Vegan food is, quite simply, an indulgence. When you indulge, you give yourself permission to enjoy the very best. Vegan eating is a truly indulgent way of life, as vegans regularly partake of the very best foods—the most nutritious, appealing, and tasty—that nature has to offer. As you’ll find when you explore the recipes in this book, vegan food is enticing and exciting. A well-crafted vegan plate offers a festival of flavors, textures, and colors that makes every meal an aesthetic celebration.
You may be surprised to read about indulgence in a vegan cookbook. You may even think of a vegan diet as Spartan or odd. Indeed, vegan diets are still uncommon in many circles. But vegan/vegetarian eating is no longer on the cultural fringe. Today we have more information on the vital link between diet and health. Our shrinking world invites us to rub elbows with more cultures and experience their cuisines. Our concern about the condition of our environment grows and our frantic lifestyles send us in search of simplicity. Today, eating a vegan diet makes more and more sense for those who seek to make personal choices that have a positive impact on their own lives and on the world at large. Good health and feeling good about our choices enable us to be more effective in our relationships and our work. When we treat ourselves to a healthy and thoughtful lifestyle, we have the energy to tackle tasks large and small with renewed vigor. Sometimes a little indulgence goes a long, long way.
For those readers for whom vegan eating is a new idea, this book will provide a variety of reasons for giving it a try. For all readers, including experienced vegetarians and vegans, we offer exciting recipes to whet your appetite for food and life even further. The bottom line is that vegan eating is about living well—in health, harmony, and joy.
What Is a Vegan Anyway?
Simply stated, vegans (pronounced VEE-guns) are vegetarians who do not eat any food that comes from animals. Obviously, that means they don’t eat beef, chicken, pork, or fish. It also means that dairy products, eggs, and even honey aren’t on the menu.
What Do Vegans Eat?
Years of eating meals that shine the spotlight on meat and relegate vegetables and grains to supporting roles have limited our awareness of their nutritional talent. On the vegan table, barley, bulgur, and millet share billing with the more familiar rice and wheat. The healthy vegan demands full lusty performances from all grains.
The palette of produce offered is varied as well. Green beans, corn, peas, and white potatoes—vegetables of our childhood table—now share billing with a host of other options, creatively and enticingly prepared.
Legions of legumes—lentils, beans, and peas—grace many a vegan plate. And soy, so frequently touted in medical circles and the media today, is, in its varied forms, an increasingly important part of vegan cuisine.
Though you may not have thought about it, you’ve probably been eating vegan foods all your life. Perhaps they never took center stage, but they have been there in the background. If your family never ate green beans without fatback, potatoes without sour cream, or salads without mayonnaise, you are in for a treat when you try vegan renditions of these foods. Even if you’ve been a vegetarian for years, chances are you have relied on cheese, butter, and eggs to a large extent, often allowing them to overpower the other elements in the meal. The recipes in this book are designed to showcase the essence of the vegetables, grains, beans, and fruits that go into them. You will be amazed at the results that can be obtained with just these ingredients.
So, while vegans may be defined in conversation by what they don’t eat, healthy vegan living is all about what they do eat. Vegan eating isn’t about deprivation—it’s about fulfillment.
Why Vegan?
Vegans choose to eat as they do for a variety of reasons. Good health is a big reason. Ethical, ecological, and spiritual reasons come into play as well. This chapter offers information and reflections on these issues, along with basic nutritional guidelines, shopping tips, and strategies for changing eating patterns. But the main feature here is the recipes. This is, after all, a cookbook! We’re dishing up food that is delicious, healthy, and inviting, for anyone who is hungry for really great food.
Nutritional Issues
You don’t need this book to tell you about the importance of eating healthy foods. Powerful voices such as the American Cancer Society and the American Heart Association have weighed in on the link between nutrition and health. The shift toward highly refined foods, with little fiber and more fat, combined with our more sedentary lives, has taken a toll on our health. As our diets and lifestyles have changed dramatically over the last one hundred years, heart disease and cancer become closer to all our lives.
