Eat with Integrity

Poisoned by Vitamins!

2009-07-24T05:08:00.000-07:00

Being vegetarian I sometimes take a multi-vitamin to supplement my diet. But not all vitamins are good for you.

A lot of multivitamins have super-high dosage, which may be bad for us. Maximum does not mean optimum.

Also, our bodies cannot process synthetically-made vitamins as well as the vitamins naturally found in food. Not a surprise! Unfortunately, vitamin makers do not have to specify how vitamins are made.

This article explains the science behind this and advises you to detect the difference between natural and synthetic vitamin supplements by reading in between the lines on their labels:

The most notable difference between natural and synthetic vitamin supplements is in their claimed potencies. Natural vitamins as in plant foods are never highly concentrated. Nature provides us with balance, complexity and bioavailability but not with a high potency. Conversely, synthetic and crystalline (chemical isolated from natural source) vitamins do appear in high unnatural potencies.

When examining products labeled as natural vitamins, note that labels of truly natural food based vitamins, should indicate the exact natural source from which each of the vitamins is obtained. Simply put, if the vitamin concentrations are high and/or their natural sources aren't listed, most likely these vitamins are synthetic. Chemical sources for synthetic vitamin supplements include petrochemicals, coal tar, chemically manipulated sugar and inorganic minerals.

The take-away:

Get your vitamins from food, not supplements. They are meant to just be supplementary.

For vitamins, more does not mean better--get the vitamins that are less concentrated and more likely thus to be from natural sources.

Photo by takomabibelot

Surimi, or Imitation Crab / Fish

2009-07-13T04:13:00.000-07:00

Surimi is imitation crab or fish made from flakes of white fish or haddock, egg whites, starch, and crab flavorings. Without the added flavoring, surimi has not much taste.

Usually, surimi has red stripes on one side, which is dyed to make it more visually appetizing. And, as you can see above, surimi can be decorated with not just red stripes but also Hello Kitty faces! Very cute! But do you really want to eat toys' faces?

So surimi is a fish product that has little natural taste and is naturally visually unappealing. Hungry yet?

If you are still hungry, follow the last link here to watch a Food Network video Eat Me Daily posted to show the 4-hour surimi processing procedure.

Photo from Oishii Yo!

Vegetarian Discomfort / Discrimination

2009-07-09T03:00:00.000-07:00

Only a few times have I been made uncomfortable for my food convictions. Usually, I don’t bring it up, because I don’t want to make anyone uncomfortable. I find that weh nI make someone uncomfortable, that is when they get defensive and start making me uncomfortable. So I don’t usually go there.

But sometimes you have to go there. One time I hosted a vegan party without telling any of my non-vegan guests that it was going to be vegan. When the realization dawned on my 3 guests of my ‘sneaky’ vegan hosting skills, only one of them had a strong reaction. She said it was quite ok to invite her over for a vegan dinner without telling her so, but I could tell that she was somehow uncomfortable with the idea. I don’t know if it has anything to do with my specific dinner party or if it related to something in her past. It quickly passed, and we are still friends.

But there are definitely spaces of disquiet when breaking bread with non-vegetarians.

Cartoon from vegetus, via Spoon Revolution

Suffering for Foraged Nettle Tea

2009-07-08T03:59:00.000-07:00

As we lounged by Berlin’s canal, one of my friends noticed that we were sitting next to a patch of nettles and suggested that we harvest some leaves to make tea.

Using nothing more than folded flyers, we harvested some mature nettle stalks with lots of leaves. Apparently, if you are careful, you can harvest nettle leaves safely with just your bare hands. Since the pricklies only grown on the underside of the leaves, you can fold the two halves of the leaf together, holding on to the upper side, and then pull the leaf off the stalk.

While making the tea, I got stung! Here I am taking the sting off with a jar of frozen red beans.

To make the tea, I just boiled the leaves for 10 minutes and then strained them. The smaller leaves are younger and less bitter. But I don’t mind bitter in my tea.

If you boil for less than 10 minutes, the stinging chemicals remain. In fact, two of my guests claimed they felt a little tingling on their tongues upon their first sip of the tea. It wasn’t painful or bad, however.

Too bad we didn’t have any lemons, because nettle tea turns bright pink after adding lemon juice, because of the ph change.

Other than tea, the leaves are edible too, like spinach. The tea can be cooled and used as shampoo.

Visiting the organic oyster mushroom farm in Berlin

2009-07-07T08:13:00.000-07:00

An organic oyster mushroom farm sprouts in Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin.

Here a girl plays in the farm’s courtyard.

The mushroom farmers buy buckets of wheat with the spores living on them.

Then they wash and heat up hay in these industrial potato cookers.

They stuff plastic bags with a mix of heated and sterilized hay and the inoculated wheat, hang them in a room on the ground floor, and wait around 2 weeks for the spores to inoculate the hay.

Then they take the mushroom logs downstairs to the basement where the air is cooler.

(This photo and the one above are both in the basement space. I didn't photograph the ground-floor room because there was nothing there.)

They also had a fan downstairs, although I am not sure whether that was for guests or for the mushrooms. Oyster mushrooms need light so that they know what direction to grow in. In the mushroom logs are holes, and the mushrooms will sprout through them.

The mushroom logs hang from the ceiling on hooks, like sausages!

I asked Christian Klein why he chose the sausage-form, and he said that it was a question of space. He had already tried to grow oyster mushrooms one without much success. The first time he had put the spores + hay mix in boxes. In the sausage-form, there is more air circulation and surface area.

He would like to sell logs so that people can grow oyster mushrooms at home, but the problem with cultures is the bad bacteria. I am not sure what the enemy of oyster mushroom is, but as you can see below, it is green.

A close-up of oyster mycelium. This white structure is what you want.

Christian Klein wrote his thesis on the oyster mushroom. He had chosen it because shitakes take a long time to grow, and white button mushrooms you cannot propogate yourself. His goal is eventually to be able to propogate the oyster spores.

Unfortunately, I did not eat any of the farm's mushrooms since they were in between growth cycles, and oyster mushroom do not keep. But you can buy the oyster mushrooms from the farm itself or in a flowershop on the Friedhof Eisackstraße on the U-Bahn station Innsbrucker Platz.

Why fermentation?

2009-07-06T07:12:00.000-07:00

Culture your Food

I started fermenting after reading Wild Fermentation by Sandor Katz, full of good recipes and tips and stories. He makes fermentation sound like fun, easy, delicious, and political—all of which it is.

Political: Because our food system is premised on mass production, which favors industrialization, sterility, uniformity, usually at the expense of nutrition and flavor, reclaiming food autonomy by making food ourselves is a political act.

Easy: And fermentation is easy! Mostly, what you need are ingredients + container + culture (what we call the mold or bacteria—I like to call them my beasties!) + time! Sandor says that fermenting vegetables is even easier than making yogurt, which is already pretty simple. I just need to find a large ceramic or glass jar. And patience to wait anywhere between 3 days and 3 years!!!!

Delicious: Plus, my kombucha, soy yogurt, tempeh, nut cheeses, strawberry honey wine/mead, preserved lemons are delicious! They are my babies! Actually, I take that back. I didn’t like the preserved lemons so much, but I may not have had the right recipes to help them shine.

