What vegans eat
I spent a long time as a lacto-ovo vegetarian aspiring to go vegan but intimidated by the perception that there wasn't much to eat as a vegan (perhaps the same perception that omnivores have about lacto-ovo vegetarianism). One thing that comforted me in becoming vegan was the observation that my lacto-ovo vegetarian diet was already about 80% vegan (with the main exceptions being dessert foods, nachos, and pizza).
I'm sure there are a lot of other people who think veganism and lacto-ovo vegetarianism are good ideas but who are deterred from actually adopting them by the "nothing to eat" idea. For a while, I've been thinking about putting up a website with examples of things that I eat as a vegan to try to reassure people that there's a great diversity of good food available without animal ingredients. This is especially true in a wealthy modern multicultural society where we have a number of raw ingredients and news of cuisines that would probably have been impossible to imagine just 20 or 30 years ago, and is probably still unimaginable to many people around the world.
Nicol pointed out to me over the weekend that PETA has put up a web site with a superficially similar plan -- to convey the idea that lots of familiar foods are actually vegan. Their site is called I Can't Believe It's Vegan! and shows pictures of some foods that happen to be vegan.
The bizarre thing about the I Can't Believe It's Vegan site (hereinafter "ICBIV") is that pretty much all the foods shown are highly processed packaged junk foods from major companies like Kraft, Nabisco, Post, and so on. The message of the site seems to be that you don't have to give up these familiar packaged foods when you go vegan (and that, if you eat a lot of junk food, much of your diet is already vegan).
Now this is perfectly true, and nobody should know this better than I, since I eat a fair amount of junk food, and since I've long been impressed with just how much junk food turns out to be vegan. Junk food as a category is just not something that vegans have to give up. On the other hand, the main reason that junk food is vegan is often because so many of the ingredients are artificial and are not from any biological source whatsoever, at least not in the form in which it would be found in nature. There are lots of jokes about this even among non-vegans. There are examples of processed foods that are sold based on the idea that they are meat-flavored and turn out not to contain any meat, because the meat flavors are derived from artificial flavorings. Praveen suggests that some of the meat flavors of Top Ramen, for example, actually contain no meat at all. One can imagine a future vegan version of Cheetos or Cheez-wiz, because what, after all, do these products gain from actually including real dairy cheese? It sure doesn't taste like cheese anymore...
But I don't think the idea that Top Ramen is maybe secretly vegan is going to turn out to be a very exciting selling point for veganism -- and neither do I think ICBIV is a helpful contribution on this score. It's not that I think people shouldn't eat artificial flavors or processed foods. It's just that the foods pictured on the ICBIV site are almost without exception (1) not nutritious and (2) not foods that readers are likely to hold in high esteem as "good food". If you were to construct a vegan diet out of the things that the woman on the front page of ICBIV seems about to hug, you might actually get scurvy or some other nutritional disorder -- because you would be eating cookies, crackers, and chips all day long. Who considers these foods the mainstays of an appealing or interesting diet?
I keep reading about people in the inner city, lacking sources of fresh produce, becoming malnourished by subsisting on food from convenience stores and liquor stores. But now we know that some of them are probably accidentally eating vegan without even knowing it.
ICBIV feels like a weird love letter to the big processed food companies: See, we knew you guys could come up with something vegan in your product lines! Yay!
To repeat: I eat junk food, artificial flavors, and processed foods. I eat a lot of carbohydrates. I like eating these things. I'm glad that many of them are made without animal products. But I can't understand why anyone would use that fact as the centerpiece of any kind of vegan advocacy. As the sum total of a diet, these things are not glamorous or interesting or healthy.
Today I ate Thai food and Mediterranean food; Friday I made sandwiches with 15 ingredients. In addition to Thai and Mediterranean, I regularly eat at Ethiopian, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Italian, Vietnamese, and Mexican restaurants, as well as soup/salad/sandwich and vegetarian restaurants. (As a lacto-ovo vegetarian, I also ate other Central American and South American food and had an easier time with Mexican food than I do now.) Although my diet is habit-influenced and could be quite a bit better balanced than it is, it isn't in the least boring or impoverished. I'd like to make a web site that shows off things like these; it feels like almost the opposite project of ICBIV. It would also be a great excuse to try new foods.
