More noodles: I'm so boring

I was going to have the curry sauce on rice and vegetables, but when I got back to my room and saw all the peanut sauce I already had, I didn't want to open a new container and waste what I had left, so I cooked the veggies, reheated some noodles and served it up. Please don't think that all vegan meals are so boring. It's just that I made scads of peanut sauce and don't want to have to throw it out. It's still tasty.

I'll have to throw everything that won't travel out tomorrow morning, and anything that I don't eat tomorrow will have to go tomorrow night, because I won't be able to take it on WestJet.

Meeting People

I felt like being social and having some kind of interesting snack, so I walked down the street to the one cafe in town that has a chance of serving something vegan. My clue was that they have vegetarian lasagna, and a kind of wholesome menu. I asked the woman there if she knew what vegan was, and she did, but she also knew that there wasn't anything there that had no butter, cheese or eggs.  "But we should!" she said.

She is semi-vegetarian and we chatted a bit about veganism. She recommended a health food store in town. I actually knew there was a health food store, but hadn't sought it out, because I wasn't interested in vitamin supplements. She assured me that it was an excellent store and had actual food. She also recommended a book called Thrive by vegan athlete Brendan Brazier, who has a line of vegan products called Vega. She called the store to see if they were open, but there was no answer.

It was on my way back to the hotel anyway, so I went by and it was open. There was a grocery section. The woman there apologized for a lack of selection in vegan food: there just isn't demand for it there.  I hadn't been expecting any, so I was happy. I bought some herbal tea and some organic spicy curry sauce, then got a ride up to the grocery store with another customer and bought some more vegetables.

Seeking organic food in a small northern town was a point of commonality, so I ended up with two different nice people's contact information.

Life Without Suffering

A tenet of veganism is that animals shouldn't suffer. The lives of animals untouched by humans are steeped in suffering. They starve, freeze, endure infections, are torn apart by predators, drown, die in natural forest fires and contract diseases. Infants may be abandoned or eaten by their parents; newly matured males are driven away from their family grouping, and the injured or infirm may be left behind. I'm not sure whether most vegans ignore this, disbelieve it, make an exception, or consider it a problem to be solved later.

Humans suffer too. I think that most humans die painfully or at least stressfully. We all want to live to an advanced an healthy age and then die peacefully in our sleep, but most of us suffer prolonged and/or painful deaths from disease. (Ironically, a lot of those diseases would be prevented if we ate a vegan diet).

Just because animals suffer in nature doesn't give humans the right to inflict suffering on them. I imagine that if there were blogs in the 19th century many of today's arguments supporting the treatment of farm animals would be found in the blogs of those arguing for slavery. Most animal cruelty laws exempt "standard industry practices" so that you could get in trouble with the SPCA for throwing your pet chicken alive into a meat grinder or a scalding dishwasher, but that's legal and acceptable in the egg hatchery industry.

Going for the Gold?

So this Go Vegan Week is a come on, because you see tomorrow is World Vegan Day, the kickoff for World Vegan Month. And then they'll announce that 2010 is the Year of the Vegan and then where will I be?

The UK Vegan Society is trying to get people to pledge to follow a vegan lifestyle for a week, a fortnight or --the "gold" level-- a month. I think I probably will extend this one more week, I was kind of thinking of it anyway, so I can try more recipes, and shop and cook like a normal person, and not have to worry about being asked to travel to another province the next morning.

Right now I'm hungry because I haven't eaten yet (the potato chips actually all got eaten yesterday) but I don't really want any more of the same thing I've been eating for two days straight, but I shouldn't buy different food when I have to finish or discard what I have before tomorrow, when I expect to be moving on.

No Way!

I found a flavour of potato chips with no whey. I ate the whole bag. I guess all this healthy vegan eating was a shock to my system. Still eating leftover peanut sauce and pasta, too. This is the last day.

How Do You Say It?

