An example of what I've been ranting about for years

Vegansaurus highlights an obnoxious advert by Physicians' Committee for Responsible Medicine. Now, I like PCRM, in general. I have a few reservations about any group promoting veganism on health grounds, but can appreciate one that doesn't actually push it as a miracle cure/source of immortality. Likewise, they've always been a bit too anti-dietary fats for my taste (even if we ignored the health benefits of, say, olive or coconut oil, emphasising this angle would lead to a fairly joyless diet for many of us, which is of course a brilliant way of putting people off being vegan), but on the other hand I haven't seen any noticeable fat-shaming from them. Until now.

When I started this blog back in 2008, part of my motivation was to challenge the seemingly uncritical delight taken by vegans in sources such as the Skinny Bitch franchise and Gillian McKeith. (Since getting vocal on the subject, I have come across more critics, and GMK in particular has lost a lot of her popularity after eating insects on TV.) I've ranted about discussed related topics many times since then. I'm sure some people wonder why I give so much energy to this topic. Certainly, tofu-world friends* have asked why it bothers me so much. After all, if selling people a diet plan encourages them to go vegan, what's the problem?

I'll tell you what the problem is. VEGANISM ISN'T ABOUT GETTING SKINNY. Some people, for better or worse, experience that as a side-effect of going vegan. Others don't. Some put on weight. Some just stay the same, wherever they started from. And if you want to promote veganism for animal rights reasons, equating veganism with perfect health is a bit dodgy. A vegan diet is no more automatically healthy than an omni one - any diet takes a bit of work to get the right nutrients. Equating skinny with healthy is quite frankly dangerous - not everyone is designed that way. And equating veganism with the aesthetic side of skinniness? Just, no. As much as anything, if someone cares about 'getting skinny' over all else, do you really think they'll stay vegan if the weight doesn't fall off? If they get skinny and get sick, meanwhile, veganism will be blamed. This is how some of the more prominent ex-vegans seem to have come to be that way.

And the advert in question, well, it seems to be trading purely on the idea that fat is a Bad Thing aesthetically - that it looks gross, for a start, and furthermore is a sign that you must have been killing baby calves to keep yourself in such disgusting shape. A vegan, by this reckoning, absolutely cannot look like that. Sadly, many unskinny vegans (myself included) tend to have this strange thing called dignity that prevents us dropping trou/getting topless at PCRM HQ - possibly alongside a couple of the skinny omnis/lacto-vegs I know - and challenging the people behind the advert to spot the difference.

I'm with Fuck Yeah Fat Vegans on this one...

*Veganising 'meatworld', internet-obsessive speak for real life

Veganism in Glamour

Why is everyone going vegan?

I wish 'everyone' was! Even if, as the article seems to think, the primary motivation is a health one. The overall effect would still be to reduce the demand for animal products. Sadly, I don't think that's the case.

Now, I like that veganism is getting mainstream coverage, Glamour is probably seen by more people than my entire blogroll put together (sorry folks). Unfortunately, the article doesn't really do much to promote veganism.

Firstly, my views on celebrity veganism are no secret - there's always the risk that they're doing it for attention and will backslide pretty sharpish. Or that they'll stick around long enough to be taken seriously then decide that non-vegan cake is the only sensible source of B12 once they get pregnant, NATALIE. So while I can see that such an opener is likely to appeal to Glamour readers, it isn't the best basis on which to promote veganism.

Secondly, yet again veganism is equated with weight loss. I honestly believe this (like the Skinny Bitch craze) does more harm than good - there's a fine line between weight loss diets and eating disorders, and many people already think vegans automatically cross that line. I've no objection to people cutting down on animal products for health reasons, see above, but the weight loss angle is as dodgy as the celebrity angle in terms of encouraging people to go fully vegan and stay that way. It needs to not be a miracle diet that gets dumped if you haven't lost a stone after a week!

