Environment/planet Archives

Finding Healthy, TASTY, Vegan Food in France – Part 2 – Paris

After our decidedly underwhelming dining out experiences in Avignon and Lyon, which I documented here, we were positive that Paris had to be different. We actually spent two nights in Orleans before arriving in Paris, but we were there to see friends and so didn’t eat in town. However, I’d noticed a place called Djaam in central Orleans that did great-looking African bowls, several of which were vegan, using traditional West African grains and sauces. We’d definitely have tried this out if we’d had time; my taste buds were yearning for some actual taste by this stage in our holiday 😄

I mentioned this in my previous France post – we eat a whole-food vegan diet, as it has served us well health-wise for many years now; so we’re looking for healthy food (with the odd cheeky side of sweet potato fries of course 😋) that is tasty as all hell. There’s just no excuse for mediocre, boring healthy food any more.

We arrived in Paris and right off the bat we discovered this vegan, gluten-free and refined-sugar free chain of restaurants called Wild and the Moon. We went there our first night in Paris and I nearly cried to see their dish of the day was a hearty bean chili. This was honestly the first time in two weeks I’d eaten food that was the same standard in both ‘healthiness’ and taste to what we make at home. My partner had their ‘Jack’s bowl’ – a tasty Thai-inspired concoction. We had a second bowl of chili between us, so starved had we been of spices for the previous two weeks.

Wild and the Moon, in typical French fashion, is hard to define. They sell healthy cold drinks and snacks in fridges near the entrance and at first glance could be mistaken for one of the ubiquitous juice/chia/smoothie bars that you get pretty much everywhere these days. Only when you venture in further do you see the hot food menu, and realise it’s a gorgeous space in which to sit down, relax and enjoy your lunch or evening meal. It’s hard to glean information on their hot food on the website too, as their home page just shows detox juices and superfood snacks. A quick skim would have you thinking it was a juice bar in a yoga studio. Only right at the bottom of the drop-down does it say ‘menu at restaurants.’

They also have a range of sweet bakery items available every day. The Wild Brownie is worth coming here for alone. In fact I’d probably jump on Eurostar for it alone 🤣 Unlike most ‘healthy’ sweet treats, while the ingredients list of the brownie is holier than thou, the taste and texture are pure sinful choc-gasmic delight. I may have eaten more than I should have of these and I ain’t repentin.’

We ended up eating at WatM three times in four days. We wanted to be adventurous and try lots of different places, but after our next experience (which I’ll get to in a sec), and because we’d been so starved of taste for two weeks, we thought f**k it, let’s just eat here from now on. We ate at the Rue Charlot and the Rue St Honore branches, though there are several others. They are in, I guess, the more upmarket areas of town, which is a shame because we were all over town visiting places I used to know when I lived in Paris, and my favourite areas are decidedly NOT the more bougie parts, but I guess they think they are where their market is. You could say it is expensive, but only in the way that everywhere is expensive in Paris – I certainly didn’t find it more expensive than anywhere else.

The next night we thought we’d try a restaurant I’d heard a lot about – Le Potager du Marais – that specialised in vegan French cuisine. It was a Sunday night. We got there before it opened and there was a big queue outside waiting to be let in – which was promising in terms of what the food might be like. Many of those in the queue seemed to be North American, or tourists from elsewhere outside of France. I guess they’d heard the same good things I’d heard.

When the time came to open up, we filed in and the crowd in the queue filled the restaurant entirely – how many restaurants can boast a full house right off the bat on a Sunday night?

I picked the French onion soup as a starter and my partner had a roast potato with tapenade and pesto. For the main course I chose a cassoulet dish. When I lived in France years ago, I loved a good Toulousain cassoulet. Cassoulet is a slow-cooked dish of white beans and sausage – I was never bothered about the sausage but those scrummy melt-in-your-mouth flavoursome beans were everything. I was hoping for a vegan recreation of this. My partner chose a buckwheat mushroom crepe.

The French onion soup is a popular dish of ‘Le Potager’, and rightly so. It does taste exactly the same, even better perhaps, than I tasted in non-vegan days. The melted cheese, onion, and wine flavouring all meld together perfectly. If you’re a vegan lover of French cuisine it’s definitely worth going just for this.

However, I’d forgotten that so much is flavoured with wine in French cooking, and that I am allergic to sulphites (of which there are an abundance in wine), and when the back of my throat started itching to remind me of this pesky affliction, I had to abandon the soup. My husband’s roasted potato thing turned out to be a small baked potato – nice enough but not what he was expecting.

And the main course? To be fair to the cassoulet it was advertised as a ‘Cassoulet de Mer -Pink lentils with smoked tofu, fresh seaweed and fennel grated with hazelnuts.’ So obviously I was wrong to expect something similar to a traditional cassoulet, but this was just…taste and texture-less. Edible but boring. Why you’d use lentils (that were undetectable – they’d just turned to mush, as had the tofu) instead of lush, slow-cooked bigger white beans is unfathomable. There was a subtle seaweed and fennel flavour I guess, but it wasn’t nice enough to make me want to devour this dish as I remembered doing previously. You’ll see it doesn’t resemble cassoulet, and the potato thing you see on the side was like pureed, then compressed potato, that didn’t taste of much either.

The buckwheat crepe, again, sounded so much sexier than it tasted (‘buckwheat pancake stuffed with leek fondu, carrots and mushrooms’) but was pretty much the same as the cassoulet – OK and edible, but really not stellar. You wouldn’t bother going there for it if you had to travel more than a couple of metro stops.

All the dishes we tried ticked the (sufficiently) healthy box. But they could all (barring the French onion soup, which was excellent) have done that while being crammed full of rich and exciting taste, and they just weren’t.

Again, as with our Lyon vegan restaurant experience, it’s the sort of food we’d have been grateful for 10 years ago, but nowadays there’s just no excuse for not wowing the socks off of vegans just as you’d try to do with non-vegans.