Fun: I like having a more intimate relationship with what I eat. By making it, I can tweak it to my taste. But more than that, I like the rhythm it confers on my life. Making yogurt and kombucha every week gives my kitchen life a cycle. As spring wakes after winter’s hibernation, so relive kombucha and yogurt creation weekly or biweekly in my kitchen. I find certain comfort in making patterns in my life.

One of the most personally important reason is that, through fermentation, I participate in fertility—in the most extravagant understanding of the term. Other people may have plants and pets. I generate more life by feeding my beasties at the right temperature. Cultivating life in the right environment is easy. My beasties are resilient. In fact, they kill the germs that would make me sick. After I eat them in yogurt, they become a part of my internal microfloral landscape and keep me healthy and safe. I give to my bacteria communities and receive from them. Is it too much to claim that we are accountable to each other?

You can hear Sandor Katz speak on Awesome Pickle.

Nutritional tidbit of the day: I knew that table salt was bad for me. In the talk, Sandor tells me why: table salt is so cheap because they who make it don’t make money from selling it. How do the salt sellers make money then? They strip natural minerals from the sodium chloride and sell the minerals to vitamin producers! That explains why unrefined salt, though less processed, is more expensive than table salt. But it is better to get your minerals with your salt rather than in pill form. It is always better to eat whole foods rather than processed foods—and vitamins are processed!

Image from howsyrface (totally crazy image, no?)

Nuka and Narazuke Pickles

2009-06-30T08:27:00.001-07:00

Photo from kyotofoodie

I have been reading about nuka pickles, which is a Japanese method of fermenting with rice bran powder, water, and salt.

It looks like so much fun! Like playing with mud, but you can actually eat the vegetables after fermentation!

Unfortunately, with my schedule, I can’t make the time to turn the pot twice a day. One more reason to live with another fermentator as collaborator…

But the more I learn about the possibilities of fermentation and pickling, the more amazed I am. For example, I just learned about narazuke, an alcoholic pickle made in Japan! After sitting in sake lees for 1-3 years, I guess the vegetables can’t help it.

Bottling Homebrew Beer

2009-06-19T04:33:00.000-07:00

Last night I sterilized 36 bottles and helped my friend F. bottle his homebrew beer, which he made from ‘beer mix’ he brought back from Australia.

At first he thought that it was contaminated with mold on the top, but I convinced him that it was just yeast.

Check out the dregs at the bottom!

I got to take home the last bottle, because it had so much of the dregs that disgusted F.

We taste in two to eight weeks…if the bottles don’t explode first!

Getting to Done: 5 lessons from Public Speaking

2009-06-17T06:56:00.000-07:00

I gave a 5-minute talk on Friday about fermentation. I was really, really nervous.

Plus, I broke my 5-month long coffee fast. Drinking coffee was made worse by having to drink bad drip coffee—ug. All buzz, no flavor. No, no, no one talked me out of it.

So, spazzed out on the ghost of coffee + super nervous = BAD .

At least, it is now DONE. And I can move on to my next projects…

Five things I learned about public speaking:

1. Entertain your audience.

Not everyone is a nerd like me. Not everyone wants to learn about something new. I thought that sharing something I thought was interesting would be enough, but a lot of people just want to be entertained.

The audience favorite was a talk about making strawberry jam. He didn’t emphasize his awesome recipe. He was just really, really funny, which leads to…

2. Delivery can be more important than the content.

3. 5 minutes can be two lifetimes.

My heart literally stopped twice during this 5-minute talk.

If you want to live forever, try public speaking!

4. Choose your audience wisely. Choose to speak only to people who share my values.

Speaking live is intimate. The feedback is immediate whether people care or not. The bond you create with your audience has to be sustained for as long as you are on stage. Preparing something to which your audience will pay attention is much, much easier if they already are receptive to it.

In my case, I have a niche audience. My message is not for everyone. I should have chosen to speak at a food, not general, event.

5. Surviving public speaking for the first time ever in front of more than 100 strangers makes you feel invincible.

Poster by Joshua Rothaas, from Bre Pettis' Cult of Done Manifesto

Things I Love Thursday

2009-06-04T03:06:00.000-07:00

In the spirit of one of my favorite lifestyle blogs, here are some things I love:

Man, I thought I was hardcore, making my own yogurt. That is NOTHING compared to growing, harvesting, threshing, winnowing, and grinding your own wheat flour! I don't even know what winnowing is much less how to do it...

Did you know that not all the chemicals in a product have to be listed? If something is a byproduct, then the chemical is a 'contaminant,' not an ingredient.

To anyone who questions that genetically modified foods should be questioned, biologist Arpad Psuztai tells you that you are wrong.

And I LOVE LOVE LOVE this line from my favorite blogger with attitude: 'billions of people continue to eat death on a daily basis, pretending that it is food.'

Some more things that made me happy this past week:
making burn-the-back-of-your-throat kombucha with chile-soaked water,
finding out that we are all connected through less than 6 degrees at a secret supper party,
meeting an old-school butcher and hearing fascinating stories of...well, butchering (what can I say? I am a rebellious vegetarian),
strangers eavesdropping on my dinner conversations and revealing themselves, and
cooking a 3-course dinner for 6...and being so happy at the deliciousness that I forget to document anything for my blog.

Photo by Darwin Bell

Bread Recipe and Food Insight from Thoreau

2009-05-25T01:43:00.000-07:00

In Walden Henry David Thoreau writes how he baked bread from a mixture of rye and “Indian meal” (I assume that this would be cornmeal), according to an old Latin recipe from Marcus Porcius Cato, without yeast or leavening:

"Panem depsticium sic facito. Manus mortariumque bene lavato. Farinam in mortarium indito, aquae paulatim addito, subigitoque pulchre. Ubi bene subegeris, defingito, coquitoque sub testu." Which I take to mean, -- "Make kneaded bread thus. Wash your hands and trough well. Put the meal into the trough, add water gradually, and knead it thoroughly. When you have kneaded it well, mould it, and bake it under a cover," that is, in a baking kettle.

Even back then, grains were fed to farm animals and farmers bought their grains:

Every New Englander might easily raise all his own breadstuffs in this land of rye and Indian corn, and not depend on distant and fluctuating markets for them. Yet so far are we from simplicity and independence that, in Concord, fresh and sweet meal is rarely sold in the shops, and hominy and corn in a still coarser form are hardly used by any. For the most part the farmer gives to his cattle and hogs the grain of his own producing, and buys flour, which is at least no more wholesome, at a greater cost, at the store.
Photo by pablo.sanchez

In preparation for 14 days of Sugar Freedom

2009-05-22T02:10:00.000-07:00

After two weeks of avoiding dairy, I will avoid white flour for two weeks. I think that if I can avoid pizza, I will be pretty ok with avoiding white flour. Then I will not eat white, refined sugar for two weeks.

But upon reading this article comparing the evils of fructose and glucose, I realized that I should study up on my sugars.

A recent study found that fructose is evil, at least compared to glucose in sweetened drinks. Stay away from sweetened drinks and processed, packaged foods.

