Unexpected treasures, or: I travel and discover gems

Mr Sam U.L. Chihuahua, my furbaby number three, is a star. Buzz and I took him down to Foster to be filmed for a TV show, dressed like a sparklyfairypinkygirl, and he behaved so so beautifully that his mother nearly burst with pride.

In the hours between arrival and filming, as is the way with television, Buzz and I retired to the nearest cafe which looked like somewhere where we could park ourselves comfortably for a while. We found The Source Cafe and settled in.

The Source has a strong and loudly proclaimed emphasis on fairtrade, organic and local produce, and displays inside all sorts of community notices and boutique products for sale. We were beyond relieved to discover that the coffee was very nice indeed, after a pretty dismal effort in a small town en route (sample conversation: "Where are you off to today?" "We're going to Foster." "What do you want to go there for, cold grey end of the earth ... like here!").


Best, though, was the lovely chef. She came out to discuss my order with me, noting down what she would cook and telling me that the bread was definitely vegan because she baked it herself.

And what bread it was! Light and crunchy, but not in a hollow way (I'm speaking to you, Flinders Bread), golden and tasting like ... real bread. Buzz's was soggier as his mushrooms and other items were pile don top, but mine remained tasting of something like harvests, hot stone ovens and aprons with flour all down the front.


It was served with what turned out to be an incredibly creditable cooked breakfast. In fact, it rated up there with some of my best breakies. Generous, fresh, each element tasting of itself, and with no scrubby little servings of one thing or another.


Inside The Source along the walls are many many awards for chutneys, jams, marmalades and other sort of preserves, and I assume that it was from these hands that the lovely light chutney on the side of my breakfast came. It was almost mangoey; like a palate cleanser between the oil gently coating the vegetables.


The baked beans were served with a fresh clean tomato and onion sauce which I think must also come from her, and unlike many non-tinned baked beans which are thick, red, saucey and heavy (and very good in their own way), these were almost a summer style bean with a delicate and soft flavour.


Each of the vegetables - tomato, mushroom, avocado and spinach - was served in generous portions and tasted of fresh, hand-cut produce (you know what I mean by a hand-cut taste; if not, please do the following: buy some fresh field mushrooms and a plastic packet of pre-sliced buttons. Eat one of each. The pre-sliced have lost something, some nutrient vitality which evaporates after slicing).


This was a tasty, hearty, delicate and real cooked breakfast, and by real I mean that it was real food cooked well by a real person in a brave cafe on a rainy monday in South Gippsland. I didn't expect to find it but it made the six hour wait for filming on that cold drizzly Monday very warm and comfortable, and I enjoyed it very much. Salut!

Further to Schmappy Schmeat - schomething I forgot to add

One thing I forgot to write in my post below (it was late, I’d been thrashed at the gym …gimme break!) was that I do see some role for happy meat (or, as I have decided to call it permanently, schmappy schmeat. It's so sch that it deserves two schs). A teensyweensytinywee role, but in existence.

There are some people who are just never going to stop eating meat. Never. Nuparoonie. They just won’t. If they start choosing happy meat then at the very very least they are actively thinking about and making choices with their food, rather than obliviously buying whatever is cheapest or tastiest without regard to the environment, their health or even the origin of their food (obviously no offence intended to people who buy the cheapest cut out of financial necessity. I'm not talking about you really. But you could totally be vegan and not spend more money. More on that another time I think).

Anything that reduces the reliance on CAFOs is something. I would prefer that the obdurate omnivore had some awareness of the context in which they shop and eat, and made a choice that was in some way informed, than condemn all happy meat of out of hand. Babysteps.

In this way, I suppose I am supporting a welfarist approach. I haven’t yet written about my position on the AR/welfare split, suffice it to say that I am AR supporting welfare. Although my own decisions are based on a simple AR position (that I have no right to take life and that each creature has the right to their own, rather than a more complex argument encompassing liberation theology or opposition to welfare measures), I support welfare initiatives and believe that they are worthy and useful. They are worthy because they reduce suffering. They are useful because they do raise awareness within people who may not otherwise stop to think, and I do not believe that they are placatory and thus anti-animal. Oaks, acorns, and all that.

I also find a welfare position the most effective when trying to explain my veganism to people unfamiliar with it – while most people reject the idea that we have no right to kill animals (even if we can bring ourselves to do it ourselves! An argument I abhor), they will respond to a discussion about cruel treatment of animals as it is less confrontational to their own choices, and connects with their own experience of pets. I don’t think this is a cop out at all – it is using the best form of dialogue in the circumstances to encourage thought and connection.

So back to the point – happy meat has some benefits when linked to a welfare perspective, which when used in a particular way can be effective, and that’s better than a slap in the face with a wet fish.

But it doesn’t make it right. Or happy.

Happy meat, schmappy schmeat, or: No such thing!

The Age has continued its slightly right but mostly wrong series on non-meat eating. Today's offering, "Who Needs Meat" by Nikki Fisher, gives the impression that vegetarianism is a grand new adventure, something a little bit craaaazy that the general public might be amused to read about. Those craaaazy kids! Next they'll be stuffing phone booths and having midnight feasts on campus and driving down to the lake in that old jalopy! Gee whiz!