It’s possible other dishes at the PdM might be amazing, just as the soup was, so if you’re a vegan lover of French food I’d still recommend going – definitely ordering the French onion soup, then something other than what we had.

It’s also true to say that I love very taste-full cuisines like Indian, Ethiopian and West African – I live in London and have great examples of these close to hand – so it’s likely my taste buds have grown accustomed to very strong flavours, and the subtle herby thing doesn’t really do it for me any more.

So for the rest of our stay we ate at Wild and the Moon – as well as the chili I can heartily recommend the Banh Mi and the burger – and bought snacks from Naturalia (that I mentioned in my previous France post).

Of course there are other great restaurants that we never got to – some were closed at the beginning of the week, some may have been too far to travel. Restaurants I’ve learned of since my return and VERY MUCH WISHED WE’D HAVE VISITED are Jah Jah Le Tricycle which specialises in healthy Caribbean food – particularly galling as we were on Rue des Petites Ecuries where it is based but just didn’t see it; and L’Embuscade, again Afro-Caribbean, again healthy, and again annoyingly in an area we were in but just weren’t aware of its existence. These restaurants will be top of our list on our next Paris trip.

I surmised several things on this France trip. Unsurprisingly, Paris is the best place for a vegan in France. However, it’s still fairly difficult to find that mix of stunning taste and healthiness in a vegan restaurant meal. In my experience other western capitals seem to be ahead on this and US cities even more so. On a subsequent visit to Paris, outside of Wild and the Moon, I’d probably stick to ethnic restaurants to ensure a tasty meal. The problem I noticed with the restaurants I visited that try to recreate French cuisine for vegans is that they don’t seem to know how to do it for the best. There is an overuse of mushrooms; I didn’t see many (any?) bean dishes – how easy is it to make beans taste delicious!? You could say that French cuisine doesn’t lend itself to vegan conversion in a way that could be healthy and tasty, but I think that would be a cop-out. This lagging behind is perhaps something to do with a French reluctance/stubbornness (yes, I’m stereotyping) to change traditions (I noticed the amount of people that still smoke in France, despite restrictive smoking bans), and perhaps great vegan French food will come as more and more people in the country go vegan and demand excellent versions of their traditional food.

I can’t wait to revisit. I love Paris – I lived here for a while and it still feels like home. Next trip I’m gonna be all about the Caribbean food; with trips to Wild and the Moon to ~~gorge on~~ enjoy their Wild brownie.

Finding Healthy, TASTY, Vegan Food in France

Part 1 – Avignon and Lyon

I’ll start by saying that this post is entirely biased and informed by MY taste in food.

There- it’s easy to declare conflicts of interest and biases when you have a mind to – take note governments, regulatory bodies and mainstream media 😄

We just spent two weeks in France, specifically: Avignon, Lyon, Orleans and Paris. I feel this gave me a pretty good indication of how it might be in most of France for those seeking to eat great plant-based food.

I’ll be honest, I was expecting it to be much better – I guess on a par with the UK – maybe not as great as in the US, but at least similar to how it is here. We visited Beirut, Portugal and Austria in the last few years and had pretty good experiences so I was expecting France to be at least as good as these places, if not a little better.

I eat a whole food, plant-based diet, because I believe it is the most optimal diet for health – both physical and mental. So far it has served me well. Thus, what I’m looking for is food that is not just vegan, but as far as possible made with whole foods – so brown or black rice instead of white, wholewheat (or other whole grain) products instead of those made with white flour, and as little white sugar and oil as possible. I don’t act like a fanatic on holiday however and will eat things I know to have SOME oil and sugar in them.

It goes without saying that every meal must be tasty AF too!

I found France to be very much a mixed bag when it comes to healthy, tasty vegan food.

We spent six days in Avignon, a charming city in the Vaucluse region of Provence. We didn’t eat out once, unless you count the one time we stopped at a make-your-own poke bowl place, or the time we grabbed some sorbet from a branch of Amorino.

The problem isn’t that there aren’t lots of restaurants with vegan options – to be perfectly fair, most Avignon restaurants DO have a vegan option – though it usually is just one amongst an absolute meatfest of a menu. The problem for me is that the option is usually either a burger or something yawn-inducing like butternut puree and quinoa (I have noticed that trend on London menus too). That wouldn’t be a problem if there were also specific vegan restaurants in Avignon, but there aren’t. I should mention that there are plenty of juice, smoothie and chia porridge type places – but these are not the kind of places you can sit down with your partner and have a romantic meal 😄

And forget about it anywhere in the region outside of Avignon. We visited a few other places in this region – Fontaine de Vaucluse, Gordes and Le Sentier des Ocres – all beautiful and absolutely worth a visit, but no bueno for vegan food. This time not even the burger or the quinoa/squash deal. I figured we could do what we’ve done in the past when in the depths of Mississippi or Louisiana and there has been no vegan option – just explain we are vegan and order a salad and fries – which has always been responded to with careful and creatively presented salads. Whack a bit of Cajun spice on the fries and boom, you got a tasty meal – something healthy and something cheeky – balance!

This didn’t wash here however. Every salad was at the very least covered in egg or cheese, and the wait staff I spoke to didn’t know what vegan was. Unfortunately the first excursion we were woefully unprepared and I hadn’t even packed my bag with the fruit, dried apricots and crackers that I’d normally carry, so we ended up buying some ‘artisanal’ crisps and hummous from a ~~rip-off joint~~ deli for 11 euros. Yes I’m still bitter 😂

Now the good:

There is a chain of health food stores in France called Naturalia. Most cities will have at least one. These stores saved my life while in the south of France. Thankfully we were staying in Airbnbs so we could cook for ourselves. In Naturalia we found plentiful healthy, tasty food. The French tend to sell many products in jars – I guess ‘cos it’s better than a can – so we found things like jarred ratatouille, beans and lentils pre-flavoured with herbs and spices, curried tofu; but the absolute gem for us were the Jay & Joy vegan camembert and chevre. I don’t buy vegan camembert often in the UK as it’s so damn expensive. In France it’s much cheaper. I’d never tried vegan chevre before and it was not disappointing – it tasted just as I remember chevre to taste. This made up somewhat for the uninteresting restaurant scene.