The article recommended that we should stay away from sugar, especially sweetened drinks like sodas and processed, packaged foods, but for your sugar NEEDS, the best 3 sweeteners are:

1. The herb stevia (this is the best and safest sweetener, although illegal to use as a food additive, according to the FDA)
2. Organic cane sugar
3. Raw, organic honey

The Nourished Kitchen blogs advises that we stay away from white sugar, brown sugar, agave nectar, high fructose corn syrup and chemically-based artificial sweeteners and only use natural sweeteners like honey, date sugar, low-refined cane sugar, molasses, sorghum syrup, maple syrup and sugar, palm and coconut sugar, or green stevia.

In preparation of my two weeks of white sugar freedom, I will see how I can substitute these into my life, but I have no idea where to find this stuff in the US, much less in Germany...Good thing that my two weeks of sugar freedom starts in 2 and a half weeks!

Photo by Leeni!

Processed Soy = Evil

2009-05-22T01:46:00.000-07:00

I always knew to think of processed soy products as evil, and here is one specific reason why: whole soybeans are bathed in the chemical solvent hexane to concentrate high-protein isolate. Usually, you can find soy-protein isolate in a lot of fake meats. But hexane is neurotoxic and, thus, "poses serious occupational hazards to workers, is an environmental air pollutant, and can contaminate food". Yes, it can be found on your soy food products if you don't buy organic. Luckily, in the US hexane is prohibited in organic products.

But the whole point of the article I read is that many of our 'organic' soybeans come from China, where organic oversight is so slack...

Process your own soy with mold, my friends. Let our microfloral allies do the work for us. Because mold ferments soybeans to make tempeh, it is actually more digestible than tofu.

Photo by Clearly Ambiguous

Fermenting Soybeans

2009-05-19T10:25:00.000-07:00

I made my own tempeh again this past weekend! Since making it is a 2-3 day affair, it gave my weekend a nice rhythm.

Friday night: soak the soybeans
Upon waking Saturday morning: remove soybean skins + cut up the beans into smaller pieces
Saturday morning: cook the soybeans while making brunch
Saturday early afternoon: spread almost fully-cooked soybeans on baking sheet double lined with flat-woven towels to dry them
Saturday early evening: after mixing with some apple cider vinegar and powdered tempeh spores, spread the skin dry beans into baking dishes, then pop into oven with only the light on
Sunday morning: check to make sure some white mold is evident
Sunday late afternoon/early evening: remove tempeh from incubator when solid

Cut into pieces to be wrapped in plastic wrap to freeze for later consumption.

The first time I made tempeh, I had to incubate for 36 hours or so. And everything turned black! At least on the side that was exposed to the air.

Last night, I had my first taste from my second batch. It was more firm than my first batch, and I didn't cut the soybeans as much, so I could taste each individual bean. For the first time, I baked it in the oven and then added it to my Thai-ish whole-grain noodle dish, which I improvised with lots of caramelized onions, half a reconstituted ancho chile, some broccoli florets, one tomato, three mushrooms, soy sauce, peanut butter, homemade mango chutney with sesame oil drizzled on top. Delicious!

Last week's meals

2009-05-18T07:05:00.000-07:00

For lunch last week, I ate cucumbers, tomatoes, red bell peppers, mushrooms and almonds with a mustard vinaigrette.

For dinner last week, I used some crusty old bread to make a creamy tomato soup. I swirled in some homemade soy yogurt, even though it was quite thick and 'creamy' enough.

To accompany the tomato bread soup, I marinated some radishes with equal amounts vinegar and jam, according to a Japanese-inspired pickling recipe. Delicious!

Day 4 of no cow torture

2009-05-14T15:08:00.000-07:00

Dairy products are products of cow torture!

This new vocabulary should help me stop liking products of tortured cow secretions.

Originally, I had planned to write about the things I have eaten since starting my two weeks of no cow torture that may have been made from the secretions of tortured cows. But being vegan is not about being perfect or being pure. I don’t need to be 100% dairy free. Animals don’t care about purity. Animals care about suffering less and not dying.

This 14-day experiment helps me see how much power I have to decrease suffering.

In these 14 days:
I break through my belief barriers and live my truth rather than live my excuses.
I take full pleasure in eating and pay closer attention to life rather than
sleepwalking through the suffering around me.
I open my heart and take responsibility for my power to end suffering, so as
to live large and fully.

In that spirit, I will NOT focus on what I ate that may have had crossed the line. Knowing what they are and why they tempt me will help me avoid them in the future, however. Mostly, I need to think before putting something in my mouth—that is the tagline of this blog: eat consciously! Don’t eat accidents!

Eating no dairy, Day Half

2009-05-11T08:43:00.000-07:00

I got inspired to stop eating dairy for 14 days.

I already ate dairy on Day 1 of my 14-day experiment without eating dairy.

This morning I completely forgot as I spread some butter on my morning bread.

And then there were cookies at the office. Dutch stroopwafels! Unfortunately, I ate them without thinking and then fished the plastic bag out of the kitchen trash can. Under the tea leaf, I found out that the cookies were made with glucose syrup and butter as the first two ingredients.

Otherwise, I was so happy to know that the cinnamon bread I get at Beumer & Lutum every morning is made with margarine. It is vegan!

And my lunch was a raw vegan salad, as always: 1 cucumber, 1 yellow bell pepper, 2 tomatoes, a few brown button mushrooms, and a handful of almonds.

Depite the setbacks, I am not at all disappointed in myself. These bumps on the road are keys to staying vegan. Now I know my barriers to eating vegan: butter and free sweets lying around. Why do I love butter on good bread? And why do I love eating sweets, especially free sweets? When I figure these answers out, I can release them.

Homemade Vegan Yogurt?

2009-05-10T05:08:00.000-07:00

I found a pretty good tasting soy 'yogurt' yesterday, and I am trying to duplicate it at home.

Usually soy yogurts are full of stabilizers and other such junk that I can't pronounce. For example, plain Silk soy yogurt in the US is made of: Organic soymilk (filtered water, whole organic soybeans), rice starch, dextrose, organic evaporated cane juice, tricalcium phosphate, natural flavors, cultured glucose syrup solids, pectin, locust bean gum, ascorbic acid (vitamin C), yogurt cultures (L. bulgaricus, S. thermophilus, L. acidophilus, B. bifidum, L. casei, L. rhamnosus).

But Sojade is just "soya drink (natural spring water, whole soya beans 8%), and selected live cultures of which Bifidus and Acidophilus". And the taste is pretty good! And since I have cultured milk with yogurt cultures successfully before by following directions for making Greek yogurt from Bean Sprouts, it can't be that hard to culture soy milk with soy yogurt cultures. Basically, boil soy milk, let it cool to body temperature, add the live cultures, put in thermos for a few hours while the bacteria get it on--then yogurt!

So we will see what happens after 8-14 hours...

EDITED: When I made the yogurt and wrote this post, I forgot about this thing called the internet. I googled a bit and found some soy yogurt resources from soy milk makers.

I found out some cool facts. Apparently, the bacteria produces lactic acid faster if you add sugar to the soy milk! And that I could buy live non-dairy acidophilus (the Solgar brand is vegan) to make soy yogurt...which means that I could use it to culture nut milk to make nut cheese. And acidolphilus breeds roughly between 100 - 105F (40 - 45C), a little warmer than tempeh culture.

