The Casual Vegan

It’s not uncommon these days for people to sit down with their friends to watch movies like Food Inc. or King Corn and realize with some horror that they would prefer to be feeding their families and loved ones food that isn’t laden with agro-industrial waste and pesticides, & that they would like most of all to be eating organic food. But the biggest obstacle for most people is cost. How does one switch their food choices to organic food without breaking their tight food budgets?

Greg and I went vegan before we considered concentrating on organic. I figured without the biological magnification of pesticides through meat-eating, we were already quite a bit safer. We actually started eating mostly-organic produce kind of accidentally and then just got used to it. The last time we were in a store where things were markedly cheaper in the produces aisles but also non-organic, I found myself being very picky about what to buy when I normally would’ve gone a little crazy and piled veggies into our cart left and right. In our situation, it happened because we moved to a town that is pretty organized around the idea of organic food. It’s fairly important here. One of the three large grocery stores in town is a Co-op that has a produce section that is almost exclusively organic.

discount rack

One of the jewels of my food existence has been the Co-op’s “discount rack,” which is a small and almost unnoticeable rack in the midst of their produce where they mark down items that are beaten up a bit too much for normal sale or items that are taken off the shelf because while they look and taste great, won’t last as long as the freshly-stocked produce. Last week I came home with 17 perfect and crispy orange & yellow organic bell peppers for $6, which in my clumsy estimation is 35 cents a bell pepper. Pretty darn cheap.

But let’s look at a list of ways that anyone can save when switching over to eating organic. Start slow and integrate organic foods into your life bit by bit. There tends to be a fatalistic approach to things like this, an all-or-nothing feeling, but starting out piecemeal is worth your time and advantageous to your health!

start saving

- Buy produce that researchers say is important to buy organic. Corn and soy are where Greg and I adamantly started, because some huge percentage of these crops are genetically-modified (GMO) in the USA. Certified organic food is non-GMO. Other produce can be categorized by amount of pesticide found on the product. Big ones to watch out for are peaches, berries, bell peppers, & celery. But the list goes on.

- Go vegan/vegetarian. There’s really no two ways about it. Organic dry beans are cheaper than organic meat. Get your good fats from avocados (which are very low on the important-to-buy-organic list), tree nuts, and flax seed. Get your good proteins and fiber and vitamins and minerals from beans, tofu, and whole grains like brown rice, quinoa, oats & whole wheat. Feel better, live longer, and spend less — what’s not to like?

- Buy produce in-season. Produce that is in-season is obviously going to be cheaper, even when organic. Also, this increases the likelihood that you will be able to buy local produce as well. Tailor your eating around the seasons. If you aren’t sure what’s in-season, guess by the low prices or ask your friendly grocer! I know that in April asparagus and greens are good buys. Even in the winter there are in-season buys: cruciferous vegetables like broccoli and cabbage get sweeter after the frost starts and who could forget a winter clementine once they’ve eaten one (or an entire box). Some staple produce is available all year round and is inexpensive, organic or not, because it’s shipped in from the south — bananas, onions, potatoes, etc.

- Buy in the bulk section of a natural food store. You will find good deals. It’s also fun. Dried fruit, whole grains, beans, flours, nuts, nutritional yeast, peanut butter, oils, pasta, corn meal, herbs. So much stuff to find there.

- Cut out junk food & processed foods. Similar to the previous advice — buying processed food not only adds a lot of weird ingredients to your life, even weird organic ingredients, but it adds a lot of packaging material to be dealt with and a lot of cost. You generally do not get the same quantity of food for your $1 when you buy processed foods, and that’s pretty important to consider when you are buying food for a family of several people.

- Eat out less often. That pizza you just ordered = lots of organic food from the grocery store. Eat from your kitchen, and take your lunch to work! Take several pieces of fresh fruit, leftover rice, a bag of almonds, even a can of beans to throw on a whole wheat tortilla with some spinach and hummus. So many options. Get creative. Save money.

