Vegetarianism

I'm not touching this topic with a ten foot pole, Ive seen how ugly it can get...

although arguably it's less wrong than eating cows and stuff, because they get to live natural lives and stuff before being killed.

also, you could argue that the closer animals are to people the worse it is to eat them. So eating chimps is very very bad, other mammals not good at all, birds kind of alright, reptiles more or less OK, likewise fish, and you can eat your fill of insects and invertebrates.

But anyways.... Yeah, I've been vegetarian for 10 years. Yeah, this topic is touchy. I eat lots of morning star products. That's good for you, right? And I find that eating foreign foods, ie: indian, chinese, vietnamese, tai, etc, gives me plenty of healthy tofu-rific options.

Vegetarians are cool, and if it wasn't for all that lovely meatfish then i would def be one. although i do eat quorn mince - see above - and i really like it

Vegetarianism isn't as annoying as people who preach it.

My IP address should now be blocked from this thread as I am one of those preachy vegetarians Noodles don't like

That didn't come out right at ALL.

Oh heavens yes. :-)

Come on, let us nibble your noodle!! ahem - i do apologise!

Some of them may be. More likely they're made with seitan -- or wheat gluten -- which is firmer and "meatier" than tofu. And k-delicious. (Me = veggie for four and a half years now.)

In any case, mock meats and tofu are my saviors. In fact, last night, I just bought a whole bunch of cold sandwiches made by these guys -- Hillside Quickies, an African American vegan kitchen/bakery based in Tacoma. It's folks like these, among many, that prove that even vegan meals can be the the opposite of bland.

Me three not having car. Mind you it is a bother for buying heavy things, or going on a holiday (ie, I pretty much can't do either all that easily or cheaply), but I manage somehow.

Trains can never mend
the carless whisper
of a good ... wait this isnt working at all.

No, I'm trying too, and really struggling. I even tried to make jokes about a pedestrian being hit by a car(Wham!) but all was laboured, contrived, forced.

I'm never gonna drive again
Guilty streets that I've been given

Hahah bless you, my custosian brethren.

The worst part about not having a car is not being able to visit friends two or three hours away for less than $65. It's prohibitive.

And thanks for the salad idea, Trayce, sounds good! Similar to one I make with white beans.

Veganism is simply the practice of the belief that an animal should not be treated as a means to an end, but rather than as something with inherent value. Since veganism, unlike vegetarianism, describes an ethical principle rather than a dietary practice per se, it's perfectly acceptable (as someone pointed out upthread) for a vegan to eat eggs, dairy, or even meat in situations where doing so would not contribute to furthering the existence of the factory farm system or anything similar. However, I doubt ultra-humane free-range egg-farming techniques are really a feasible universal solution to the cruelty problem -- factory farming exists partially because it's one of the only ways that large urban populations can be supplied with animal products, and free-range farming is too land- and labor- intensive to ever be anything more than a specialty market. Vegans of a Kantian bent might avoid eggs for that reason alone. Either way, I've rarely been approached by someone asking me if I wanted to eat some eggs they were about to throw out.

i know some kantian vegans, but i'm more of a hegelian vegan myself. = fuck eggs.

i've been sticking to a mostly vegetarian diet since i got to the US, mostly by default because my bf is vegan, but now i find when i do occasionally have meat (probably less than 10 times in the last 7 months) i'm more and more repulsed by it.

this was not helped by driving through coalinga on our way to LA - god, the STENCH uugghh

coalinga... home to a large beef packing plant, a prison (in which outbreaks of a fungal infection called "valley fever" is common), and a mental hospital for sexually violent predators. fun times!

*are common.

lack of meat has killed your brain cells

the treatment of animals in the modern world is a disgrace. there are other disgraces too but this is a big one. i think i agree with shelley that our indifference to the suffering of animals is connected to our indifference to the suffering of other people, is all part of the same ecosystem of cruelty. i get pleasure from meat eating, sure, but what kind of justification is that for anything? the fact that i haven't really made any concrete steps yet toward veganism makes me scared of myself and my selfish laziness.

anyone here successfully convert to veganism? how did you do it? i think eating more ethically will be an important step in my larger, lifelong quest to live more "consciously". haven't had much success with other components of this quest though so far.

iirc, one simply makes the decision and then figures out the implementation as they go along. The number of things one cannot ingest as a vegan are decidedly more numerous than the proscribed list of a vegetarian, but it all boils down to not putting certain things in your mouth, which is merely an extension of a skill we learned as toddlers.

obvious but worth stating: if you go vegan don't forget b-12 supplementation.

get a good rice cooker if you can afford it.

early on maybe err on the side of giving yourself some leeway in terms of how healthy you eat until you get used to the lack of animal protein/fat. this can be a shock to the system if you ate a lot of it previously.

