I agree that it's lame that so many prepared foods have either non-vegan ingredients in them (like, say, whey solids in crackers) or non-vegetarian ingredients in them (say, gelatin in yogurt). It, too, is a product of the industrialization of foodstuffs. Most of this junk is for shelf life and texture. I read a creepy article (in the New Yorker, I think) about all of the combinations of inert gases used to fill bags of fancy salad mixes for shipping across country.

I would like to drop some props for Bragg's apple cider vinegar. being a huge fan of apple cider vinegar i can say this stuff tastes great--more like apples! Plus it's got the nice cloudy mother in it.

what kinds of cheese do you make, phidauex? i know i can get veg. rennet from new england cheesemakers supply, but i've yet to make cheese that requires it...i'm still in the soft cheeses, using culture only.

I'm just getting into the cheese making thing myself. We've made chevre, and queso blanco mostly. I'd like to get into mozzarella making, since its not super difficult, and its my favorite type of young cheese. I took a cheese making class recently, and it was a good time. We used only vegetable rennet in the class, and the teacher said that many cheesemakers actually prefer it for its cheese-making properties, in addition to its more animal-friendly nature.

peace,
sam

As a result of this discussion, today I made arrangements to buy a trailer off someone and I'm making a commitment to do weekly shopping at the haymarket. It's something I've been meaning to do for a while but just have never gotten around to. In theory it should be easy for me to eat healthier since I'll take on anything that doesn't move fast enough.

that's awesome! (and congrats on your avatar, it's great, if a little asstonishing).

meat eating hippie-environmentalist. i didnt eat meat for 13 yrs and then my accupuncturist told we to eat nothing but red meat, which i did for a while and bulked up (i was thin as a rail). now it is more balanced, lots of fish. all organic, all the time - which to me is the ethical/political issue food wise, how it is produced more than what it is.

i would be interested in reading that article. but you know, you ought not be creeped out by inert gases - they are inert, after all.

shelf life and texture are very important in manufacturing processed foods. i think the overarching principle is for the production of these stuffs to be automated, and for every batch to turn out the same. so whether you buy that twinkie in bangor or bakersfield, it is exactly what you expected. that cannot be done without a considerable amount of planning and science.

there is a hippie-like cooperative bakery in my neighborhood that makes their own version of the hostess ding dong. every one is a little different, but boy oh boy are they delicious!!

evan nyc: thanks for the heads-up on those bands...i've been a little out of the loop.

creepy, though...i, too, am studying to be a teacher. it's almost enough to make me want to stop talking to you before i find out we have more in common. but i'm nicer than all that.

was kirsch in yaphet kotto? i could never quite get into them.

nah, kirsch wasn't in yaphet kotto, although mag from YK was in bread and circuits with him. early on YK was amazing live, and the first lp is pretty good, but everything after that was a step down, and the latest one is terrible.

teaching is awesome. i did it for the past 3 years, but i'm heading back to school this year for a second masters, this one in counseling. good luck with the studies!

haha this has gotten so far off topic... what happened to that music post?

seems to me that i remember the guitars being kind of out of tune on that first YK lp, but it's been a long time since I heard it.

oh, and as far as veganism and eating habits (bringing things around again), I will admit a weakness for fake meats.

yaphet kotto, pfft... new jacks.... go listen to some indian summer.

ps. the Please Inform the Captain this is a Hijack lp I have is amazing, glad to see I'm not the only one who knows who they are (or maybe no one's listenning to them in the circles that I run).

vegan here. not for health reasons - in our society today there is no reason or excuse for eating the products of animal torture and slaughter. We have gone beyond that. we can get everything our bodies need from non-animal sources. a vegan nowadays can go to sleep with a bellyfull of fake steak and ice cream and feel healthier and more ethical than ever. it's easy to eat what you want and what will make you feel good.

in NYC there's a place called may wah that's amazing as far as fake meats go. they basically supply all the "fake meat" veggie restaurants around here and i think through most of the northeast. it's insane, they has stuff like fake eel, fake intestine... on the 4th of july we stocked up there for a barbeque and had some delicious drum sticks, barbeque shrimp, salmon, and shrimp rolls. sooo good. haha definately not healthy though.

yeah science. so with 165 (the magic number) persons responding we have nearly 15% claiming to be vegan, and another 20% vegetarians. even if you account for some rather obvious sample bias (for example, vegans being more likely to respond and vote) that still seems to be an above average rate of veganism/vegetarianism. the connection to fixed gear riding is entirely conjecture, and possibly uninteresting. but pass the dofu all the same.

Unfortunately, we still need to raise animals to use their manure for fertilizer. It's either that or use natural gas and petroleum products.

Before the 20th century, beef was mostly a product of keeping a cow in milk, so we could eat the milk and the calves and also feed the excess milk to the pigs, and raise the chickens on the excess cow manure and then spread the collected compost on the fields in fallow. I know, torture and slaughter. Things die. Their deaths make the lives of others possible. It's how the world works.