- Farmers’ markets. I could rave about farmers’ markets, but I think this is self-explanatory. Direct consumerism cuts out extra costs. Good seasonal deals. Local. Usually a lot of organic stuff, but depends on location.

- Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA). Joining a CSA costs somewhere around $25-35 per week and should feed your family its week’s worth of produce, if not more, depending on what kind of eaters you are.

- Look for deals. Maybe your local Co-op or natural food store has a discount rack in the produce aisle, or in another aisle. Leaf through the store’s newsletter before you shop to see what’s on sale. Join the Co-op for a moderate fee and take advantage of the deals that they offer members. (Our Co-op offers 10% off everything in the store one Wednesday a month.)

- Start a garden. ‘Nuff said! You know it will be organic! Get involved in a community garden if you don’t have a yard.

- Get rid of your car. Honestly, I kind of think this is the most important advice, but I also know a lot of people who don’t have a car and still look for ways to afford organic food. If you have a car, and this is even a remote possibility for you, I don’t think I need to tell you the ridiculous amounts of money you will save by not owning a car. You can get the coolest bike in the world and still have tons of extra money to buy organic food. You can put a trailer on the back of your bike to haul the groceries and the kids. You will be my hero. (Check out my sister’s sweet ride here.)

make organic important to you

If you have a goal for your health and family, you will find ways to accommodate that goal without compromising the overall balance of your life. If eating organic food is important to you, then sit with it & think about the ideas in this post and come up with your own. Maybe you will find aspects of your life that you can prioritize and you can make organic food more important on your budget. Maybe your community is a terrible place for getting affordable organic food, but maybe you’re the person who will change that!

Check out Affordable Ways to Eat Organic Part II

Streak running is a task in insanity. I first heard of the idea from the second part of pod cast from The Story called Running Together where a son and his mother run every single day for 2 years straight. I then looked into the idea and found the United States Streak Running Association where runners have been running daily for 30+ years!

The rules of a streak are simple. Run at least 1 continuous mile every single day. A writer for the New York Times did a piece on her father who has run 2+ miles daily for 30 years. He apparently has a strange gait, and runs pretty slowly now, but he’s no worse for wear.

The 8th Day

I’ve been on my first running streak for 8 days now. But, today on the 8th day of my streak, I participated in the 6 Rivers Running Club hour long race. The race was held at the HSU track where I run several times a week already. How could I not participate? Yes, I could have run slower, and not as far… But, with an amazing 10 year old runner named RJ running a sub 6 minute mile, how could I slack off?

The Food

I ate oatmeal with lots of fruit and flax this morning, and brought some  sweet orange bell peppers, an orange, and some almonds to the race. I kept two almonds for luck, but can’t remember when I ate them. I was surprised no one gave me weird looks for eating a whole pepper like an apple, but they are so good. After the race I immediately devoured the orange, and tried not to be rude as I turned down cookies three times. Since I eat so little processed foods and don’t use salt, I get very little sodium. I’ve salted my dinner tonight, but it covers up the marvelous flavor of these orange peppers.

The Hour Race

The first lap was a lot of fun, everyone was chatty and friendly. I was running too fast, but everyone else seemed so strong and fast. I was floating. My first three miles were too fast. I was nervous, but everyone around me was running so fast, it was hard to slow down. Going past 3 miles was strange…. The fastest I’d ever taken a treadmill was 7.0 and that was hard. And, I ran faster than that for 5+ miles before my mind started to shut down. By the end of the 7th mile I was dead. One of the fast runners who lapped me many times held up 3 fingers and shouted, 3 minutes left! So, I ran a lap and a half in three minutes.

Nothing hurt. I couldn’t breath, but I felt great.

When I stopped running I was actually surprised to notice the people in front of me weren’t running anymore, and I was hit with a wall of pain almost instantly, my left thigh was on fire and I could barely stand on my calves, let alone walk!