Much of the increase in fat consumption comes with hefty support from the meat and dairy industries. In the typical diet of developed nations, slightly more than a quarter of the fat comes from meat, a quarter from butter and margarine, a quarter from milk and cooking fats, and a quarter from cheese and the fats in sweets. Cheese consumption in the United States has risen 300 percent since 1970, making cheese the leading source of saturated fat in the American diet. (For more information on saturated fats, see page 25.)
The foods we eat have often been processed in a way that reduces fiber and vitamin content. A potato is rich in complex carbohydrates, fiber, folate, and vitamin C before its transformation into French fries. Potatoes destined for the fryer are often aged in warehouses so the complex carbohydrates become simple sugars. This helps the potatoes become brown and crunchy. The peeling, washing, frying, and salting dramatically change the nutritional profile. One serving of French fries, about 10 to 15 (who really eats only 10 to 15?), has almost 4 times the calories of a medium baked potato but only one-quarter of the vitamin C and fiber, one-half of the iron and carbohydrates, and 180 times as much fat and 25 times as much sodium.
Processing takes away and, unfortunately, it adds as well. A wide variety of chemicals not naturally found in our food—pesticides, preservatives, artificial flavor, and color additives—are added regularly for preservation and presentation. And when we eat “futher up the food chain” to include animal products in our diets, we consume not only the chemicals used to process and preserve these foods, but also the chemicals fed to the animals, such as growth hormones, antibiotics, and the pesticides sprayed on the plants they eat, which all concentrate in animal fat. We also add items that we should be limiting, such as salt, fat (especially hydrogenated fat), and sugar.
Choosing a vegan diet won’t magically shield you from nutritional and chemical pitfalls. But changing your eating pattern to exclude animal products and embrace whole foods can go a long way toward preserving your health. When you say goodbye to animal products and highly processed foods, you remove all of the cholesterol and much of the saturated fat from your diet. Your total fat intake will fall from the 36 to 40 percent consumed by the typical American omnivore to about 30 percent or less. Most of the fats you do consume (and yes, fat is necessary for overall health) will actually be good for you!
The fiber content of your diet will increase as well, providing defense against cancer and heart disease. Increased fiber intake helps regulate blood sugar levels (a particular benefit if you are hypoglycemic or diabetic). Fiber consumption also helps you maintain a healthy weight: because fiber makes us feel full, we actually may take in fewer calories.
A wide range of vitamins and minerals, including cancer-fighting antioxidants, will find their way into your body, and not just in pill form. The traces of hormones, steroids, antibiotics, and other chemicals fed to animals to speed up maturation or increase body size will disappear from your diet. If you choose primarily organic foods, your intake of trace amounts of pesticides and agri-chemicals will decrease as well.
In short, if you decide to change to a vegan diet, if you do away with animal products and choose varied and less-processed foods, you’ll do your health a favor.
Ethical Considerations
Though many vegans choose their diet on the simple premise that killing is wrong, the ethical issues that surround vegan eating are really quite complex. Concern for the ethical treatment of animals starts well before the slaughterhouse. Inhumane practices designed to meet the massive demand for all animal products are rampant throughout agribusiness—mistreatment of which the average consumer is often quite unaware.
The Saga of the Dairy Cow
Think your life is stressful? Forty years ago the life expectancy of a dairy cow was twenty years. Today, Bossie can expect to live only four years—four very hard years. Modern industry practices keep the cows in a nearly continual state of pregnancy through artificial insemination. Rarely allowed to roam free, Bossie and her bovine companions are fed synthetic hormones to increase milk production by as much as 40 percent, which necessitates frequent milking. She is also subjected to a steady diet of antibiotics and animal refuse (the latter linked to mad cow disease). These “advancements” in dairy cow productivity have created a glut of milk, which, in turn, has generated increased marketing campaigns to create demand.