Food aside, Avignon is a beautiful city, but I was excited to get to Lyon, France’s third biggest city, for some top tasty grub.

First night in Lyon, we tried an all-vegan restaurant, which I’m about to excoriate so I won’t name them.

They had a set menu only, with a choice between two starters and two mains. They say they keep the menu small to avoid waste. Hmmm. Nothing on this menu was really calling out to me. You might ask ‘didn’t you know this in advance when you looked at the menu online?’ HAH! Finding accurate menus of restaurants online in France is damn near impossible as they… pretty much do what they like every day. It’s rare that a restaurant will have the menu on their website. Most of the time the restaurant may only have an FB page so either you are relying on a photo of a menu someone took two years ago, or they say up front that they change their menu seasonally and if you’re lucky, they may give a few examples of what they serve.

I had a miso soup for starters which was, I guess, fair enough, nothing wrong with a good miso. My main course – that this restaurant believed was their ‘piece de resistance’ – was a cannelloni made with courgette and was filled with cold, wet, mushroomy..stuff. There was black rice and butternut puree on the side – see the picture that heads this post. I was grateful for the healthy squash and rice but it didn’t really taste of much. The courgette cannelloni was just wet, cold and pretty tasteless. The waiter came up to me when I’d finished and said enthusiastically ‘did you experience a marvel?’ And to my shame, for (uncharacteristically) I had no fight left in me that night, I lied ‘yes.’

This restaurant thought it was so much better than it was. I would have been grateful for it ten years ago, but now I just want great-tasting food, like everybody who ISN’T saving the planet gets to eat 🤣

The next day, I was excited to go to Lyons branch of The Copper Branch. This is a Canadian chain of vegan restaurants (with branches in the US and a couple in Europe) that have tasty looking burgers – with healthier options for the bun, and the patties made of yummy spicy beans rather than the ubiquitous Beyond Meat burgers – I don’t like these and Bill Gates isn’t getting a penny from me (HA, he’ll be sorry! 🙂 ) The menu also showed chilis and other delicious looking bowls.

It turned out that The Copper Branch in Lyon is in a Westfield shopping centre – I mean, who wants to be in one of those monstrosities on holiday?? And it also turned out the menu of the Lyon branch had only a fraction of the items on the Canadian menus – and the tastier, healthier burgers and bowls were not available. I think I had a soggy portobello mushroom and some sweet potato fries.

It was back to Naturalia to find food for that evening!

We were only in Lyon for two nights, and it is possible there is a vegan jewel of a restaurant that I just didn’t come across. I had researched pretty extensively on Happy Cow, but that isn’t always 100% comprehensive, so don’t sue me if you know the best vegan restaurant ever in Lyon.

To summarise: you can eat as a vegan in Avignon, Lyon and bigger cities in the south of France in general, if your only requirement is that your food be vegan and nothing else. You will not starve. You may however end up either getting ‘burger-ed’ out, or your taste buds will go on strike out of boredom.

If you want to eat not only vegan but great-tasting healthy food, my advice is to stay in an apartment or Airbnb and use Naturalia, with the occasional meal out if you get bored of cooking. Take plentiful little snacks with you when sight-seeing – fruit, dried fruit, nuts, crackers, good chocolate, nut bars etc.

Next week – Paris!

The Carnivore Diet

What to say about the Carnivore Diet?

white tiger eating raw meat on rock — An ACTUAL carnivore

As I understand it, the advent of this new fad for eating ALL THE MEATZ, ALL THE TIME started with a surgeon and weight-lifter called Shawn Baker appearing on Joe Rogan’s podcast, announcing that with an all-meat diet he had managed to regain his energy and strength, reduce inflammation in his body, and control his blood pressure and weight among other things.

Since then he wrote a book called The Carnivore Diet, in which he promotes an all-meat diet for the health benefits he has perceived (I should say mostly meat, it seems he will sometimes eat eggs), and other well known figures like Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson have revealed that they too are on a 90-100% carnivore diet.

It’s not me who will tell Shawn Baker that he’s not feeling better if he says that he is. He’s a grown-ass dude, a surgeon no less, and knows how he feels.

He should also know however, that there could be a multitude of reasons for his health improvement, there is no way of establishing exactly just what the cause is.

It could be as it is with the paleo diet – when people eliminate dairy, refined sugars and processed food from their diets they can experience major health improvements. The science would say that this is more likely to be due to the elimination of these other foods than to the increase in meat.

There are lots of other factors we don’t know. He could’ve had a food intolerance or allergy to anything he was eating previously, perhaps one he didn’t know about, that cleared up on elimination of the food allergen.

There are so many possible other reasons for his health improvements, it’s just not scientific or truthful to categorically state that they were definitively due to an all-meat diet.

And Baker never tried a whole food plant-based, or even junk food vegan diet, so we can’t compare how he felt on either of these to how he feels on an all-meat diet. For all anyone knows, all his health issues could’ve been solved by transitioning to an all-plant diet, he may even feel even BETTER than he does now if he were to try it. We just don’t know. And neither does he… because there’s not any science behind it as far as I can see, his claims all seem to be anecdotal.

On Googling ‘The Carnivore Diet’ I was startled to see many books, not just Shawn’s, with the same or similar titles, all promoting an all or mostly meat diet.

Here are all the reasons why this sh*t is insanity I believe we are not meant to eat this way:

There are so many reasons why eating only meat isn’t the best idea – I’ll stick to 8 so the post doesn’t get too long. I’ll include some obvious arguments and a few less so. I’ve left ethics out of it because it’s blindingly obvious that a Vegan Coach would find a meat-based diet unethical! 🙂

Saturated fat. Animal products contain far greater levels of saturated fat than plant-foods. High consumption of saturated fats, especially from animal products, are linked to inflammation; oxidative stress; liver disease; diabetes; breast cancer; cognitive decline and Alzheimers.