Do you have free access to a kitchen and adequate refrigerator space you can monopolize? Do you buy your own groceries? If so, then you have the correct tools to begin. If you have no particular skill at cooking, then get a good basic cookbook and study it closely. It can be a library book, if you prefer not to lay out cash for it. To be Captain Obvious once more, you must crawl before you can walk and walk before you can run.

Lentils are a good place to start. They are very friendly and quite forgiving. Bread is more of a graduate-level course.

basically cooking for yourself is essential. it's tough to eat out often and stay vegan (but mb not so much in your area? yr'e in nyc or thereabouts right?).

lotsa grains (rice, quinoa, buckwheat, barley, lentils as aimless said &c &c), greens, legumes, root veggies, &c. there are so many varieties of veggies i don't see how anyone would want to go back to eating meat, but people do.

replace butter w/ veggie oils (olive, grapeseed, hemp &c &c); replace meats w/ tofu, tempeh, seitan.

i personally wouldn't even bother w/ vegan cheeses as i can't stand them, plus an aspect of veganism for me is avoidance of overly-processed foods so it doesn't make sense (to me) to eat something that's just as processed as pizza-flavored pringles.

cuisines that i find lend themselves to being veganized: japanese, middle eastern, central american, south asian and southeast asian. maybe find vegan cookbooks you like or just tweak recipes from non-specifically vegan cbs.

also keep up your supplements but make sure to do some research about the sourcing for some of them (for instance, i recently found out that it's difficult to obtain b-12 from non-animal sources o_O).

these are all super posts. if you're srsly vegan there are little things to beware of like the fact that powdered sugar is filtered through bone char and hence not vegan unless you find a specifically vegan brand. forgetting other surprising examples i've come across since niece started all-out vegan-ing a few years ago but there are quite a few

i've been vegan for 7 years, so i'm kind of the stage where i don't even think about what i eat all that much now. you develop a bunch of recipes that you cook and you figure out what are the best restaurants to go to for you and you suss out how to deal with situations outside of those everyday things and it's pretty straight forward. i can't say that i've spent too much time thinking about how to get the optimal diet or anything, i've just gone with instinct and tried to keep things varied as much as i can be bothered. just run my sixth marathon and haven't dropped dead or anything so things seem to be working for me. have to say though that i am hugely lucky to have a supportive family and live in a pretty vegan friendly city, but there are a whole bunch of folks out there who don't have those things and get along just fine anyhow. it all boils down to remembering why you do it and developing good everyday habits around that and once you reach that point it just becomes an easy thing imo.

sorry if that sounds smug btw but i'm a little drunk tbh

you get drunk faster as a vegan.

i live with a vegan and cook almost exclusively vegan at home. but i don't think it has to be all or nothing. i know it's really important to many vegans to avoid any minute non-vegan thing, but i think it's the effort that counts, and that cutting out meat and dairy out as a main ingredient in your diet is pretty huge and beneficial - eating the occasional item with egg or gelatin or cheese or powdered sugar is not gonna make you a bad person for 'failing' as a vegan. even ethically-sourced animal products is a great step. i don't think it does anyone or any animal any favours to be super hardline about being vegan.

there are tons and tons of vegan recipe blogs out there, and even as a subpar cook i don't have any trouble coming up with things to make. many animal-based recipes can be easily converted to vegan ones if you do a bit of research.

yeah, this is an important point, i think. about 20 years ago i became an ovo lacto vegetarian, and since our daughter was born in 2001 i moved to being a pescatarian. but i don't carefully check restaurant items, beyond asking whether, for instance, a given soup is made with chicken or beef stock.

not sure if any of its made me healthier. just something i wanted to do, and now i don't want to go back.

my god, someone from my running circle made a super awesome vegan cheesecake yesterday and i found myself wondering why the heck i don't do any baking or anything, but the thing is, you don't really need to cook fancy stuff to get by if yr not that way inclined or just plain lazy like me. i know just1n3 posts amazing sounding recipes though!