Thirdly, the health section at the end contains a level of scaremongering that looks likely to put people off going vegan. I'm all for appropriate nutrition, and for most people (vegan or not) this probably will involve supplements at some point in your life, purely because of lack of time to create a perfect diet. I'm not convinced that all vegans need B12 tablets, but at this point in time I feel healthier when I take them, and I have too much to think about without worrying about finding more natural vegan sources. I call it my insurance. But the 'you won't get enough protein oh and soy kills oh and B12 oh and you'll die without a multivitamin so you might as well just forget this vegan nonsense and cut down on eating animals and by the way let's apply that to other moral issues so you might like to only shoplift once a week rather than three times' approach is chronically unhelpful and likely to put people off veganism altogether rather than encouraging them to find out more.

A health post

Before I embark on a series of cheap recipes, here's a list of vegan superfoods from the Green Diva.

Hot foods for coldy vegans

So, in my department teaching assistants have to go to the lecture for their module. This is partly so the students get to know who we are, and partly so we know exactly what was said in each lecture. Enter freshers' flu. Half the first years coughed their way through the lecture yesterday. So by the afternoon, be it real or psychological, I felt a cold coming on. My strategy for colds is pretty much always to go home and eat spicy food to chase them away.

A few individual ingredients that are useful here:
-Garlic. Raw if you can take it.
-Ginger. Raw or minced in vinegar is better than powder.
-Horseradish or wasabi (different nationalities of the same plant)
-Chilli, of any sort. Hot peppers will unblock your nose and probably a few other parts of your anatomy. (None of which you should wipe straight after cutting up the peppers - wash your hands or get a nasty shock...)
-Any normal curry ingredients. The hotter the better. On this occasion, it is a good thing if your eyes and nose run!

Last night's dinner ended up being miso soup with pasta and a whole load of heat-producing ingredients. I don't have a cold this morning, so either it did the trick or the whole thing was a psychosomatic reaction to being cooped up with sneezy freshers for an hour!

Recipe:
-A tablespoon miso buillion (Marigold, for those reading in the UK)
-Two mugs of water (didn't measure it this time, but I do know how much my smallest pan holds)
-About half a coffee mug of pasta
-1 teaspoon each of horseradish relish and minced ginger
-Half a teaspoon of wasabi powder
-A splash each of soy sauce and rice vinegar (I am putting this in everything right now because I only just bought the bottle)
Boil for about five minutes to give the pasta a head start on cooking. Then add veg. Last night I used:
-Two spring onions
-Two mushrooms, chopped v. small
-Two cloves of garlic. These should be as raw as you can stand, so put them in fairly near the end.

I have put broccoli and carrot in this in the past, but didn't have any broccoli and had been eating carrots in absolutely everything lately so wanted a change.

Vitamin watch #1

A more 'serious' post is brewing in my brain and drafts folder. For now - apologies to anyone who objects to supermarkets or taking nutritional supplements - I just thought I'd share the news that Tesco are labelling which of their vitamins are vegan. (Vitamin C in particular is difficult to figure out without a label, since the orange flavour is often carried in beta-carotene which involves gelatin derived from fish. Nice.) I have what feels like the start of a cold, and which I am determined not to let evolve into the start of a constant stream of illness (and of snot) like it did last year when colds were just the respite periods between worse things. This will not be made any easier when term starts next week, as first-year lectures are like germ hypermarkets. So, although my diet does naturally contain a whole lot of vitamin C, I felt it necessary to buy a huge bottle of tablets for the weeks ahead and also a smaller one of echinacea pills. And avoiding animal derived stearates, gelatin, bone meal, etc is a major pain in the arse, so I'm always happy to see a manufacturer using vegan labels. I'll keep posting on this when my supply needs restocking.