Cholesterol. Only animal products contain cholesterol. All animals (including us) produce cholesterol. If you are consuming animals, you are taking their cholesterol on board, on top of your own. Having high cholesterol maximises your risk for atherosclerosis and heart disease.

The planet anyone? Even the highest quality organic, grass-fed, pasture-raised (or whatever the f**k the latest feelgood marketing term is) meat is at best, as bad for the planet as intensively-farmed meat; at worst it is more harmful because intensively-raised meat has a shorter lifespan and so emits less climate destroying methane. You’d have to really not give a shit about future generations to be happy eating an all-meat diet.

Sustainability. The high quality meat that these human carnivores supposedly eat is not sustainable. It needs much bigger areas of land to be raised and produced. If everyone wanted to eat that kind of meat, we’d need several planets!

We are not carnivores. Lions and tigers are carnivores. Our bodies and digestive systems do NOT resemble theirs. They have:

Long canines (all the better for piercing the jugular veins of their prey), which we do not.

Very short intestines, so they can digest meat in an effective way and in the correct amount of time. We have very long, narrow intestines, designed to digest fibrous plant food in an effective way, while meat can get stuck in them and can fester and putrefy there for years.

Acid in their stomachs that can kill any pathogens, to stop them getting sick when they eat raw meat. We have to cook meat to kill the bacteria; otherwise we can get very sick.

Speed. They can run extremely fast to catch their prey. If we were to try and catch any animal other than those that are advertised to us because of their docility and cheapness to feed and shelter – if we were to try and catch a gazelle or an impala for instance, just as other carnivore mammals do, we’d fail miserably. We’d need tools like guns to shoot them. Real carnivores don’t need guns.

Long claws – so they can better kill and then rip their dead prey apart. We have rather pathetic nails in comparison. Again, we’d need tools like knives to achieve what carnivores do with their claws.

Fibre is one of the most important nutrients for our bodies. There is no fibre in an all-meat, or all animal product diet. Fibre is only found in plant foods. We need fibre for healthy digestion, healthy weight loss, heart health, and cancer prevention among other things.

Fibre is the main nutrient that helps us attain great gut-health . Maintaining gut-health is arguably the most important aspect of achieving optimal health. In case you haven’t heard, 70-80% of our immune system is in our gut, and it’s now thought that dodgy gut-health is linked to many, many diseases, including fibromyalgia, ME, chronic fatigue syndrome, multiple sclerosis, heart disease, some cancers, and all the currently ubiquitous mental health issues like depression, anxiety, bi-polar syndrome and schizophrenia. We know that red meat is bad for gut-health, so how on this sweet earth can eating an all-meat diet (at least one of the self-professed ‘carnivores’ eats only red meat), be beneficial long-term?

Hormones. Even if you are eating the best quality meat in existence, you are STILL consuming extra mammal hormones. Doesn’t matter if this meat is labelled as ‘hormone free’ – this just means there are no added hormones. But animals, just like us, produce naturally-occcurring hormones. These are over and above what your body needs, and may mess with your own hormone levels.

Blue Zones and Inuits. There is a book by Dan Buettner called The Blue Zones. The Blue Zones refer to all the areas of the world that have clusters of centenarians. Buettner investigates what the determining dietary, social, economical, spiritual and community factors are behind so many living to 100+ in these regions. In terms of the dietary factors, all ate either a 100% plant-based diet or very, very close to that.

Inuits on the other hand are an ethnic group that, due to their location and climate eat huge amounts of meat – more than most other populations. Their life-span tends to be 10-15 years less than that of non-Inuits.

All of this (and ethics!!!) aside, eating only one type of food for every single meal is some crazy shit though, isn’t it?

Vegan YouTube ‘Stars’ that Stop Being Vegan For Health Reasons

In recent months there have been several high profile vegan Youtubers that have gone back to eating animal products; and Twitter, FB et all has had much to say about it.

The one I knew the best is Tim Sheiff, who I followed pretty consistently at the beginning of his transition to veganism. I followed him less over the years because, I don’t know, I just became less attracted to his persona.

I have to admit, I was pretty shocked when I heard he was no longer vegan, because for all of my going off his vibe, I still really thought he fully comprehended all the reasons to be vegan, and thought he understood about health – which was the main reason for him stopping his vegan lifestyle.

I understand that he felt like crap, and that it’s crap to feel like crap. And that his excessive fasts and other slightly outlandish-seeming dietary experiments were in his pursuit of health. I get that. When you feel like shit and you read something that gives you hope, you’ll try it, even if it seems a bit crazy. I’ve been there and empathise with this. A few years back, I discovered I had chronic candidiasis, manifesting in horrible skin….stuff…on my body. I won’t even tell you the most horrendous symptoms because I don’t want to put you off your cocoa 🙂 That’s one of the things I DID like about Tim, he wasn’t afraid to go there with the gross body stuff 😀 Anyway, at this time I would have tried pretty much anything just to feel better.

Thankfully, I eventually found a way to overcome my issues. I went on an anti-candida diet, took grapefruit seed extract, and used apple cider vinegar and manuka honey (yes I know honey isn’t vegan, but it was medicinal. Lots of medications aren’t vegan, so shut up). It was a long, slow process, but I got there.

From the symptoms he described, I believe Tim’s issues were also candida and digestion-linked. He seemed to end up associating these issues with his vegan diet.

I’m not trying to blow my own horn here. Ok, maybe I am just a little, but at no time during my couple of years of candida hell on earth did I think my suffering was because of my vegan diet.

