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V-talk: vegan, vegetarian and verisimilitude

vuk said:
more than a quibble: extra-virgin olive oil should be the main choice here, not only for health reasons.
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nonsense

Nut oils can lift a dish and change its nature - walnut oil is delicious, macadamia nut oil is delicate. We also use cold pressed rape seed oil for salad, alongside atm a greek evoo and a Spanish one (they are so different)
 
windhoek said:
I'm sure I've read online - first mistake right there - that B12 from tablets can only be absorbed very slowly so that there's no point in taking more than two a week; a tablet a day makes for expensive piss. I've been taking B12 tablets twice a week for a few years as my meat intake had been low for years and now it's down to zero.
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If B12 absorbs slowly that's all the more reason to take it daily. The residence time for your gut is maybe 36 hours, average, so what hasn't gone in is flushed away. As for the cost, forget it. My multivitamins come from the supermarket at 120 for less than £1, they have 100% of B12 needed. One a day to mop up any shortcomings, and if I don't need it I've wasted 0.8p. I'll take that, most people in the north of the UK are low on vitamin D in the winter, especially those with dark skin.
 
jtrade said:
But why are you changing your diet in this way ?

(my 19 year old daughter has been vegan for 3 years, so I, her pescatarian father, support this by buying 95% vegan for the household. I strongly feel there is an environmental imperative for humanity to adopt a vegan diet & consider it a lack of consciousness on my own part that I have not quite done so. Lots more to write, but I’m out for the rest of the day. Btw, Quorn has egg white in it, unless you’re buying the new vegan Quorn which is still not available in NL)
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Quorn stuff contains egg white? I'll look out for that next time I go shopping.

As for why I've been changing my diet over the last six months or so, it boils down to animal welfare. I somehow ended up watching a video on YouTube that showed what goes on inside an abattoir. The video was horrific to watch, to say the least, and that was it as far as meat goes.

A friend of mine told me around that time that for all intents and purposes, there's no such thing as free-range eggs (unless you buy them from a micro-farm that only has six chickens or something like that). Apparently, free-range hens are housed (packed!) in barns that contain thousands of hens and although there are openings dotted around the barn here and there, chickens are so territorial that unless you're one of the chickens that lives next to an opening, you'll never see daylight in your life. And then there's issue of male chickens - what happens to them where they're born, and how bad must it be to be a chicken inside in a chicken-battery barn; as Youtube videos show, the quality of life is absolutely horrific.

I'd also seen a few videos of people and animals doing amusing stuff and I noticed that even fish have a personality of a sort. And the way we just pull them out of the sea in mass fishing is just bad news for the fish and sea life in general. And then you've got the way in which they die once they're out - sometimes it's quick, sometimes it's really appalling.

The more videos I watched the more I began to think about the food industry and next up was honey. How must it be to be a be that works it's butt off so that the hive can produce the honey it needs and then have that honey stolen and replaced with a sugar alternative. Not cool.

And then last week a work colleague told me something about milk. Something that should have been obvious to me but somehow it wasn't: cows only produce milk when they've been impregnated. For some reason, I assumed cows produce milk naturally and all we had to do was milk them in the morning. No. Cows are artificially inseminated throughout their child-bearing stage of life to make sure that they produce as much milk as possible. Apparently, they get a three-month respite between birth and the next insemination, but once they're no longer suitable for further insemination, that's it, game over - even though they could live for another 10 or 15 years or whatever. And then there's the issue of what happens to males when they're born! And baby calves are apparently separated from their mothers shortly after birth so that we can get the mother's milk.

All of which is to say mass-produced products that are- or contain meat or dairy (and fish and honey) are ethically dirty and I want nothing more to do with it.
 
There are 2 sorts of Quorn. One is veggie, contains egg, the other vegan, contains potato starch. The potato replaces the egg, or tries to. The functionality is, erm, limited.
 
windhoek said:
All of which is to say mass-produced products that are- or contain meat or dairy (and fish and honey) are ethically dirty and I want nothing more to do with it.
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Bravo.

More & more people - especially the younger generations - feel this way. Change is happening, although more for economic & environmental reasons (the lack of real concern about animal welfare globally is horrific, but every single individual who truly cares makes a difference).
 
I just finished off the last of the milk that was in the fridge to make my last cup of coffee with milk, which will probably be gone by the time I finish this sentence... yep, all gone. I've got 4 cartons of Alpro milk alternative at the ready, oat and almond flavours, so I'm all set for a few weeks. So that's me done as far as wet milk goes. I've still got a few single Twix bars in the cupboard plus there will be other stuff containing milk or eggs but, as I said before, I might as well consume it seeing as it's already out of the supply chain. But going forwards, dairy no more.

