Voracious Vegan Starts Eating Meat

Tasha, author of the top-ten vegan blog The Voracious Vegan, has started eating meat, and has renamed her blog VoraciousEats.com.

This has stirred up quite a controversy.

She posted here, ten days ago, about the medical and spiritual journey that led her back to eating meat, after years as a vegan. (Her story is similar to the story told by Lierre Keith in the excellent book, The Vegetarian Myth.)

Tasha received so many views and comments on her blog that her web server crashed. She also received death threats and other harassment from putative vegans and animal rights activists. She posted here, a few days later, about this fallout.

Many of the constructive comments on the blog post are worth reading. And lots of other folks have blogged insightfully about the situation; you can find trackback links at the bottom of Tasha's posts.

Some of the perspectives represented in the comments include vegans who are having similar health problems; vegans who are doing just fine; pseudo-vegans who secretly eat meat; omnivores who eat only Meat Of Known Origin; and a good number of people who are concerned most of all for Tasha's well-being, and are happy to hear that her health has improved dramatically.

My observation:

Many vegans are motivated by concern for animal welfare. They are horrified by factory animal farming.

Many thoughtful omnivores are also motivated by concern for animal welfare, and are also horrified by factory animal farming.

We all want to see a food system that is healthier and more just for everyone. We all have different ideas about exactly what that looks like, and how to get there. And each of us has ideas that evolve over time.

Fundamentally, our goals and motivations are similar.

I would ask us all to focus on our common ground, where possible, rather than focussing on our differences.

Happy & Healthy Holidays e-course

Lots of people obsess over calories and fat and vitamins, in the hopes of being healthier.

I say that the biggest step you can take to being healthier is cooking your own food.

To that end, I'd like to recommend the Happy & Healthy Holidays e-course from Jenny at Nourished Kitchen. She has put together a cooking course including 29 videos, 50 menus, and 175 recipes presenting healthy, nourishing, traditional recipes for a variety of autumn and winter holidays: Thanksgiving, Chanukah, and Christmas. (And before you complain that Thanksgiving has already come and gone, I will point out that Thanksgiving dishes are delicious and appropriate all winter long…)

You can get the whole e-course series for $89, or individual lessons for $15 each if you don't want the whole thing.

For details, click here.

And if you'd like a free sample lesson, you can get one here.

Signup ends December 1!

Wise Traditions 2010 Conference

This year's Weston A. Price Foundation Wise Traditions Conference starts two weeks from today, in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania.

I went to the conference last year in Schaumburg, IL, and it blew me away. Really. It played a very significant role in helping to shape and refine my thoughts about food and health and nutrition.

Check out the list of presentations for this year's conference. Then check out the food menu. I pretty much guarantee that this is the best conference food you will ever find. I can offer a couple of explanations. First of all, a huge amount of the food is donated by sponsors who want to showcase their great natural products. Second of all, traditional food lends itself well to large-scale preparation. Stews, braises, charcuterie, and fermented foods are pretty durable…

If you are coming from far away, it may be a little late to get flights/hotels/etc, although there is a forum on the website for rideshares and roomshares.

You can register for the whole thing, or day-by-day.

-----> To register, click here.  <-----

I'll be there, along with lots of other Real Food Media bloggers. Let me know if you'll be there and would like to meet up and chat over some liverwurst!

Killer Celery (Reason #192 To Eat Real Food)

"4 deaths tied to bacteria at food processing plant" in Texas. What was the food in question? Celery. What was celery doing in a processing plant? Details here.

We've seen the same story before, with eggs, luncheon meats, organic tomatoes, spinach, and so on. It seems like the frequency of these crises is increasing.

Are these foods all inherently risky?

I think that's beside the point.

The problem is that when food is processed on a large scale by people who really don't care, trouble is around the corner. Government oversight is not enough, because (a) the interests of the regulatory agencies are often not aligned with individuals' (in fact, sometimes they are diametrically opposed!); (b) even when their interests are aligned with ours, the agencies are spread too thin to actually do their putative jobs; and (c) they often step in only after the fact, if at all.

Your best defense against getting sick from industrial supply chain food is to avoid it when you can. Rather than buying pre-cut, plastic-wrapped, packaged, processed food from a supermarket, convenience store, or bad restaurant, consider buying whole, unmolested food from a small-scale food producer such as a local farmer. It's not always possible, but it's something to aim for.

Fermenting Vegetables

Last weekend, I did a fermentation demo as part of the Urban Homesteaders' League Market Stand at the Union Square farmers' market in Somervile, MA. (Photos.) The Market Stand is a great project that brings together skill-sharing presenters with farmers' market attendees. Among other things, it features a reference library (that UHL mastermind Lisa Gross schleps back and forth to the stand), a swap table (where you can leave things and take them—I left some fermented vegetables!), and a handout containing notes from each of the presenters.