It didn’t make sense that that could have been the cause. And now there is enough research to show that a varied whole food, plant-based diet is the best diet to keep candida at bay (listen to this doctor who is an expert in the field). You may, like I did, need to try a more restricted anti-candida diet at first if you currently HAVE candida, but once you are free of it, it’s a whole food vegan diet that is best.

I remember every time I saw videos of Tim, he was guzzling ridicuous amounts of fruit. I mean, fruit is a snack or a dessert. We are not meant to eat 50 frickin’ mangoes for breakfast FFS. Of course eating fruit in those quantites can contribute to candida overgrowth. That’s wayyyy too much fruit sugar fermenting in your gut! Admittedly sometimes I did see him eating a nutritionally balanced meal, but this didn’t seem to be a consistent thing. It often seemed to be one new food philosophy or another.

The YouTuber Rawvana – the vegan who got caught eating fish – I knew less about. From what I did see, she seemed, like Tim, to constantly be trying new things, whether all raw food, or water fasts, or whatever it may be. Her health issues seemed similar too – yeast and digestive issues. She thought that eating fish and eggs would be the answer to her health problems.

Although it’s disappointing that these people amassed huge profiles and thousands of followers by proclaiming how vegan they were, and personally profited from this – then stopped – thereby probably causing a significant amount of their followers to stop too, my reason for writing this is not to judge Tim or the others (even though if I’m honest they do piss me off a little. Hey, I’m human). I’m not interested in anyone’s path except my own (she says trying to sound grown up and shit :D).

But seriously, my point in writing this piece is as follows:

1. To reassure you that a whole food vegan diet is suitable, health-wise, for everybody at any stage of life. No ifs, no buts. To also assure you that animal products in the diet are not a cure for anything. Unless you are dying of hunger on a desert island and there is no vegetation anywhere, just the proverbial cow… That’s it. Some people may need to avoid certain plant foods in the case of intolerances or allergies – but this is the same with a non-vegan diet. For example, I am highly allergic to eggs. So, um..it’s a good job I’m vegan.

2. To encourage you to watch whoever appeals to you on social media. We all follow people for a wide range of reasons. Sometimes I’ll follow an absolute moron just because they make me laugh. BUT, if you are following a vegan on a particular platform for the sole purpose of learning how to be a healthy, happy vegan, PLEASE make sure they refer to science (peer-reviewed if possible). If you’re not sure how to do this, you can just cross-reference what your new vegan hero is saying with the works of the eminent plant-based doctors – Dr’s T. Colin Campbell, Michael Greger, John McDougall, Caldwell Essylstyn, Michael Klaper, Neal Barnard – they all have plenty of resources online.

Make sure your new vegan gal/guy is consistently eating/cooking (and advising you to eat) a diet rich in whole grains, beans, lentils, root veg, leafy greens and other veg, fruit, nuts seeds, herbs and spices. If they start talking about fasting or being 100% raw, or eating 50 mangoes for breakfast – throw your phone or laptop in the garbage instantly and run as far away from it as you can 😀

When Non-Vegans Ask ‘…But Why Do Vegans Eat Fake Meat If They Don’t Like Meat?’

My Tofurky roast from a couple of years ago

When discussing veganism with non-vegans; hot on the tail of ‘…but palm oil‘ will often follow: ‘why do vegans eat fake meat if they don’t like meat?’

It’s a misconception that people go vegan because they don’t like the taste of meat. Some may quit meat for that reason – wasn’t a huge fan myself – but the main reason people go vegan is because they’ve stopped believing that animals are a commodity put here for our use, and the main way that manifests is in them stopping participating in the cruelty and barbarism that is animal agriculture.

Bearing this in mind – why shouldn’t some vegans want to recreate the taste and texture of meat with an animal free product? I mean, why not? In terms of the ethical reasons, a meat alternative serves the purpose of avoiding the cruelty but still having the taste, so win-win no?

People often find that even if they start off eating alternative meat and cheese products as a vegan, they’ll gradually learn how to make amazing dishes themselves consisting of veg, beans, lentils, grains, herbs and spices etc – think chili’s, soups, curries, pad thais, tagines, porotos granados and all manner of dishes that just don’t need a meat substitute.

Alternative meats can be a great help to people who want to move towards veganism but are a little fearful their new food will be too ‘different.’ It can be helpful, then, for them to have their ‘new’ plate resemble the old one. For this reason I am thrilled about all the alternative meat products we now have available to us – vive la Gregg’s sausage roll!

People also go vegan for health and environmental reasons as well as the ethics (for me all three are interconnected).

So how does ‘fake meat’ fare compared to meat in terms of health and the environment?

Fake meat will never contain cholesterol, anti-biotics or hormones, so already it has that over meat. The chances are very high it will also contain less fat. Another score. So while it may not be a super healthy product, a meat alternative will pretty much always be healthier than a meat one.

As for the environment, even if non-vegans are quick to point out the meat alternative contains palm oil (and I kill that line of argument dead here), it will still be much better for the environment than meat. Animal agriculture is the prime driver behind ALL FORMS of environmental destruction.

And did you know we have 12 years to avoid planetary ruin, and we’re advised to move away from animal products NOW?

So yeah – bring on the fauxsages, and quick!

When Non-Vegans Yell ‘….But Palm Oil!!’

I feel like I’ve been called to write this post 😀

In the last 3 days, on 3 separate occasions (one in print and twice in TV interviews), I’ve heard non-vegans using ‘…but palm oil’ either to denigrate a vegan product, or just generally throw it at vegans with the implication that vegans are hypocritical for using palm oil, when palm oil contributes to deforestation and loss of orang-utan life.

Firstly, we have to acknowledge that palm oil production IS a problem and does cause deforestation and the deaths of the animals of the forest, among them orang-utans. Obviously this is not desirable and nobody would deny that it behoves us all, especially vegans who are mindful of the well-being of all animals, to either make our best attempts to avoid it, or to source products that contain palm oil from an ethical, sustainable supplier.

There are several elements to this.

What non-vegans that throw ‘but palm oil’ in our faces, forget (or just choose to ignore), is the following.