Vegan Pesto made with bärlauch, radish greens, and ancho chile

2009-05-07T02:24:00.000-07:00

Last night I improvised a pesto. Improvisations are great ways to learn what works and what doesn’t.

Previously, I had made a vegan pesto inspired by delicious days’ radish green pesto. To radish greens, I added wild garlic or bear’s-paw garlic (what Germans call bärlauch), sunflower seeds, lemon juice and zest, salt, and olive oil. The radish greens give a peppery bite and a bright green to the pesto. Spring spreadable on bread!

Since I had some dried ancho chile peppers from my December trip to Mexico, I thought last night that they might be a good replacement for sun-dried tomatoes, so I added an entire rehydrated ancho chile to my pesto. Normally, smoky and sour and hot, the chile was perhaps not the best substitute for sun-dried tomatoes. In fact, it fairly overpowered the delicate spiciness of the radish greens and the delicate garlic flavor of the bear’s-paw garlic.

The pesto was still delicious last night on pumpkin seed bread under radish slices and tempeh, but restraint with the chile would work better next time.

what Integrity means to me

2009-05-06T03:24:00.001-07:00

Part of the reason I started blogging was to figure out what eating with integrity would mean to me.

At the time, I was tempted by veganism, but I wanted to play more with growing bacteria and molds. Even though bacteria and molds can be found in alcohol, tempeh and natto, bread, and other vegan goodies, I couldn't resist the idea of growing bacteria in cheese and yogurt. I didn’t want to give up expanding my repertoire of kitchen culture experiments, with an eye towards perhaps transferring those skills to vegan cultures.

And eating vegan doesn’t mean that the distributors of vegan food don’t also distribute meat. Take a look at your grocery store. Are you not voting with your dollars to support a store that makes meat consumption possible? Go backwards through the supply chain, and you will find blood on everyone’s hands. Just by bicycling and watching films, I have blood on my hands as rubber tires and film stock both use animal derivatives in their production. For a while, I was freegan, scavenging from rather than contributing to capitalist food production. But there are no simple answers there either.

Besides, vegan doesn’t automatically mean healthier. For example, fast food made from processed soy derivatives is still unhealthy!

The integrity I seek means eating for my optimal health AS WELL AS decreasing suffering for sentient beings everywhere.

In sum, I was unhappy following the label 'vegan' or 'freegan' or 'locavore' or what have you. In addition to realizing that no label was ideal, I also discovered that adhering to some label restricted my freedom to choose. That was not a freedom I wanted to give up, because I want to eat whatever makes me feel the most alive. I want to eat consciously every time I eat and not just depend on rules to which I submit.

Barry Schwartz talks about rules crippling wisdom in his talk at TED: ‘The real crisis? We stopped being wise’. Here, he abstracts to society at large my idea that labels like ‘vegan’ overrides thinking when eating.

What I took away from Schwartz: Anything we do with people requires wisdom. Practical wisdom is moral will + moral skill + improvisation depending on the situation. That means, to practice wisdom we must want to be moral, have the abilities to act morally, and respond to each situation as it demands. For this, we need time + permission + being mentored + space for experimentation, that is, the possibility of failure and learning from failures.

Current societies try to change behavior through rules and incentives, believing and acting as though more and better rules as well as more and better incentives will bring about better behavior. (This is the ultimate political question for me: how to non-coercively rearrange others’ desires) According to Schwartz, rules and incentives only lead to mediocrity, because we stop thinking about what is right. Rules atrophy moral skills; incentives destroy the desire to do the right thing.

Schwartz proposes that to become wise, we must celebrate moral exemplars and heroes. We must have examples on how to do the right thing in the right way for the right reasons. Likewise, we inspire through being good examples. As teachers, we are always teaching because someone is always watching. Schwartz makes this sound like Big Brother, but I prefer to interpret it as that people reflect back to you what you give out. Someone is always learning from you through your actions. Just pay attention to what we do, how we do it, and in what organized structure we work to develop wisdom. We must practice wisdom to serve, not manipulate, others.

In the end, Schwartz is talking about virtue. I haven’t heard that word in public discourse in a very long time. These days I read a lot about happiness and people’s quest for happiness. Unfathomably even to myself, I find myself less and less concerned with happiness and thinking more and more about how to do right—how to live virtuously. And since living and eating are intertwined, living virtuously means eating with integrity.

Photo by Mr. Kris

Eating Vegan Changes the World and Me

2009-04-27T08:46:00.000-07:00

I followed the Internet machine's cookie crumbs and came to Sean Bonner's post about eating vegan to change the world. He has an excellent series of posts about how to change the world--specifically, the environment--through our own personal actions. Being vegan was the first suggestion because of the huge impact it could have on healing the environment.

I have been toying with eating vegan for almost two months now. I am not fully vegan yet, but I am making progress towards it. Right now, I am learning the skills to make eating vegan delicious and triumphant for myself. For example, I am buying less dairy and eggs, making delicious and nutritious dairy substitutes (rather than just buying icky processed soy dairy substitutes), and expanding my repertoire of vegan recipes.

I don't want to force myself to eat vegan. One day I will find eating vegan makes me happy, healthy, and satiated, and I won't want anything else. For now, I have to confess, I just ate a homemade crustless quiche because that was what the leftovers in the fridge called out to me to make. I am not ready yet. But I am learning more and eating more vegan every day.

For the longest time, I couldn't imagine going vegan because that would have meant drinking coffee with soy or rice milk. I loved the bitter cut with creamy, and soy and rice milk just don't cut it because they are too watery. So in February, I just decided to stop drinking coffee. Then I don't add milk to my drink! Now I drink mostly green tea in the morning, because it is the only kind of tea that I don't want to cut with milk.

It is now almost May, and I haven't drunk coffee in a cup--even though I have had a few tiramisu slices and a scoop of accidentally-ordered mocca latte ice cream. It was quite easy, like my going vegetarian. One day, without much forethought, the idea just occurred to me to eat vegetarian or to replace coffee with tea. And even though sometimes I see how much easier and convenient it might be to eat meat or drink coffee, I don't go back. Like those phases of my life are in the past now, dead to me.

The irony is that I occasionally drink a chai or tea latte. Yes, I quit my caffeine addiction in order to support my vegan exploration but still indulge in frothy milk drinks. Perhaps one day my brain will decide that the time is right for me to eat no more dairy or meat products. And I won't ever go back.

Carol J. Adams, author of The Sexual Politics of Meat, says : "You think change is too hard; not changing is harder, you just haven’t found that out yet."

Vegan Truffles!

2009-04-23T15:10:00.000-07:00

Inspired by the vegan truffles I used to order from Lagusta in NY, I made some vegan truffles of my own!

Coconut milk infused with earl gray tea, dark chocolate, and carob powder = pure deliciousness!

Usually, for cream-based truffles, after blending the cream and chocolate together, one puts the mixture called "ganache" in the fridge. I did that with the coconut ganache, but it became too solid in the fridge. So the next time I make this, I will try rolling the balls as soon as the ganache cools.

Also, the truffles taste really coconut-ty but not at all earl grey-ish...back to the recipe board!

Dried Fruit + Almonds Carob Energy Balls

2009-04-21T13:32:00.000-07:00

Sometimes substitutions and improvisations work, and sometimes they don't.

