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Introducing Guest Bloggers on The Vegan Voice

Ed and I have so much going on with Get Healthy Marshall that we have hardly blogged this year. There are many excellent and exciting voices out there in the blogosphere that we would like to promote and share however. For this reason we are inviting guest bloggers to The Vegan Voice Blog. If you’re interested in guest blogging, just send an email to veganvoice@gmail.com. If your blog fits our criteria (vegan related, reasonably well written, and free of profanity), you’re in. Anyone who submits a blog that we use will receive an Amazon gift card to show our appreciation. We will also promote your entry mercilessly to our over 4000 social media followers.

Our first guest post comes from Jackie Sabon, the mastermind behind Vegan Yack Attack,  a vegan food blog that covers everything from indulgent desserts, to healthy dinners, and even raw recipes. Jackies blog also includes restaurant reviews and a beer bit of snobbery. Not to mention her beautifully sumptuous food photos. You can find her here tomorrow - and the rest of the time at http://veganyackattack.com

A Letter from a Shelter Manager

What follows is an anonymous letter from an animal shelter in North Carolina. Where it’s from isn’t really relevant though, because it’s true of shelters everywhere. I volunteered years ago in animal shelters in Houston, Texas and on the island of St. Maarten in the Caribbean and it was equally true in both places. Please share this with every animal lover that you know. I beg you.

A Letter from a Shelter Manager

I think our society needs a huge “Wake-up” call. As a shelter  manager, I am going to share a little insight with you all… a view from the  inside if you will.

First off, all of you breeders/sellers should be made to work in the “back” of an animal shelter for just one day. Maybe if you saw the life drain from a few sad, lost, confused eyes, you would change your mind about breeding and selling to people you don’t even know.

That puppy you just sold will most likely end up in my shelter when it’s not a cute little puppy anymore. So how would you feel if you knew that there’s about a 90% chance that dog will never walk out of the shelter it is going to be dumped at? Purebred or not! About 50% of all of the dogs that are “owner surrenders” or “strays”, that come into my shelter are purebred dogs.

The most common excuses I hear are; “We are moving and we can’t take our dog (or cat).” Really? Where are you moving too that doesn’t allow pets? Or they say “The dog got bigger than we thought it would”. How big did you think a German Shepherd would get? “We don’t have time for her”. Really? I work a 10-12 hour day and still have time for my 6 dogs! “She’s tearing up our yard”. How about making her a part of your family? They always tell me “We just don’t want to have to stress about finding a place for her we know she’ll get adopted, she’s a good dog”.

Odds are your pet won’t get adopted & how stressful do you think being in a shelter is? Well, let me tell you, your pet has 72 hours to find a new family from the moment you drop it off. Sometimes a little longer if the shelter isn’t full and your dog manages to stay completely healthy. If it sniffles, it dies. Your pet will be confined to a small run/kennel in a room with about 25 other barking or crying animals. It will have to relieve itself where it eats and sleeps. It will be depressed and it will cry constantly for the family that abandoned it. If your pet is lucky, I will have enough volunteers in that day to take him/her for a walk. If I don’t, your pet won’t get any attention besides having a bowl of food slid under the kennel door and the waste sprayed out of its pen with a high-powered hose. If your dog is big, black or any of the “Bully” breeds (pit bull, rottie, mastiff, etc) it was pretty much dead when you walked it through the front door.

Those dogs just don’t get adopted. It doesn’t matter how ‘sweet’ or ‘well behaved’ they are.

If your dog doesn’t get adopted within its 72 hours and the shelter is full, it will be destroyed. If the shelter isn’t full and your dog is good enough, and of a desirable enough breed it may get a stay of execution, but not for long .
Most dogs get very kennel protective after about a week and are destroyed for showing aggression. Even the sweetest dogs will turn in this environment. If your pet makes it over all of those hurdles chances are it will get kennel cough or an upper respiratory infection and will be destroyed because shelters just don’t have the funds to pay for even a $100 treatment.

Here’s a little euthanasia 101 for those of you that have never witnessed a perfectly healthy, scared animal being “put-down”.