I've heard the pronunciations VEE-gən, VAY-gən and VAY-jən. I think they are all acceptable. The last makes the most sense, because the g in vegetable is soft, but I like the one that sounds like someone from the Vega star system. I suppose after I quit this, I can be a lost vegan, too. I could move to Nevada and then go wandering around without a map and be a lost vagrant Las Vegan lost vegan. But it wouldn't be worth it.

Apparently the word is supposed to be derived from being the beginning and end of a vegetarian diet.

Fences Around Fences

I learned the title expression from a friend who was explaining how Kosher laws progress, for example from the prohibition "thou shalt not cook a calf in its mother's milk" to a home with two kitchens completely separating utensil, dishes and preparation surfaces for milk and meat. (Hmm, looks like veganism might be a simpler answer for the ultra-orthodox Jew). The idea of fences around fences is that a prohibition is a fence standing tightly around the taboo, but it leaves open the possibility that you might slip and accidentally stray over the fence. So you concoct another prohibition, more restrictive than the first, so that if you accidentally fall over the first fence, you're still outside the second. And because the second fence is observed by tradition, it becomes the new prohibition itself, so a third fence becomes necessary. And thus you have people, especially around special observances, strictly adhering to rules that are so far removed from the biblical prohibitions that I didn't recognize them.

This isn't quite accurate in describing the various levels of veganism, as each  deeper level of veganism is actually taking into account ways in which animals are harmed by a person's lifestyle. Mission creep might be a closer match. Here's a list of vegan issues, including the glue on postage stamps. Some vegans reject sugar because burning canefields harms the animals that live in them. And even your cruelty-free all-organic vegan broccoli has to get to market somehow. Do you reject it because the truck in which it arrived may have hit a deer, and most definitely killed thousands of bugs, on its journey from the farm? Do you cultivate your own, or live in fear that your trowal may have inflicted suffering on a worm?  It's an unachievable goal. That's okay. Lots of life philosophies centre around striving asymptotically towards some sort of perfection. This one is a concrete goal, and most people are going to agree with some aspect of "be nice to animals."

Vegans have been characterized as unrealistic, and I thought there might be a lot of holier-than-thou back-biting, but here is an example of a vegan having to choose or reject a tetanus shot, knowing it was not vegan, and both she and all the commenters seem to be agreed that accepting it was sensible and reasonable.

Thursday: Noodles and Peanut Sauce

The new hotel room has a kitchen!  Stove!  Oven! Full refrigerator!  Pots and pans and plates and even a dishwasher. I went shopping and bought way way to much food, just because I could cook it.

As I arrived back at the hotel, I discovered it was free pizza night. Right there in the lobby: free food and I had to walk by. So far that's been the only conscious deprivation of pretending to be a vegan. It would have been harder had I not recently discovered that pizza is better without cheese. Next time I'm involved in a pizza night, I'll convince them to order one with double sauce no cheese. That will work for dieters and the lactose intolerant too. It's all about recruiting others who want the same thing, even if not for the same reasons. When I was a vegetarian there were no other vegetarians in my club but we always ordered one vegetarian pizza to accommodate me and the guy who was following Jewish dietary law.

Here is a picture of my first serving of whole wheat pasta noodles with veggies and peanut sauce. The peanut sauce consists of a 500 g jar of crunchy organic peanut butter stirred together with a can of coconut milk, and then mixed with a lot of pepper flakes.  I got the idea from here, but used much more coconut milk and I like it. I meant also to throw some spinach in for the last few minutes with the pasta, but the pot was pretty full already.

I could have spent more time artfully arranging the serving or tossing the noodles or something, but I was like, "Hey, this peanut sauce it good! And it goes with everything!" so just dumping it on.  There's lots more left, so if I don't post for a bit, it's because I'm busy eating the leftovers.  I just had some for breakfast. And this time I remembered the spinach.

