Taking a first bite of 21-day project
Editor’s note: This is the second in a series of articles about Kickstart Your Health Little Rock.
Because of a tear in the space-time fabric of the cosmos, I am on Day 2 of my 21day vegan diet but speaking to you from a point in the past. Such is the nature of print journalism. There’s a delay. For the printing part.
As a matter of fact, the words you are reading were first typed just minutes after I filled my belly with a pimento cheeseburger from Copper Grill. For all my browbeaten Catholic guilt over matters material, filial, carnal, never have I felt guilty about a big ol’ burger and I won’t start now.
No, I will start now. The now of the present.
I embarked Sunday, in fact, upon a 21-day vegan diet. All the soy-spun products of our nutrition-industrial complex, the whole grains and fresh plants born of seeds in fields — none of the cooked flesh and eggs and milks of beasts of field.
And what better month than February, whose entirety can be divided into four tidy quarters like a tofu and broccoli rabe quiche I may bake up tonight.
February, the month Romans reserved for performing rites of purification around their deceased. In my case, I’ll be right to purify myself of deceased animal in my tank.
VEGAN
The first time I actively ate a traditional meal modified for veganism was a few months ago. My fiancee made this spaghetti bolognese that leaned on chopped walnuts where my mother would have fried hamburger. The recipe also had some beans, shiitake mushrooms and maple syrup, I remember that. The mouthfeel of it is not quite like regular bolognese — drier, less chewy — but the taste is fresh. Tart, almost coppery, and sweet.
My fiancee has since lobbied for pescetarian dinners, and I have gone along with it. By now, as so many vegetarians and vegans report, I “no longer notice.”
But we do a lot with cheese and eggs. That will be harder abstinence. The umami of cheese is rich and irreplaceable.
Look around the so-called healthy section of the grocery. There are today plenty of meat substitutes (the best of which is the vegetarian burger — delicious whether you’re off meat or on), and almond and soy milks are pretty close proxies to the lactic ur-aliment.
There are no good cheese replacements.
COOKING CLASS
I’ve signed up for cooking class! I hope we learn to make vegan taco-in-a-bag.
Dr. Christie Beck, spearhead of the 21-day kick-start, cooked up a bean chili with braised kale Jan. 23 in the second-floor kitchen classroom inside the Hickingbotham building at Baptist Health Medical Center.
Beck asked her roughly 40 students to share their reasons for coming, and the answers ranged from “I signed up for a 13-week Biggest Loser class” to “I’m married but I don’t know how to cook.”
The two most popular answers were weight loss — “I’m a ballroom dancer. Nobody likes to see a fat ballroom dancer.” — and disease — “I have high blood pressure, cholesterol, and I can’t take statins.”
One woman said that she had chronic sinus infections that disappeared when she went off dairy. Now she wants to stretch her palate.
ANIMAL WELFARE?
“Man is the only animal that can remain on friendly terms with the victims he intends to eat until he eats them,” wrote the 19th-century satirist Samuel Butler who wrote The Way of All Flesh. A little bit of reading and you’ll definitely come across this quotation on animal-welfare blogs and sites.
(Butler was fond of imagining a time when machines would gain sentience and subjugate us, thus making chattel of their very creators.)
Anti-vivisection and animal welfare never appealed to me, and I’m certainly not interested in veganism to spare the death of a cow — should I be?
(Please, please post your answers below this story on our ArkansasOnline.com Web page. I’m in a friendly competition with Bradley Gitz. One more thing, Christmas is pagan.)
There’s this fellow in Atlanta, Peter Heimlich — son of the doctor whose “maneuver” now famously saves choking victims, or does it? — who has called me and emailed a few times and posted a blog rebuttal to my first story on the subject (“Project promotes 21-day vegan diet,” Jan. 19) warning that the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine’s real aim is disrupting the livestock industry and freeing lab rats.
It’s true I know very little about PCRM. It’s also true that this collection of nouns — physicians, committee, medicine — sit kind of inert in the brain like, say, national, socialist, workers, party. It’s possible this vegan kick-start may indeed shroud a targeted wish to end abattoirs and biomedial experimentation. OK. But a vegan diet isn’t a doctrine dropped by PCRM and litigiously guarded like Dianetics. It’s a crowd-sourced body of recipes distributed because they are tasty and, reportedly, healthy. Doctors and scientists not associated with PCRM are co-authors of studies published in well-read medical and nutrition journals that correlate plant-based diets with health improvements. I’ll buy that. I have an expanding waistline and sleep apnea and heart palpitations. I hope and believe that this diet will help at least one of those concerns. Maybe it won’t, but I can’t imagine suffering an infarction from my heart missing pork chops.
Veganism passes the eye test. When I was younger I watched my mother become an Atkins dieter. (She still avoids carbohydrates and replaces the calories with meats.) One meal she sat down to included two cans of green beans and a lightly charred steak sweating blood onto her plate. I don’t think that comports with Dr. Atkins’ conclusions about healthy eating, but still, that diet never passed my eye test.
If this vegan diet is bunk, I will only have cut my grocery bill some by avoiding expensive meats for three weeks. I will only have conserved energy (per food calorie, plants require far less energy to produce and distribute than animal products). I will only have to report back that I am wrong.
And I will.