First, your pet will be taken from its kennel on a leash. They always look like they think they are going for a walk happy, wagging their tails. Until they get to “The Room”, every one of them freaks out and puts on the brakes when we get to the door. It must smell like death or they can feel the sad souls that are left in there, it’s strange, but it happens with every one of them. Your dog or cat will be restrained, held down by 1 or 2 vet techs depending on the size and how freaked out they are. Then a euthanasia tech or a vet will start the process. They will find a vein in the front leg and inject a lethal dose of the “pink stuff”. Hopefully your pet doesn’t panic from being restrained and jerk. I’ve seen the needles tear out of a leg and been covered with the resulting blood and been deafened by the yelps and screams. They all don’t just “go to sleep”, sometimes they spasm for a while, gasp for air and defecate on themselves.

When it all ends, your pets corpse will be stacked like firewood in a large freezer in the back with all of the other animals that were killed waiting to be picked up like garbage. What happens next? Cremated? Taken to the dump?
Rendered into pet food? You’ll never know and it probably won’t even cross your mind. It was just an animal and you can always buy another one, right?

I hope that those of you that have read this are bawling your eyes out and can’t get the pictures out of your head I deal with everyday on the way home from work.

I hate my job, I hate that it exists & I hate that it will always be there unless you people make some changes and realize that the lives you are affecting go much farther than the pets you dump at a shelter.

Between 9 and 11 MILLION animals die every year in shelters and only you can stop it. I do my best to save every life I can but rescues are always full, and there are more animals coming in everyday than there are homes.

My point to all of this DON’T BREED OR BUY WHILE SHELTER PETS DIE!

Hate me if you want to. The truth hurts and reality is what it is. I just hope I maybe changed one persons mind about breeding their dog, taking their loving pet to a shelter, or buying a dog. I hope that someone will walk into my shelter and say “I saw this and it made me want to adopt”.

THAT WOULD  MAKE IT WORTH IT.

-Anonymous in North Carolina

Easter Ham and the Ancient World.

When a dining companion offers you a bite of their steak so that you may “see what you’re missing” are you ever tempted to tell them that their “food” is as appealing to you as road kill? That they are eating a carcass, and the only thing you’re going to miss is having an increased risk cancer, heart disease and diabetes in the long term and suffering from indigestion and constipation in the short term. Do you want to say that eating corpses only leads to becoming one sooner yourself? Or that if you were going to choose to eat dead bodies that you would prefer to find one that died naturally so that you weren’t complicit in the slaughter of a living individual.

Okay, it’s not very diplomatic and most of us would never say those things, but you are not alone in thinking them. Almost 2000 years ago Plutarch was thinking something similar. On being asked why the Pythagoreans ate no meat he wrote:

Can you really ask what reason Pythagoras had for abstaining from flesh? For my part I rather wonder both by what accident and in what state of soul or mind the first man did so, touched his mouth to gore and brought his lips to the flesh of a dead creature, he who set forth tables of dead, stale bodies and ventured to call food and nourishment the parts that had a little before bellowed and cried, moved and lived. How could his eyes endure the slaughter when throats were slit and hides flayed and limbs torn from limb? How could his nose endure the stench? How was it that the pollution did not turn away his taste, which made contact with the sores of others and sucked juices and serums from mortal wounds?

My grandparents raised pigs and cattle. The old way. I remember getting in the pen with the pigs and visiting with them. They were quite social.  But I grew up eating pork chops. It was a disconnect. Once I saw the connection the veil fell away and today I would no sooner eat bacon than I would this. Easter eggs are suffering chickens confined to battery cages (and balls of cholesterol filled with infectious bacteria) to me now, and ham is an animal that can outsmart my dog and save a young boy from drowning. As my cousin’s 4H pig did just a month before he was slaughtered.

The dogs were swimming with my cousin in the pond and panicked in the deep water. They started pawing him under. The pig saw this, figured out what was happening and swam out into the pond. He got between the dogs and my cousin, and swam to shore with my cousin holding on to him. A month later my cousin was forced to kill him because that’s how it is in the country. My cousin has never been the same since. He became a dark and brooding man and has had a difficult life.

Agribusiness giants ended up putting my grandparents and most other small pig farmers out of business years ago, but just because we don’t see them doesn’t mean that they aren’t intelligent, sensitive animals capable of heroic acts given the right opportunity. It just means we let strangers do the dirty work. Plutarch saw it coming nearly 2000 years ago.