Wednesday Supper: Using up the leftovers

I'm halfway through my week of veganism. A week is actually a pretty poor test because honestly I probably could go a week without food of any sort without dying, and can go a week of eating at Boston Pizza without ill effect, so a week without animal products is in no way a proof of it being a healthy lifestyle. Next week I will be off work and able to use my kitchen, so maybe I'll extend the experiment another week so I can try actual vegan cooking as opposed to vegan ingredient eating.

My work group is moving on tomorrow, to another province, but they haven't told us which one yet. I have to use up all my perishables, so that pretty much determines what I eat: everything. First course for supper is a salad of lettuce, alfalfa sprouts, avocado, yellow bell pepper, tomato and sunflower seeds. (I remembered to add the sunflower seeds after I took the photo). Meanwhile I sliced the beets and carrots and put them in the microwave, same as on Monday, except this time I added the water to the plate after I had fit it on the spinner in the microwave, so I didn't spill beet-coloured water all over the place. And this time I knew it was going to take about twelve minutes in the microwave to get the veggies right. So I put them in for eight minutes, flipped them all over and then put them back in for five more minutes.

Except that when I finished my salad, I realized the microwave was still running. I had accidentally set it for 50 minutes, and it had consumed eleven of them, and evaporated all the water. Dehydrated beet chips, anyone? They were inedible.

So I ate a pomegranate. That's a process a lot longer than that sentence. Pomegranates do not give up their seeds without a gore-streaked fight. Between the beets and the pomegranate, the hotel staff are going to think I slaughtered a pig in here. Okay, done.

I told my coworkers that I had food to finish up in my room, but that I'd come out for desert with them. I hope there's a vegan-friendly dessert available. If not, I can just hang out.

Glycerol, What?

Breakfast was same as yesterday, lightly toasted whole wheat bread with peanut butter. Ingredients weren't available for the peanut butter, but they wouldn't put animal fats in that, would they?  At work I snacked on some Arrowroot biscuits from my flight bag, but now that I look at the ingredients list I see glycerol listed.  Okay first: weird. What is glycerol doing in my biscuits? And then it's hard to know where it came from. Some is produced as a byproduct of soapmaking from animal fats, some is a byproduct of making diesel fuel out of crude oil that presumably was biological several million years ago, and some is a byproduct of the production of cooking and salad oils. The Wikipedia article suggests that only the result of the last process is considered safe for human ingestion, so I think that means that these arrowroot biscuits are okay for vegans.

Tuesday Supper: Double Sauce No Cheese

In my job I eat meals with my customers. I don't mean that I take the customers out for lunch now and again, I mean that for a month, I eat at the same table as my customers, usually for both my meals every day. It's where we plan and where we find out what is happening next, and demonstrate that we are the sort of people they want to be involved with. It's relatively important that I appear normal in this respect, to the extent that I ever seem normal.

Sunday I begged off with some excuse. It's okay to do that now and again. Monday by coincidence everyone was eating leftovers, or had a late snack or the like, and didn't want to go out. Today was the test. It's pasta night at Boston Pizza, so I knew we'd be going there. But what could I eat?  Their menu is online with nutritional information, but not ingredients. The FAQ mentioned vegetarian options, but not vegan. On Sunday night I used a web contact form to ask for an ingredients list for the vegetarian dishes, and the site said they would respond within 48 hours, but they haven't yet. I studied the menu and then phoned and asked if they had an ingredients list for the pizza sauce and crust. They had an allergy list, which would do, because eggs and dairy were possible allergens. But the items I asked about contained no eggs or dairy. Score!

At the restaurant, when the ordering got to me I admitted I was going to be a little high maintenance and then requested, "A small vegetarian pizza on whole wheat crust plus pineapple, double sauce, and no cheese." She repeated "no cheese?" with just a touch of incredulity, but wrote it down without a struggle.

The pizza came, and I was going to risk weirdness by taking a picture of it for you, but there was no point. It looked totally normal. It honestly didn't look sufficiently different from a loaded pizza with cheese for it to be worth taking a picture of. And it was delicious. I liked it better than a pizza with cheese. Seriously, you should try it. I think I'll always order pizza this way now. The toppings fell off a little more easily than with cheese, but how cool is a grease-free pizza? 