Travel menu

I am currently on something that is part health kick, part not-getting-ill kick and part sheer terror of starting to dislike crisps due to consuming too many while travelling. Commuting for me has always meant a day or so of eating crap. That's ok if it doesn't turn into four days a week of eating crap, for several months. So, this week i'm bucking the trend a bit. I boiled up a triple-load of quinoa, chopped a few different vegetables, made dressing and divided the lot between a Swedish Glace container and a margarine pot. And put some on a plate for today's lunch, of course.

So...
Lunch today: quinoa, chopped carrot, yellow pepper, raw garlic and ginger (chopped VERY SMALL to save mouth-burning!) with green salad, hemp oil and balsamic vinegar
Dinner tonight: quinoa, spring onions, peppers, sunflower seeds, green salad, hemp oil and balsamic vinegar.
Lunch tomorrow: quinoa, carrot and celery with hemp oil and balsamic vinegar, also any leftover green stuff
Snack (the whole time): 1 jar of brazil nuts.

How to transport green leaf salad: get a sealable freezer bag. Place leaves etc inside, not packing them tightly. Seal bag with as much air as possible. Place in plastic tub, large enough to put it in without squeezing air out.

In the raw

Again, sorry, no nudie stuff in this post. One person gets to see that, and he doesn't do blogs. :)

Ahem, that aside...

This post is about what I see as a major difference between health vegans and those who are in it for animal rights reasons. (Or maybe between 'raw veganism' and any other form of veganism I can think of offhand) There has been a lot of fuss recently, sparked by a person who posted about the damage her raw vegan diet (which wasn't even vegan, but she doesn't mention *that* to the newspapers!) did to her children. (Incidentally, I made another post about this case but consigned it to my draft folder as it was based rather on personal anger and meanness - while I still agree with the overall sentiment, I felt the actual message was rather undermined by the medium of snarkiness. Suffice it to say, the resulting attention has led one of the vegan world's best-known raw-foodists to speak out about the amount of health problems in vegan children she knows.

Now, part of me thinks it was brave of this woman - a first-time parent of a child in the last stages of breastfeeding, so somebody for whom it is an issue like RIGHT NOW - to raise the issue. Because, while veganism (raw or not) is not automatically a bad diet, it is not automatically healthy either. Too many people assume that it is (and incidentally assume that a vegan with a cold or period pain or a broken bone must have been sneaking off to McDonalds, blah). And people who disagree with this will at some point be lambasted for it.

The factor that distinguishes raw, health-minded vegans from certain others among us (maybe the majority?) lies in the solution this person suggests. Now, she isn't doing so blithely or without some kind of conflict, but she is nonetheless raising the possibility of introducing raw goat milk and similar items into her daughter's diet. It is explicitly *veganism* she feels the need to compromise on, rather than *rawness*. Now, reading this as an animal-rights-minded (and so far non-breeding) vegan, this struck me as being the opposite of what I would expect. Maybe this is because my experience is of families where the children are raised vegan but not raw. (And, generally, had roughly the same or a lower level of ill-health than their classmates) Maybe because I can see a whole lot more scope for a varied diet including cooked food than I can for one involving raw animal products. (unless one goes for raw meat, but the salmonella content might be a little *too* varied there!) Or maybe because my beanburger-and-chips fed self had a perfectly normal puberty and came out of it at above average height with teeth that can crack nuts! At any rate, when avoiding animal products for reasons pertaining to the animals themselves is the key motivation for being vegan, then veganism itself is the last principle to be sacrificed, rather than the first.

Good thing being vegan keeps blood pressure down

The pro-GM crop scientist on the Today programme really annoyed me. Now, I have a fairly open mind about the wider GM issue. Much of my suspicion comes from the sort of companies that are involved, rather than the science itself. I have a hard time seeing why Monsanto would want to solve a global food crisis, for example. I don't buy GM food, but that's more along the lines of a boycott and an avoidance of actively supporting it rather than some idea that my body is particularly pure. I eat soy (albeit organic), drink coffee, use deodorant with aluminium in and am not particularly fussed about ingesting the odd artificial something-or-other (except sweeteners, they make me ill), so GM can join the queue on that score. I am, however, prepared to listen to the arguments on this issue.