Bossie’s calves are removed from her side very shortly after birth and shipped to veal factories. There they are chained in a stall, fed a diet without roughage or iron to ensure nicely textured and colored meat, and injected with hormones and antibiotics to support survival until the calf is large enough to slaughter. The old standard for veal was a calf, six months or younger, fed exclusively mother’s milk. The modern farm industry is able to raise a calf almost to maturity, resulting in higher profits from a larger animal whose flesh is like that of a newborn.
Productivity at Great Cost
Cows aren’t the only ones to suffer. Chickens are often caged so tightly that they can hardly stretch their wings. Packed in tightly with others, they tend to peck and claw in desperation—so producers cut off their beaks. Extreme lack of exercise causes brittle bones that break with the slightest stress. Wire mesh floors cause foot deformities. Starvation forces molting, which renews egg production. As a result of pressure from animal rights activists, in 2000, McDonald’s agreed to stop buying chicken from suppliers that debeak or starve, and required that each egg-laying hen have an eight-by-nine-inch cage. Recently McDonald’s and Denny’s have committed to supporting growers who use controlled atmosphere killing (CAK), which is thought to be the most humane way to harvest the birds. In this method, nitrogen or other gas replaces a normal atmosphere and the chickens are said to die with much less trauma. While this represents a step toward more reasonable treatment, the end can hardly be called compassionate or humane. Hard to believe that these guidelines represent improvements!
In the business of agriculture, animals are fed, kept, and medicated with an eye to increased production, not their well-being. And the conditions under which animals are shipped to slaughterhouses and put to death are far from humane. When we consume animal products, we lend support to these practices.
Sharing the Wealth, Maintaining Our Treasures
Raising animals for food is an inefficient use of our world’s resources. Grain is the primary source of nutrition for most of the world’s population. Of the land that is used to produce grain, about a quarter provides feed for livestock. Furthermore, acres and acres of tropical rain forests—forests vital to the health of our planet—are being destroyed daily to make room for cattle to graze. Chemical and biological waste runoff from livestock production pollutes our waterways. When you add up the costs to humanity, raising livestock for food is a losing proposition.
Spiritual Reflections
We rarely think of food as spiritual, but there is a strong spiritual aspect to eating. This is because food is, at its very essence, life giving. The fact that food is spiritually significant plays out in religions across the human spectrum. In the Roman Catholic tradition, Benedictine monks and Carmelite nuns maintain vegetarian diets in conjunction with their contemplative lives. Orthodox Christian sects require abstinence from animal products during the Lenten season, a time of prayer and penitence. Many sacred scriptures instruct their followers to avoid senseless killing. The best known connection between vegetarianism and religion is ahimsa, or the ideal of harmlessness, which is common to Buddhism, Jainism, and Hinduism.
Deciding to pursue a vegan diet can be an active choice to do what is good. In seeking to do no harm—to ourselves, to other beings, and to the earth—we draw from the spirit and feed the spirit.
The Bottom Line
There are myriad reasons to embrace a vegan diet. A vegan diet will improve your health. It is healthier for the environment. Eating only plant-based food speaks against the cruelties often perpetrated against other beings for the sake of commerce. Eating vegan is a peaceful choice, one that may feed us spiritually and improve our lot as human beings. Vegan eating is also delicious. It introduces a creative aspect to the act of eating, enriching our day-to-day existence. At the very basis of the choice of a vegan diet is respect: respect for your own life and the lives of others. Inherent in the choice is a desire to live mindful of the consequences of our daily decisions, and an acknowledgment of the connection linking humans, animals, and the earth.
All the rhetoric and arguments aside, veganism is a joyous celebration of life. A decision to live in a healthful and compassionate fashion feeds not just the body but the soul. Surround yourself with what you need to continue on this journey to health and wholeness.