It came with a caesar salad, but they substituted a garden salad, no dressing, and that consisted of good lettuce, red onions and red peppers.

Autocannibalism

It's so dry here. I've been biting my own chapped lips all day. I declare it okay for vegans to eat their own body parts. My chapstick, Blistex Spa Effects is made from non-animal ingredients, but some are carcinogenic. I guess I go back to chewing off my own lips.

Running in the Snow

I ate a leftover piece of a Luna Bar and then went for a run. Mine was Caramel Nut Brownie flavour, but same idea. They're made by a company that is all over the organic environmental thing and earlier I checked out their website where they say "LUNA bars do not contain animal products or ingredients sourced from animal products."  And I had these before I started this vegan trial, so you see I'm not a vicious anti-vegetarian in real life.

But as I was uncrinkling the wrapper to see if I could take a picture of it, I noticed the words "may contain traces of dairy."  I imagine a hierarchy of vegans disdaining one another based on how they react to this ubiquitous phrase. I personally don't think it makes a whit of difference, but then I'd probably eat a products that said "may contain traces of human babies" if I thought health standards had been adhered to. Some people are probably grossed out by it, some get angry, some sigh and eat it anyway?

Ah, here's an explanation later in the FAQ: Clif Bar Inc. specifies to our suppliers and bakers that ingredients going into our LUNA bars do not contain dairy. The food manufacturing process however, is such that we cannot guarantee that trace amounts of dairy will never turn up in our products even for products as natural and wholesome as ours. If you believe that you are allergic to dairy you may want to consider not consuming our products and take the same precautions you do with all other pre-packaged and processed foods.

Dunno. It tasted good. And the run was great, too. There was no ice and all the drivers were really nice and changed lanes when approaching me. I went further than I expected in my 45 minutes and didn't cold or sore.

Every Waking Moment

I'm getting to understand the habit of this vegan thing.  I turned on the TV last night and a background circuit in my brain activated to ask, "Wait, is that vegan?"  Yes, Robyn, there is no way watching TV could not be vegan. And then I did it again as I climbed into bed. Yes, Robyn, sleeping is vegan. Except that as my head hit the pillow, I realized that you could have a feather pillow, a wool blanket or a horsehair mattress. Okay, maybe not a horsehair mattress, assuming your bed is under a hundred years old, but you know what I mean.

Is killing bedbugs unvegan?  What would you be supposed to do if you got them?  Live in peace and harmony with them?  Do vegans slap mosquitoes?  Are there vegan arachniphobes? Is veganism a constant pattern of having to compromise and then discovering that you screwed up, followed by guilt and pennance? I'm sure you get into patterns so you don't have to think about it every waking moment, and one can't really say there's something wrong with constantly thinking about how you live your life, but it's not just mealtimes: it's a full time commitment.

For breakfast I had a different kind of bread: lightly toasted Texas Toast 60% Whole Wheat, and I had peanut butter on it.

Monday Shopping

As you may have figured from my having ingredients in supper that weren't on Friday's grocery list, I went shopping again today. I don't intend to document every shopping trip, but here are a few notes.

• Dr Pepper doesn't contain any non-vegan ingredients, but I didn't buy any.
• The soy cheese contained casein, a milk product.
• There were some vegetarian fake meat products but most contained eggs or milk products. There was some fake back bacon and pizza pepperoni that met vegan criteria, and was even labelled as such, but there was more in the package than I wanted to eat

I will see if I can try some weird vegan products like that, and not just normal food, before I'm done.

Monday Supper

I found out we're staying here a few more days so I went grocery shopping again, so I have some new ingredients for supper. I sliced up a beet and some carrots and put them on the microwave rotating plate. I meant to buy a small bottle of olive oil for this, but I forgot, so I just put some water on the plate -- it has a shallow lip, and I microwaved them until they were almost done, adding some mushrooms for the last two minutes. As you can see from the picture, I served it with alfalfa sprouts, olives and a kind of multigrain bread thing.

