vegetarian

Appetite for Reduction: 125 Fast and Filling Low-Fat Vegan Recipes

mandy — Fri, 15 Apr 2011 08:00:00 +0000

My library copy of Vegan with a Vengeance shouldn’t have been returned. Not in the state it was in after it lived in my kitchen for five renewed status cycles (the maximum number I was allowed before I had to return it to my local library). The book shouldn’t have been returned because it smelled like food. A cookbook, naturally, absorbs the effort of its teachings: oils and buttered thumb prints, dried arrow root smudges, and one small berry stain on two of the pages when I tried to turn them with fruit juice-stained fingers. Luckily, I don’t have to return Isa Chandra Moskowitz’s newest book, Appetite for Reduction, which is doomed to the same fate as its predecessor: lovingly used with pages that are turned with excitement, torn at its edges and bearing of all kinds of quirky marks, compliments of the daring cook.

Moskowitz discloses her personal health reasons that resulted in her decision to find more recipes that are lighter in caloric intake. She also stresses her reluctance to contribute to the war on bigger bodied women. So what does Moskowitz do? She writes a cookbook for vegan stomachs searching lowfat, delicious recipes. For those in the vegan community who are also health conscious, Moskowitz has delivered the goods on a plate too irresistible to deny.

Isa Chandra Moskowitz is the best friend we’re all looking for: she writes in a way we understand, a language that is easily understood and humorous. She is also the cook we want for our healthy lives and families. She gets it. She gets that we don’t want to give up taste and satisfaction for healthy living. With this book, she dismantles the notion that vegan eating and cooking is not either extreme of the rumor spectrum. Veganhood is not bland rabbit food, nor is it substituting large amount of full fat in place of flavor.

From funky hummus creative ideas to “OMG Oven-Baked Onion Rings,” from sides to satisfying full entrée ideas, Moskowitz turns your vegan kitchen upside down, shakes out the fat, and replaces it with novel and tasty ideas to keep your mind interested and your tongue happy you tried something new. For this, I raise my spatula to Moskowitz with a need and heartfelt thank you. Vegan or omnivore, you will find something to rave about and savor in Appetite for Reduction.

Written by: Lisa Factora-Borchers, April 15th 2011

Jonathan Safran Foer (01/19/2011)

brittany — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 20:00:00 +0000

London School of Economics

London, England

Jonathan Safran Foer spoke about the issues in his most recent book Eating Animals to a packed house at the London School of Economics. I haven’t read the book yet, or either one of his other two titles Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, so I went bracing for a preachy rally full of vegetarian dogma.

For those of you who have read the book, you probably know that I had no reason to fear. I’m a vegetarian, but both vegetarian activists and passionate meat eaters alike bother me. I tire of vegetarian propagandists shoving violent pictures of animal cruelty in people’s faces in an attempt to convert the nonconvertible. Just the same, I grow weary of telling people I’m a vegetarian and fielding questions like “No meat? What the hell do you eat?!” “Why? It’s natural to eat meat, y’know” or my favorite, “Ok, but jamon you eat, right?”

Thankfully, there were no leaflets handed out for either cause. Rather, I was captivated by Safran Foer’s social and environmental observations gained from the three years of research he put into the project. Safran points out that at this point in society’s development, everyone can recognize that eating meat is an “issue”, something we care about. However, voices from both sides are overly judgmental.

Safran Foer says vegetarian activists have helped create this strict dichotomy between meat eaters and non-meat eaters so much so that people do not see the benefits of just cutting down on meat consumption. “They have created a framework in discussing this so that they feel there are only two options: you’re a vegetarian or you’re a carnivore. And, most people cannot condition themselves to become a vegetarian… I think most people can condition themselves to eat less meat.” According to Safran Foer, if Americans can attempt to not eat meat for just one meal every week, the influence on the environment would be the same as taking five million cars off the road.

Vegetarians are often teased that they have canine teeth because humans are meant to eat meat naturally. Perhaps that was true during times when food was simply putting calories in our bodies. But Safran Foer points out that the huge social discourse surrounding the meat industry and the great lengths they take to create an idealistic picture of factory farms plays a much larger part in what we eat than we realize. According to Safran Foer, the animals in factory farms in the U.S. consume eight times more antibiotics than humans. Safran Foer asks “Is it natural to eat these kinds of animals that are raised in these ways? What’s natural about eating an animal that cannot survive without antibiotics? What’s natural about eating food that most nutritionists biologist and doctors I’ve spoken with say is probably the reason why girls are going through puberty at ages nine and ten?”

The system in which meat is produced is so distanced from consumers that we aren’t conscious of the externalized costs to the environment. Safran Foer says fast food “is presented as the cheapest food that’s ever been produced, when in fact it’s the most expensive food that’s ever been produced.” Indeed, the cost rung up at the supermarket does not include the destruction done to the environment. Safran Foer says the Global South has paid a huge price for this. Africa, South America, as well as parts of Eastern Europe all export food that they grow themselves but don’t eat to American and European companies. Their natural environments are destroyed in the process. Safran Foer asks “For what? Only for burgers. Not to solve the healthcare problem. Not to create peace in the Middle East. It’s for cheap burgers that make us fat.” Safran Foer also found that ninety-nine percent of the world’s soy crop is fed to animals concluding that, “No one eats tofu like meat eaters.”

