as chips.  But I am able to laugh at myself, and have not rushed off to the store for any Flaming Hot Cheetohs yet.

Gas Station Dining

We went down to my parents cottage this afternoon and planned ahead to pick up dinner at a Subway we found through Google maps.  I rather hopelessly checked out a few other restaurants that would be on the way down, but most of them do not serve vegetables.  Well, I could get a plain salad.  Possibly pasta, but I would have to call each one and sound like a weirdo asking whether they have dairy in their marinara sauce – I am really tired of doing that, especially in this region.  I have a strong hunch that my daughter and I are the only vegans in the county.

We had trouble finding the Subway and that was because it was inside a convenience store for a gas station.  So that is what it has come around to: the healthiest food in the region is to be found at the back of a gas station.  I’m grateful!  I got a veggie sandwich on whole wheat with everything.  They had spinach so I got that instead of lettuce, and of course plenty of hot peppers.  That sandwich was smokin’!

During the drive I listened to a series of podcasts from the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, out of Yale.  This center is run by the professor whose class I am watching online.  I like them.  There are shorter 3-4 minute ones on such subjects as discrimination against obese patients in hospitals and getting trans fats out of restaurants, and longer 20 minute ones interviewing experts.

U.S. Vegans

Ellen Degeneres: vegan

Tobey Maguire is not going to eat this spider because he's vegan.

I recently read an article in Vegetarian Resource Group, a scrupulously scientific source of vegan nutrition and facts, about their 2009 Poll.  Their survey showed that 3.4% of U.S. adults consider themselves vegetarian (no meat at all) and .8% are vegan (1.3% if you include those who eat honey).  Similar results were obtained in 2010 when youths were polled.  With a population of almost 310,000,000, there should be about three million American vegans.  That’s a lot of people!

Some of them are famous.  Wikipedia includes a list of vegans who are actors, authors, musicians, politicians, and athletes.