Easter may symbolize something beautiful but it hides something very ugly.

Happy Easter? Not for the pigs and chickens.

Milk Wars Transcript with Dr. Neal Barnard

Here is the transcript from the ISSUES WITH JANE VELEZ-MITCHELL episode featuring Dr. Neal Barnard that aired April 15, 2011 for those (like myself) who missed it.

VELEZ-MITCHELL: All right. Up next, a controversy over school lunches erupts. The battle of milk is next — yes, milk. Every parent has to hear this.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JOHN SALLEY, FORMER NBA PLAYER: It`s funny, they put vegetarian food in front of them when they were hungry. Some of them booed, some of them ahh-ed But at the end of it, they all was fed well.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ROBIN QUIVERS, HOWARD STERN SHOW: The food industry has done a great job of confusing us as to what food is and what good food is compared to bad food.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

VELEZ-MITCHELL: Tonight, chocolate milk stirs up a controversy around the country. The debate is raging over whether schools should be passing out that sugary beverage to our kids. Some people argue chocolate, strawberry, any flavored milk is not the only way to get calcium and the added sugar in all that flavored milk is out of control, contributing to the childhood obesity epidemic that America is in the throes of right now.

But the National Dairy Council says in the school cafeteria “milk, whether white or flavored, plays a vital role in helping children meet needs for essential nutrients,” end quote. Reports claim about three- quarters of the milk in school cafeterias is flavored, chocolate milk.

Chef and TV star of the ABC show “Jamie Oliver`s Food Revolution”, he was in L.A. to try and take on childhood obesity. Check this out.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JAMIE OLIVER, CHEF: What I`m going to do right now is I`m going to pump this bus, this icon of trust full of one week`s added sugar just for flavored milk in the LAUSD. This is 100 percent real. This happens every day. This is only a week`s worth and this is actually classic to the whole of America. Guys, you think we`re done? We are done. We are done now.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

VELEZ-MITCHELL: Yes. That`s going into our kids` bodies, all that sugar. Jamie says 57 tons of sugar in one week pumped into kids, not just in the L.A. school district but this is happening all over the country. And that is just the sugar they are getting from flavored milk alone.

Straight out to the renegade lunch lady, Ann Cooper, glad to see you there in your starched whites. Why are you so upset about schools serving chocolate milk?

ANN COOPER, RENEGADE LUNCH LADY: I mean, we just shouldn`t serve our kids that much sugar. Most chocolate milk has twice as much sugar as the same fat content as regular milk. There`s no reason with this obesity crisis to be force feeding our children sugar.

VELEZ-MITCHELL: I want to bring in Dr. Neal Barnard, the national best-selling author of fantastic book “21-Day Weight Loss Kick Start”. You`re an expert in combating obesity. Now, in your opinion, doctor, is this just about the sugar or the high fructose corn syrup in flavored milk? What about the milk itself? Is the milk itself helping or hurting our children?

DR. NEAL BARNARD, CLINICAL RESEARCHER AND HEALTH ADVOCATE: It`s hurting our kids. And the problems are that kids today are in the worst shape of any generation we`ve ever had. The risk of diabetes, the risk of obesity, the risk of high cholesterol and the heart disease it leads to, they are higher than it has ever been. And a big part of the reason is that schools, sometimes they are forced to — they are feeding junk to kids. It`s as simple as that.

And it`s not just the sugar that`s in the milk. It`s the milk itself, the main nutrient in skim milk, believe it or not, even before you add anything to it, is sugar, lactose sugar. There is fat in it as well. The proteins, a lot of kids don`t react to it. Kids just don`t need it.

VELEZ-MITCHELL: But what about that calcium argument? And the dairy council talks about that. We got a statement from the dairy council that essentially says that the nutrients that are of public health concern, calcium, vitamin D, and potassium are these essential nutrients found in milk.

BARNARD: Sure, there is a certain amount of calcium in milk but asphalt has calcium in it. There is calcium in so many food; that doesn`t mean you should be eating it. Green leafy vegetables have calcium, beans have calcium; you just don`t need calcium from milk. The vehicle for delivering that little bit of calcium has enough fat, enough calories, enough sugar, enough junk to really put kids at risk. There`s no reason for it.

