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.