26 million rainforest acres have been cleared for palm oil production*

136 million rainforest acres have been cleared for animal agriculture

Perspective right there! And:

The leading causes of rainforest destruction are livestock and feedcrops

These are just the stats on rainforest destruction; I haven’t even got the space or time to talk about how much more animal agriculture destroys the rest of the environment than does palm oil.

I feel we can all agree that animal agriculture is responsible for far more animal deaths than palm oil production?

70 billion farmed animals are reared annually worldwide. More than 6 billion animals are killed for food every hour

I totally agree orang-utans are cute AF, but it is not a worse crime to needlessly kill them than it is cows or pigs. All have the same capacity to suffer.

And another fun fact, just to illustrate how ridiculous the ‘but palm oil’ argument is:

82% of starving children live in countries where food is fed to animals, and the animals are eaten by western countries

Bottom line; animal agriculture will always be more destructive in terms of environmental damage and animal cruelty and killing than will the palm oil industry.

The other line of ‘reasoning’ the ‘but palm oil’ crowd seem to have is that we, as vegans, are not as damn well perfect as we think we are because we consume products that contain palm oil, so we are hypocrites, and may as well not be vegan.

To this I say:

Many vegans DO avoid palm oil, I know of a couple personally.

Also, as vegans, we are not trying to be perfect, we never were. This is a projection that non-vegans impose on us – I dare say fuelled by a defensiveness they have about not being vegan when on some level they are aware it would be the right thing to do. It’s impossible to be a ‘perfect’ vegan in any case. We can go for a walk and trample bugs underfoot. We use cars that have tires made with animal products; we take planes that use aviation fuel containing animal products. In terms of the environment, we all drain the resources of the planet in some way every day, just by living. All we vegans are trying to do, as far as is practical and practicable, is limit unnecessary cruelty to animals and minimise environmental ruin. The best way to do this to have maximum impact will always be to go vegan. If we make the conscientious decision to avoid palm oil too, well great! And I hope more people do. I need to make greater effort in this direction myself. But we are no less vegan if we don’t, and we are still having the most impactful positive effect on the planet and animals than a non-vegan who just avoids palm oil.

*All stats from the Cowspiracy Facts page

But Plants Have Feelings Too

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So your argument for not going vegan is that it’s totally proven now, don’t you know, that plants have feelings too and you wouldn’t want to be a hypocrite and eat plants while not eating animals, so…there’s really no point is there? For added weight you also make the point that harvesting plants kills lots of tiny animals, so… again – what’s the point in going vegan, you’re always going to be killing something, right?

If these are included in your reasons for not going vegan, you’re not alone.

Typically (because I’ve had this conversation fifty-hundred times), this argument will be the last one someone pulls out of their excuse arsenal, after ‘but vegan isn’t good for your health’, and ‘but grass-fed cows are ok’ and ‘it’s too difficult, it’s not realistic’

I saw this very argument unfold the other day in an online publication by an esteemed author in the comment section of a piece she wrote, part of which attempted to discredit and dismiss veganism. This publication is very progressive and forward-thinking, and all its contributors are continually thinking outside, like, every box ever. On practically every other point I agree with all their writers, and can only dream of having the knowledge and insight that they possess.

So it was kind of shocking to see someone of this intelligence/enlightenment level resorting to the ‘plants have feelings too’ argument after her previous arguments were rebutted. I think it’s testament to the universality of the fear people have of having to change their life if there should emerge a logical reason to. They think veganism is too different and alien, they are not aware how kinda pretty normal it is, and that we still eat just as much amazing food as non-vegans. Actually I eat more. So this quasi-scientific-sounding, ethical-sounding argument about the feeliness of plants is used as that final barrier between them and veganism, it’s the argument that is supposed to have the effect of shutting the hell up that annoying vegan they are having the debate with.

So, lemme take that final barrier down for ya!

Using the ‘but plants have feelings too’ argument with vegans is set on the premise that vegans are trying to be perfect beings who never contribute to any animal cruelty whatsoever. Because they are just so holy and righteous.

Hahaaaa, I’m so holy and righteous!!! If only you knew.

As vegans we accept that no human being can live without harming animals. It’s not possible. If you’re looking for humans that do the least harm to other living beings then I believe that would be the Jains, a religious group in India, who not only are vegan, but also won’t eat root veg because they believe more insects are harmed in the harvesting of them; and they often wear face masks so they don’t breathe in tiny flies and other insects, thereby killing them.

Vegans are not even close to Jains. I love my root veg. And they love me. And God knows how many flies I sucked up in all the years I cycled around London.

We all inadvertently kill tiny insects every day underfoot. And animal products are in SO.MANY.THINGS. Aviation fuel, car and bike tyres and musical instruments to name but three. So unless you want an incredibly hermetic life, it’s impossible to live harming no beings at all.

Our goal is to do the least harm possible, as far as is practical and practicable. We don’t need to eat animal products, in fact we thrive without them, so it’s not only practical but actually sensible NOT to eat them. Plant food is available everywhere, so living vegan is easily practicable too. It’s very easy to find vegan clothing and footwear. It’s NOT easy to avoid using cars, bikes, buses, airplanes etc. You can’t check every step before you take it to ensure you don’t crush bugs. Not practicable. Geddit?

Thus, we accept that bugs and small critters do die when our plants are harvested. But being vegan we’re actually responsible for fewer of these deaths because we only eat plants. Non-vegans eat plants AND animals that eat plants.

Similarly, if you are genuinely worried about plants having feelings, the best thing you can do is go vegan. Why? Vegans just eat plants. Non-vegans eat plants AND animals that eat plants.

Another fave anti-vegan argument is ‘but lions tho’ – meaning; lions have to eat meat to live, therefore so do we. I like to borrow from this and in so doing have found a great two-for-one rebuttal to both the ‘feely plants’ and ‘but lions’ narratives.