I would encourage anyone who's around Cambridge or Somerville either of the next two weekends to go check it out. And I would encourage folks in other cities to do something similar to the Market Stand! It gets folks thinking about food (and other topics) a little more deeply. They come home from the market not only with a bag of turnips, but with new insights into those turnips.

Below are the notes that I distributed to go with my presentation.

FERMENTING VEGETABLES

Today, most of the food we consume has been preserved in one way or another. We rely heavily on refrigeration, freezing, and sterilization/canning. These are all modern techniques. Refrigerating and freezing were impractical during harvest season until recently; canning dates back only to the early 1800s.

Vegetable fermenting is an older preserving technique. There is evidence of fermented kimchi, a close relative of sauerkraut, from as long ago as 600-1000 BCE.

Fermentation relies on the action of microbes to change the chemical composition of our food. Lactofermentation of vegetables, in particular, takes place when Lactobacillus and other types of human-friendly bacteria convert naturally-occuring plant sugars into lactic acid. As the acidity rises, the medium become less and less hospitable to other microbes—most notably the human-unfriendly ones.

Fermentation has advantages over other preservation methods.

When you compare it to canning, you find that fermentation creates an ecosystem in a state of stable equilibrium. You don't have to start your fermentation from a completely sterile state; in fact, you can't! Fermentation also preserves, even enhances, enzymes and vitamins that are diminished or destroyed by the heat of canning.

Fermenting vegetables does not require any electricity. It requires only some salt, to give the Lactobacillus a head start over the human-unfriendly bacteria, and an ambient temperature between roughly 50 and 80 degrees Fahrenheit, which can be found by digging down a few feet into the ground, even at the height of summer or in the depths of winter.

Many raw plants contain compounds that our bodies can't process very well. Fermentation helps us here by breaking down these compounds. Fermented cabbage and fermented soybeans are much more digestible than their unfermented counterparts, for instance.

Finally, fermenting vegetables is fun, and provides a great way for you to get back in touch with your food—literally!

HOW-TO

Choose freshly-picked vegetables. Prime candidates include cabbage, turnips, rutabagas, and radishes. In my experience, these work excellently (presumably because they tend to host healthy colonies of Lactobacillus). You can ferment just about any other vegetables, too, but I would advise combining them with one of the vegetables I mention above, or with a starter. The easiest starter to use is a portion of fermented vegetables or juice from a previous batch.

I like to combine turnips, beets, and parsnips. Cabbage, onions, and carrots. Or just turnips on their own. Any of these will work.

Wash and/or peel the vegetables. Cut off any parts you're not using.

VARIATION 1

Weigh the vegetables. For every pound of vegetables, allocate two teaspoons of salt. Alternatively, for every kilogram, use 20 grams of salt. This works out to roughly 2% salt by weight. Use sea salt or Kosher salt that is free of additives.

Slice or shred the vegetables finely, with a knife or a box grater.

Mix the vegetables together with salt. Add herbs and spices as desired. Pack the mixture tightly into Ball jars or other jars with tightly-closing lids, leaving at least an inch of space at the top. Really push down on the mixture until liquid starts to rise over the top. Close the lid. Leave it at cool room temperature. (Root cellar, cool pantry, or bury it!)

Every day or two, open the lid, taste it with a clean fork, push down until liquid rises again, and replace the lid.

When you like the way it tastes, start eating it! The colder you store it, the more slowly it will sour. When it becomes very sour, it can still be used in soups and stews.

VARIATION 2

Put the vegetables, whole or in pieces, with herbs and spices as desired, into large Ball jars with tightly-closing lids. Using water that is free of chlorine, make a 6% brine by dissolving 60 grams of salt per liter of water, or approximately 4 tablespoons per quart. (The brine should be at room temperature.) Pour the brine into the jars to cover the vegetables, leaving a little space at the top. Close the lid tightly.

Wait a week, or much longer, before opening the lid.

Eat the vegetables!

(For variation 2 in particular, apparatus can be helpful, to keep the vegetables under the liquid and to keep the "bad" microbes at bay. I've had excellent experiences with Pickl-It, for instance.) [UPDATE: see here for some more thoughts about airlock contraptions.]

BIO

Alex Lewin is a fermenter, health coach, software engineer, real food activist, and urban biker. He authors a blog called "Feed Me Like You Mean It". He thinks that Ball jars are the ultimate glassware. His heroes include Sandor Katz, Vandana Shiva, Anthony Bourdain, and Kurt Vonnegut.

RESOURCES

Real Food Fermentation, by Alex Lewin
http://tinyurl.com/vegferment
Wild Fermentation, by Sandor Ellix Katz