Safran Foer claims that Eating Animals exists to begin a discussion about how people eat meat. He was not trying to create a book to persuade readers to become vegetarians, which is why he approached it journalistically, relying on the industry’s statistics and using two fact checkers. Even if you’re a die hard carnivore who scoffs at anything coming from the Kingdom Plantae or if you’re a vegan who refuses to swat a malaria carrying mosquito or somewhere in between, you should read Safran Foer’s book, if for no other reason than to learn about the affect the foods you choose to eat have on the rest of the world.

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

An mp3 recording of the event can be accessed here.

Written by: Sara Custer, February 9th 2011

The Meat Lover's Meatless Cookbook: Vegetarian Recipes Carnivores Will Devour

gita — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 16:00:00 +0000

By Kim O’Donnel

Da Capo Press

The recipes in The Meat Lover's Meatless Cookbook are very good. This cookbook is perfect for people who want to cut down on their meat consumption. Kim O’Donnel describes her motivation for writing this book as the realization that she and her family needed to cut down on their meat consumption for health and environmental reasons. O’Donnel is not a member of a vegetarian cult and does not want to recruit others. She wants to add delicious vegetarian recipes to the meat-heavy North American diet.

To that end, the recipes are organized into fifty-two menus, enough for one year of one meatless dinner each week, and the menus are grouped seasonally to reflect what is available in most regions of the U.S. during that time. Ingredients were selected with supermarket availability in mind so procuring organic virgin unicorn hair is not necessary. The book includes resources for the few items that may not be in the supermarket as well as more readily available substitutes.

People who have experience cooking vegetarian food will be familiar with many of the dishes included in this cookbook, but everyone could benefit from the section, “Kitchen Tricks for Your Sleeve.” “Metric Conversions” and “Resources” are two more universally useful sections in the book. O’Donnel has a folksy writing style and trusts the reader to use ingredients that they have and like, as exemplified in asides about her differences with her husband about the use of sugar in cornbread and noting that home cooks should use their preferences as a guide.

This book offers useful tools to expand one’s cooking repertoire. For example, one menu features ways to cook beans and rice, with varied seasonings for white beans, black beans and pinto or kidney beans, essentially explaining what flavors typically work well with different varieties of beans. This is the kind of information that the reader can build on, and makes this the perfect cookbook for people who are learning to cook. The quibbles I have with the cookbook are that it lacks total cooking and prep times and, as a result, takes some consideration to determine which are the best school-night meals.

Written by: Melissa Ditmore, October 26th 2010

Viva Vegan!: 200 Authentic and Fabulous Recipes for Latin Food Lovers

mandy — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 17:08:39 +0000

By Terry Hope Romero

Lifelong Books

Let’s just get this out of the way—Terry Hope Romero is the best gift a vegan chef could ever hope for. While I am just a vegetarian, I often find myself flirting with the idea of going vegan. Thanks to Viva Vegan!, though, I can now successfully have a vegan Mexican dinner night.

Now, if you are a vegetarian, chances are you’re familiar with things like seitan and tempeh. If you’re not, no need to worry. Romero begins the book with an extremely helpful section called “The Vegan Latin Pantry,” which itemizes traditional foods necessary for the Latin kitchen and lists vital foods for vegans. The book is helpfully formatted with short paragraphs and text boxes to make the pages more visually interesting—let’s just say that the “These Are a Few of My Favorite Beans” text box has staved off any boredom I was experiencing from my standby black beans and rice lunch.

The 200 recipes in this book are sorted into an impressive fourteen categories, ranging from salsas to tamales. One benefit of having such a range of recipes is that there truly is something for every skill level and every kitchen. Personally, I don’t have a steamer basket or a large lasagna dish, so the tamales weren’t up my alley, but I found plenty of soups, stews, and condiments to try. There aren’t just guacamole and salsa recipes here—Cashew Crema and Chocolate-Chile Mole Sauce make for a delicious condiment section.

In addition to her creativity with condiments, I’ve got to give it to Romero on her commitment to home cooking. An alarming amount of cookbooks seem comfortable recommending that their readers use tons of ingredients that are bought from grocery store shelves, like bread, cakes, and other items that can be made from scratch. While Romero has a few recipes like that, she doesn’t say to head to a specialty store to pick up seitan; she explains how to make your own for chorizo seitan sausages. As someone who’s spent way too much money on seitan in the past, I’m grateful to have an easy recipe to follow that’ll save me money and produce a great dish.

