We're all in this together

An article in the New York Times makes clear the inter-relatedness of all life on earth.

Menhaden, a species of fish that was once as common as the passenger pigeon, are the linchpin of aquatic life. But they are being overfished to extinction, and one company, Omega Protein of Houston, is largely responsible.

Who owns the menhaden? And does Omega Protein have the right to fish them to extinction in federal waters?

Cornbread, Part 2 of 2

Vegan bakers struggle to find something — anything — that has the magical binding property of eggs. Flour, a sweetener (such as sugar), and a leaving agent (such as baking powder) are the basic ingredients of any baked good, but these substances are meaningless granules until a binder, and the heat of an oven, orchestrates them into something nutritious and delectable.

Ingenious vegans have discovered many binding agents, including bananas, cornstarch, arrowroot powder and others. You can also buy your binder in a box — Ener-G Egg Replacer is one common brand.

This recipe uses a homemade binding agent, ground flax seed, boiled in a few tablespoons of water. It actually works pretty well and, interestingly, the flax seed acquires the sticky, shiny texture of an egg.

I use a coffee grinder to pulverize the flax seed. When you prepare flax seed for this recipe, grind it very fine. The cornbread will still have flecks of brown, which you may or may not like. This is a savory, crumbly, somewhat dry cornbread, very different from the recipe I posted earlier.

DANA SLY’S BLUE RIBBON VEGAN CORNBREAD

2 Tbsp. ground flax seed
6 Tbsp. water
1 C all-purpose flour
1 C cornmeal
1/4 C sugar
4 tsp. baking powder
3/4 tsp. table salt
1 C soy milk
1/4 C canola oil

1. Adjust oven rack to middle position; heat oven to 425 degrees. Spray 8-inch-square baking dish with nonstick cooking spray.

2. Bring the water to a boil in a small saucepan. Add the ground flax seed, reduce the heat to medium-low, and simmer the ground flax seed in the water for 3 minutes or until thickened, stirring occasionally. Set aside.

3. In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour, cornmeal, sugar, baking powder, and salt until well-combined.

4. Add the ground flax seed mixture, soy milk, and canola oil to the flour mixture. Beat just until smooth (do not overbeat.)

5. Turn into prepared baking pan. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes, or until a toothpick inserted in the middle comes out clean.

6. Cool on wire rack 10 minutes; invert cornbread onto wire rack, then turn right side up and continue to cool until warm, about 10 minutes longer. Cut into pieces and serve.

Cornbread, Part 1 of 2

Cornbread is one of those dishes that is more than a dish. It's a childhood memory, a mother-daughter experience, a connection to ancestors who were dead before you were born.

There are northern cornbreads and southern cornbreads, sweet cornbreads and savory. But most cornbreads are anything but vegan. They contain milk, butter, or eggs. Some recipes tell you to grease the pan with bacon fat.

Here is a wonderful, and vegan, cornbread recipe from Great Sage Restaurant (www.great-sage.com) in Clarksville, Maryland.

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Skillet Cornbread
Serves 8

1 1/2 cups of soy milk
2 tsp lemon juice
1 2/3 cups unbleached all purpose flour
a cup cornmeal
4 tsp baking powder
1 tsp sea salt
1 cup corn kernels (1 ear corn produces 1 cup corn kernels)
1/2 cup canola oil
1/2 cup maple syrup
optional: 2 minced jalapeno peppers

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees.

Lightly oil a 10" iron skillet or 9x9 metal pan and line with parchment paper. Place in oven to warm.

Mix the soy milk and lemon juice to make "buttermilk."

Combine the flour, cornmeal, baking power and salt in a large bowl. If you wish, add the jalapeno peppers.

In a food processor or blender, puree the corn kernels, then add the oil and syrup and process until well-blended.

Mix the wet ingredients into the dry and stir until just combined. (It will be a little rough.)

Pour into the prepared pan and bake for 25-30 minutes or until brown.

Up From Slavery, or Michael Vick's Dogs

April 25, 2007, was Emancipation Day for the 51 dogs at Michael Vick's notorious Bad Newz Kennels. In its December 29, 2008, Sports Illustrated summarized their lives since then.