I changed the Raisin Nut Ball recipe on page 49 of the Healthy Living Cookbook - Excellent Vegan Recipes from HerbalLegacy.com, and I wondered if I would have liked it better as it was.

Their recipe called for mixing half raisins or currants and half nuts, a mix of almonds, cashews, pecan, and walnuts. I decided to go diverse with the fruits and mixed it up with dried apples, mangos, apricots, plums and half almonds and a generous dose of carob. Since carob is naturally sweet, it made the balls too sweet for my taste.

If I were to make these again, I would substitute cacao for carob, since cacao is naturally bitter.

Vegan Almond Mayonnaise with Roasted Asparagus and Leftover Pasta

2009-04-20T12:42:00.000-07:00

The magical world of almonds has opened my eyes to vegan food without processed soy products!

After tasting delicious raw vegan almond mayonnaise at Rohvolution a few weekends ago, I set out to find a recipe to make my own raw vegan almond mayonnaise. I found the magical one on page 35 in the Healthy Living Cookbook - Excellent Vegan Recipes from HerbalLegacy.com, which they call "Almonnaise--a Perfectly Mucusless blender Mayonnaise".

I adapted their recipe somewhat to my taste, because I like stronger flavors and wanted something more like aioli.

Blend, in the following order:

1/2 cup whole raw almonds soaked in water for 24 hours
1/2 cup water
1 tsp nutritional yeast
2 cloves of garlic
1/2 tsp salt or kelp
1-1.25 cups olive oil
5 Tbs. lemon juice

Keep up to 10 days in the refrigerator, tightly sealed.

Since asparagus is in season, I decided to pair the creamy, tart mayonnaise with the flavor that can only be described as asparagus--unless you want to call it "pee-ish". Which is not so appetizing...

I roasted a few asparagus stalks at 240 degrees Celsius for 15-20 minutes after tossing them with some oil and salt. These are from Morocco as Germany's aren't ready yet; at least, I haven't seen them at market.

I paired the asparagus and dressing with some left-over whole-grain pasta from last night, and the raw vegan almond mayonnaise was pretty good with the pasta too--a creamy lemon sauce.

After I took the photo, I added some roasted black sesame seeds for contrasting color and smell. Yum yum yum. I really can't wait to make more!

Simple, Flexible Salad Recipe

2009-03-13T09:19:00.000-07:00

Photo by LollyKnit

The photo above is for a gorgeous fruit salad of watermelon + mint + raspberry with honey + lime juice as the dressing. I can't wait for summer to indulge!

Almost every weekday, I eat a vegetable-based salad for lunch. I don't like leaf lettuces unless they are ultra-fresh, so I mainly use vegetables and fruits.

Here is my basic salad recipe:

Dressing (olive/flax/sesame oil + lemon juice/cider vinegar + mustard)
Aromatic (like ginger, scallion, shallots, garlic, onions)
Green (like spinach, kale, kohlrabi tops, cucumber, zucchini)
Colorful Vegetable (bell pepper, tomato, carrot)
Protein (like nuts/seeds, tofu, boiled egg, cheese, beans)
Herbs
Fruit, fresh or dried
salt + pepper

I usually start with the dressing at the bottom of the bowl, then I add the aromatic so it has time to infuse the salad dressing.

Next I try to add the green so that it has enough time to soak up the oil and become tender, especially zucchini. If zucchini doesn't soak up enough oil, it can be bitter.

I try to make my salads colorful and have a variety of flavors, like sweet and bitter with apples + daikon radishes together or fennel + orange.

If I want extra texture, I add mushrooms or avocados to contrast all the crunchy raw vegetables.

Juicing versus Blending, or: Why I am not buying a Juicer

2009-03-12T06:57:00.000-07:00

Photo by *Solar ikon*

With my new immersion hand blender, I have been drinking more smoothies as a way to get more fresh fruits and vegetables into my diet. I usually do banana + a sweet fruit, like strawberries, apples, or kiwis. If I feel like an extra boost, I also add a dash of cocoa and a handful of almonds.

After reading The Raw Food Detox Diet, which touted juicing as the foundation of eating raw (pp. 49-52), I started wondering what the differences were between juicing and blending as well as which one was better for me.

Here is what I found:

What is the difference between juicing and blending?

Juicing separates fiber from juice to make juices, while blending blends fiber and juice to make smoothies.

According to the Raw Food Detox Diet (pp.49-52), juicing releases organic water—or ‘hydration’ as Natalia Rose calls it, chlorophyll, and enzymes from the fibers. These we cannot absorb from the fibers without juicing. Without fiber in the way, all the fresh water, chlorophyll, and enzymes go straight to the cellular level.

Organic hydration is water from plant sources, not from a spring, well, or faucet. This organic water released by juicing contains all the vitamins, minerals, and enzymes from the plant. Furthermore, Rose asserts that no more water is needed on her diet because of organic hydration (!). And without the fiber to fill us up, we can drink even more organic water.

I don’t know if I believe everything Rose has to say about juicing. According to her, the minerals in mineral water and sea salt may even leach minerals from the body! Not that she provides documentation on this, however.

How are juicing and blending good for you?

Both blending and juicing saves you time on chewing, chopping, and digesting. By blending and juicing, you get to eat more and facilitate more and faster absorption in our ‘compromised’ intestines. Apparently, eating trashy food will compromise your intestines.

Freshly juiced and blended juices are better than bottled. Bottled juices are pasteurized, which kills live enzymes through heat. In fact, when Alissa Hamilton, author of the soon-to-be-published book Squeezed: What You Don't Know About Orange Juice, explained pasteurization, she also revealed how ‘fresh’ Tropicana orange juice really is:

“In the process of pasteurizing, juice is heated and stripped of oxygen, a process called deaeration, so it doesn't oxidize. Then it's put in huge storage tanks where it can be kept for upwards of a year. It gets stripped of flavor-providing chemicals, which are volatile. When it's ready for packaging, companies such as Tropicana hire flavor companies such as Firmenich to engineer flavor packs to make it taste fresh. People think not-from-concentrate is a fresher product, but it also sits in storage for quite a long time.”

Now who still wants to drink juice from a box?

So to juice or to blend?

Here is a summary of juicing and blending pros:

Juicing juices :

+ good for getting unpalatable greens into your diet by mixing with apples

+ high volume is possible

+ absorbed in 20 minutes, little energy to digest without fibers

Blending smoothies :

+ good also for mixing unpalatable greens with fruits

+ high volume also possible

+ whole food, no wasted fibers, but longer to digest

+ high-speed blender can also break cell walls for easier absorption

+ noisier than juicers

+ easier to clean because you eat all the fiber

Both blending and juicing are good for getting unpalatable greens at a high volume into your diet. But I already eat plenty of greens in my weekday salad lunch.

The main difference between the two is the fiber. Fiber is important roughage that is good for you, but a raw food diet already has a lot of fiber. Because I am only about 50% or less raw, it is important that I get fiber from whole vegetables and fruits.

Moreover, juicing refines vegetables and fruits so that they are no longer whole foods. Whenever possible, I try to choose the least-refined food.

I also don’t want to spend the money or the storage space on a high-speed blender or juicer.

In conclusion, I will continue to blend smoothies at home for my own food enjoyment and buy juices from the café downstairs if I need to digest some nutrients fast—like right before I head off to yoga.