Some of the recipes can be intimidating (I still haven’t tried to conquer making empanada dough), but all of them are well-explained without a hint of condescension. If you’re starving, don’t make the mistake I did by looking at the sixteen pages of full-color pictures. I understand the magic of Photoshop, but digitally-altered or not, that is some fine-looking cuisine. Ultimately, Viva Vegan! is a fun cookbook to read through and experiment with. Romero does a fantastic job of proving that while vegans may have dietary restrictions, there are still plenty of delicious, creative foods to be made and devoured.

Written by: Alyssa Vincent, September 4th 2010

The Vegetarian Option

admin — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000

By Simon Hopkinson

Stewart Tabori & Chang

In the past, Simon Hopkinson has been referred to as the best cook in Britain who nobody in the States has heard of, but I’m hoping this will soon change. After devouring The Vegetarian Option, I know the chef has a lot to offer when it comes to beautiful, simple food.

Hopkinson first gained acclaim with his 1995 cookbook Roast Chicken and Other Stories, but it seems as if the public has always been a little behind in praising him because it wasn’t until ten years later in 2005 that a panel of chefs, food writers, and consumers in the British magazine _Waitrose Food Illustrated _ voted it “the most useful cookbook of all time.”

Obviously, roast chicken does not a vegetarian make, which is the reason why The Vegetarian Option was so interesting to me: It was written by a non-vegetarian and the book allows readers to determine how strictly they want to adhere to the vegetarian guidelines—giving them the vegetarian option. Hopkinson even urges readers to add protein to some of the dishes if it suits their fancy.

The book, though a bit stiff, was right up my alley because in terms of cooking, there’s nothing I hate more than tortured vegetables. I’m sure you’ve witnessed this: People who don’t really like vegetables slather broccoli in cheese sauce, encase cauliflower in casseroles, and boil everything else until it’s within an inch of its life. Hopkinson’s recipes honor the integrity of the vegetables and by breaking them down into seven sections (Vegetables, Herbs, Pasta, Legumes & Grains, Rice, Eggs, and Fruit), he ensures that the book will include something even the most staunch vegetable hater will be sure to love-or at least like.

Thanks to Hopkinson, I am now the proud owner of a simple Korean kimchi recipe (though it takes five days to ferment and come to fruition), which I used to love eating as a kid when visiting my best friend. Her mother, aunts, and grandma used to spend entire weekends making gallons of the spicy cabbage delicacy and though Hopkinson’s isn’t as spicy and doesn’t include shrimp paste (many consider this essential to kimchi), it’s a nice standby to have on hand.

Lately, I’m very big on conflicting flavors in a single dish. Perhaps this is why I went crazy for Hopkinson’s incredibly healthy and oh-so-delicious carrot salad with cilantro and green chili. Carrots are one of those vegetables that don’t get enough play; they’re jam-packed with essential vitamins and nutrients and delicious eaten raw or cooked. This salad requires a measly seven ingredients (including salt), but the addition of coriander seeds, fresh cilantro, and a spicy jalapeno really bring it to life.

Another standout was the broiled eggplant with pesto; this recipe couldn’t get any easier. After blending together a classic pesto (olive oil, pine nuts, basil, garlic, and parmesan) in my rickety and ancient food processor, I simply smeared it on top of eggplant halves and broiled them until they were golden and bubbly. Frankly, I loved this because it’s stupid simple, yet I would have never thought to combine eggplant and pesto on my own to such delicious results.

At the age of twenty-five, I’ve only encountered one vegetable that I do not like: parsnips. Because of this reason, I gave myself permission to “torture” them a bit by following Hopkinson’s recipe for cheese-crusted fried parsnips with romesco sauce, which is an outrageously tasty blend of almonds, olive oil, garlic, chili, sundried tomatoes, and peppers. Truth be told, an old shoe would taste good if it were crusted in cheese, fried, and dipped in romesco sauce, but these delicious little treats made me a parsnip believer.

I could go on forever about The Vegetarian Option, but unfortunately I can’t. I will say this, though: Whoever said that vegetarians are missing out doesn’t understand all that vegetables are capable of.

Written by: Tina Vasquez, June 12th 2010

The Butcher and the Vegetarian: One Woman's Romp through a World of Men, Meat, and Moral Crisis

admin — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000

By Tara Austen Weaver

Rodale

Food writer Tara Austen Weaver was raised in a vegetarian home since her birth. As an adult, she unexpectedly gets diagnosed with thyroid disease. What’s she to do? Fast for forty days? No. Go macrobiotic? Nope, not that either. Instead, Weaver must eat meat—by doctor’s order. So she turns to a carnivorous diet. What unfolds is part chick lit-cookbook and part treatise on farm animal rights.

Weaver’s introduction to the world of animal flesh brings her into contact with many meat-industry types. Some she casts in an ethical light. These include kind butchers and organic cattle ranchers. She also comes to know a charming meat blogger. Readers may object to the notion of ethical, caring cattle ranchers and butchers, but I can assure you these characters would cause anyone to re-examine their assumptions.