i buy groceries vegan and eat out vegetarian, which i find really manageable. the only difficulty i had at first was that i felt like i wasn't getting enough protein, which is something i've heard from a lot of other guys. i don't have this problem at all anymore mostly thanks to two products: tofurky brand sausages, which have 30 grams of protein (soy and gluten) and actually taste like real sausage, and nutribiotic brand rice protein, which i use in shakes with soy milk and in my oatmeal. i get over 100 grams of protein a day easy, and i feel satiated.

i used to love meat, and if you told me in the past that i could go without it i wouldn't have believed you. but i honestly don't even crave it anymore--maybe if i'm walking by a food truck with fried chicken or something, but that's it. i feel good and look forward to what i eat.

a serious upside also is that it's cheaper--i can shop at whole foods and don't have to think twice about whether i can afford it, which was definitely not true before!

you don't find eliminating egg and dairy and, say, fish, creates a very limited diet that is hard to maintain?

i can dress up salads a lot, and i can go for weeks eating, say, morningside farm's faux-chicken nuggets, but i'm not sure i could sustain it for months or years.

you get so used to it - i don't even think twice about cooking vegan, which is def not something i could ever have conceived of 5 years ago. i really don't find it limiting and i don't think i use that many fancy or processed ingredients to replace meat/dairy. i mean, i will use tofutti sour cream on nachos bc it tastes like the real thing, but there are simple recipes out there for homemade vegan sourcream, i just can't be bothered and don't care that it's processed.

nickb, this baked vegan cheesecake is SO GOOD: http://sundaymorningbananapancakes.yummly.com/2011/11/turtle-cheesecake.html

i want to try it as a ginger version - make the base out of those little ginger snap cookies from trader joe's, same filling as the original, and then a caramel sauce and walnuts on top.

actually, i never really cooked until i started cooking vegan - it made me become a better cook. it forces you to discover new veggies, to use different lentils and grains, to research 'weird' ingredients; real food daily has a recipe for pate that tastes like the real thing, made of lentils and walnuts and a few other basic things, but also ume plum paste, which i didn't know existed.

also, bc i'm not vegan, i feel fairly confident when i say something tastes like the 'real thing', as opposed to some vegan recipe bloggers who haven't eaten animals in 10+ years.

i think of veganism as kind of the oulipo of the food world - having to work within the parameters of veganism has made me much more creative than cooking omnivore ever did.

that's a great analogy, and i personally hope that that having dietary restrictions would make me a more creative cook/eater. today i ate a tuna sandwich, fries, and appetizer portion of fried calamari, and a green smoothie for breakfast to prevent me from getting rickets and that's it. oh yeah and three cups of coffee, a manhattan, and three beers. i want to sort this shit out and eat in a way that shows that i actually care about both my body and the earth, which i do (nominally).

thanks for all of the encouraging, helpful comments btw. i love ilx. i'm definitely going to start working toward this in earnest starting this week.

i live with a vegan and cook almost exclusively vegan at home. but i don't think it has to be all or nothing. i know it's really important to many vegans to avoid any minute non-vegan thing, but i think it's the effort that counts, and that cutting out meat and dairy out as a main ingredient in your diet is pretty huge and beneficial - eating the occasional item with egg or gelatin or cheese or powdered sugar is not gonna make you a bad person for 'failing' as a vegan. even ethically-sourced animal products is a great step. i don't think it does anyone or any animal any favours to be super hardline about being vegan.

^ like this attitude

we've gone to no-meat meals twice a week or so, haven't had to repeat a recipe yet. if i was to give anything up for my health it'd be sugar but going veg doesnt seem to be the impossibility i'd have thought it a couple of years back

For me baby steps has been the way to go. I couldn't have contemplated the switch directly from eating meat regularly to veganism, but after a couple of years of semi-pescetarianism, I do find that I now often go several days without eating any meat without a thought.

I went dietary vegan cold-turkey in late 1999 trying to get my life sorted: alcoholic, regular-smoking, 80 lbs over weight, but final straw was my hair started greying post-financial crisis. All the evidence at the time pointed to a minimal animal product diet having the lowest health risks, and no internet denizen can spend much time looking for vegan recipes without encountering the reality of the modern factory farm. Dropping animal products entirely is probably a marginal gain healthwise (compared to minimal animal products), but a huge weight lifted from one's conscience.

Today I drink once a week, replaced > 90% of my smoking risk with snus, lost 50 lbs, and can look at my dinner plate without guilt. I'm still salt & pepper at the temples.

If you care about the health issues, read The China Study, follow Dr. Greger, or if you're an unfortunate 'sperg like myself start there's a vast peer reviewed literature supporting a whole food plant based diet.