We actually ARE like lions, but not in the way you think.

Lions are obligate carnivores. They HAVE to eat meat to survive. They are not hard-wired to care about their prey – otherwise they couldn’t survive.

Humans HAVE to eat plants to live and thrive. Even if plants possess ALL the feels, which I doubt, but even if they DO I cannot care about this, because to survive I need to eat them. So I’ll eat them without regard for their sentience.

However I don’t need meat to live, in fact it makes us sick – so why would I? A lion instinctively wouldn’t eat something that would make it sick. I will eat what I know optimises my survival, just like the ol’ lion. This is practical and practicable. And I am still doing the least harm possible.

Bam! Two arguments dead for the price of one.

Don’t Kid Yourself About ‘Pasture-Raised, ‘Grass-fed’ Animals

Aren’t human beings amazing?

Only humans can convince themselves that slaughtering fully-sentient beings at around a tenth of their natural lifespan, is a humane and ‘normal’ thing to do.

Only humans can be self aggrandising and deluded enough that they purchase carved-up dead animals, but because it has a label slapped on it saying ‘pasture-raised’ or ‘grass-fed’ – it makes them feel all fuzzy and like they are doing something good for themselves the planet and the animal.

In terms of health, of course pasture-raised cows, pigs and sheep are better than intensively-raised animals whose bodies are probably full of pesticides and antibiotics. But all animal flesh contains cholesterol, saturated fat, and hormones (think hormone-free meat is safe? This only means no added hormones; you cannot get away from the fact that you will always being ingesting the hormones of any being you consume).

Pasture-raised and grass-fed animals are just as bad (if not worse) for the planet as intensively-farmed, and if everyone in the world decided they wanted to eat this way there wouldn’t be anywhere near enough land to accommodate this. So it’s very much an entitled, elitist way to eat. Not to mention that if it gets more popular, how many forests will be razed to the ground to make way for pasture? God knows the world has lost enough forest already.

As mentioned – you aren’t really doing a whole lot for the animal either. Pasture-raised and grass-fed animals still want to live out their lives, just as (I assume) you do. Pasture-raised and grass-fed animals still go to abattoirs. No-one sprinkles sleepy dust on them so they just drift off to sleep and die for you.

It’s funny that ‘pasture-raised’ and grass-fed’ are such hipster (that have spilled over into middle-class) trends. People seem to be convincing themselves that they are eating in a more ‘natural’ ‘real’ or ‘spiritual’ way when their food sports these labels.

There is nothing natural or spiritual about unnecessary slaughter. Your body not only doesn’t need meat, it thrives without it. You can bleat about being ‘high-vibe’ and natural and primal all you want, but there is nothing high-vibe about unnecessarily brutalising an innocent being who is as sentient as you.

You think these animals are humanely killed?

The phrase ‘humane slaughter’ always makes me laugh. Is there such a thing as humane rape? I mean, there MUST be if there is such a thing as humane slaughter. We only use this term when we are talking about animals. We’d never use it about people. ‘You murdered that woman?’ ‘Yes, but I did it humanely.’ ‘Oh, ok then…er…cool.’

To see if something is truly humane, ask yourself if you’d like it to happen to you. If we assume that you’ll live until 90, then unless at the age of 9 you’d appreciate a bolt to your head to stun you (which is likely not to work) then have your throat slit and be hung upside down by your leg to be drained of blood, then it ain’t really humane to treat animals this way.

I just went on to a UK website for a pasture-raised cow company. I clicked on the section about animal welfare, and there was lots of talk about how the animal is raised, but I was specifically looking for how the animal was killed. You’d think they’d want to make the abattoir sound as fluffy as possible. But you know what? There was zero information on this. Turns out you can’t make an abbatoir sound fluffy.

It talked about how the animals are ‘free to express their normal behaviours’ – but how are they free to do this? If they naturally and instinctively want to live, they are not being allowed to fulfil this desire. It should maybe end the sentence with ‘…free to express their normal behaviours -up to the point where we kill them at a tenth of their normal lifespan.’

Look, I’m not here to force anyone to be vegan. I just don’t want anyone to be deluded by marketing bullshit. If you eat this stuff – please know what it is. It is not better ethically, environmentally, and health-wise only marginally (but if you are genuinely interested in health – go plant-based!).

The people selling ‘pasture-raised’ this and ‘grass-fed’ that will OF COURSE try and make you feel good about buying it – they want your dough! And people that fell for this already will tell you it’s a great thing to do because they want to justify their own habits and feel good about their choices.

But you are more than capable of thinking for yourself.

A tenth. Of a fully-sentient beings natural lifespan. Start by thinking about that.

And, um, go vegan anyway, lol! 🙂

Eat In A Truly ‘Mindful’ Way – Be Vegan

Please note:

This post is not intended to throw shade (as the kids say) at anyone who isn’t vegan or vegetarian. That would not be nice and that is not my purpose.

It IS however, intended to throw a whole shit-ton of poop at the peddlers of nonsense, who know they can gain followers/make money by making people feel fuzzy and comfortable, even though this is not the best thing for anybody in this particular context.

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You’d have to live somewhere pretty remote and without access to any media to not have heard about the whole ‘mindfulness’ shebang that is currently pervading all wellness websites and ‘mind body and spirit’ sections of commercial bookstores everywhere in (and influenced by) the western hemisphere.

I have no problem with the concept of mindfulness per se. Of course, in essence it can only be a positive thing. But, like the words ‘moderation,’ ‘flexitarian,’ or ‘clean’ (in relation to eating), it has no real definition and there are only seemingly very ambiguous suggestions on how to achieve it.

Of course, eating is one of the more popular things to be mindful about.

It is not clear however to what extent you should be mindful about eating, and if it’s ok to just be mindful or whether you should then take action?

I thought it would only be logical that ‘mindful’ books and websites would promote veganism as the optimal mindful lifestyle.