The article is well worth reading in its entirety, but the most illuminating (and encouraging) fact is this: of the 51 dogs taken, 14 are in permanent homes, 33 in foster care, and only four are deceased. Of those four, two died while in shelter care, one was euthanized for medical reasons, and one -- just ONE -- was destroyed because it was too violent.

Not bad for a breed once demonized as inherently violent and banned in Prince George's County, Maryland.

The lesson is clear: abuse from people can make dogs bad. But almost every dog -- even those most abused -- can be rehabilitated.

Re-Educating Your Palate

People sometimes ask me if I miss the taste of meat.

The short answer is no. I've been a vegetarian for over 30 years. I couldn't deny myself meat for that long if I craved it.

But it is also true that I once ate fried chicken with gusto. It's just that, over the years, I have re-educated my palate. I don't crave tastes I once enjoyed.

Neal D. Barnard, the physician who founded the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, described this concept on a book tour some years ago. He claimed that re-educating your palate can take as little as 30 days.

Dr. Barnard gave the example of switching from whole milk to skim milk, a dietary adjustment many have made. Was it hard at first? he asked ("very" was the answer). But, he pointed out, if you stuck with skim for 30 days, and then tried whole milk again, what did you think?

A woman in the audience gave the answer for all of us: "It was like drinking cream. Switching back to whole milk would have been as painful as switching to skim was in the first place."

Lesson learned: It is possible to re-educate your palate. It may take longer than 30 days, though this number appears often in book titles. But whatever the exact number of days -- 21, 30, 45 -- the point is that cravings disappear in time.

Of course, some cravings will persist longer than others, depending on your commitment, amount of exposure, and other factors. For me, giving up meat, fish, and poultry was easy. Milk, eggs, and cheese were harder. And chocolate? Did I hear someone say I should give up chocolate? Uh...no. I have to draw the line some place.

Next: Michael Vick's Dogs

The Vegetarian 3 x 3

First, happy holidays to everyone! I hope you enjoy this time with family and friends and remember the non-humans in your life.

At the Great Harvest bread store yesterday (stocking up on the vegan Dakota bread), I began chatting with the clerk. Like many, she says she'd like to get out of the fast food, meat-centric, typical American diet but didn't know how to get started.

The Physicians Committee on Responsible Medicine advises the 3 x 3 method:

• Think of three vegetarian meals you already enjoy (pasta primavera, vegetable stir fry, vegetable soup)
• Think of three meals that can easily be made vegetarian (vegie burgers, not hamburgers, bean burritos, not chicken burritos, pasta with marinara sauce instead of meatballs)
• Try three vegetarian recipes. Clicking on the link will lead you to a site with over 2,000 vegetarian recipes. Search for the term on Google and you'll have over five million hits (in 0.13 seconds)!

It's easier than you think.

Next: Re-educating Your Palate

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Memorial: Miriam Makeba

Miriam Makeba, the singer and activist known as "Mama Africa", died last month, just after performing a concert in Italy.

You can listen to a few of her songs by clicking on the links in the "Music For Your Ears" box to the right. There are many dances to "Pata Pata", here are some cute girls in a living room and a group of recreational folk dancers. Neither group is doing the choreography I know!

Your Diet's Carbon Footprint

As a long-time vegetarian, I already knew that being vegetarian was part of "living lightly". I knew that:

• Forests are destroyed to create grazing land for cattle, goats, and sheep.
• Overgrazing leads to desertification.
• Grain fed to animals could be fed to hungry humans instead.
• Grain grown in huge monocropped fields degrades the topsoil.
• Waste generated when animals are confined in small spaces pollutes waterways.

So I knew, in a general way, that vegetarianism was "good for the planet". Frances Moore Lappe first drew that connection in Diet for a Small Planet, a book I read in 1975 or so.

But now you can get more detail. The Low Carbon Diet Calculator, courtesy of the Bon Appetit Management Company, shows the global warming impact of any meal. The calculator is a snap to use: drag items to a frying pan and watch the gauge in the thermometer shoot up to the red or oranze zones or (more happily) rise just a green zone micro-meter or two. You can see, in animation and in full color, the carbon impact of meat, and, especially, beef.