Genetic Modification in Europe

2009-03-09T03:44:00.001-07:00

Photo by azrainman

Like many Americans, I believed that Europe has no GMO food products. Unfortunately, that is not true. In a few processed products, like canned soups, I have seen ingredients labeled 'modifiziert'--modified. At least here, genetically modified foods are labeled.

I found an excellent resource about GM in Europe in English, GMWATCH.

Review: The Raw Food Detox Diet

2009-03-08T06:15:00.000-07:00

In the tradition of my of my favorite personal finance blogs, every other Sunday, Eat with Integrity reviews a book about food.

I picked up Natalia Rose's book, The Raw Food Detox Diet: The Five-step Plan for Vibrant Health and Maximum Weight Loss, because I wanted to learn more about eating raw. Instead of finding motivational research or scientific facts, I found a lot of misinformation and an unfortunate attitude towards food.

What is the raw food detox diet?

Rose is stridently against "waste" in this book. According to her, "waste=weight". If you get rid of waste, then you get rid of weight. Rose's diet focuses on removing as much "waste" as possible from the diet (basically, everything that is not fruit or vegetable) and eliminating the toxins that have built up in your cells from birth, toxins that come from eating anything other than fruits and vegetables.

To that end, her diet encourages you to eat "quick exit foods in quick exit combinations,"that is, eating food that leaves your body quickly. Practically speaking, this means eating only fresh fruits, starches, meat-proteins or nuts/seeds/dried fruits (fat-proteins) together. Rose offers no scientific explanation for why a longer digestion time might be harmful to the body.

Questionable suggestions in the book

The sad thing is that she advocates using the artificial sweetener Splenda for sweetness. While Rose does not advocate completely eliminating all processed foods from one's diet until one is ready to be 100% raw, Splenda is a sugar-free chemical whose safety many question. The fact that Rose recommends the chemical Splenda as a white sugar replacement suggests that she is not concerned with completely eliminating processed foods nor with safe foods.

Moreover, the diet is only one part of her detox plan. The other half entails "waste elimination specialists" to help you get rid of current and past toxins. Among activities like sweating and deep breathing, which I'm all for, colonics and enemas are what she most recommends. In Rose's interview with her colonics therapist, they both agree that certain people may not need help to "eliminate" at first, but eventually everyone reaches a point where they come up against "post-putrefaction", waste that has been lodged in the body for so long that it needs professional help to leave the body.

For starters, no one needs a monthly or weekly professional treatment to eat healthy. I sincerely think each individual can heal her- or himself. Second, colonics has been debunked! Even by the raw food community! One of the supplements Rose's colonics therapist advises is psyllium. I found out through rawveg.info that psyllium becomes a gel that conforms to the shape of whatever container it is in, so that once you ingest it, it creates a gel that is in the shape of your intestine! Add clay for color and herbs for gunkiness, then your poop looks really like shit, like post-putrefaction.

While I didn't research into any other of Rose's claims, the fact that she recommends Splenda and psyllium as part of her detox plans made me less inclined to believe her other claims.

Meal planning ideas

After Rose explains her diet philosophies, she gives a quiz to diagnose your detox transition level. If you have been eating unhealthy for a while, you are a level 5, whereas if you are ready to go 100% raw, you are a level 1.

I was on the low side of a level 3, so I read both level 3 and level 2 weekly menu plans. A level 3 was basically 80% raw for breakfast and lunch with dinner open to almost anything as long as it was "well-combined." She mostly advocates a "green lemonade" vegetable juice first thing in the morning, then fruits for breakfast and snacks before and after a raw vegetable salad lunch. A level 2 was someone who incorporated more creative raw dinners into her diet.

I am ready to try gourmet raw recipes for dinner, but one thing made me hesitate: Rose asks Level 2 to stick to mono-fruit meals, that is, eating one type of fruit for a meal. I cannot ever imagine enjoying a meal of 16 bananas or an entire watermelon. I crave variety and diversity in every one of my meals, and this type of mono-fruit meals will never be something that appeals to my instincts of eating with joy and abundance.

Good ideas from Rose

Helpfully, Rose advocates planning ahead to avoid temptations in real-life scenarios, like at the office or at other people's parties. I really appreciated the extra motivation she offered about changing habits at the office, which is one of my weak areas. I really need to replenish my healthy snacks at the office, such as nuts, dried fruits, and chocolate with over 70% cocoa content.

I appreciated a few of Rose's philosophies. Rose is not concerned with making anyone 100% raw. In fact, she is against anyone "transitioning" too fast to a 100% raw diet. She also wrote about not labeling herself as even an "aspiring raw foodist." If she felt like eating something mainstream, she does without worrying. She recognizes that as long as we mostly eat healthy, indulging in meat or raw cheese is ok. She just eats what she eats when she wants to. And that is something I agree with: find liberation and joy in your meals rather than be limited by an identity label like vegan or raw.

Is The Raw Food Detox Diet worth reading?

Because Rose presents her diet along a continuum, there are a few good ideas and recipes you may find useful in this book. In fact, I did see a few recipes I wanted to try and may share on the blog later.

Nonetheless, I found her book filled with misinformation and a weird distrust in the joy of food that I would not recommend it. Also, Rose recommends a lot of brands of food to buy. While these specific kinds of recommendations may take the thinking out of eating, what if the manufacturers change their recipes? Her book is not a resource for people who want to become more conscious about what they eat, but for people looking for a specific program about which they don't have to think too much about.

Vegan Fast Food: Gyros

2009-02-16T09:58:00.003-08:00

Viana produces lots of organic soy-based products. On their site are lots of recipesand even Viana TV cooking shows to show you how to prepare delicious food with their products.

In their veggie gyros, there is neither soy protein isolate nor GMO soy! Hooray! Just tofu, wheat protein, pure volcanic Eifel water, sunflower oil, soy sauce, spices, tomato paste, sea salt, roasted onions, carob powder, beetroot, celeriac, and mustard.

And it was delicious!

Feed a stranger with Every Dinner

2009-02-16T09:24:00.000-08:00

Photo by obo-bobolina

On Sunday I hosted dinner for five. One guest couldn't come at the last minute, and I thought to invite my friend An. who needed some cheering up. Unfortunately, An. didn't want to venture out in the snow to my house for dinner. So I asked another guest M. to invite a friend. He offered Al. I agreed as long as Al. would get along with another guest J. M. assured me that they would, and Al. came all the way from the same neighborhood as An. to my house through the snow for dinner.

Al. was a great guest: appreciative, helpful, and hungry! He told great stories about educating the rich about architecture via Powerpoint, eating cookies served by their maid in a maid uniform, and being chauffeured around Berlin. Al. also agreed to give us an architectural tour of the Hansaviertel in the spring.

Now I want to feed a stranger with every dinner I host! Thank you, Al.!

Vegan Cashew-based Truffles

2009-02-16T09:15:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I made vegan truffles with chocolate and cashew 'milk' from this recipe. To make cashew milk, blend equal amounts cashew and water. To that I added 1.5x of melted chocolate.

After letting the ganache sit in the fridge for two hours, I started pushing them into little balls. I rolled most of them in cocoa, but some in chili + salt, fresh basil, and fresh rosemary. You can see in the photograph above a lone rosemary-covered truffle sitting in the middle.

