Vegetarian Star

Michael Pollan is a hit or miss with vegetarians.

Not a veg himself, he lost even more popularity points by calling the vegans neurotic.

But he does call for an end to excessive fast food, less consumption of meat and a return to the kitchen to cook your own food.

That includes your own junk food.

In an interview with the New York Times, Michael discusses one his latest book, Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual, and shares one rule about eating junk food.

“Eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself.” That gets at a lot of our issues. I love French fries, and I also know if I ate French fries every day it would not be a good thing. One of our problems is that foods that are labor or money intensive have gotten very cheap and easy to procure. French fries are a great example. They are a tremendous pain to make. Wash the potatoes, fry potatoes, get rid of the oil, clean up the mess. If you made them yourself you’d have them about once a month, and that’s probably about right. The fact that labor has been removed from special occasion food has made us treat it as everyday food. One way to curb that and still enjoy those foods is to make them. Try to make your own Twinkie. I don’t even know if you can. I imagine it would be pretty difficult. How do you get the cream in there?”

Hey, if the producers of Zombieland can make a vegan Twinkie for Woody Harrelson, it’s worth a try at home!

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“School cafeterias serve chicken “McNuggets” and give kids 10 minutes to eat, educating them to be the next generation of fast-food eaters. We need to give kids good food and enough time to eat it, teach them where food comes from, and provide them with opportunities to grow the food in school gardens and cook it in school kitchens. Knowing how to cook is an essential skill. Parents can also get their kids involved in cooking. They need to take back control of their kids’ diets, which has been ceded to food marketers. [Parents] need to be the gatekeepers.”

—-Michael Pollan, author of In Defense of Food and The Omnnivore’s Dilemma, in an interview with Vegetarian Times.

Although Pollan isn’t vegetarian, he has recommended we eat less meat and begins In Defense of Food with the following statement: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

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Last March, Michael Pollan asked readers of the New York Times Well blog to submit rules for healthy eating habits.

After over 2,600 responses were taken, Pollan picked his favorites.

We’re liking some of the responses, like not leaving the table until you’ve finished your fruit.

However, we’d have to disagree with reader submitted rule #6:

“Never eat something that is pretending to be something else; eg., no “texturized vegetable protein” or veggie burgers (fake meat), no artificial sweeteners, no margarine (fake butter), no “low fat” sour cream, no turkey bacon, no “chocolate flavored sauce” that doesn’t contain chocolate, no Quorn. If I want something that doesn’t taste like meat or butter, I would rather have the real thing than some chemical concoction pretending to be healthy.”

We beg to differ on some of those items.

Take a Boca Burger versus a McDonald’s Happy Meal burger, for example.

The Happy Meal burger contains these stats:
275 calories
106 fat calories with 11.8 grams of total fat
35 mgs of cholesterol
387 mgs of sodium
30.5 grams of total carbohydrates
12.3 grams of protein
6% of daily calcium
13% of daily iron.

In contrast, the Boca Burger’s numbers are the following:
90 calories
25 fat calories and only 3 grams of total fat.
5 mgs of cholesterol
280 mgs of sodium
320 mgs of potassium
4 grams of total carbohydrates
3 grams of dietary fiber
14 grams of protein
15% of daily calcium
10% of daily iron

Looks like this “faker” Boca Burger pretending to be real is clearly the better option.

For the entire list of Pollan’s favorite reader submitted rules, visit nytimes.com.

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In Defense of Food author Michael Pollan is outspoken improving health through better food.

He believes in less fast food, cooking at home more often, and everything in moderation.

He does not, however, believe in a vegan diet.

From isthmus.com:

That’s a very similar argument to what Karen Dawn makes, that if you’re too hardcore about a vegan diet you lose people.
“That’s right. I don’t want people to lose track of the fact that pleasure is a very important part of this, and being neurotic about eating is not good for your health. You know, there’s a great M.F.K. Fisher quote: “All things in moderation, including moderation.” I think she’s got the right idea.”

Granted, not everyone is gung ho about cutting all animal products from their lives.

