Starting the vegan pledge … what is ethical?

So I’ll say that I started this post yesterday after the first meeting or the local PAN Vegan Pledge.  I was struggling some to really capture my thoughts, so I waited to finish.  I came back today and the draft is gone.  So I will just have to start over. I will however admit, I am really struggling with this post.

I attended the first meeting of the Pan Vegan Pledge yesterday.  I’ve been excited about this meeting for a while, so I will admit my expectations were high.  The first meeting consisted of introductions, a cooking demonstration, and some time for small group discussion of different issues and concerns that we pledges might have.  I will start by saying I was overwhelmed by the enthusiasm and energy the hosts and mentors brought to the meeting.  We’d had an ice storm the night before, but the room was filled with about 40 people (including mentors and pledges).  The mentors shared their journey to becoming vegan, sharing both how and why they became vegans as well as describing their recent meals to offer a sense of a variety of vegan meals.  A theme from many of the mentors involved becoming vegan for ‘ethical reasons’  or described themselves as ‘ethical vegans’ (I put this in single quotes because it is a paraphrase.).  In discussing ethics, there were two dominant concerns that were mentioned: 1) concern for ethical treatment of animals and 2) concern over fair-trade and child labor issues.

These are important concerns, but actually don’t reflect a significant concern for me and the core of this blog.  I think we have a major problem in this country with regards to food; we don’t know what we eat, where it comes from, or how it gets to our plate.  My vegan exploration was primarily motivated as an exploration that would inform me of alternatives and also allow me insight into the vegan lifestyle’s views on these issues.  Clearly this is not a scientific study, but I wonder now whether these issues are as pressing.  Throughout the meeting there were some mentions of GMOs and the environmental impacts of industrial animal agriculture.  But we also talked about chain restaurants that prey on low wage earners, use food sources from the lowest prices to make profits, and rely on an industrial food system that obfuscates the origins of the food we eat.  Similarly, people shared ideas for using convenience foods to simplify vegan eating, but these foods are also suspect in terms of environmental hazards from production as well as transportation, refrigeration, and packaging.  From my perspective these are also huge ethical issues; just not ones that involve physical harm to animals or children.  Please understand I am not advocating either.  But we do need to keep in mind that ethics is complex.

Let me make this more concrete.  Tonight I cooked my first vegan meal.  Last night was another fantastic meal at Fiction Kitchen to marvel the tastebuds marveled – I had the ‘pork’ barbeque and was having a hard time staying in my seat for the joyous cascade of flavors! – I digress.  So tonight was Sweet Potato Burgers with a Side salad:

I will say that I don’t know where any of the ingredients came from – save one I used homemade chili powder from chilies I dried and crushed – and that’s the issue with this.  I can get Sweet Potatoes now at the Farmer’s market.  In fact, I can get most of the ingredients for this dish there.  When I do that, I give the money to the farmer, the food travels a shorter distance to me, no animals are harmed in the process, and no children are forced into labor to get that food.  This is the kind of ethics I am talking about.

During the next few meetings I’ll start asking more questions.  I am really stumped by this.  More than one person talked about the fact that  ovo-lacto vegetarians are not really responding to all the ethical dilemmas.  But I think this it a straw man argument.  If that is your stance, is it any different if you aren’t considering all the environmental issues as well?  I don’t want to come off negative or argumentative… I really want to understand.

Is that what I think it is?

Last week I tried a new restaurant, Fiction Kitchen. It was fantastic. I had ‘chicken’ and waffles that were amazing.

So there are several cool things about this place. First, its vegan friendly all vegetarian. Second they get a lot of their stuff from local providers. There are few places that offer locavore options around us. But those that do are meat heavy. Moving from vegetarian to vegan (it all starts tomorrow) makes that even more challenging.

I’ve been talking about it a while and the day has arrived. The vegan pledge starts tomorrow. I’ll attend a meeting tomorrow and hope to have lots to share. I’ll post tomorrow about my first experience.

A twist on chips and salsa

Foods from South of the Border have amazing flavors  from chilies, spices, and cilantro, .  But a challenge arises as I try to think about making foods from whole ingredients, that are minimally processed, and preferably local.  For example, in late fall when this meal occurred, where could you get fresh corn chips for salsa?  I really wanted some guacamole, so that was also a driving force in this meal.  So, looking around the market I got inspired to try something.  Here are the photos of the dinner I made:

Dinner was a stuffed Poblano Pepper with corn, black beans, quinoa, and feta with a Chipotle Pepper sauce.  That wasn’t the interesting part of the meal.  Rather than corn chips, I made crispy, spicy sweet potato chips using chilli powder made from peppers dried from our garden.  Some of you might say this is impressive, but really it was all easy, just took a lot of time.  The peppers dried for months – yes months.  Extras peppers grew in the garden. So, I set them up to dry and left them until they were ready to process.  Then I used a coffee grinder and ground the dried peppers – that’s easy.  When I say it took a long time, I mean there are still some peppers from summer that are still drying out this old fashioned way.  Anyway, back to the chips. I then took a white sweet potato, sliced it thinly, coated it in olive oil, salt, and chili powder and baked them in the oven.  I won’t give details here, you can look up how to make baked sweet potato chips.  But I highly recommend adding some chili powder, it adds great zest.

What is coming next?

So, I want to warn folks that I am taking a further diversion in a few weeks.  I’ve got one more post to work up, but there is a change coming.  I’ve signed up for the Triangle Vegan Pledge which is a Peace Advocacy Network event.  I am really excited to try a month of a vegan lifestyle.   I’m worried about giving up cheese and honey and needing to pack my lunch since there are few vegan options for me near work.  But, I bought agave nectar to try in my next loaf of bread or batch of granola bars. As part of the pledge, each week in February I will attend meetings to learn more about vegan lifestyle and choices. I decided that I will post here about those meetings, my thoughts, things I learn, and recipes that are useful.