Throughout the The Butcher and the Vegetarian, Weaver’s writing is lively and clever. Readers will enjoy her wit and keen use of hyperbole. At one point she describes a Holy Grail-like experience wherein she smothers her steak in a rapturous chimichurri sauce.

The Butcher and the Vegetarian’s cover art depicts tiny hearts and cute cartoon characters, but the book offers up several dark and unexpected twists. One minute I was reading about pork tenderloin; the next thing I know, Weaver is describing how her mother's boyfriend molested her when she was thirteen and her two subsequent suicide attempts. Woah! Hold it right there, meat lady. I need a minute to digest!

Although surprised by the confession, I appreciate Weaver's honesty and think the topic of abuse deserves a place in the book. Weaver's relationship with meat mirrors her relationship with men. To her, meat is a very masculine experience.

In passing, Weaver mentions that she doesn't consider fish to be meat. And as for chickens, I was equally shocked to find out she puts them in the category of "almost not a meat." Still, The Butcher and the Vegetarian shares some good information about the treatment of farm animals and the truth about our (and their) sources of food. These facts are of great value to readers.

Although once a vegetarian, Weaver is no activist, and she also makes her preference for food over animal welfare transparent from the beginning. It does strike me as suspicious, however, that someone so horrified at eating a steak and so knowledgeable about the farming industry would be okay with consuming eggs and dairy. I wonder if she doesn't recognize the incongruity.

Personally, I could care less about how to prepare meat; it’s simply not part of my life. Though The Butcher and the Vegetarian is well written, Weaver lost me at each mention of fine cuts of X or a special preparation of Y. What I did find fascinating (and thoroughly graphic) was Weaver’s research visit to the farm where she witnesses the process of slaughter. She writes that seeing this occur repeatedly has a desensitizing effect, that it becomes ordinary, or even "normalized."

In my experience, there was nothing normal about it. When I was in veterinary school, I witnessed the slaughtering process several times, and the blood of those poor cows still floods my nightmares. Maybe that makes me overly critical. But it’s the truth.

Written by: Laura Koffler, April 23rd 2010

Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs and Wear Cows: An Introduction to Carnism

admin — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Melanie Joy

Conari Press

I will say it, here and now: I eat meat. Now that I have announced that, I fear that Melanie Joy will fly through my window to tell me how the meat industry recapitulates Nazism. Okay, I don’t really. But you catch my drift: this woman is serious.

As a person with very close vegetarian friends, and who has also purchased, prepared, eaten, and enjoyed seitan, quorn, and tofu, I would say that I have a decent understanding of vegetarianism without actually practicing it. I am not convinced, however, that Joy’s book offers much that is new to the vegetarian rhetoric.

The title led me to expect a book that delved into humankind’s history with animal relationships, that would try to scratch the surface of when and why certain animals took on specific functions in our lives and others didn’t. But rather than that, this book is focused on the psychology that “allows” humans to be comfortable with meat eating. To talk about this topic, Joy has made up a word for meat-eaters: carnists. She defines carnism as “the belief system that enables us to eat some animals and not others.” Throughout the work, Joy examines how the carnist mindset and the meat industry work together to keep animals as a dinner item despite various displeasing realities connected with the practice. While doing this, Joy describes the inhumane conditions at slaughterhouses and factory farms, and the effect that the meat industry has on the Earth.

And I don’t dispute any of that. I believed it the first time I read it, in books such as Fast Food Nation and The Omnivore's Dilemma, which Joy quotes and references an obscene number of times in her 150-page book. So much of the book is gleaned from other works that it reads very much like a college thesis paper; I suspect it once was.

Despite her legitimate arguments regarding the disgusting and hidden reality of factory farms, Joy doesn’t take into account people who raise their own animals in perfectly humane conditions or who hunt legally, or people who have any number of health issues that make a vegetarian diet anywhere from impractical to dangerous. The meat debate is a huge topic that goes far beyond the dualism of carnism and vegetarianism, and Joy doesn’t come close to covering all the bases here.

As I implied before, this book also has an irritating tendency to mention Nazis a lot. While I understand the connection Joy’s trying to make on a cerebral level, something about describing meat eating—not cruel factory farm conditions or inhumane slaughterhouses, but just eating meat—as being akin to being a member or supporter of the Gestapo is just distasteful to me.

I do applaud Joy on her willingness to acknowledge the suffering of slaughterhouse workers and others whose employment in the meat industry is dangerous and taxing. Many times, when it comes to arguments against the meat industry, I feel as if workers are under attack for earning a paycheck and given no sympathy whatsoever for the dangerous work they do. This author doesn’t suggest that the fate of the human animal is less important than other animals, and I appreciate that.

Written by: Kelly Palka Gallagher, March 28th 2010

That's Why We Don't Eat Animals: A Book About Vegans, Vegetarians, and All Living Things

admin — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 08:00:00 +0000

By Ruby Roth

North Atlantic Books

If you are planning on raising a vegetarian child who will be well-prepared to explain his or her beliefs to inquiring peers, teachers, and friends’ parents, That's Why We Don't Eat Animals is a great start.

