Too Vegan To Function

No, not me, although I would find that description amusing if it came from someone I wasn't too annoyed with otherwise. I was randomly flicking through people's links (because just occasionally I take a night off from kicking arse and do aimless web-surfing for a bit) and came across Too Vegan To Function, a gem of a blog with detailed advice on being vegan in a variety of situations. It hasn't been updated for a while, but that doesn't diminish what is there.

Hey, folks?

Try not to feel sorry for me if I'm not eating anything in a cafe, ok? Believe me, I would not go somewhere I can't eat *anything* if it was my only chance of food that day. I'm more likely to suffer from the embarassment of being the centre of attention - especially when it quite frankly makes me look and feel like a freak - than from having to make do with a packet of crisps until I get home.
What is helpful, however, is taking your resident vegan's suggestions seriously when it comes to where to eat. Especially if s/he knows a place that buys vegan cakes from his/her friend's company (ok, that just got a bit more specific! But they are great cakes!) or indeed if they know a whole list of places (yes, I have been to nearly all the ones in the town centre) to get great food.

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.

Veganism and (in)convenience

Yes, first update in ages. But, hey, it isn't a food post!

So, I've mentioned that I don't find a vegan diet the easiest. I'm aware that this is an unpopular thing to say, and that quite a few people will throw their hands up and shout me down with cries of 'but it's EEEEAAAASY!!! You just aren't TRYING!' or just mutter about the crazy fat girl trying to put people off veganism as if she didn't do this enough by merely admitting to being vegan with *that* figure. (Assuming they acknowledge me as a vegan in the first place - my not-especially-tiny figure puts me under suspicion in certain folk's eyes - that's a whole other post though!) But, the fact is, it isn't easy. And I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who's found that. Not everybody has cooking facilities at work or a canteen that serves vegan food beyond plain crisps and overpriced apples and bananas. Not everybody has vegan or even vegetarian workmates or ones who are willing to try two or three different food outlets, even with the promise of finding something eventually, for the benefit of the weird girl who won't eat normal food. Not everybody has colleagues and friends who factor veganism in when organising group meals, let alone who are willing to actually go to a vegetarian resturant. (Before going any further, the people I work with *are* usually pretty good about stuff like this, but there are often limits to what is possible when accommodating a wide range of expectations.)

There are ways around the inconvenience angle. Most of the food posts on this blog have reflected/will reflect this. I am not going to deny, though, that it involves a change of routine, some level of thought for the first few weeks (in my case, the first few weeks of each university term) beyond merely choosing a different option in the canteen. (If your work canteen has a vegan option, lolz d00d ur lucky. I want to work where you do. Unless of course I hate the sound of your job...) It may need to be done gradually, dropping a few things at a time until you realise that you can in fact live perfectly happily without *any* of this stuff. You are very likely to eventually just stop thinking of animal material as food, but it won't be instant. The habit of a lifetime is hard to break, and (this is one thing where i agree with the Skinny Bitch authors, crack out the bunting folks) cheese contains addictive substances.

But, believe me, it does get to be less difficult over time. Your mileage may vary with what 'time' actually means. So, hmm, I suppose I should try to quantify how exactly to make it easier? Ok, well, in no particular order:

• Don't freak out if you can't go the whole way from the start. It might help to set an official starting-point in the future, and work towards veganism gradually until then. (Tip: it's fine to say 'I'm going to be vegan after I've moved into the new house/finished the stuff in the fridge/come off the medication/overcome whatever your main stumbling-block is, but don't expect anyone (yourself included) to take you seriously if you play the unrepentant carnivore until that point.)
• Don't be demoralised by other people's pronouncements that being vegan is easy. They are either in a very lucky situation (don't like non-vegan food on taste grounds, have easier access than you to decent vegan food, have more supportive friends/family, etc) or have been vegan for so long that it seems easy to them. As I said, it gets a whole lot easier with practice.
• Don't give up on the whole thing because you mess up a couple of times. You won't be struck down if you forget to check for whey powder until you've eaten half the packet of crisps. But it doesn't mean you might as well go back to your old eating habits! A new vegan who makes a few mistakes is still on track to do a whole lot more good than someone who doesn't even try. Just remember to check the label next time, huh?
• Make sure you are doing this for reasons you believe in. That's the only way to truly commit to something. It is those reasons which you will call up in your mind as a counterbalance for your desire for pizza or whatever. They will also form the basis of the arguments you use if/when people give you grief.
  
• Approach going vegan with a positive frame of mind. If you see yourself as a martyr it won't work.
  
• Learn to cook. It doesn't have to involve anything complicated (if it does, make enough for leftovers or freezing - three days' worth of food is worth a whole lot more faff than one evening's dinner) but it is worth developing a rota of staple meals that you can make quickly. Something which is quite restricted for vegans is access to convenience foods as the term is traditionally understood. (Are supermarket readymeals that much of a sacrifice??) If you already cook, you just need to use a bit of imagination to replace the non-vegan stuff. Get a decent cookbook (eg Vegan with a Vengance) or look on teh interwebz.
  

Those are all the tips I can think of for now, and I think they are the most vital ones for vegans having teething problems. (absolutely no pun intended there, yeahright) Think of it this way: you don't give up on everything that takes some practice, do you? No? Well, this is the same.