The Vegan Experience

[minoanmiss]

Kenji Alt Lopez's article about Year 5
http://www.seriouseats.com/2016/03/the-vegan-experience-year-five.html

Intriguing. I could never be vegan (am not interested in being
lectured about it) but of course I want to eat more nutritious, delicious
vegetables and rather less meat and other animal products. Also, foodways
always intrigue me -- building flavor and maximizing texture in vegetable
based recipes involves an overlapping but not identical set of techniques
to those used on recipes built around dairy, eggs, and meat.

The discussion is interesting, especially the part where he and others
answer the critics who call him a hypocrite because he's not a pure vegan.
As someone who has struggled with 1) people's judgemental attitudes
around food and 2) "letting the best be the enemy of the good", I found
the assertion that reflection and gradual transformation can be good
instead of being bad for their lack of purity. "But remember: just because
you can't address all problems doesn't mean you shouldn't address the ones
you can." is an excellent philosophy and the very antithesis of the
all-or-nothing, compromise-is-bad Protestant Christian philosophy that I
grew up with and which pervades American culture.

Like many people I have bad-experience-induced associations between
veganism and preachiness, judgementalism, etc. Being told as a fat
teenager that I was personally destroying the world by existing made an
impression; so did reading about meatless ways to flavor vegetables and
seeing someone obnoxiously put in "HOW ABOUT SOME BACON YOU LILY LIVERED
TREE HUGGER?". Ugh, people are so often so judgemental. But Mr.
Alt-Lopez's writings about Vegan cooking on Serious Eats look to be a good
resource from a reliably knowlwedgeable source without judgement attached.
Here's hoping.

Comments

[baranduin]

especially the part where he and others
answer the critics who call him a hypocrite because he's not a pure vegan.

I always figure when someone uses the argument of "if you can't do it 100%, then it's useless" they automatically fail and have no credibility. Actually it's just a knee-jerk defensive move turned aggressive. Grrrr.

[sabotabby]

That was a good read.

I've been vegan a year now. I know it's going to go to shit when I'm in the Ukraine, because they haven't even heard of the concept of vegetarianism there, but, as you say, the perfect is the enemy of the good. I mean, most if not all of the vegans I know agree that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, food included, and the only thing one can do as an individual is to be as ethical as you can under your particular circumstances.

I wish his recipes were actual recipes; those look delicious. Though probably too fancy for me—I'm a "dump a bunch of stuff in the stuff and add assloads of spice" person.

[surrealestate]

I don't know how long you are going to be in Ukraine, but fwiw, I was there for a couple of weeks ~ten years ago and was able to stay vegan, including at some excellent restaurants.

[sabotabby]

Oooh, that gives me hope! I'm going for a few weeks.

[corylea]

Re: Preachiness -- I've been a vegetarian since I was 24, which is rather a long time. I talk about it whenever anyone asks me to; aside from that, I just say, "I'm a vegetarian for ethical reasons."

My husband is NOT a vegetarian, and we went to a wedding where I was served a vegetarian meal, and he was served the standard meal, which turned out to be half a chicken and four string beans. He looked at the huge hunk of chicken sitting on his plate and thought, "What the heck do I do with THIS?"

And then he turned to me and confessed (in a low voice, so as not to bother anyone else) that a huge plate of meat with essentially no other food no longer looked like a meal to him, after living with me for (at that time) five years. He said, "If you'd TRIED to make me a vegetarian or PREACHED at me about being a vegetarian, I'd have resisted. But no, you had to just quietly stick to your principles in spite of how hard it was a lot of the time, and now I get a plateful of meat and don't WANT it."

Not only is preaching disrespectful, but it also turns out to be less effective than a quiet good example. :-)

(Yes, Spock is a vegetarian, but no, that's not why I am. :-D)

[gingicat]

The MEAT lightly garnished with veg is pretty standard in plated banquets and, unfortunately, dinners in some seriously fancy restaurants.

[eustaciavye77]

Interesting thoughts. I recently started eating a lot of tofu myself. I discovered that for some stuff I like it way better than chicken. I doubt I'll ever be vegan or even vegetarian but from an environmental perspective swapping a few meals a week makes a huge difference.

related - have you had the tofu banh mi at All Star Sandwich Bar? OMG.