But eating vegan isn’t pleasurable? Vegans are neurotic?

Pft!

Pollan’s starting to sound like Giles Coren.

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Tony Gonzalez insists that his success on the football field is most closely tied with adopting “vegan principles,” according to usatoday.com.

Not a complete vegan-not even a complete vegetarian-Gonzalez still eats seafood and chicken occasionally, but has given red meat the permanent punt off his plate.

“You have to put good stuff in your body. Everybody should, but especially athletes. We’re high-performance machines. You wouldn’t put regular gas in a race car. Jimmie Johnson is going to put the high-octane, good stuff in there. It’s the same thing for football players. You’d be surprised by how many players don’t do it. But I’ve seen the results.”

Tony’s trying to get the wifey on board too, but she’s not the best willing participant.

Uh-oh.

Does she need a Skinny Bitch to keep her in line?

“She’s having trouble. When I cook, she’s eating good. But if she has to do it on her own, she might not make the best choices.”

Tony made the switch to a mainly vegetarian diet after sitting next to a man who ordered a vegan meal on a plane flight and bugging the heck out of him with questions, which led Tony to read The China Study, which outlines how diseases that drive health care costs up can be prevented with a plant based diet.

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Hey you flexitarians out there!

Congratulations for the making the choice to improve your health, save animals, and lessen the environmental impact of the livestock industry on planet Earth.

New York Times columnist and food writer Mark Bittman, who’s been advocating a vegan until dinner type approach, has given the UK Times online some tips for those who want to cut the meat from their diet.

“My ‘vegan before 6pm’ approach is just one way of doing it. Indeed, the opposite schedule — eating your heaviest meal of the day for lunch or breakfast — may make more sense to you,” Bittman said. “You can opt out of two servings of meat a week. You can start the day with oatmeal instead of bacon and eggs. My guess is that 70% of my calories now come from non-animal sources. A shift of 50% would be significant for anyone.”

“The basic line is this: no matter how you do it, you [and the planet] will benefit if you eat a higher proportion of plants and a lower proportion of everything else.”

Visit the Times online to read an excerpt from Mark’s book, Food Matters, where Mark recommends taking a B vitamin supplement and gives sample meal plans.

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kentgoldman on Flickr

Those of you who follow the religious sect known as treehugger.com know Graham Hill is the smart, environment lovin’ chap who founded the website for all the latest green news and information.

Although Graham isn’t a complete vegetarian, he flexes and calls himself a “weekday vegetarian,”-saving the bacon for Sunday brunch.

Eating vegetarian at least during the week is just one of the ways Graham recommends going greener.

He also shops at his local farmers’ market and buys organic produce.

And don’t worry, you big city dwellers, who think because you’re living the fast paced life, you’re being too rough on the planet.

Graham thinks cities are greener because more people use public transportation or bike and apartments are smaller, so there’s less room to fill up with useless junk. Plus, there’s a plethora of organic shops to frequent on every corner.

“You can find some weird vegan bakery, if you want to,” Hill said.

Before you run off to locate that vegan bakery with weirdos, read the rest of Graham’s feature story at the observer.com.

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Dxede5x on Wikimedia Commons

Kathy Freston blogged about the benefits of skipping chicken once a week on the environment and Vienna Teng is living that example. 

During a recent interview with laist.com, the New York based pianist and singer-songwriter said she finds it hard to be a complete vegetarian (she says she loves Southern fried chicken too much), but agrees with the principles and tries to flex when possible.

“I don’t know LA all that well, but I do love this vegan restaurant, Real Food Daily, in Santa Monica. When I was recording Dreaming Through the Noise, I randomly decided that I was going to be a vegetarian. I basically agree with vegetarianism in principle but I don’t have the willpower to do it long-term. I’ve just been trying to do it in short stretches, and that was one of them. So when I was recording that album in Santa Monica, I probably went to RFD five times a week. I love their bacon cheeseburger!”

Here’s Vienna in her music video “Gravity,” from the album, Waking Hour.

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