I've also popped into ASDA, Tesco, Co-op, Morrisons and Sainsbury's over the last few days to explore the 'free from' sections I'd normally skip to see what sort of stuff each store had to offer. It was a mixed bag. I liked Morrisons the best as they had a good range of choices and everything was in the same aisle, albeit some of the products weren't necessarily about being free from milk or eggs: sometimes it was about wheat or whatever. But still, I liked their layout. I wasn't too keen on ASDA as they didn't seem to have as wide a free from range as Morrisons. Plus it was a much bigger shop so I had to explore a much larger area to find what I was looking for. In a nutshell, I reckon I'll mostly be shopping at Tesco and Morrisons from now on.

Not counting fruit and veg, it turns out, everything is just a wee bit more expensive than their dairy equivalent, except Morrisons' vegan ice-cream which was only 80p per 500ml tub. I've tried vanilla flavour and I'll be trying the others for sure as the vanilla flavour is pretty good. The upside, however, is that I won't be buying as many biscuits, cakes and chocolate as I used to, so I'll save money on that side of things; vegan chocolate is okay but it's certainly not tasty enough to make me want to buy it all the time.

As for shopping in general, I noticed that a lot of stuff described as suitable for vegetarians contained milk and/or eggs; like some of the Quorn fake meat slices that Steve mentioned up-thread. Thankfully, Tesco three-bean chilli soup is suitable for vegans so it's good to go. But my choices are much more limited, which isn't necessarily a bad thing as it means I'll be eating processed food much less than before.

One last thing to mention is that I'm losing weight. I reckon my natural healthy weight should be somewhere between 10 stone 10 and 11 stone. I've been hovering around 11 stone 8 for ages now but I can tell I'm moving back towards 11 stone, so that's good; something I'd attribute to cutting way back on milk-based junk food more than anything.

So there we are. Still committed to not buying meat, fish, eggs, honey or dairy and so far so good :)
 
Good plan. I think the greatest benefit veggies and vegans get is a greater involvement in what they eat. They read labels, they think about what they are eating, and best of all they prep it themselves. I know very few obese people who prep their own food from basic ingredients. I suspect that so doing gives you an understanding of the constituents and helps with portion control.

Yes, I realise that there is an irony here given that I earn a living manufacturing food, but I think that there's a space for all this. I also know where my food comes from, I've been in dairy farms, worked in abattoirs, and I have killed animals for food, prepped and cooked them. Often these have been animals injured on the road, I ended their suffering. After that it's between taking it home and leaving it for the crows, and they can go and eat worms.
 
"vegan chocolate is okay but it's certainly not tasty enough to make me want to buy it all the time."
Most high quality dark chocolate is vegan.Most of it excellent,there is loads of choice out there.
Booja=Booja etc.
 
I’ve not eaten meat for about 35 years.

Cooking with fresh ingredients is key to avoiding processed food and gaining control over what you’re eating.

Rather than trying to replace/ substitute meat, I’ve found investigating and learning about recipes from across the world really rewarding, with Mexican, Persian, Indian and some Italian my own favourites.
 
crimsondonkey said:
Rather than trying to replace/ substitute meat, I’ve found investigating and learning about recipes from across the world really rewarding, with Mexican, Persian, Indian and some Italian my own favourites.
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I'm with you on this. I do eat meat but on days when I don't want to I have no desire to eat something that looks like bacon but isn't. Chickpeas are great. They are great as chickpeas, great as falafels, great as hummus. Turned into a quasi chicken burger? Nah.
 
Concerning milk substitutes in hot drinks, I have found that the more expensive “barista” versions, designed to be foamed without breaking down, are vastly superior in both taste & texture to the regular ones (which are fine for cereal, smoothies etc).

My favourite by far is Oatleys Barista, which is an oat milk & twice the price of dairy, but - amazingly - I now greatly prefer its taste in tea ...but for my cappuccino in an Italian piazza... still dairy milk, I regret (although Oatleys barista at home).
 
stevec67 said:
I'm with you on this. I do eat meat but on days when I don't want to I have no desire to eat something that looks like bacon but isn't. Chickpeas are great. They are great as chickpeas, great as falafels, great as hummus. Turned into a quasi chicken burger? Nah.
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Agree ... except for the new generation of high-tech burgers : Beyond Burger & Incredible Burger are my favourites , though new ones are coming on the market. They are expensive , but supply is increasing & prices will eventually come down to match the price of meat (will take quite a few years, I’d guess).

Interestingly, my vegan daughter prefers the old fashioned vegetable burgers and quinoa burgers : she doesn’t really like products designed to taste like meat, which she has never eaten.
 
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