VELEZ-MITCHELL: Well, here`s my take. Ok. I want to do full disclosure to my viewers. I`m a vegan. I do not drink cow`s milk and I have not in at least 15 years.

Now, I want you to meet my great niece, Nicole, she`s 13 1/2 and this young lady has never tasted cow`s milk in her entire life. She is as well a vegan, we have a lot of them in my family. And she`s very tall, very healthy, and doing very well in school. I think she`s living proof that this whole idea that a child, a human child, must have cow`s milk could be a selling tool that we critically need to question.

Now, the National Dairy Council says it`s difficult and expensive to replace the nutrients lost from decreased milk intake in school meals. We just talked about the calcium. But you just heard, Ann Cooper, Dr. Neal Barnard said there`s calcium in plenty of other things that we can get and we`re not suffering from some massive calcium deficiency nationally. So why push it in the milk all the time?

COOPER: Well, I absolutely agree. There is not a calcium crisis in America. There`s an obesity crisis in America. The reason we serve milk in school is because of the National Dairy Council. I mean it`s a lobbying effort.

As a lunch lady, I have to serve milk at every meal. I have to offer it to every kid. You know, and milk can be, I actually think that milk could be part of a healthy diet. But the idea that in schools we would be serving it to kids one, two, sometimes three times a day is –

(CROSSTALK)

VELEZ-MITCHELL: Hang on. We`re on the other side. We`re getting started.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SALLEY: It`s funny, they put vegetarian food in front of them when they were hungry. Some of them booed, some of them ahh-ed, but at the end of it, they all was fed well.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

VELEZ-MITCHELL: All right. That`s my vegan buddy, NBA great John Salley, we`re back talking about the childhood obesity epidemic and this whole controversy over flavored milk, some kind of chocolate milk, strawberry milk, milk that they serve in schools that critics are saying hey, it`s contributed to the obesity conversation. And we`re actually expanding the conversation to — what about milk in general?

Dr. Neal, here`s my thought and somebody told me this, I didn`t think this up myself. Cow`s milk was meant for cows. We`re the only species, we human beings that steal the mother`s milk from another species and drink it for ourselves. So what does cow`s milk do in terms of how it works on calves and how does that relate to human being?

BARNARD: Yes, well, I think that`s so important. The purpose of milk, if I can put it that way, is not for dunking cookies in it. The purpose of milk is to make a calf grow and so it contains not just calcium and protein at that but it contains hormones. It contains growth factors and it stimulates the production of more hormones and more growth factors in your body.

And you don`t need that, particularly in adulthood where there`s a lot of evidence that men who are drinking milk two or three times a day have more risk of prostate cancer. That`s because the growth in their body is of cancer cells. Now, that`s pretty frightening.

But if you`re looking at kids, kids are drinking milk. They get no advantage for their bones. Back in 2005 pediatrics, an — article in pediatrics showed that kids who never drank milk have just as healthy bones as kids who do. But what they are getting is a lot of fat, a lot of sugar and a lot of health problems.

VELEZ-MITCHELL: Well, here`s my big issue. We have an obesity plague in this country. Obesity is not just an epidemic anymore, it`s a plague. The amount of overweight children in this country is growing at an alarming rate. “Kids` Health” says one out of every three kids in America is overweight or obese.

So, I have to ask you, Ann Cooper, we`re talking about the sugar and now we`re hearing from Dr. Neal and other people say it, even though oh, it`s against that whole mantra about milk does a body good. I think it`s time to question and not just march in lock step and say why this constant drum beat that everybody has to drink milk when nature didn`t design it for human beings, it was designed for calves.

COOPER: Well, you know what; I don`t want to debate whether we should serve milk in schools or not because the U.S. –

(CROSSTALK)

VELEZ-MITCHELL: Why not? If it`s contributing to kids getting overweight maybe we need start thinking outside the box here.

BARNARD: If you serve chocolate milk it has 150, 200, 220 calories depending on the type. This is a big part of the obesity problem.

COOPER: I absolutely agree with that. I absolutely agree with that. We have to get the flavored milks out of school. If a child chooses flavored milk every day for the 180 days they are in school they will gain 2 1/2 or three pounds just from the added sugar in that chocolate. It`s crazy. We have to stop this.