I am not veg vegan, but a couple of cookbooks have helped me cut a lot of meat out of my diet because the food is so damned good. Yotam Ottolenghi's plenty and various iterations of the tassajara cookbooks. Neither is 100% vegan but fantastic recipes that have made me much more creative without meat.

i live with a vegan and cook almost exclusively vegan at home. but i don't think it has to be all or nothing. i know it's really important to many vegans to avoid any minute non-vegan thing, but i think it's the effort that counts, and that cutting out meat and dairy out as a main ingredient in your diet is pretty huge and beneficial - eating the occasional item with egg or gelatin or cheese or powdered sugar is not gonna make you a bad person for 'failing' as a vegan. even ethically-sourced animal products is a great step. i don't think it does anyone or any animal any favours to be super hardline about being vegan.

^^^great attitude and really good advice. lots of good advice elsewhere in this thread.

imho getting particular about powdered sugar and isinglass-filtered beer and all that noise will make you more frustrated eating vegan. use it as a general guiding philosophy for eating and living. it should simplify your life and not make it more complicated. it's about living gently and compassionately, on animals, others, and yourself. there is no point in being hardline about it. i was hardline for a year or two early on and i alienated others and myself.

i was vegan for about 10 or 11 years, and have now been vegetarian for the past two years. you pretty much only need one to three really good cookbooks. simply, plant-based and vegetable-focused cookbooks that draw on a broad variety of foods. my tome is "vegetarian cooking for everyone" by deborah madison (here is a newly updated version: http://deborahmadison.com/vegetarian-cooking-for-everyone/. basically any type of vegetable is covered in that book and the cooking is simple, accessible, and delicious. it's comprehensive but not intimidating. it's really ideal for any level of cook, beginner or advanced.

i avoid super-fancy or fussy vegan cookbooks as well as "vegan diner and junk-food" cookbooks, not my thing (though occasionally i do enjoy vegan diner food, especially in the winter).

i was happy as a vegan but i do find that i'm a little more satisfied being vegetarian. organic eggs sourced by small farms in the area have really been a wonderful thing for me. i have eggs almost every morning, and i feel like i appreciate them a lot more after 11 years of being vegan. i do eat some dairy, mostly whole-milk plain yogurt but that's about it. i find that i am happier being vegetarian, there is some greater flexibility especially when dining out with non-vegan friends. that said, except for eggs and yogurt, i still cook about 95% vegan. my wife is vegan too so that is a motivating factor.

While we're recommending cookbooks, I like "Vegetarian Classics" by Jeanne Lemlin. Several of her recipes have become standbys for me:

http://www.amazon.com/Vegetarian-Classics-Essential-Recipes-Course/dp/0060194820/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1397486034&sr=1-2&keywords=vegetarian+classics

Mark Bittman's "How To Cook Everything Vegetarian" also has a lot of great recipes and is a useful reference work:

http://www.amazon.com/How-Cook-Everything-Vegetarian-Meatless/dp/0764524836/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1397486366&sr=1-1&keywords=mark+bittman+how+to+cook+everything+vegetarian

The vegetarian sausage was invented by Konrad Adenauer

2 months now and it feels so good

That's awesome. I was vegetarian for 20 years before finally deciding to go the distance and become vegan the last 5 - a real game-changer that transition was for feeling free & clear. My only cheat were (appropriately) cheeto's for like a year

The transition to a meat-free diet was, for me, much easier (and healthier!) the most recent time I tried (5 years ago) compared to the first time I tried (20 years ago, jeeeezes), especially since there are a lot of great vegetarian/vegan food bloggers now to guide you (the flipside is that there are also a lot of bad food bloggers too).

Well I broke ranks over the weekend with a “28 day aged burger”

No worries! We had a company potluck and one of my coworkers brought in a lasagna made with ground bison, which I had, because how often am I going to get to try bison meat?

It's a pretty common offering at burger places in the NY area.

I switched to vegetarian in August and haven't regretted it for a minute. I don't eat dairy but have been eating fish, so a weird hybrid of vegan/veggie, I guess. I've also largely cut out bread and damn do I feel better - much less bloated after meals and, uh, some extraordinary visits to the toilet.

My current approach seems to be that I never eat meat, except sometimes when it 1) was prepared by someone's immigrant mother/grandmother, or 2) comes on a pizza, and it's the only available pizza.

I LOVE JERKY!