You may have noticed that I've been doing a lot of baking lately. None of which has really been vegan. Technically speaking, most refined sugar is not vegan because it is refined with animal bones, and of course, anything containing butter, eggs or honey is an animal product. So what is this new vegan to during her first holiday season with this plant-based lifestyle???
Find balance...
For my favorite Everything Bread Recipe, I struggled for a while over the use of honey. For the time being, I've decided to use organic, local honey, and to just be ok with that for now. If I feel differently later as I continue to grow into my new humane plant-based lifestyle, then that's fine too.
For my to-die-for Whole Wheat Morning Glory Muffins, something that I eat for breakfast every day now, I didn't know what to do. The recipe contains two eggs. Watching videos of factory chicken farms makes me feel so guilty about this morning pleasure. So for now, I've decided to buy only organic, cage-free, vegetarian fed eggs. If I can talk to the farmer and buy them locally, even better. If I later find an egg substitute to replace this ingredient then great! Better yet, I'd love to get my own backyard chicken coop. But for now, I'm choosing to be ok with using my buying power to support only animal products that I want to support.
Butter. Hmmmm. It has always been one of my favorite flavors! For baking, I've been buying organic butter. For spreading and cooking, I use Earth Balance. I hope to eventually look for other vegan alternatives for baking too, but its just so scary to start messing with all your tried and true recipes!
Finally, the sugar issue. This is something I have not even started trying to conquer yet. You can buy raw natural sugar that is vegan, but I'm not ready to start experimenting with my recipes to see how this effects them, yet. Someday, in my fantasy world, I'll find the time to not only bake, but to experiment with baking too. For now, if I can squeeze 30 minutes in here or an hour there, I'm going to stick with what I know and get the job done. The point is, at least I'm making everything from scratch, which is definitely healthier and kinder to the planet in so many ways.
The biggest lifestyle change with trying to eat a mostly vegan diet, is all the homemade cooking and preparation in advance that needs to be done! I have found I really need to use my weekends to plan for the week ahead, because there are very limited fast-food or pre-packaged options available to me. Which really is a good think if you ask me anyway :)
Well, speaking of which, I better get back to my vegan Rustic White Bean & Mushroom dish that I'm bringing to pass at Christmas (to make sure I have a protein too). See, always have to think ahead!
I had a wonderful weekend of cooking, cleaning, and walking with my dogs. In the little down time I had left, I found time to watch three great documentaries through Netflix instant streaming.
The first one, Ingredients, came on recommendation from a friend, though it had already been sitting in my instant queue for a while anyway, just waiting to be watched.
This film was very good, though both DH and I felt like we had watched it before. The story of the Canadian Farmer's Fight with Seed and Pesticide Giant, Monsanto, was very familiar to us.
Regardless of whether it was a repeat for us or not, it was a great reminder of why we should spend the extra money, whenever possible, to buy organic & local food. It reminded me that not only are the pesticides they spray not something I want traces of in my food, but also the genetically modified foods are scary! They are less nutritious and could even be harmful to our bodies! I actually I paused this film about half way through in order to rush off to the farmer's market and load up on some yummy fruits & veggies!
The next documentary, King Corn, was also recommended by the same friend. I'm glad she mentioned it because I'd seen it in the Netflix "Recommended" section (based on other films I'd viewed and liked), but I was totally judging a movie by its cover! I thought the image (left) looked like some crappy 70's comic book cover or something, and didn't ever bother to look deeper and see what the film was about.
Turns out, it's about these two friends from CA who move to IA to plant an acre of corn and then follow their product through the commodities chain into our food system.
This was a GREAT film and I highly recommend it for anyone who needs a reminder as to why we should be avoiding processed foods! Corn is in everything. You can go to McDonald's and order a corn-fed burger, with fries fried in corn oil, and soda sweetened with corn syrup. All because the government chooses to subsidize a few select crops over all others. And the crops they subsidize are genetically modified, and actually cannot be eaten straight from the ground, but rather HAVE to be processed in order to become edible. Gross!
The final documentary we watched this weekend was called Tapped. DH was getting a little "tapped out" on food films, so we decided to switch things up. We had heard about this one a couple weeks ago from some tourists who had taken the Milwaukee Photo Tour with us, and while we walking along the Milwaukee River Way, our guide mentioned how ground water works in Milwaukee vs the surrounding suburbs and what an important resource it is. The other tourist mentioned this film and it stuck in my memory.
This film was enlightening. It is about the bottled water industry and the damage it is doing to communities, our health, and our environment. Did you know until the 70's that only Europeans really used bottled water, and then they were glass? Did you know that your city's municipal tap water is tested multiple times a day...and bottled water companies don't have to test their water at all? Did you know that in many cases, bottled water companies just draw water from the same ground water sources that municipal tap water comes from, but they take it for free and then sell it back to you at highly marked up prices, sometimes at hundreds if not thousands of times the price it cost them to gather and package it? All of it being the exact same water you could get out of your own faucet for free, just lest tested for safety and now exposed to harmful chemicals from the cheap plastic bottle it is packaged in?!?!?
I've been carrying around reusable water bottles for about 3 years now. I started during my second master's degree because everyone else had these unique looking "SIGG" bottles and it seemed like the cool thing to do. Plus, they often came with caps that can be hooked to your book bag or easily carried by looping one or two fingers through the middle.
It was a large investment at first (around $20 on average per bottle for this brand), but I did the math and it quickly paid for itself in only a few weeks, especially if I were to buy bottles one at a time from vending machines, rather than buying cases in bulk from the store.
I found myself drinking a lot more water at school, on the road, and even in the evenings when I had my own personal bottle with me, that I could refill whenever, wherever. I also liked that I could express myself by my choice in decorative bottle too.
Over the course of three years, I became so accustomed to carrying free water with me everywhere (that I now get from my refrigerator Brita Filter), that I started collecting water bottles from any source I could find them. I stopped paying the big bucks for my SIGG bottles and started buying cheaper generic aluminum bottles, then cheap plastic bottles, then collecting free bottles.... all plastic.
While watching tapped, DH and I realized how harmful to our health all the plastic food and beverage containers were! This prompted me to do a little internet searching and I discovered the following list effects that Bisphenol A (BPA), found in hard plastics, can have on our health:
- breast cancer
- prostate disease and cancer
- diabetes
- obesity
- hyperactivity
- impaired, altered, and compromised immune system and functions
- miscarriage
- impaired female reproductive development
- sperm defects
- lowered sperm count
- chromosome abnormalities
- chromosome sorting errors
- Down’s syndrome
- Turner Syndrome
- Klinefelter Syndrome
- genitalia deformity
- early onset of puberty
- impaired learning and memory
- increased aggression
After watching this film and learning about all of this, DH and I immediately went into the kitchen, gathered up all the plastic storage containers we could find, and put them in a bag to take to goodwill. Then went out to buy some glass food storage containers. I'm currently in the process on deciding which cool design SIGG bottle I want to buy again to replace all the plastic ones we're getting rid of!
I strongly recommend that everyone I know watches this film. And don't be surprised if you wind up getting a fancy BPA free water bottle from me as your next Christmas gift too :)