I agree wholeheartedly that the beef industry is unnecessary, poisonous, and evil. but believing in fake steak as more ethical is like believing that hydrogen fuel cells are going to allow us to keep driving after oil becomes too expensive.

Veganism, and the general belief that you can simply "be better" by choosing a particular path of consumption, is simply another product of the oil economy, and our separation from foodways and actual natural resources. Tofu and fake hot dogs and skittles all rely on massive oil-fueled transport and chemical-manufacturing infrastructures, among other modern evils/poisons.

Read Wendell Berry, he's a much better writer than I am, and less enflamed/frustrated. Also James Howard Kunstler, who is a better writer than me but even more enflamed.

Or just ignore me, and go on doing what you're doing. It certainly beats eating factory-farmed meats and shopping at 7-11. I'm not telling you it's wrong, I'm just telling you there's more to it than you think. Read Wendell Berry anyway--he's brilliant and will expand your perspective.

dude, when was the last time you went to the garden store? you can totally garden without relying on either animal or gas/petroleum products.

i agree that our entire economic/commerce system is very messed up and reliant on oil, but tofu is no more the culprit than say, bicycle inner tubes, right? it seems to me that when up against such a goliath, doing the best we can to tread lightly is sometimes all that we can do.

------

i saw still life once, does that count for anything? sure, it's not indian summer or moss icon, but still, i must get some mid-nineties emo cred for that.

i saw still life, bread and circuits, yaphet kotto, former members of alfonsin, reversal of man, combatwoundedveteran and several more bands all at one show! che fest 99!

okay, you win. but that still life show was in a basement...

now go read my thread about getting grips on my bars and see if you can help me out.

haha, seeing still life was amazing. they played a short acoustic set as well. it was rad cause they are basically the band that got me into this stuff... che fest was rad cause the che is a nice cozy venue.

plus indian summer is over rated!

I am aware that gardening is possible without gas or petroleum products. Are you saying there's a fertilizer available that is natural and doesn't contain animals or animal products in it? Check again. maybe I'm wrong but most organic fertilizers are, largely, manure (chicken manure mostly--it's crazy with nitrogen). Here on the tiny homestead we fertilize using crop rotation, legumes, mixed cover crops, and composted (mostly vegetarian) kitchen waste, as well as our beloved chicken manure and dry waste mucked out from the chicken coop.

Anyway, I don't wanna argue the nuances of what's available at the garden store. I'm talking about food production on a society-wide scale. We agree that treading lightly is a good idea, and we are all finding our ways to do it. I think that's the most important thing.

The production of food and its relationship to soil fertility is of great spiritual and practical importance to me. I could talk about it forever, in case that's not painfully obvious; but I shall leave it at that, and close by offering some more specific recommendations from my earlier rant, for anyone who may be interested in learning more about traditional food production, petroleum usage in agriculture, and the way it relates to our society.

Wendell Berry "The Unsettling of America" Sierra Club Books, 1977
James Howard Kunstler "The Long Emergency" Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005
Richard Manning "The Oil We Eat," originally an article in Harper's: https://www.wesjones.com/oilweeat.htm
A very enriching discussion of community production hidden in a recipe for ginger beer: https://www.westonaprice.org/foodfeatures/Realthing.html
An eye-opening treatise on the need for animal fertility in vegetable farming: https://www.westonaprice.org/farming/wasteland.html

moss icon has cred? i remember i was running a tiny distro in Colorado in 1988 and they were the first band to send us vinyl. I liked em. Didnt know they'd gone on to notoriety though.

haha yeah moss icon's got all kindsa cred. certain records are very sought after. they did a reunion a few years back and were reportedly terrible live, but i heard they were originally terrible live so i guess nothing changed.

weed eater - just checked out the urban homestead site and i really dig it, although i have to say i was rather disturbed by the adorable and affectionate pictures of the chicks followed immediately by a moroccan chicken recipe.

oh, yeah, well. that was an unintended (i swear!) bit of tough love. my mom got a little freaked out too. maybe i should switch the date of the recipe so it's closer to the preserved lemons recipe it uses (and further from the other "ingredients" )

thanks for the props

--patrick

edit: ok, i moved it slightly but now the chicks precede my "where do you get your meat" rant. ummm...a little better, I think, but, there's just no escaping it. chicks are cute, then later we eat them. that is one of the many things our blog is about.

I like how the adjective normal was placed in parenthes next to omnivorous... it might be normal for you to make careless decisions resulting in the gruesome treatment of animals, because your taste buds can't live without the taste of murdered flesh... it might have been normal thousands of years ago when we were living in caves barely surviving, but now we have the luxury to think about our choices, and I think it's the furthest thing from normal to feel comfortable giving KFC your money for a bucket of dead n fried flesh.

c'mon, now that's just trolling...