Did you know that turkeys blush? Or that newborn quail start walking the moment they are hatched from their eggs? I didn’t, but any child who reads That's Why We Don't Eat Animals will know. Facts like these work to emphasize the connections between living things in a way that small children in the book's targeted audience (about age 4 and up, in my estimation) will understand and appreciate.

The book shows animals in their natural habitats, and explains the difference in the quality of life an animal will experience if it is running free versus living in cramped quarters on factory farms. The book also illustrates the effect that factory farming has on various biomes and the health of the Earth overall. The animals are charmingly drawn in a caricaturist, almost geometric style, and their environments are depicted with bright or dark colors, depending on their living conditions. The vocabulary is simple and straightforward, doesn’t get too dark or complicated for children, and avoids a preachy, overbearing tone in favor of a sensitive, informative one.

In another review I’ve written this month on a book promoting the vegetarian lifestyle, I’m not nearly as praiseful. The books share primarily the same messages—that eating animals is morally shady and bad for the environment—but the book for adults tends to alienate and divide, as if putting meat-eaters and vegetarians on opposing sides of a war, while the children’s book emphasizes the connectedness of living things. Whether or not the children ingest the other moral and environmental messages of the book, that one message trumps all.

Written by: Kelly Palka Gallagher, March 27th 2010

Vegetarian Dishes from Across the Middle East

admin — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 01:00:00 +0000

By Arto der Haroutunian

The Experiment

The late Arto der Haroutunian first published this book in 1983 when how-to's for vegetarian cooking—let alone for Middle Eastern vegetarian cooking—were relatively rare in the U.S. Ahead of his time, der Haroutunian's tome of some 250 recipes laid dormant and out of print for 20 years. This new reissue is the first time the book has been available in North America.

As a vegetarian, lover of Middle Eastern food, and cooking newbie, I was thrilled to get my hands on this book. As an added bonus, many of the recipes are vegan, or can be easily tailored to be vegan. I resolved to make half a dozen recipes before reviewing this book, some more than once. After doing so, I've decided that I have a love/hate relationship with said book. My partner, who is an engineer, put it this way: “There is so little instruction that if this was a booklet that came with something you bought at IKEA, it would say, 'Assemble your furniture.'”

Translation: it's assumed that you have as much culinary knowledge as the author. For someone like me—who did not own a set of pots and pans until receiving them as a wedding gift—this made crafting recipes a bit difficult. The recipes don't make any mention of this when referring to the type tools needed—“place mixture in a baking dish”—you're left light on specifics. What kind of baking dish? Pyrex? Stainless? Deep? Shallow?

Some of the baking times were also way off; had I not checked on the potato eggeh, for instance, we might have had a fire in the oven. Ditto with my first try at pita bread: the book forbids you to open the oven before the rounds have baked for 10 minutes, but in my oven that made them a bit tough and crunchy on top. (On my second attempt, baking them for seven minutes, they turned out soft, yummy, and addictive.)

That said, many of the difficulties I encountered could be placed squarely on the shoulders of the American publisher. They failed to take into consideration the fact that flour available for purchase in the U.S. (the cook is simply instructed to use “all-purpose flour”) varies from flour available in the Middle East and the U.K. (the author lived in both places during his lifetime). I seriously doubt the rishta (homemade pasta) was supposed to have the doughy taste that it did; coming up with pasta that tasted like pasta required some research on my part, and the use of semolina flour.

The publisher also did not think to include metric conversion for those of us on this side of the Atlantic; my partner was standing by with a calculator and table, lest I guess wrong and blow up the bread. Lastly, with no photographs—other than the very phallic-looking eggplants on the cover—it was visually disappointing and looked like a textbook.

Despite these disappointments, with a little tinkering, we came up with some delicious homemade food. Other points in the book's favor: all of the ingredients are relatively easy to come by, and don't require a chef's talent to make. Just some patience and experimentation is required.

Written by: M.L. Madison, February 4th 2010

Quick and Easy Vegan Comfort Food: 65 Everyday Meal Ideas for Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner with Over 150 Great-tasting, Down-home Recipes

admin — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 13:00:00 +0000

By Alicia C. Simpson

The Experiment Publishing

As someone who has been cooking far less time than I’d like to admit, I should explain that I’ve gotten quite skilled in the arts of chopping, mincing, and sautéing in a very short time, and I enjoy my kitchen prep time far more than I ever expected. I’m a vegan in a decidedly un-vegan land, so I had little choice when it came to learning to cook. After going vegan, the options were eat junk or go hungry.

Alicia C. Simpson, known to some as Vegan Guinea Pig, a writer for the Vegans of Color blog, and founder of Lici’s Sweet Treats Organic Bakery, found herself in a similar predicament. A native Californian living in Atlanta, she had a tough time locating simple, healthy vegan food in her community. Raised on a combination of soul food from her Southern father and veg-friendly Cali fare from her mother, Simpson’s journey to veganism began several years ago and accidentally (if fortuitously) produced a cookbook. After making her own booklet of instructions, she realized that her creations had become a full-fledged publication. Brand new publisher The Experiment believed in her work, and the result of their collaboration is stunning.