Say, for example, that you are looking forward to that typical American lunch of cheeseburger and fries. Hmm, a red zone rating of 1,977 CO2e points (the points represent the amount of global warming from greenhouse gases generated by the meal). Substitute a falafal sandwich (you can still have the fries) and the score drops to the green zone, just 422 points. And you don't have to go vegetarian to lower your impact. A hot dog and fries weighs in at 750 points (green zone!), about a third of the cheeseburger score.

Even vegans (who typically win the "most ecological eater" contest) will find that not all meals are created equal. If beef is the villan of carnivores, rice plays that role in the vegan diet. For example, my beloved meal of falafal and rice (virtuously low impact, I thought) gets a warning zone rating of 1,064 points. Substitute oven roasted potatoes, and the calculator's global warming thermometer drops to 384 points. Go for pasta primavera instead, and the calculator barely moves, registering just 180 points.

Nice eye candy for your laptop or desktop. And you can even get the numbers while waiting in line at Taco Bell: text a food item to the site and the site sends back the carbon footprint rating. How cool is that?

Fast, Filling, and Veggie

I hear people say that they want to be vegetarian (or at least that they want to eat less meat) but they don't know what to make instead.

It's readjusting the way you plan meals. Most people start with the meat ("roast chicken") and fill in from there ("hmm, rice is nice").

Here's an alternative menu that is filling, simple to make, and beautiful on the plate:

• Indian Style Dal (recipe follows)
• Rice (You know how to make that)
  
• Mollie Katzen's Crispy-Edged Roasted Brussels Sprouts

Preparing the Plate
A beautiful plate makes the meal more appetizing.

• Mound the rice on the plate and dig a hole in it.
• Place the dal in the "rice hole".
• Arrange the Brussels Sprouts around the rice.
• Garnish the dal with cilantro, if you wish.

Indian Style Dal
Indian cuisine is filled with lentils and beans, peas and pulses, known generically as "dal" in Hindi. There's no single English word that covers all these different small, round or oblong, nutritious gobbets: garbanzos, red lentils, brown lentils, black beans, black-eyed peas, Great Northern beans, kidney beans, navy beans...and many others I haven't listed.

Gandhi, a proponent of the simple lifestyle, won India's independence from Great Britain while eating meals of "dal chaval" ("dal and rice").

Make this recipe with your favorite dal. You can also mix a few types together, to get nice contrasts in shape, size, and color.

The proportions below are flexible. You can add more chili pepper, more onion, more garlic. Or less, depending on your taste.

1/2 cup of any dal
1 chili pepper, cut in pieces
Canola or other oil
1/4 teaspoon cumin seeds
A quart of an onion, sliced
Two cloves of garlic, minced
1/2 teaspoon salt, or to taste
Lemon juice
Cilantro for garnish (optional)

Put the dal and chili pepper together in a good-sized pot and set on the stove to boil. Boil gently until the dal is soft. Use plenty of water. There should be some water left in the pot after the dal is soft.

While the dal is softening, prepare the onion-spice mix:

• Add oil to a frying pan and let it heat
• Add the cumin seeds and wait for them to sputter and turn black
• Add the onion and garlic
• Fry until the onion is soft and light brown

While the onion is frying, cut the cilantro, if you will use it for garnish.

When the dal is soft, add the onion-spice mixture
Add salt to taste
Add lemon juice

What is Proposition 2?

Proposition 2 was a California ballot proposition in the most recent California general election. It passed with 63% of the vote.

The proposition requires that veal calves, chickens, and breeding pigs be housed in cages that allow them to turn around freely, lie down, stand up, and fully extend their limbs. It prohibits use of veal crates, battery cages, and sow gestation crates.

The law doesn't go into effect until January 1, 2015, which means that farmers have over six years to adapt their operations to the new law. In real terms, this means that farmers can continue to use their existing equipment, but should purchase cages that adhere to the new law as the old ones wear out.

Why clutter the blogosphere?

Why indeed?

Well, why not? When I looked for a blog that covered the vegetarian lifestyle with the breadth and quality I wanted -- I didn't find it. So why not make my own? Why not give you a forum for your comments and thoughts also?