After making about 50 truffles, I put them in the fridge to set.

Everyone loves chocolates, including my guests. My guests claimed eating the rosemary-covered truffles was like 'eating grass...but good-tasting grass'.

Above is a close-up on my basil-covered truffles. The basil didn't taste so much like basil, which makes me wonder if I should repeat it with dried basil or else infuse the chocolate with basil oil in the ganache itself.

As for the taste, it was delicious! I worried that the truffles would be a bit grainy because I didn't blend the cashews completely smoothly, but it was perfect. If anything, the truffles were a bit soft. I would love for them to have a bit more structure.

Pros and cons of eating vegan

2009-02-13T03:07:00.000-08:00

Photo by striatic

One of the reasons I started this blog was to figure out for myself how I want to eat with integrity. I have been reading more about eating vegan as well as eating raw, and for a long time now, I have tried to eat as organic and local as possible. However, none of these labels really fit the way I want to eat. At least, not in a way that would be in alignment with my values.

Veganism aligns with my values to not harm animals, but the way many vegans eat is counter to my food values. The fact that an organic vegetarian/vegan fast food restaurant could be lauded boggles my mind. Of course, sometimes I do crave a simple veggie burger with a side of fries and a shake, but vegan fast food goes against a few values I feel strongly about. I believe that taking the trouble to cook good, real, whole food is worthwhile. And any movement that celebrates substituting meat with industrially-produced chemical-based meat substitutes rather than delicious vegetables gives me pause to join them.

For a long time I have been attracted to veganism's ethical treatment of animals, but so much of vegan food depend on meat and dairy substitutes. Many of these have unhealthy flavor and mouthfeel additives, especially those made with soy protein isolate. Whether I care to replace meat or not is another topic, but soy protein isolate is not healthy. For one, Monsanto monopolizes the soy bean and, as a result, the soybean is heavily genetically-modified. Worse, soy protein isolate is heavily processed and far from a whole food. Soy protein isolate is the protein part of the soybean separated from the soybean's fat and carbs through heavy chemical processing. Then fake flavor, color and nutrients are added back to it via more processing. If anything, soy protein isolate is the industrial vegan food par excellence. Many soy products like soy ice cream and soy cheese contain soy derivatives.*

Besides the fact that vegan food often seemed fake, vegan food sometimes did not seem so delicious. In fact, vegan recipes almost seemed apologetic for substituting meat. Why would one want to replace meat in their vegan meal, in any case? To maintain a meat-ish dish as the center of a meal seemed to express that vegetables, legumes, grains, and fruits could not center a meal like meat or a meat-like substitute could. Fake meat is not only usually made from unhealthy soy derivatives but also disrespectful of the flavor that vegetables, legumes, grains, mushrooms, and fruits bring to the table.

In addition to eating real, whole, AND delicious food, I also want to explore and respect local food cultures of where I lived and traveled. When I lived in France for almost three years, as a vegetarian I couldn't eat most of France's traditional meat-based food, but I feasted on cheese discoveries, delicate buttery pastries, and glorious sourdough bread. Of course, as a vegan, I could explore its alcohol cultures, its vegetables and fruits, but it just seemed too limited socially because I love getting to know cultures through its foods.

And one last thing that turns me off about veganism: the divisiveness of its militancy. I don't believe that all militancy has to be divisive, but the way many vegans approach their militancy seems divisive to me. I respect the sanctity of life, but friendship is also sacred to me as well as respecting people's decisions for themselves. More on that later...

* More information about soy: Vegan chef Lagusta separates the good soy from the bad soy in a very informative article. Out of all the vegans whom I have met (online or in person), she is the one who really made me seriously consider eating vegan with her delicious vegan truffles.

Food, Inc. at the Berlin Berlinale

2009-02-10T06:58:00.000-08:00

My good friend M. invited me to see Food, Inc. at the Berlin film festival Sunday. Surprisingly, over a thousand people cared about the American food system enough to see the movie. Then again, food touches everything: workers' rights for those who grow American food, energy and environmental concerns, public health, agriculture, intellectual property law for seed ownership, animal welfare and/or rights.

Food, Inc. basically takes a look at who makes our food and how they make it. Our current system depends on petroleum, antibiotics, and cheap labor. The factory system of food production values uniformity, speed, size, and cheapness. To make everything cheap, machines do more and more processing. To make sure that everything fits our machines, we make our chickens (and everything else like vegetables and fruits) as uniform as possible. Driven by profit, the industrial food production system has no incentive to be accountable to waste, public health or environmental damage. It is in corporate interest, not national interest. And even though it is 'cheap' and 'fast', it is not efficient because it is not sustainable. It will destroy itself and us...

Food production should not be about growth but health and flavor. Industrial food production changes the taste of vegetables and fruits through breeding for ease of transport and GMO manipulation and/or contamination.

Monsanto prevents the labeling of GMO foods, just was it was against labels that revealed calories, trans fats, and country of origin. 70% of processed foods in the US contains GMO ingredients, but no one knows. There is even a 'veggie libel law' in farm states that forbids people from publishing photos of feed lot operations and speaking out against 'veggies'.

Did you know that engineers can basically combine aromas and mouthfeels to make anything they want us to taste? Most of these are based on ingredients from highly-processed corn, soy, and wheat, like high fructose corn syrup, maltodextrin, di-glycerides, the list goes on... So they can tweak them towards what we are programmed to want: salt, fat, sugar. Eating too much of these wears down how we process sugar and may lead to diabetes.

The movie echoes what my CSA farmers in Connecticut always said to me: 'Know your food.' Meaning, know where your food comes from and how it is made and what is in it. If you knew,
you would want to buy organic, local foods that are in season. And we have a right to know, no matter if the biotech companies think that knowing about cloned meat might 'confuse the consumer'.

Afterwards, at the panel discussion, I was surprised to see the parallels between German and American food production systems.

Slow Food, an organization with roots in Italy, values biodiversity and the union of producers and co-producers (their word for consumers). They want to change how food is produced, to de-industrialize food for traditional practices. The solution to the problems of industrial production is not ever more high-technology but a return to local, culture-specific culinary traditions.

During the panel discussion Michael Pollan thanked and engaged the representative from Cingento, which I inferred was the German/EU equivalent of Monsanto. In the representative's view, 'we protect plants' so that producers generate certain yields at a good quality. To achieve this, we need technology, with gene technology as only one technology among many for food production. According to him, the rate of growth for non-GMO foods is 1-1.5%. He did not specify how much GMO food production grows, but other sources say that yield of GMO seeds are now falling. In addition, using patented gene technology means the loss of seed sovereignty. As Food, Inc. shows, farmers are forever dependent on and indebted to Monsanto after they start using their seeds. They cannot save and reuse their seeds.

The German Minister of Consumer Safety also spoke at the panel. She wanted to democratize good food via government policy. She advocated for citizens' rights to know what is in our food and how it is made--notably, through organic and GMO labeling. Because the EU required GMO labeling, there is no GMO foods in the supermarket--no one would buy it. The minister said that she wanted to label foods' sugar and fat content with red, green, and yellow lights, but the food industry blocked it because no one would then buy their products.