VELEZ-MITCHELL: A lot of people say well, what`s the alternative? And obviously we all know there`s soy milk and there`s rice milk and there`s almond milk. But let`s also question the idea that we all have to be drinking this milky substance. Where did that come from? That`s a cultural invention.

I can wake up and have a green tea in the morning. I don`t necessarily have to have something with milk in it. I can have a piece of fruit. I don`t necessarily have to have something with a dairy product in it. So a lot of what we`re told we have to do is really cultural conditioning.

Final word in a moment.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

VELEZ-MITCHELL: Change one thing about our school system starting with Ann Cooper, renegade lunch lady.

COOPER: The one thing I would change in our schools is getting ready of the processed food and, oh by the way, chocolate milk, soda and (INAUDIBLE) get it out of schools.

VELEZ-MITCHELL: Dr. Neal Barnard.

BARNARD: I would base the meals on the healthy foods, the grains, the beans, the vegetables and the fruits. The meats, the dairy products, that`s part of the problem.

VELEZ-MITCHELL: I agree with you. That`s what I would do if I were in charge of the schools. I would make sure there would be a fruit plate in every single classroom when the kids get the munchies they could reach for a banana or an apple and eat some of this healthy food. You know, some of these kids in the inner-city particularly don`t even know that these vegetables exist because they have choice of fast food or no food at all. Let`s get the healthy food, the greens into the school system.

This is a wake-up call, America. We need to change.

Thank you, fantastic panel.

Remember folks, Jane is the voice of veganism for cable news. Be sure that you let CNN know that she is appreciated so that they keep her on the air. You can do so by using the comment box at http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/issues.with.jane/.

Remembering Shirley – Making Food into Poetry

The world lost a bright shining star this past weekend. My words aren’t enough to pay sufficient tribute to Shirley Wilkes-Johnson but she is the reason that I sprinkle pomegranate seeds on birthday cakes and she is the reason that we attended the Lone Star Vegetarian Chili cook-off many times, eventually entering ourselves and taking home the winning trophy in 2006 (for the now defunct Vegetarian Society of Houston). She inspired and delighted multitudes both through Go Vegan Texas (and later Vegan World) Radio and through personal encounters. She was a great thinker and a great cook. She was kind, passionate and driven.

Here is my favorite memory of Shirley…

She taught a cooking class at the Fiesta cooking school in Houston several years ago. This was after 9/11 and the theme was “A Romantic Middle Eastern Dinner”. We were fighting in the Middle East then, as now, and the idea of combining romance and the Middle East might not have made sense to many people, but when she concluded the class it all came together beautifully. She dusted the dessert with pomegranate seeds and talked about how they were considered an aphrodisiac. The pomegranate was a fruit of love, she said, and one of the ways that we learn to love and appreciate other cultures is through their food. Then she did an amazing thing. In the most poetic of ways, she extrapolated that into her dream for world peace, and made each of us there that night believe that we could all be a part of that vision simply by living a compassionate life. She made us believe that love could be spread as readily as hate and that kindness was contagious, and compassion the answer. I never left a cooking class filled with such emotion. Not before then or after. She had a way of turning a simple cooking class into a magical journey into the human heart.

Here are some remembrances of Shirley from others in the last few days…

Vegan.com: http://vegan.com/blog/2011/04/11/in-memory-of-shirley-wilkes-johnson/

Carol J. Adams: http://caroljadams.blogspot.com/2011/04/remembering-shirley-wilkes-johnson.html

Rhea on The “V” word: http://theveeword.blogspot.com/2011/04/in-memory-of-shirley-wilkes-johnson.html

You can be sure that there will be many more to follow.

 

 

Honoring the Man Who Made Us

We are “vegans” today because of Donald Watson. He coined the term in 1944 because he felt that the word vegetarian was lacking. According to Watson, “The pronunciation is “VEEGAN” not “VAI-GAN,” “VEGGAN.” or “VEEJAN.” The stress is on the first syllable,” He primarily created the word in reference to dietary practices. It was later expanded to include the use of animals for other reasons. Here is an excerpt from an interview done the year before he died (at the age of 95).

