Veg*anism

Vegan food in IKEA and the trains

Maia 2 Comments

There was so much excitement earlier this year, when IKEA and our rail services announced that they would start serving something vegan. In both cases, that was a big change.

Well, as usual, things tend to turn out a lot less appealing than you first expect.

IKEA’s ‘meat balls’ that are rather basic – ‘vegetable balls’ served with lettuce or some salad. So no protein. They might still taste great but the trouble is, it’s also a quite expensive dish.

On the trains, they have three or four vegan dishes. Sounds good, right? Turns out they all contain garlic – which I’m allergic to. At least one of them contains ginger and I hate that. All dishes are also quite expensive and the portions are rather small. Now I realize that they can’t accommodate everyone. Being allergic to garlic is quite rare. But doesn’t anyone agree with me that it seems rather unimaginative to serve three or even four dishes with the same seasoning?

Eat meat and cheat, lie, steal, fight… Joke!

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From a news article on the BBC site, about unusual passages in Indian text books:

A national textbook for 11-year-old students created uproar in 2012 when it was discovered that it said that people who eat meat “easily cheat, tell lies, forget promises, are dishonest and tell bad words, steal, fight and turn to violence and commit sex crimes”.

I found this a bit funny. Sometimes I’d like to think it’s true, but unfortunately, while I  totally agree that people who eat meat are usually that way, vegans and vegetarians, while more ‘righteous’ in my book, are still perfectly capable of doing all of the above. 🙁 By now, I’m completely disillusioned when it comes to the great majority of people, all kinds of people.

How You Can Stick To a Vegan Diet

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How You Can Stick To a Vegan Diet

Veganism has seen a surge in popularity over the past decade. Vegetarian Times reports that an estimated 1,000,000 people in the U.S. are currently vegan.

A new study commissioned by the journal Appetite found an interesting trend among people who self-identified, or once self-identified, as vegan: those who chose the diet for ethical reasons stayed with it longer than those who cited health reasons.

Read more here.

Personally, I have never had any trouble at all, sticking to a vegan diet. Of course, my main reason for going vegan was ‘ethical reasons’ – ie I loved animals and didn’t want them to get hurt because of me. Since then I have discovered many other great reasons, but that was the starting point.

6 Nutrients Every Vegetarian Needs

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6 Nutrients Every Vegetarian Needs

Learn how to create a balance of vegetable protein, carbohydrates and quality fats with each meal. You must also replace the six essential nutrients provided by animal proteins with plant-based foods containing the protein, iron, zinc, calcium, B12, and Essential Fatty Acids that are reduced with the elimination of meat, poultry, pork and fish.

“Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.” ~Albert Einstein

Read more here.

VeganTalk gone too

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A while back, I wrote a blog post, lamenting the death of Bleat. Now, my dear new(ish) friend, VeganTalk is gone. It disappeared once, but came back, and I thought it was just a scare, but now the account has been ‘suspended’, whatever that means and has been gone for weeks. The new friends I made there weren’t on any other site and we hadn’t exchanged email addresses, sno now we’ve lost touch. That’s a shame, but it’s also a great shame that such a nice vegan community that we vegans sorely needed has disappeared.

Sure there are a few other vegan communities, like Vegetarian Friend, Volentia (which is about to move to another site, so I’m not sure what’s going to happen) and Vegppl, where I never managed to make any friends, and now that it’s moved to a new site and become a lot more sexy, won’t let me log on at all. There’s also Vegan Around the World Network where I’ve never managed to get any kind of response from anyone.

There’s also still Care2, where my sister and I successfully ran a vegan group (The Veghead Zone, The Vegan Cafe) for years, but where groups aren’t working very well anymore and most people have vanished to Facebook. In fact, my sister and I have run a few relatively successful vegan groups/clubs/communities over the years, for instance in Second Life, the 3D community. That came to an abrupt end when we had a really difficult member ruin the atmosphere in the group during a meeting. He claimed that we were all discriminating against him because he was autistic when we felt that he was trivializing the problems with slaughter and meat-eating (which you could argue was stupid in a group of vegans and vegetarians).

Were you on Bleat or VeganTalk? Do you miss it as much as I do? Where do you hang out now, if you do like to hang out in social groups for vegans?

Want to save the environment? Go vegetarian!

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Going vegetarian is the easiest and quickest way to lower your carbon footprint, reduce pollution, and save energy and water. That’s because meat production requires staggering amounts of land, water, and energy, compared to plant foods. Let’s explore that now.

Read more here.

This seems like great info, but I’m not really happy about the ‘crazed hippie’ remark.

Healthiest Flours

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Swapping out the refined, white flour in your favorite baking recipe can have a big impact on the nutritional content of your favorite baked goods! Find out the benefits of different flours, and how to incorporate them into your recipes.

Read more here.

Rye, oats and barley flour are also among my favorites. I’ve also tried hazelnut flour, green pea flour and potato flour (not ordinary flour – works the same as corn flour in America or arrow root in Asia). Looking forward to trying amaranth flour and tef soon. About whole wheat flour – spelt/dinkel is about the same, just a more old-fashioned type, and that should mean, at least I hope so, healthier. I’m also looking forward to making different types of pasta with many of these cool flours.