I ate all that and was still hungry. This is where I need to eat more to get the same number of calories, because I'm no longer using a cow to pre-concentrate my vegetable energy. I also ate an orange. I was still kind of hungry, but my stomach was full. I think the lack of fat is bothering me. I should have bought that olive oil.

Shampoo?

So last night I'm washing my hair in the shower, and I suddenly wonder, "Can shampoo be non-vegan? What about this hotel soap?" When a Google search on "vegan shampoo" turns up a page full of hits of people asking each other where they can buy an inexpensive vegan shampoo, I conclude the answer is yes.

So what about mine? It's Garnier Fructis. I can't read the ingredients because it's a mini travel bottle that has been used and refilled many times, so the writing has worn off. But the issue is not the ingredients. To a real vegan, not the "for a week" variety, it's not just the contents of the product you use, but the whole process of how it got there. Products that are tested on animals are not vegan. According to the Garnier company website, they "rigorously lab-test all our new product propositions."  But does that lab involve animals?

A thread on a bulletin board starts with saying they, or at least the parent L'Oreal, used to do animal testing but don't any more, then says maybe they still have the suppliers test the ingredients, and ends with someone saying Garnier says they don't test on animals. The UK group Uncaged (which is just asking for a parody called Unhinged) has Garnier on their boycott list. Every second answer on every website dealing with the question contradicts the previous one. Can you imagine having to do this research for every product that you ever used?  And what if Company A extensively tests a set of ingredients on animals, determining them safe for human use, then Company B makes a product out of the same ingredients and just trusts Company A's test results? And then along comes Company C and makes a product out of different, untested ingredients and it turns out to cause tear duct cysts, or whatever it is they are testing for. My husband used to think that "Not Tested on Animals" was a government-mandated warning label for possibly harmful products.

I really don't care a lot about what kind of shampoo I use, so if there were a clearcut answer to whether any particular product were or were not tested on animals, I could be convinced to use a untested product. But I'd like it to be made from ingredients that had been in use for a long time and were known to be safe--probably because once upon a time they HAD been tested on animals.

For what it's worth, I support the use of Nazi scientific findings to help modern scientists. And maybe I've just found out why hippies traditionally have filthy hair.

Is Veganism Natural?

I don't believe that veganism is a natural lifestyle. A natural lifestyle is to eat anything that your digestive system can process, and, when there's a choice, to give precedence to the highest energy foods available. Prior to the invention of philosophy, I'm sure that any human who did not use animal products did so because he wasn't able to catch any animals. (The author of this funny column said that growing up in Kamloops, anyone on a meatless diet would be presumed to be both poor and a poor shot). Biologically, we have omnivore teeth and enzymes that can process animal proteins. Many of us (me included) even have a cool little mutation that allows us to digest milk long after weaning. These abilities are natural and I don't see anything unnatural in using them.

Animals are the source of a lot of useful things: meat, milk, butter, cheese, whipped cream, honey, leather, fur, wool, gelatin, shellac, and even some medications. There are substitutes these days, but in many cases the substitute item is less natural and probably has a greater environmental impact than the genuine, natural product. Leather and fur are truly awesome materials, even more so because they are available outdoors in the winter, right where they are needed. Almost every single item in the lifestyle of a traditional Inuit family was animal derived: meat, oil lamps, hide kayaks and parkas, bone needles and harpoons, floats made of bladders and dog-powered hide & bone sleds. Is that more natural than subsisting on soda pop and potato chips? The latter diet, if you find the right brand of potato chips, is vegan.

But humans do a heck of a lot of unnatural things, many of them to our benefit, so whether veganism is natural or unnatural isn't a particularly good argument either for or against.