Interviewer: We understand that you are responsible for creating the word “vegan.” How did that occur? Why did you feel the word was needed?

Donald Watson: I invited my early readers to suggest a more concise word to replace “non-dairy vegetarian.” Some bizarre suggestions were made like “dairyban, vitan, benevore, sanivore, beaumangeur”, et cetera. I settled for my own word, “vegan”, containing the first three and last two letters of “vegetarian” — “the beginning and end of vegetarian.” The word was accepted by the Oxford English Dictionary and no one has tried to improve it.

He goes on to say “Veganism gives us all the opportunity to say what we “stand for” in life. The ideal of healthy, humane living is now easy with modern transport bringing us vegan foods from all over the world. Join us and add decades of health to your life, with a clear conscience as a bonus.” You can find the complete interview here.

Watson was very clear throughout his life that health was an important component of his lifestyle. He wanted to outlive his critics, and he refused to put “poisons” into his body, including alcohol. So the genesis of the word vegan had both an ethical and a health component. Animal rights activists that live on processed foods and sodas are outside of Watson’s ideals, as are health food vegans that wear leather. Although, I suspect that this brilliant and compassionate man would have probably embraced both as seekers on the right path. Ideally we should all seek health and justice but the road is never straight. Regarding roads, even car tires aren’t vegan – so we can at most try our very best, but until the world changes, 100% vegan purity is a near impossibility. That’s why we should work towards that change together and avoid disparaging each other as not vegan enough.

The Vegan Voice is intended to promote vegan ideals but we acknowledge that the word means different things to different people. Whether someone is vegan for health, ethics, the environment, or religious reasons we believe that their choice is valid and they have the right to call themselves vegan. We personally try and follow a “nutritarian” style vegan diet. We consider ourselves “plant strong” vegans and eat a “WFPBD”. I find all the qualifiers unwieldy though, so usually we just call ourselves vegans. I don’t buy leather but my husband will, and since the term originally referred to dietary practices I consider him just as vegan as I am. Many people may disagree, but as I see it, the “more vegan than thou” attitude just creates divisiveness in the end. We are stronger if we stand together.

If you’d like to know more, here are some additional Resources:

Watson’s Obituary

Remembering Donald Watson from VegNews Magazine

The very first issue of The Vegan News from November 1944

The Health Care Crisis Solved

The Austin Lounge Lizards have a  point here. Besides being a terrific band, they may just be great modern day philosophers.

Check out this video of their song The Drugs I Need for the cure to our health care crisis - if the pharmaceutical companies had their way. 

Eating better and exercising are just way too hard. Progenitorivox is so much easier.
Even if it kills you.

Oven Baked Oil-free Tostada Shells! Oh yeah.

 

Just discovered these at the new Mexican grocery here in town. Yes, it’s relatively easy to bake tostada shells using corn tortillas, but  Sanissimo oven-baked corn tostadas are super convenient and totally tasty. We had some with Amy’s organic low salt refried black beans, chopped lettuce, fresh cilantro and Hell on the Red salsa last night and they were completely satisfying. They also don’t have a load of crazy hard to pronounce ingredients like most plain corn tortillas do at the regular grocer these days. Why plain corn tortillas need a roster of chemicals suddenly is beyond me. These are nice and simple.

Favorite Vegan Convenience Foods Exposed

Sometimes you just want something easy. If you can combine easy with delicious, better still. If you can mix a little healthy into that equation you’ve really hit the mark. Here are a few products we have discovered that do just that – with the added bonus of being available at regular retail outlets – even in our neck of the backwoods.

1. Evol Burritos come in two varieties that are vegan and several nasty non-vegan varieties. The delicious and wholesome vegan ones even have whole wheat tortillas wrapped around them. Other brands use mostly refined white flour. The Veggie Fajita is a spicy handful of delight and the Tofu and Spinach Saute is pretty tasty too. We’ve found them at Kroger, Drug Emporium and Whole Foods.