Quick and Easy Vegan Comfort Food is filled with accessible, invigorating recipes. Alongside simple preparation instructions are cooking tips and suggestions for pairings with other dishes in the book. Several pages are devoted to whole foods green smoothies and, for vegan newbies, how to ease into drinking them so you body doesn’t go into some sort of detox shock that leaves you stuck in the water closet for a day.

Beautiful full-page color photos illustrate delectable combinations, like sweet potato waffles with a spinach omelet, Fool Your Friends Tacos, and Sloppy Josephs. I think meaty Sloppy Joes are one of the most disgusting foods invented, and a vegan version hardly sounded appealing. But the photo of the TVP (textured vegetable protein) mixture on whole-wheat buns made my mouth water. With a sauce made from scratch, you avoid all the preservatives and high fructose corn syrup. That’s a re-appropriated comfort I can get behind.

Cookbooks can do more than instruct. They can also inspire and validate. Simpson’s unpretentious recipes provide vegan simplicity, and her enthusiasm for cooking is infectious. She offers basic tips for stocking a low-cost vegan pantry. When she writes, “Trying oat milk for the first time is a life-changing experience,” I truly believe her—and not just because I happened to have tried oat milk less than a week before receiving her book in the mail. Indeed, had I carried her supportive words with me to the grocery, I would have spent far less time debating which carton of dairy alternative to purchase.

The only other decision I faced recently when selecting food was which of Simpson’s enticing creations to try first. In my home, we are vegans who admittedly miss cheese (and my partner is only vegan at home, for what it’s worth). For that reason, the Dilla recipe—that’s sans queso, you see—was a perfect choice. A lightly fried tortilla filled with a hummus and veggie concoction, we ate too much and didn’t think twice about missing cheddar. But then, I don’t expect vegan ingredients to replicate—only to replace—animal products.

Quick and Easy Vegan Comfort Food delivers on all counts. A food preparation manual has rarely been so appropriately named.

Written by: Brittany Shoot, December 5th 2009

Cook Food: A Manualfesto for Easy, Healthy, Local Eating

admin — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 07:05:00 +0000

By Lisa Jervis

PM Press

I’ve long enjoyed Lisa Jervis’ critical analysis, a woman best known in feminist circles as the co-founder of Bitch magazine. Growing into my own love of all things kitchen this past year, I fully expected to be won over by Cook Food; sadly, I was not.

It seems like a complicated time to write this book. Educated liberals finally care about “food studies” now that Michael Pollan is writing books about his omnivorous dilemma. At the same time, many progressives have long known about the risks associated with genetically modified foods and hydrogenated oils, the benefits of plant-based (or at least plant-heavy) diets, and the importance of eating slowly and locally. Many are also aware of how hard it is to find affordable, fresh produce in many areas of the country.

It’s hard to know to whom this book is marketed. Anyone who has read any of Michael Pollan’s books or articles in the New York Times Magazine is likely familiar with the concepts that influence Jervis’ writing. Yet because this short book mostly lacks larger systemic analysis about how gender, race, and speciesism plays into your dietary options and choices, it’s hard to know Jervis’ point of departure—and thus it’s difficult to gauge what ours should be.

Because the book is seemingly geared towards socially-conscious people without much experience in the kitchen, many recipes use basic vegan ingredients. This is both a strength and a weakness. While soy mayonnaise is never called for—which is great in terms of keeping the recipes as universal as possible—a meal based on tempeh and kale also isn’t often wildly appealing to people unfamiliar with vegetarian or vegan cooking. Jervis also admits that being from the Bay Area, her surroundings—plentiful farmers markets—influence her attitudes and writing. Unfortunately, that specific context doesn’t necessarily lend itself to using this book’s recipes across varying regions and availabilities.

A number of the recipes—five of the twenty—in Cook Food are modified from the originals found in Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone. While I appreciate Jervis’ honesty, none of the recipes are all that unique, which is noticeable even without reading her necessary disclosure. It seems a little tricky to call one’s book a "manualfesto" while borrowing so heavily from others' work.

Jervis states repeatedly that we should all do the best we can, but in the end, I’m not left very convinced that she believes you can manage your own kitchen without a plethora of local green grocers, markets that stock tofu, a pepper grinder, and quality cookware. That this book doesn’t win over a frugal vegan like myself cannot be considered a generalized condemnation of good work; a reviewer’s ego needs to be reigned in when personal essentializing overshadows objective judgment. Still, if I’m looking for a cozy vegan-ish book to gift to a friend, I’m afraid this won’t be the one.