According to the German organic farmer, 80% of Germans on the street want organic but only 4% actually buy organic on the market. His pessimistic conclusion was that organic costs too much for the average German, double the amount of normal food, because it is inefficiently produced. Luckily, someone pointed out that conventional growing methods are also very inefficient in terms of energy consumption. The only reason that they SEEM cheap is because they are subsidized.

In Brussels, multinationals lobby the EU Commission and the European Parliament. There is no farming lobby. We need a food movement to ask to subsidize organic, local, small producers and distributors.

The powerful message behind this movie is now that we know the sources of our food, we have to ask our governments to police it for our health and safety. Against the powerful and well-funded meat and dairy lobbies, we have to show Obama the movement against subsidies for bad food, which are holdovers from Nixon and the Cold War. The battle against tobacco should be a model for us.

Interestingly, the only speaker from the Global South was the actor Gael Garcia Bernal. Like the moderator, I was blinded by his good looks and forgot to take notes while he spoke. But he was the one who was pushing a radical agenda for land reform to distribute land to its farmers. Perhaps he was the only one, as an activist movie star, who could afford a radical agenda.

The EU throws away 50,000 tons of food every day. The US throws away 70,000 tons of food every day. Waste is a tactic of capitalist production. Hunger is a social, not technological, problem. It is a human right to eat well and with pleasure.

Vegan Nutrition

2009-02-08T03:47:00.000-08:00

One of the books I read about veganism, the Vegan Sourcebook, has an entire section on vegan nutrition. Getting enough protein is not a problem, but getting enough calcium and iron may be as well as B12.

The Vegan Sourcebook included a chart for the recommended daily intakes for nutrients and charts for the nutrient content of different foods. Interestingly, it lists fortified and non-fortified versions of food. For example, it would list the calcium content of both "soymilk" and "soymilk, fortified". This shows how much more calcium fortified soymilk may have, although one would have to read the label to be sure. I like this because it makes me reconsider how much more nutrients I need to get from fortification. For the record, 1 cup of soymilk has 84 mg of calicum and 1 cup of fortified soymilk has 250-300 mg of calcium.

What I found annoying was that they listed not only whole foods but also brand-name cereal like Wheaties, Grapenuts, Nutrigrain, etc. While I understand that people have to consider all their options, I want to eat whole foods as much as possible, not processed and prepared foods. And even though I have never studied nutrition, I feel like getting calcium from sesame seeds (2 tablespoons has 176 mg of calcium) or collard greens (half cup cooked has 178 mg of calcium) is qualitatively different than getting it through fortified Rice Dream (1 cup has 300 mg of calcium).

And I guess that is why I am writing this blog. My heart and ethics tell me to eat vegan, but many of my vegan information sources depend on fortified or highly-processed foods like textured soy protein. While these may be vegan and have lots of nutrients, they are not whole foods. I want to eat delicious whole foods.

So here are the whole food winners of the different nutrient categories:

Adults need 1000-1200 milligrams (mg) of CALCIUM per day. Besides collard greens and sesame seeds, 5 dried figs have 258 mg of calcium, 2 tablespoons of tahini has 128 mg of calcium, 1 cooked cup of navy beans and great northern beans each have 121-128 mg of calcium, and half a cup of cooked turnip greens has 125 mg of calcium.
Adults need 2 micrograms (mcg) of B12 per day. Out of all the fortified foods, the only one that I would consider eating is Red Star brand Vegetarian Support Formula nutritional yeast flakes, of which 1 tablesppon has 4 micrograms.
Adlut males need 1.7 mg of RIBOFLAVIN per day, and adult females need 1.3 mg per day. Sea vegetables win hands-down for riboflavin. A half cup of cooked alaria, dulse, kelp or nori give between 1.91 mg (dulse) and 2.93 mg (nori), much more than even enriched cereals. Half a cup of cooked soybeans only give .24 mg, and 2 tablespoons of almonds give .25 mg.
Adults need 5-10 mcg of VITAMIN D per day. Instead of eating the fortified Grapenuts and vegetable milk, I would rather just sit outside in the sun to make my own Vitamin D.
Adult females need 15 mg of IRON per day, and adult males need 10 mg per day. Just as for riboflavin, sea vegetables win hands-down for iron. Half a cup of cooked alaria, dulse, kelp, or nori offers between 18.1 mg (alaria) to 42 mg (kelp) of iron. In contrast, 1 packet of instant oatmeal provides 6.3 mg of iron; half a cup of cooked tofu has 6.6 mg; and the same amount of soybeans has 4.4 mg. Other good sources of iron are chickpeas, at 3.4 mg for half a cooked cup, and lentils, at 3.2 mg for the same amount.
Adult females need 12 mcg of ZINC per day, and adult males need 15 mcg per day. Apart from fortified cereals, half a cup of cooked hyacinth beans gives 2.7 mg of zinc and the same amount of aduki beans has 2 mg of zinc. Other good sources are the sea vegetable Irish moss, tempeh, and peanuts.

Of course, not only is it important to get enough of these nutrients, but also in the right combination for the most efficient nutrient absorption. For example, it is best to eat iron with vitamin C, like spinach with lemon juice or tomatoes, for maximum absorption.

Welcome to Eat with Integrity!

2009-02-05T10:18:00.001-08:00

I am starting this blog to help me eat with integrity. Part of eating with integrity will include defining what integrity means to me.

For a while now, I have been playing with the idea of going raw for 30 days. But I decided that I didn't want to be 100% raw. Then I started reading the Vegan Sourcebook and decided that I want to try eating vegan for 30 days. The temptations are many, even when I have been a vegetarian for almost eleven years.

One of my challenges going vegan is that I don't like soy or rice milk in my coffee. It simply isn't creamy or thick enough. I thought about substituting coconut milk, but eventually settled on the simpler and healthier solution of cutting coffee out of my morning routine. I replaced it with some nice green tea which I supplement with fennel or mint whenever I need a little something extra.

So while I am not able to eat completely vegan yet, as a by-product, this month, February 2009, I am going without coffee.

I would like to explore the twists and turns of my eating journey as well as document my DIY education in eating healthy with integrity.

Eating with integrity means eating according to my values. Some values I would like to live by:

+ cultivate my taste buds
+ pay attention to hunger cues
+ resist instant gratification for cooking at home
+ eat until only 80% full
+ cook well and eat well
+ eat with friends

On a more practical level, I would like to say goodbye to
- white sugar
- white flour
- dairy*
- eggs

* Except that I would like to make an exception for raw cheese and yogurt with live cultures. I love my lacto beasties, not sure if I can give that up. I still want to make kefir and work at a sheep's cheese farm in, say, northern Spain or on Crete. I have not evolved enough to give those dreams up!

And say hello to:
+ raw vegan lunch on weekdays
+ raw smoothie dinner/appetizer 3x per week
+ raw shakes on Sat and Sun mornings

I already eat a raw vegan lunch most weekdays unless I am celebrating a co-worker's birthday or having lunch out with a friend. On average, this happens 3 x a month.

I got the idea for a raw smoothie dinner three times a week because going to class straight after work 3x a week makes cooking tiring. So why not drink it up?

And I thought that it would just be a good idea for weekend mornings to wake me up.

To eating with integrity in 2009!