A Full Belly

"make no mistake: we are animals"

Michael Ruhlman's currently guest-blogging over at Megnut and wrote an excellent post the other day about how all the talk of ethical eating is, well, annoying: It's a Wonderful Life. Anthony Bourdain turned up as requested and left a comment, of which the following is an excerpt:

Extraordinary that in a time when we're force feeding PEOPLE at Gitmo--and when hundreds of thousands of PEOPLE are starving to death in the Sudan and elsewhere, that there is no more burning issue on the minds of educated, well-fed, financially comfortable citizens than whether or not a clam feels pain--or whether a duck can handle what any respectable adult film ingenue considers routine.

On a related tangent, one of my many, many problems with PETA is that they consistently choose to fight the smallest of fights to get attention for themselves, instead of fighting the big battles that would actually advance the, you know, ethical treatment of animals. Augieland, on why the fuss over live lobsters is ridiculous:

At best, PETA and Whole Foods have advanced the idea that lobsters have a central nervous system, equating them with earthworms. Pigs have such developed brains that the common industry practice of weaning them a few weeks early in order to get a head start on their hormone-laden fattening diet leaves them so distraught they develop an oral fixation that causes them to incessantly suck on each other's tails until they fall off, leaving sores that get infected. The pork industries solution? Cut the tails off (tail docking) at the time of the early weaning. But pay no attention to these grievous violations of ethical animal treatment, you can rest easy because PETA has convinced Whole Foods to stop selling the live version of what are essentially bugs.

Vegan Lunch Box

Vegan Lunch Box is the blog of a stay at home mom who makes her kid vegan "laptop lunches"
every day filled with everything from stromboli to dim sum to sushi. Lunch should always be this much fun. [thanks for tip, Jenny!]

no more vegan marshmallows?

Vegan marshmallow scandal! AFB's favorite marathon-running vegan librarians Kate and Jenny couldn't find their beloved vegan marshmallows at Whole Foods or Teany and eventually discovered that the marshmallows weren't vegan after all—it turns out that Emes Kosher-Jel, the popular alternative to gelatin used to make them, contains protein.

faking it

One of my most traumatic eating moments ever came a few years ago, when a vegan friend lured me to a vegetarian restaurant in Chinatown by saying something like, "You have to try the fake kung pao chicken! It tastes just like the real thing!"

I'll spare you the unpleasant details, but let's just say that since then I've become exceedingly wary of meat substitutes—tofu is great but when it's tofu, not dressed up trying to be something else. (And don't even get me started on the abomination that is seitan, may it never cross my lips or the lips of anyone I care about again.)

Anyway, Slate's Dahlia Lithwick did a fake meat roundup way back in 2001, subjecting herself and her friends to all sorts of pork, beef and turkey substitutes. Some products did well (Lightlife's Steak Style Strips had testers saying things like "close to steak," "beefy," "wow I'm converted."), while others tested the limits of friendship (Worthington's Savory Slices was the worst of show, with comments like "tastes like eating suede," "something removed in a doctor show," "oh, my God," and "you've got to be kidding."). Lithwick closes her piece with this:

"One hates to be a reactionary, but sometimes absolute relativism is an evil unto itself. Plunging neck deep into the world of meat alternatives made it clear that the good Lord may have put cows and soybeans on different ends of his great classification system for good reason. Pigs rarely aspire to be asparagus. And wheat should not strive to be meat. With enough sauces, and marinades, and spices, a filament of gluten can pass for a strip of steak. But no one should be forced to eat three full courses of products that are all, as one of the artists among us observed, shaped either in circles or blobs. And no one should have to choke down stringy, tasteless, or chewy morsels just because they are coated in a sauce that might once have coated something at McDonald's. Call me a food fundamentalist, but the land in which meat and tofus collide is a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there."

It's been four years since she wrote that, people. Four years! Has food science advanced any since then? Are there any new fake meat products that won't make dedicated carnivores like myself ill? Tell me about them, or share your tales of bad fake meat experiences in the comments.

black pudding is not a pudding

Silly me, never having had one I've always assumed from the name that a black pudding was, you know, a pudding, but it turns out it's actually a sausage: "Black pudding, as made in the UK, is a blend of onions, pork fat, oatmeal, flavourings - and blood (usually from a pig). As long as animals have been slaughtered to provide food, blood sausages like black pudding have been in existence. Sources indicate that the corpulent sausage had its origins in ancient Greece, and Homer's Odyssey makes poetic reference to the roasting of a stomach stuffed with blood and fat."

Those of you who love black pudding but no longer eat meat can rejoice, as The Real Lancashire Black Pudding Co's recently developed V Pud, vegetarian black pudding that supposedly tastes close to the real thing. Not that there are many Filipino vegetarians, but I wonder if anyone can make a vegetarian dinuguan...

[via eachman.com]

vegans on lj

The Vegan Inventive Chef Community on LiveJournal. Home of the weekly Vegan Inventive Chef Cook Off, lots and lots of recipes for those of you who are veganally-inclined. (Wow, that sounds kinda dirty.)

Vegan restaurant guides

Friends of Animals has compiled vegan restaurant guides for major cities including New York and San Francisco.

clinton rumors

Bubba Forsakes All BBQ? Salon's Rebecca Traister on rumors Bill Clinton is going vegetarian: "Bill Clinton not eating meat? A man whose very name brings to mind the word "pork"? Who has never met a nitrate he didn't like? Whose all-night bull-and-barbeque sessions were sent up hilariously in "Primary Colors"? The man who once, after having consumed a 3,300-calorie lunch with German Chancellor Helmut Kohl in 1994 that included meats, cheeses, seafood and veal-stuffed ravioli, ordered a piece of chocolate cake to go?" (If I ever thought about giving meat up, people would be writing much the same about me.)

sloane crosley, vegetarian

Where's the Beef? Sloane Crosley discusses her journey from vegan to vegetarian to lazy vegetarian. "What can I say? New York is sushi city, and sushi is the one thing I've consistently craved over the past decade (besides the secret craving of every vegetarian: bacon). My education about the moral and environmental impact of eating meat is thorough, but my response to all the statistics has developed a major fissure called "sashimi.""

SF Best vegan places

SF Ask Metafilter: Best vegan and vegetarian restaurants in San Francisco?