RJ passing people who both out ran me

The good news is I can still walk, the bad news is, tomorrow’s run is going to be extra, extra hard. I’m still questioning my sanity on this streak business. To make matters worse, the Avenue of the Giants Marathon is in 3 weeks. I was hoping to complete my first marathon, but with all this streak running, I’m probably going to compete in the half marathon or 5k instead.

The Beautiful Streak

The beauty of a running streak is that you never have to ask yourself if your going to run today. The answer is always an unquestionable yes! I’ve never run more than 5 days in a week before, so we will see how this goes. Next time, I’ll best 8 miles.

I am celebrating Easter mostly by eating a lot of fruit and beans, reading Howard Zinn, and enjoying the strange coastal winter storm we’re having. Er, we’re not really followers of any tradition around here. So, while I was slicing up an avocado in the skin and squeezing out the contents onto a dish (very mess-free way of preparing an avocado), I decided to have a full serving of the taste combination I had had a hint of the night before by accident.

sans soy substitute

Now, Frank’s Red Hot Original Cayenne Pepper Sauce has all kinds of recommendations for things to pair the sauce with — chicken & eggs and the like. There’s a recipe for buffalo wings on the label, which of course calls for butter as Frank’s itself only has 5 ingredients: cayenne pepper, vinegar, water, salt, & garlic powder. Frank’s plus that buttery addition is the flavor that everyone comes to recognize as classic hot wing material. Well, take the naturally-buttery and slightly greasy consistency of avocado and put it together with Frank’s right out of the bottle, and you’ve got yourself a dish that mimics the tender portions of hot wings in a way that Greg says is “creepy.” For someone attempting to approximate a well-known meat dish, this combo blows soy products out of the water and is about 8 million times better for you, and doesn’t require frying to boot. It’s also just a really interesting way to consume a whole avocado and everyone could use more avocado in his or her life!

(Turns out Frank’s is pretty tasty on mangos too.)

a new study sheds light on the honesty of scientific research on stroke medications. The study found that up to 33% of research results have been absconded. It’s well known that much research in this country on strokes is paid for by the large drug corporations. They fund the research, they approve the results. If you don’t discover what they want to read, your research can simply be ignored.

This manifests itself not in false studies, but in missing studies. When you’re studying a new stroke medication on animals and your research fails to prove the drug has any benefits, your work is simply forgotten, ignored, or lost.

Registration Required for Human Trials

Thankfully in 2007 the major medical journals have required registration BEFORE you start a study. This means that you can’t cheat and simply ignore results that don’t agree with the desired corporate outcome. However, that also means for the past 80-90 years it was acceptable to bias your research by making sure no one read studies your benefactor didn’t agree with.

Hopefully, enough people will care about this to demand registration for ALL peer-reviewed published research.

Once an onion sprouts, Greg has a hard time cutting into it (like, emotionally). This is our onion (one of many as we love onions around here) last spring. We put it in some dirt and let it grow for awhile, harvesting some of its shoots now and then. It grew very tall in our front window and produced an interesting flowertop!

a community farm in autumn

The farmers’ markets are opening up next month and I’m really looking forward to not only mingling with the veggie-eaters and growers of the community, but also having access to the wide range of plants available as the local growing season progresses. Greg and I usually take about $40 to the market, can’t resist spending it all, and come home with our reusable bags heavy with produce (especially when we go for the cruciferous sort – cabbage & cauliflower, so heavy!). But this year, we’re going try a new route to fresh vegetables, one that takes less time and less money overall ($24/week), our local community farm, or CSA (Community-Supported Agriculture), which will prepare a box of seasonal veggies for us every week for pick-up.