But when I googled ‘mindful eating,’ none of the entries I saw suggested a vegan diet as the optimal ‘mindful’ diet – or even vegetarianism. They just bleated vaguely about being grateful for every bite you eat, chewing your food slowly and being mindful of the process of how the animal got to your plate.

To be fair, they did promote eating lots of organic fruits and vegetables and whole foods, but it seemed to be enough that when you ate animals and their products to just be mindful and…um, respect the animals’ life and chew them slowly.

If I were cynical I would think that the purveyors of books, courses, retreats and programs on ‘mindfulness’ were trying to cash the hell IN on the whole fashion for all things wellness and woo.

Because meat-eaters are a bigger market than vegans, it’s obviously more lucrative to make them feel warm and fuzzy about themselves by suggesting they just…think a little…while continuing to live the lives they’ve always led, not by actually encouraging them to change.

But…

We know that NOBODY NEEDS to eat animal products.
We know that animal product production DESTROYS the planet.
We know that consuming animal products is TERRIBLE for your health.
We know that non-human animals are as sentient and suffer in the same way as human animals, so how can we possibly call eating slaughtered animals ‘mindful’?
We know if we really think about it and we have even just one brain cell, that ‘humane slaughter’ is just as much of an oxymoron as ‘humane rape’ or ‘humane torture.’

So..

If you aren’t promoting veganism – you are not promoting mindful eating, however much it benefits you to think that you are.

If you aren’t vegan, (and absolutely not intending going vegan any time soon), you aren’t eating mindfully, the end. Because if it has truly entered your mind how the cheese, chicken or fish came to be on your plate but you still don’t want to change your lifestyle; then your mind wasn’t properly engaged.

The animal doesn’t care whether it is ‘respected’ before someone chomps down on it. It would much rather have led a long happy life and not have suffered to be on a plate. It would probably rather have not been bred as a commodity at all in fact.

The planet doesn’t care that we respect the process of how an animal got to a plate. It would rather stay healthy and not be choking in methane.

Heck, our own bodies would rather we didn’t eat animal products. They were designed to be lithe, active, alert and vibrant. Consuming animal products is markedly less conducive to all those states than is food from plants.

I think some would-be entrepreneurs want to jump on the wellness wagon, but because they feel they couldn’t go vegan themselves, they can’t exactly encourage anyone else to be. But when you know the truth about physical, mental and emotional health and wellness, and what affects it the most – it’s impossible to encourage any other lifestyle than a whole foods, vegan one.

Carry on eating animal products if that’s where you’re at right now. You are on your own path and it certainly isn’t for me to judge you – but please, please, please don’t let these woo merchants persuade you that it’s a ‘mindful’ thing to do.

The Problem With ‘Flexitarian’ And Why It’s Not Enough

One last look at 2012. Happy New Year planet Earth! from Flickr via Wylio — © 2012 NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Flickr | CC-BY | via Wylio

So Donald Asshat Trump won the US election (do you remember saying a few months back, as I did, ‘it’ll NEVER happen!’), and I’m seeing lots of concern on social media about what this means for the planet.

It’s said that Trump believes climate change is ‘a hoax invented by the Chinese.’ If this is true, then of course it’s very worrying indeed.

He may let energy and business projects go ahead regardless of the environmental impact, and may not be too concerned with implementing clean forms of energy. Not to mention the fact that he may get the planet nuked if someone pisses him off too much on Twitter!

However – there is LOTS that WE can do to counteract his ecological idiocy.

We know that the best and most positively impactful solution to all forms of environmental damage is cessation of animal agriculture.

This can only be achieved if WE stop consuming animal products.

Watch Cowspiracy and read the works of Dr Richard Oppenlander if you didn’t know this already and need it substantiated. Though I have a hunch you already have an awareness of this.

Worryingly, what I’m seeing on Twitter from some non-vegan peeps that are worried about Trump’s effect on the planet, is a call to ‘flexitarianism.’

This word has no exact definition, but seems to mean a reduction in amounts of meat consumed.

Under one such call to arms I saw people saying they’d reduced their meat consumption to three times a week, and that they felt good about the change.

While it’s true that any reduction is good; it’s not enough. And it’s not helpful just to encourage people to lessen the amount of meat they eat by an ambiguous amount.

Here’s why:

The tweeter that now only eats meat three times a week is possibly still eating eggs every day, and dairy a few times every day. It’s ALL animal products that bugger up the planet, not just meat, so to put the focus on meat is misguided.
It dilutes the discourse; it lowers the bar; however you want to say it. If you think that all you have to do is not eat as much beef – then that’s ALL you’ll ever do. If you’re encouraged from the outset to avoid animal products and you understand why, you’re more likely to keep moving in that direction. It may take a while, but the end goal will be more achievable than if we make people feel comfortable just reducing meat a little.
‘Flexitarian’ is very much like the word ‘moderation.’ What does it mean? Everyone’s definition is different. By not having a firm definition, this slows down progress, as anyone who even does as little as stops eating meat for one meal a week can call themselves this.
I don’t care if being flexitarian is the most zeitgeisty thing to do right now – it’s NOT working anywhere NEAR quickly enough. We need more and quicker movement in that direction if we are to salvage anything for future generations.
I include ‘Meatless Mondays’ in this criticism. What this really means is that you’re screwing up the environment and contributing to world hunger six days a week instead of seven, but it makes you feel that you’re ‘doing your bit for the planet’ and that that is ALL you need to do. It’s true some people might start here and go further, but I believe in the long run its better to be honest about what is really needed, and have people start moving in that direction, than have lots just stop at Meatless Mondays.

Manifest your concern for the environment by going vegan. Call it ‘plant-based’ if you don’t want to call it ‘vegan.’ The planet doesn’t really care. It just cares that you quit doing what is harming it the most – consuming ALL and any animal products.

If we really care about the fate of the planet, we absolutely have the power to counteract a substantial amount of the harm that Trump may do (uh, unless he nukes it of course!)