2. Next on the list is something that as Texans, we treasure. A healthy, low fat, lard free, tamale made right here in our state. The Texas Tamale Factory in Houston makes a number of other tamales not worth mentioning to vegans, but they have really hit a home run with their Black Bean tamales. Despite their checkered past we still love them. In the early days they used vegetable oil, then they switched to lard (ick!). When veg customers complained long and loud they switched to partially hydrogenated oil. Trans-fat! Needless to say we were still not happy. Eventually, they came to their senses and returned to using regular vegetable oil in their formula. Be sure and check the ingredients when you purchase these, because frozen foods can sit on the shelf for a long time, and some of the old formula could still be out there. We get these at Kroger but many other stores carry them and they can easily be ordered online.

3. How do you dress those burritos and tamales? You can’t just leave them naked! You can actually, and they’re delicious like that, but if you really want to take it to the next level, you need salsa. Another Texas favorite is Hell on The Red. The mild is as hot as most brands spicy, so keep your palate in mind when purchasing. We love spicy food but we always buy the mild as it has kick aplenty. Hell on the Red has no oil, no sugar, and very low sodium for a salsa. Which turned out to be a good thing, because it was Ed’s favorite brand already and we didn’t have to give it up when we began eating healthier. Lucked out on that one!

4. Leaving Texas roots for Italian influence we now travel to the land of eggplant. A food I always hated as a kid, not because I ever tried it, the name just creeped me out. Now that I’m vegan it’s the only “egg” that I eat. Irony abounds.  In the freezer section of many major grocers and also some health food stores you can find Dominex frozen breaded Italian style eggplant cutlets. Don’t be deceived by the grated cheese melted on the box cover. These are vegan deliciousness through and through. Not all of Dominex products are vegan but those that are usually say so on the front of the box. (Thanks Dominex! We vegans appreciate that.) Cook them a little longer and hotter than the instructions say for extra crispness and stack them with a great pasta sauce for a memorable Eggplant Marinara.

5. A luscious acompanyment to those eggplant cutlets is our all time favorite pasta sauce, Mom’s Garlic and Basil Spaghetti Sauce. As sublime as anything cooked at home, with the ease of opening a jar. Whole cloves of tender garlic and savory basil leaves give this sauce something that pureed store brands can never even hope to come close to. It’s available at Randall’s, Kroger, Whole Foods, and many independent heath food and gourmet stores.

Natural whole home prepared foods are the ideal but the reality is that plenty of relatively delicious convenience foods are available to us. A pantry and freezer that include some of these things make our lives simpler and allow us not to compromise our health or palates the way that fast food does. It still feels like I’m cheating a little when I eat this way but I take comfort in the fact that our cheats are healthier than most Americans regular fare.

Resolve to Inspire Others by Sharing What Inspired You.

Among the reasons we started this site was to be a resource for other vegans, a window into veganism for non-vegans and a way to let the world see who vegans really are. That’s what all those tabs under the title are about. Events, Food, Humor, Resources, The People Project – are intended to address those things. One thing we haven’t addressed – and didn’t think to in the beginning was our personal inspiration. We are all inspired in some way by something. There is a tremendous amount of resistance to our way of life. We need to have good reasons to go against the grain. We don’t commit to something that much of the rest of the world finds inscrutable for nothing. Something leads us here. It’s almost always knowledge. Many of us feel that once we learn the facts there is no other choice. Then why when we share the facts with others do they not come around and see things our way? They have a multitude of “reasons” I suppose, but none that ring true any longer to us. So it appears sometimes the facts aren’t always enough. We can also use our experiences to inspire others, and telling them what we experienced often strikes just the cord someone else needs to take the next step, or to keep going.

My husband Ed and I came from very different places, but we each arrived here together. Our paths crossed as the paths of so many do. He came from a conservative background, and I from a more liberal family.

Many of my relatives embraced vegetarianism early on and I too became vegetarian at 14, but my lack of knowledge and need to fit in combined, led me to resist becoming vegan for many years. His transition was instantaneous. Ironic that the more “liberal” of us spent more years fitting in than the “conservative”. Ed’s strong sense of right and wrong and his tremendous intellect allowed him to make a choice overnight, that I had wavered on for years. Those years I now regret, but as my journey inspired him, his too inspired me.

That is in part why we added the Personal Stories section under Vegan Voices, on the right side column. Please consider telling your story as a way to inspire others to choose vegan. Even when we know it’s the right thing, sometimes we need someone else to help show us the way.

Have a Happy, Healthy & Compassionate New Year.

Amanda (& Ed)