not just for country folk

Over the past two years, it seems like more and more people I know are signing up for these programs — And I know this because they are always giving me the extra vegetables that they can’t eat in one week when I tell them how much I like veggies. Even in large cities like Chicago farms outside of the city provide locally-grown, organic produce for city denizens for pick-up at a designated spot in the city. Greg and I realized that since moving to California, we now live very close to our CSA, just right down the street, closer than our grocery store, and I never would’ve realized that this farm existed if it weren’t for that casual google search investigating local CSAs. For someone who will be 9 months pregnant in June (me!), this is going to be ideal. But if I’m the one to pick up the box, I might accidentally eat all the fresh strawberries on the way home!!

eating locally (a.k.a. yummm)

Buying produce directly from farmers at the market or at a community farm is an easy way to support your community and your planet! (Just think about how much less fuel it took for those veggies to get to your table.) Your fruits and vegetables are so much fresher and more delicious — really, you won’t believe how much flavor can be packed in a sweet pepper or a handful of cherry tomatoes, or how visually-pleasing food can be… I’m drooling just thinking about summer eating!

Eating junk food makes you sick. As soon as you finish off a plate of french fries or a pizza, you know you’ve done it to yourself. The stomach pains, lethargy, and digestion problems are just beginning. Most people eat junk food multiple times a day, and they eat it so often they lose touch with their body’s signals. When you eat too much junk you no longer feel the stomach pain and discomfort. A new study on rats may help explain why*.

I’ve been guilty of a french fry bender, but now instead of repeating the behavior when I’m sick the next day, I strive to eat as much healthy food as I can.

Junk Food Drug Addict

Even worse than no longer feeling the negative signals from your body, you also lose touch with the reward signals in your brain! Just like a drug addict, pleasurable foods are no longer as good. Eating fresh, warm, ripe strawberries on a summer’s day is marvelous. However, if you eat junk food constantly, your experience of strawberries is greatly diminished.

Rats fed a high fat, junk food diet for 40 days not only ended up fat, but they also had a greatly diminished reward mechanism. The study actually found that rats would ignore pain to continue eating junk food in the same way that cocaine addicted rats will.

Eating a wholesome plant-based diet not only tastes delicious, but it helps you lose weight, regain energy, and feel marvelous.

*note: I disagree with most uses of animals for research, but I won’t ignore the findings. This study in particular was one that could have been done on humans, it would just have taken more effort.

Paying bills is always a chore. If I manage to get a check off before a bill is late, that’s a big success. I hate paying bills to faceless corporations that espouse values I don’t support. However, my water bill actually makes me happy to pay because I believe everyone should pay for their impact on the environment. This belief most especially applies to corporations.

Big corporations have a blank check from the government to consume, abuse, and destroy the environment without paying a single dime for the resources they squander. When I pay for my family water use, I’m paying for the resources I consumed. When my water bill goes up, I have no complaints.

How Much is Your Water Worth?

Today was the first time since moving back to California that I actually read the bill.

Last month I used 3000 gallons of water!

Water is so cheap I’ve never noticed the shocking volume of water I’m using. Water in California costs me about 1.4 cents per gallon. That’s about 5-6 cents to flush a toilet. This month, I’m going to make more of an effort to stop wasting so much clean, fresh water.

How much do you use?

This is where you come in, I could look up government statistics on the Internet, but I’d really like to know how much water like-minded folks use. I have a family size of 2 and we used 2992 gallons last month. Post a comment and share your numbers if you can find them. If you’re like me and you have no idea how much you use, please post that!

John Robbins is one of my heroes. He’s just a guy. But, he’s a guy willing to stand up and fight for something he knows is true. The way corporations treat animals in this country is appalling. He first wrote about food in a book called Diet for a New America in the 80′s, and his book Food Revolution helped me to become a better, healthier person. It’s a challenge to find video of John that isn’t hard to watch, because many contain animal abuse footage spliced in, but this one has no dramatic editing. This is a very powerful speech that doesn’t need editing.

If you’re looking to improve your health, looking for the courage to make a change, or just interested in the way food is produced in this country, you should read Food Revolution. You can find it at your library, in used book stores, or if you must, on amazon.