So why did this particular scientist piss me off? Well, it was his brief exposition of one particular health benefit of GM food - the potential for adding essential fatty acids to plant matter which can currently only be found in fish oil. And, he says, this would help to conserve fish stocks. Now, I know that it is difficult to find a vegetarian source of these acids, but I also know that they can be found in flax. That may be known as linseed where you live or buy food. You can get the seeds themselves, or a powder. (some of my friends swear by the powder as a cooking ingredient - I'm not keen but will occasionally go on a health kick and buy some). These can be bought in health food shops, including Horrid and Bastard if you don't have anything else to hand, and also in Teh Evil Teh Sco. And, guess what? Eating these instead of fish will also help to stop said fish going extinct. See, that didn't take much gene-fiddling, did it?

Misplaced blame

Girl admitted to hospital - vegan diet blamed. Now, while I'm willing to believe that the parents in this case are messing up somewhere, I don't see why the default assumption has to be that the vegan diet is to blame. In every similar case so far, there has been some other factor - usually that the parents are cranks in some other way. (Hey, I'm not denying that veganism does attract this sort of person - but they don't represent the majority of us, ok?) For example, the family (maybe more than one - sadly, plenty exist) who rely on the 'power of prayer' to fix illnesses rather than taking their kids to the doctor. Or the mother who thought breastfeeding wasn't vegan - come on, you think a demographic containing a large number of crunchy granola types would really accept that as a norm?

Why am I so dubious? You may be thinking at this point that it is a knee-jerk response (rather like that of the doctor blaming veganism rather than looking any further?) from someone who will defend veganism at all costs. And you may worry about the future of my potential children. That is entirely your problem, since I'm unlikely to have any in the near future anyway.

But you know what? Although I don't have children, I do have a fair bit of knowledge here. I know enough people who have raised healthy vegetarian or vegan children to know that the diet isn't intrinsically a problem. (Some of their parents aren't even people I like, let alone carry a torch for - the point is that their kids are physically healthy.) I even know a smattering of life veg/ans of various stripes who have, amazingly if the press is to be believed, actually reached adulthood with no more than the average number of health problems.

Then there is my own experience. While not a life veg/an, I have been either vegetarian or vegan since well before puberty. If you ask me whether the change in diet affects a girl's periods, I won't be able to answer. (Yes, I do have them. And sometimes take iron supplements during them. Just like my omni friends, in fact.) I went pescatarian at age nine (being a child with no vegetarian relatives might be construed as one of the few good excuses for this), vegetarian at maybe 10 or 11, was vegan consistently from 14-20, slipped up and went back to being vegetarian for a bit, went vegan again in my early 20s. I do not have the spine of an 80-year old. I get back pain when doing heavy lifting, for sure, but am fairly confident that this isn't a specifically vegan trait. I am above average height for a female in England (5'8") and possibly slightly overweight. I have obviously female breasts for the first time in my life, probably because the soy content in my diet has gone up. I get more than my fair share of throat and chest infections - brought on by stress and living in a polluted city - but no other health problems. I take no daily vitamin supplement - just massive doses of vitamin c to ward off freshers' flu each year and iron for maybe one period in five. (Btw, I have heard from certain quarters that 'real vegans don't have periods' - this is neither typical nor healthy, and the people in question can jam it up their non-bleeding parts and get a sodding life.) I get my ID checked for alcohol purchases way more often than my 'young persons' railcard (I'm a mature student) gets checked closely on the train. I sometimes have the mouth of a thirteen-year old. I have spent my entire life listening to doom-laden predictions about my future health, none of which have come true.

Finally, there is the question of why exactly the press doesn't seem as keen to cover the health problems of children raised on junk food. Or if they do they blame it on external factors, never parental choice. There does seem to be a concerted anti-vegan trend in the media, and it does rather make life difficult for the majority of us who aren't like that.