Monday Breakfast

Breakfast is a pretty mundane meal in the hotel. I had a multigrain bagel again, although I still haven't verified an absence of honey or whey. I figured the jams would all have gelatin in them, so I put some stewed strawberries on it. They were offered as a waffle topping, but of course I didn't have a waffle.

Sunday Supper

The vegan diet isn't nearly as limiting as the facilities available for me to prepare food at the hotel. I have a microwave, a bar fridge, a swiss army knife, and a plastic knife-fork-spoon set. Here's the preparation of some of tonight's meal. I'm using my swiss army knife to cut up vegetables on the rotating platter from the microwave,and using the plastic container the spring mix came in as a salad bowl.

The first course consists of spring mix (a premade mix of various organic leafy edibles), green onion, yellow pepper, alfalfa sprouts and roasted sunflower seed. I mixed these all together in a bowl and ate them, while watching The Fugitive on the Aboriginal Peoples' Television Network. Apparently Tommy Lee Jones, the one who wants a chocolate doughnut with sprinkles, is of Cherokee descent, so they show his movies on this channel. An ad for some sort of cheese comes on, and the first thing I think about it is, "nope, can't eat that."

I was still hungry after that, so I then I had some walnut pieces and then some blue corn chips and red pepper hummus and a kind of mini-bread loaf. They had a book in the grocery store where I got to check all the ingredients. And maybe Ill have another piece of chocolate.

Sunday Snack

I just got in from work, but I want to go for a run before it gets dark, so I just had a snack. A red delicious apple (which was free in the hotel lobby) and a square of dark chocolate. There's me and the apple. I don't usually look that scary, but I'd just taken off a baseball cap. In the interest of full disclosure, the apple was pretty shiny, so it might have been coated with shellac. And the sweater is wool, so I'm really losing at this vegan thing. The chocolate was yummy.


And then I decided that it was too late to go for a run and still get back before dark so I ran on the treadmill and did some upper body work with free weights, in the hotel gym.

Sunday Breakfast

I'm at a hotel with an included breakfast, so my task was to find vegan fare within the selection. The box the muffins came in was on the counter, so could read the ingredients and see that they included eggs. I should have guessed that. I asked about the packaging for the bagels, but it was in the freezer downstairs. I decide to eat it on the assurance that most bagels are vegan. The multigrain ones aren't shiny, so I know they haven't been brushed with egg whites. The loaves of bread by the toaster still have their packages so I read the ingredients on the raisin bread. All vegan, except that it says "may contain" milk products.  I know that means it's made in a facility where other things have milk ingredients so someone may have touched it, or some milk powder may have been flying around in the air. I'm not going to be fanatical about that. I lightly toast some raisin bread.

Plus a glass of cranberry juice. I didn't see the ingredients for that, and I suppose some rats, earthworms and other small creatures were drowned during the flooding of the cranberry bogs for the harvest, but Mother Nature doesn't have a problem with drowning her own creatures, and the animals weren't really a part of the process. I declare cranberry juice vegan.

It was good. It was enough food. It wasn't any different than what I probably would have had for breakfast anyway.

For the Animals or for Us

Many of the links on the World Go Vegan Week site are to do with animal cruelty, especially in modern farming methods. It's true: the animal products industry inflicts a lot of animal suffering.The goal of the vegan is to cause no harm to any creature. It's not just a diet; it's a lifestyle. To a vegan, if you buy meat or meat products you have ordered an animal to be killed for you. And that's quite true, even if it isn't as literal as choosing your own live lobster or trout out of the tank at the grocery store.

I'm actually quite okay with animals being killed for my use, assuming that they are raised and killed humanely. The problem is that they're not. I don't think many people can know about the treatment of factory farmed pigs and say "yes, this is right; this is the way I expect my food to be raised," but even someone who doesn't give a damn about the plight of a pig, may care about the health of beaches and rivers, and the potential for disease that can spread to humans. That trio of links may have put me off bacon permanently. And I love bacon.