I was looking up hummus recipes… every recipes website on the first page of Google is terrible. They are full of foods that better taste good because they will kill you. The worst part is most the sites are just search results of other sites, and they all steal recipes from each other! So, you get the same recipe over and over again. However, tonight I found something truly interesting. I was on All Recipes and I noticed in the footer that they have the website in different languages I saw SE Asian and thought, wait what language could they possibly use??

It turns out the SE Asia version is in English, yet all the dishes are completely different from the U.S. recipes site! The American version is full of cup cakes, but the “.Asia” version has all sorts of yummy veggie dishes I’ve never tried. One of the downsides to the lack of an American culture is not only are most of the foods I know from childhood bland and boring, they are terrible for my health. It’s a shame I can’t read Japanese because some of these recipe pictures look amazing!

Oh, Internet. How often I use you, but how little I accomplish!

I am still here, still pregnant, and having much more fun eating now that I’m 23 weeks along with things. I admit to still being much more “casual” about veganism than I had been prior to pregnancy, but I’m finding nice ways to temper that when I eat at home. My cravings ebb and flow. For a week, I was eating cheese slices at home, but found a nice way to up my fiber and vitamin intake while fulfilling that craving was to pair the cheese with apples and oranges and cucumbers sliced up and served to myself like an elaborate appetizer.

Greg is not a big fan of texturized soy protein products, and while I certainly don’t think they’re fabulous for me, I do find them to be a better alternative than running out and grabbing some real chicken nuggets, et cetera. Plus, for someone that kind of shies away from salads, they can be just an excuse to eat a lot of great veggies for flavor. Today I was cooking up a vegan burger patty and chopping up tomatillo, cucumber, thin yellow onion slices, and a small handful of red lettuce, when I realized I had way too many veggies to put on the bagel I had planned to use (I visualized them all falling out of the little hole) — So I grabbed a whole wheat pita, cut it in half, popped it in the toaster to make it warm and tasty, slathered it with hummus and a little salsa, cut up my burger patty into smaller parts and made a yummy hummus sandwich!

That’s all. Just checking in, Friends.

A Dutch study concludes that giving kids choices about vegetables does not make a difference in the amount of vegetables they eat. However, on average out of hundreds of 4-6 year olds tested, most ate around 50 grams of vegetables, which is roughly 2 ounces. Sure kids don’t eat a lot, but 2 ounces is 14 calories of spinach. Any parent who doesn’t do something when their children only consume 14 calories of vegetables in a meal is neglecting their children’s health.

The story was reported by major media, and they didn’t mention the shockingly low consumption of vegetables in the study. In fact the coverage implies that nothing you do makes any difference in how children eat! If the researchers had given the children all healthy foods, and no unhealthy options at all. They would have made shocking discoveries about the amount of vegetables the children ate.

Hungry children, whos parents eat vegetables, will eat healthy! Even if your child is picky and “refuses to eat anything but french fries” he or she will eventually get hungry and give in. There’s almost no nutritional value in french fries. So, you need not worry about what they are missing out on by not eating their french fries. If you don’t have healthy foods in your house, your children will make healthy choices too.

It is harder to make healthy choices when unhealthy choices are in your house though. I still don’t feel good after last night’s french fries.

Hello, Readers! I’ve been MIA for some time now, and with a pretty good excuse — Greg and I (but mostly *I*) are pregnant! This is a murky ultrasound of Dax at only 8 weeks and some change, but I am now at 14 weeks, and the little guy or gal has shed his or her tail and become quite a bit more human in the past several weeks.

Dax, through no fault of his or her own, made me quite ill through the first trimester and I am only just coming out of that now. The consequence of the nausea, headaches, fatigue, and picky taste buds (picky is actually an understatement) was that I fell off the vegan wagon entirely and not even in a casual way. My body was saying NO WAY to green foods and whole grains and even beans, so the lack of nutrients unfortunately started to signal the need for all those old foods in my life, cheese and meat, to fill the gap in my diet.