Written by: Brittany Shoot, October 17th 2009

Vegan Soul Kitchen: Fresh, Healthy, and Creative African-American Cuisine

admin — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 07:07:00 +0000

By Bryant Terry

Da Capo Press

Whether you're rebuilding yourself or just doing daily maintenance, healthy food is a necessity for bringing the body back and keeping it going. Now that I can't go to Whole Foods, it's time to get creative with the selection from produce stands and farmer's markets. Today I saw a man with a straw cowboy hat selling tomatoes, melons, and sunflowers out of a battered pick-up truck. Chilled soup, sorbet, and an arrangement for the table? As attracted as I am to the 'slow' and local foods movements, I am frequently concerned with their possible elitism. Therefore, I was delighted to hear Bryant Terry on the Tavis Smiley show detailing the history of African American cuisine incorporating vegetarianism: Seventh Day Adventists, Dick Gregory, Etta Lewis, and Elijah Muhammed. The only cuisine that doesn't tempt me is standard “'Merican”—canned green bean casserole, mashed potatoes from a box, egg salad, orange plastic-wrapped cheese, jello with tiny marshmallows in it, plates of unseasoned monochromatic beige, fry everything, the only vegetable is the cubed carrot-lima-bean-corn kernel mélange—so I always appreciate an introduction to other nutritious, delicious methods of preparation.

West Coast chef Bryant Terry presents traditional southern cooking without chicken or pork products, and without the soy dependence or preachy tone of many vegan cookbooks. An unrepentant omnivore, I already have a few vegan and vegetarian cookbooks, and Vegan Soul Kitchen definitely earns a place on the shelf. Recipes like the creamy celeriac sauce could conceivably accompany tuna as well as tempeh, and if you happen to slip a little turkey andouille in the Gumbo Z, well, I won't tell on you. Better yet: my life comes with a soundtrack—a highlight of one job was being told that I'd channeled Sally Bowles perfectly—so it makes perfect sense that each recipe comes with a song. If I met anyone who could cook like this, it might be time to reference Salt-N-Pepa's “What a Man.”

Written by: Erika Mikkalo, October 8th 2009

The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability

admin — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 16:41:00 +0000

By Lierre Keith

Flashpoint Press

When I initially saw the title of this book, my inner scale wanted to weigh its contents against my fifteen year decision to exclude eating anything that had parents. I also presumed the author was one of those pork slinging individuals who just couldn’t cut it as a vegetarian. The good thing about getting older, though, is the wisdom I have acquired in remaining open. Lierre Keith discusses three reasons—moral, political, and nutritional—why most vegetarians choose to adopt a meatless diet, and the misconceived notions that often accompany those reasons.

What stood out to me is Keith’s discussion of agriculture and its effects on land, society, animals, and the relationship between all three. The land that is used to cultivate all those vegetables that vegetarians feel so ethically euphoric about consuming must be cleaned and cleared of every single piece of lint in order to be successful in producing a single plant. Consequently, the animals and microfauna (bacteria, fungi, and yeasts) that symbiotically thrived off that land are forced into their demise, with the bison serving as an example. Keith states that the sixty to 100 million bison that existed in the U.S. in 1491 have been reduced to 350,000 in number today. Also, only 10,000 wolves now remain where there were once between 425,000 and a million. Once this relationship is forced to call it quits, the land that would normally nourish and replenish itself is now barren until another piece of land is taken over, or until fertilizer is used.

With political vegetarianism, Keith uses the symbiotic relationship of the many companies that are seen as profit-fueled while also holding a financial interest in those meat-free, so-called environmentally-friendly products we so proudly consume. Basically, that soymilk we may drink out of protest against Coca-Cola is owned by the same company that holds shares in that red can.

In the section on nutritional vegetarianism, of which I took particular interest, Keith explains the physiology involved in consuming a low-saturated fat, high carbohydrate, and high grain diet. She also gives a personal account of how this diet affected her own body resulting in fourteen years of sickness, nausea, and bloating. Not only in vegetarianism, but also in the diet many Americans have been scared into adopting, the above-mentioned way of eating is being attributed to cardiovascular disease. Some of the diseases Keith states are attributed to the “diseases of civilization” are arthritis, diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, and stroke.

What I thought would be a book filled with disgruntled accounts of a has-been vegetarian justifying the excuse to pig out on double cheeseburgers again, was actually a well-researched, statistically sound book that deals with truths from both a personal aspect and a social one. Keith, although opinionated in some places, still allows the reader to consider both sides of the vegetarian argument from three perspectives. For those who insist on one way versus another, The Vegetarian Myth presents us with enough information to wisely weigh whatever we choose to put on our plates.

Written by: Olupero R. Aiyenimelo, August 13th 2009

Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love

admin — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 22:01:00 +0000

By Sheila Rowbotham

Verso

Writing a biography is tricky terrain, particularly on a subject whose name is generally unknown. The author likely has reams and reams of information gathered from years of research and has the thankless task of deciding what can go into the book and what should be left out. For this reason, many biographies suffer from too much or insufficient information. Luckily, Sheila Rowbotham navigates these waters easily with skilled contextualization and engaging writing.

Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love takes us through one of the most intriguing periods in Western history. Born to a wealthy Brighton family in 1844, the young intellectual eventually headed off to Cambridge to study theology. However, he was soon swept up in the counter-culture of emerging socialism and class revolution. Rowbotham mirrors Carpenter's growing social awareness with his own "deviant" sexuality with skill and sensitivity.

Shunning his inborn privilege, Carpenter sets off to live an activist life, educating the working class and living off the land. Of course, problems arise. The many strong personalities involved in the Victorian social reform movement made creating an English utopia an impossible task and the affable Carpenter was often left stuck in the middle.

What is most striking about Carpenter's life, and the lives of those around him, is how unexpectedly progressive these individuals were. Almost a century before Greenpeace and recycling programs, Carpenter espoused the importance of eating locally-made food and even the benefits of vegetarianism. Several of his friends lived openly (to a degree) as homosexuals and Carpenter himself had intimate male relationships his entire adult life, eventually settling down with George Merrill for almost three decades.

Full of a genuine desire to make the world a better place, Carpenter and his colleagues all attempted to enact their beliefs to some degree. There was formidable opposition: George Orwell openly despised Carpenter, and around the time of the the trials of Oscar Wilde, both Carpenter and Merrill were the target of witch-hunting conservative groups out to punish homosexuals. But none of this seemed to hold Carpenter back; he continued to publish texts, give lectures, and travel around the world for all of his long life.

His tale is inspiring but also worrying; a century later we still struggle with the same issues Carpenter tackled. Groups like the Fabian Society and the Social Democratic Federation believed a cultural revolution was imminent, and that sexual, gender, and class liberation would occur within their lifetimes. Sadly, subsequent generations have not done these pioneers justice.

Pessimism aside, this book has much to teach us about what it takes to change a strongly traditional culture. Although names like Carpenter's have been lost in the selective retelling of history, the impact that these people's lives made was evident in the cultural upheavals of the 1960s and, one might argue, in activism of the present. An unwavering commitment to a simple, open-minded life made Carpenter an extraordinary person and an inspiring role model.

Rowbotham's biography is lengthy and thus might turn off some potential readers, but so much of the book is about the context of Carpenter's life and the bizarre (and often entertaining) company he kept, which makes the biography consistently engaging. My only criticism is that, as someone familiar with Rowbotham's work, I was hoping for more of a feminist analysis of Carpenter's ideas, as he was close to several "new women" of the day and also a strong supporter of suffrage and women's rights. All in all this is an amazingly written biography!

Written by: Jennifer Burgess, March 23rd 2009

This Crazy Vegan Life: A Prescription for an Endangered Species

admin — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 17:37:00 +0000

By Christina Pirello

Penguin

I love meat. I love cheese. I love all things animal, and I've always believed that these foods are part of a healthy, balanced diet. I couldn't imagine becoming vegan, giving up all animal products completely. Veganism seemed like a quick road to malnutrition (how could you possibly get enough protein and calcium?), boredom (spinach again?), and overall weirdness. ("I'll have the soyburger with soy ketchup on a soy bun with soy fries.") Fortunately, Christina Pirello's This Crazy Vegan Life challenges all of these perceptions and shows how choosing a vegan lifestyle can improve health, energy, and wellness.

The author begins by briefly sharing her powerful personal testimony; adopting a vegan lifestyle led to her recovery from a terminal form of leukemia. In addition, veganism has helped her to lose weight and feel better about her impact on the planet. Her energetic, passionate voice and real-life stories and advice make this book practical and engaging from cover to cover.

The initial chapters are devoted to educating the reader, providing information on food and culture throughout history. The author presents startling statistics about the origin of foods we eat and the impact of these foods on our health, and shows how choosing healthy non-animal foods will benefit the reader and the planet. Veganism begins to sound not only appealing, but also intelligent, practical, and delicious.

Common misperceptions about veganism are dispelled clearly and simply. For example, many people believe that eating a vegan diet is too expensive. The author points out that a pound of veal costs $7.99-$8.99, while a pound of tofu is just $1.49 and a pound of carrots is about $.89. It's hard to argue with that!

After reading the first chapters, most people will be ready to give veganism a try. Fortunately, the author anticipated this, and included several very complete chapters about how to make the transition to the vegan lifestyle. She explains basic nutritional principles, such as different types of carbohydrates and fats, and how these work with a vegan diet. Readers learn how to make sure they're getting proper nutrition, and why seeking this nutrition through non-animal foods is healthier and safer than what most Americans are exposing themselves to through conventional foods.

Lists of foods to stock in your pantry and refrigerator are included, along with a twenty-one-day menu plan. Over 100 recipes for delicious dishes (even desserts!) will help the new vegan approach meal preparation with confidence and know-how. A chapter on exercise provides an illustrated resistance band workout and ideas for other forms of healthy movement.

By the end of This Crazy Vegan Life, I was chomping at the bit to try some new recipes and give up animal products in my diet. Thanks to Christina Pirello, I'm on my way to a healthier, more natural, more energetic life.

Written by: Amanda Moss, February 20th 2009