I believe that people should make an informed decision about what they eat, but that requires them to have information. Much of the information  on animal cruelty in food processing is so shocking as to seem unbelievable, or that it seems like an aberration rather than normal practice. And it's not fun to read

Vegan Eve Shopping Trip

World Go Vegan Week starts tomorrow, so I went on a vegan shopping trip today. I came home with a rainbow of food, but nothing so strange that it would be out of place in a salad at a nice chain restaurant like Earl's or Moxie's.

My rainbow:

Red: tomato
Orange: carrots, roasted pepper hummus, mandarin orange
Yellow: yellow pepper
Green: lettuce, alfalfa sprouts, spring onions
Blue: blue corn tortilla chips
Indigo: pomegranate juice, and maybe the avocado
Violet: some sort of purple lettuce in the spring mix

I also bought several different sort of nuts and some rice. Later in the week I will experimentally answer the question, "Can I cook rice in a coffee maker?"  I forgot to buy a can of chickpeas to go with the rice. I can get that when I go back to get more fresh ingredients in whichever town I'm in next.

I had a few surprises as I scrutinized the ingredients lists for animal products. I was wrong about potato chips being vegan: my favourite brand and flavour contains honey, and all the other kinds I liked contain whey. There may have been a flavour that didn't, but I bought tortilla chips instead. All the yummy-looking packaged olives contained lactic acid. I didn't know whether it was milk-derived or not, so I didn't buy any, but research shows me that lactic acid is produced commercially through fermentation of glucose, so the olives probably were vegan. The best surprise was a vegan 70% Dark Chocolate bar, containing only cocoa mass, cocoa butter, and natural bourbon vanilla beans.

It all came to $39.07.

I Don't Expect to Find This Store

My only real question about eating vegan for a week is getting enough calories. A week is not enough time for me to develop any nutritional deficiency, even if I eat the worst vegan diet known to man. But will I have the time and opportunity to shovel enough vegan food into me to support my energy needs? Will a big vegan meal stay in my stomach long enough to get me through the day? I'm working after all, in a somewhat physical job. It's cold out, and I'm also training for an upcoming race. While there are certainly vegan athletes who do very well, they are probably eating at least three meals a day with plenty of time for preparation and consumption. I only eat a couple, because there's no meal service on my flights. If eat a hamburger, I'm taking advantage of those cows having first eating low-energy-density grass for hours, then lying down for a few more hours and rechewing the grass. When it comes to deriving energy from food, cows are a labour-saving device.

Plants also concentrate energy, in nuts and seeds. If there are any fattening organic things, those are going to have to be the basis. And if all else fails, except for the milk chocolate, most Hallowe'en candy is vegan.

Maybe I Made a Difference

A couple of days ago I was scoping out the local grocery store, wondering what I could buy to prepare in my hotel room that would be vegan. I noticed some samosas in the deli case, but as far as I could see I had a choice between chicken and beef. "Are there any veggie samosas?" I asked.

I happened to be speaking to the manager of that section and she said thoughtfully, "No, but those would be good, wouldn't they?" Perhaps she will ask her supplier for some.

World Vegan Week

Next week is World Go Vegan Week. Proponents of veganism hold it to be a natural lifestyle, more harmonious with nature and healthier for the practitioner than the alternatives. I don't know about that. Quite frankly, veganism seems like a ridiculous extreme of deprivation. But I'm always up for a challenge, so I'll play the game. I'm not planning to actually go vegan, just to try it out for a week. If anyone would like to join me, or if any existing vegans would like a voice on this blog, let me know and I'll invite you as a co-author.

Robyn

I'm a healthy 40-something woman who spends about 200 nights a year in hotels, often in small towns with limited opportunities for grocery shopping and restaurants. I was vegetarian for about ten years once, but in 1996 I went  back to eating whatever is available, because usually when I have opportunity to feed, it's late, I'm hungry and there is not time or opportunity to have much choice in what food I get.