I’m writing here today to simply say that it was very hard to be in this state, and Greg struggled with it too as we momentarily lost our bond in eating. I felt sick to begin with and the food that I was eating was not helping me feel better. I felt strange, too, having to eat against the principles that I had developed over the course of being a nutritional vegan.

It’s a little disconcerting to be in that state and to open a book or a website that tells pregnant women to eat their greens and their beans to keep healthy. Even my favorite nutritionist, Dr. Fuhrman, doesn’t really offer a lot of good advice for this dilemma, although I will let you queasy readers know that a homemade fruit smoothie (Fuhrman has a bunch of recipes for these in his books) with some spinach added in is a fantastic way to trick your body into consuming some greens, because you can’t taste the spinach and you can’t smell it either. Also, while I once sort of scoffed at the idea of a multi-vitamin, I realized that I needed to be consuming all those vitamins and nutrients that had once been included in my daily meals. Going on my sister’s advice, I chose this prenatal vitamin. (After I attempted to take the same brand’s Prenatal One Multivitamin, I quickly realized that I could not swallow a horse pill everyday due to a pretty bad gag reflex, so I switched to the Petite version.)

I have a lot to say about pregnancy and diet, and a lot more time to put in being pregnant, so now that I feel better I will be updating about topics related to this more often. I’ve been able to put aside most of the cheese and meat and start to get back to a plant-based diet, but I will not forget this time in my pregnancy, and I really have to imagine that a lot of you out there are experiencing the same thing. Although everyone I talk to in person seems to have had a really easy, no quease pregnancy, studies say that nearly 75% of women get nausea in the first trimester — so from the perspective of this blog, I’m going to update with some things that you can have around the house to make you eat well and feel a little better!

The Marine Daily 16 is a set of calisthenics exercises that Marines “lovingly” refer to as PT (emphasis on the P) which is short for physical training. I’m writing a series of posts about this training program in this series I’ll walk you through the Daily 16 describing each exercise sharing my personal preferences and experience as well as putting together the entire program. My brother is a Marine stationed in Afghanistan, but before shipping out he got to come home and teach me exercise the Marine Corps way. I’m not writing about politics because this blog is about food and exercise. I’m proud of my brother, and hope they can all come home soon.

Home from boot, my brother showed me a series of exercises called the Daily 16. It is a series of warm ups, stretches, core calisthenics, and cool down exercises. The program used to be called the daily 7, but the new marine daily 16 program incorporates exercises for every major muscle in your body. You don’t need any equipment to do any exercises, and they are a safe, effective full body work out.

When you begin you’ll start just by doing the exercises, but as you get more comfortable with the exercises, the marines do what’s called a double. They mix running or hiking in with the exercises. So you go through the warm up exercises, then go for a short slow run. Then you stop, perform an exercise, and then go back to jogging. After a short jog, you stop and do another exercise. The exercises are your breaks from running, and running is your break from exercise. You end the workout with a jog and your cool down exercises and stretches. I’ll walk through each of the exercises in the series, and provide links to the very little information that’s available on the Internet about this exercise program. While the program was designed to turn boys into physically fit soldiers, the program works remarkably well for people of all ages and fitness levels. It’s fun and entertaining.

The marine corps provides a rough PDF file explaining each of the exercises: Marines Daily 16. The next post will follow shortly.

Jana DrJoel is a new blog that chronicles Jana’s journey through Dr. Fuhrman’s eat for health book. She’s making all the recipes and posting pictures of each one. This blog makes me hungry. This is a website that Dr. Joel should have made. I love his recipes, but it’s so much easier to eat them when I’m reminded of them in photographs. While, you’ll need a copy of eat for health to follow along with the recipes, Eat for Health is a book that I recommend everyone read anyway. The blog is an inspiration, and I’m going to be enjoying a couple of the recipes myself this week. You should too! Follow Jana in her new blog and subscribe to her updates.