The article begins promisingly, with:

WHEN trainee book editor Jane Winning first stopped eating meat eight years ago, she was motivated by a concern for animals and the way they died. Today it is a way of life for Winning, a keen cook who lives in Melbourne's inner north and shops for fresh produce regularly at Footscray and Preston markets.

Snaps to Jane! Jane continued the good work:

More recently, she has become aware of the toll that meat consumption takes on the environment. She says that after being a vegetarian for a couple of years, she discovered the work of Australian ethicist Peter Singer, who wrote the influential book Animal Liberation and later co-wrote The Ethics of What We Eat.

So far, so good. The article sets up the animal rights/welfare concerns like a flick of a left jab, follows it up with a solid right hook of the environment, and finishes off with a one-two combo of globalism and health benefits. That there's some teeth on the floor!

Winning typifies a growing awareness of how our food choices have a global impact. Coupled with the health benefits of reducing meat consumption, it is changing perceptions of vegetarian cuisine and who eats it. The mung-bean-munching whiff of hippiedom has gone; today's vegetarians match pinot gris with terrine of baby heritage tomatoes and sage and goat's cheese mousse. And they satisfy their consciences to boot.

And floating like a butterfly, stinging like a bee, Fisher delivers this one:

For those who have made the change or are moving towards it, the sophisticated vegetarian palate is well sated. Take Jacques Reymond's restaurant, for example, where you might sit down to a zucchini flower spiced with Japanese sancho pepper and cooked in lighter-than-air tempura batter, enhanced by the contrasting textures and flavours of cauliflower and horseradish dressing and sweet, slightly acidic beetroot glaze. Or perhaps tender white asparagus paired with green pea and mint puree and citrus emulsion.Hungry?

My goodness lordy lordy me, yes. Following comments from Vue du Monde echo the commitments of some of Melbourne's best dining rooms to non-meat cooking.

So how did it end up with our hero being KOd? Unfortunately Fisher appears to have wandered astray and taken the environmental route to the detriment of any meaningful discussion of why else people may choose to avoid meat. Like previous articles in The Age, this one completely fails to interrogate the assumption (or even recognise its existence) about the validity of eating meat in the first place. This is compounded by the linking of otherwise valid environmental concerns to the 'happy meat' argument:

Book editor Winning agrees. She says she knows several people who had been vegetarian for environmental reasons but now eat kangaroo meat and free-range organic chicken because "the farming of these animals doesn't have nearly as negative an effect on the environment as the farming of cattle does".

and:

CARMEN Bateson, part-time food co-ordinator at Friends of the Earth cafe in Collingwood, eats meat occasionally, but it must be wild, organic or biodynamic.

I am always naively shocked by things like this. I know that many people's prime reason for being veg*n is environmental. For many animal or health issues come second, and I'm cool with that. But to feel that 'happy meat' so ameliorates all those ethical concerns that it's ok to chow down on kangaroos whose joeys may have been clubbed to death in the pouch, or on cows who may have led exactly the same existence as the ones who ended up in Big Macs except for the lack of chemicals in their feed, astonishes me. Happy meat is not ethical. It may be environmentally nicer, but the fact remains it doesn't guarantee any humanity in the life or death of creature killed, it still requires the death of living being, and I think that if you care enough about the environment to want to eat flesh that when alive hadn't consumed chemical feed, you should probably care a bit about the animal too. Eating happy meat means that you don't. At all. So just call yourself a chemical-free eater, not an 'ethical meat eater'.

I also found that the article presented vegetarianism like I imagine it was sometime in the early 1980s - tricky, unusual and at odds with the general population (oops, that's veganism!). Comments like these ones don't really do much to embed vegetarianism in the normal operaiton of society:

Winton cites gastro-pubs as being the worst offenders for offering the vegetarian little beyond a bowl of chips.

Winton again:

"Unfortunately some vegetarian restaurants give vegetarian food a bad name by serving bland food with no texture," Winton says. "I wouldn't expect my friends, who all eat meat, to go to a vegetarian restaurant - even a good one - so I go to a lot of non-vegetarian restaurants and wish their menus were more balanced."

In 17 years of vegetarianism across three continents I never, ever had to eat just a bowl of chips (and again ... that's veganism!). Sure, many pubs have little to offer, and many restaurants appear not to have let the 1980s with their veggie dishes, but just chips? Surely not. More to the point, though, is that these comments are not exactly welcoming or encouraging. A lot of would-be veggies are apprehensive about how they would manage their new choices in environments where they have previously relied on, say, a parma. Hearing that there's a lot of bad food out there (as though every meat dish necessarily tastes like manna mixed with ambrosia) and that friends shouldn't be expected to visit vegetarian restaurants - even good ones! - could be pretty disheartening.

Some sensible comments about health, such as this one by Dave Hughes:

Hughes says his motivations for abandoning meat were health and the environment. "I read that red meat can be linked to bowel problems. I haven't studied all the science, of course,but it made sense to me. Some of my family members had issues with bowel cancer ... once I get something in my head I just go with it."

were great. But some others made me gnash my teeth in grrrargh frustration:

"I'm no purist though," says Gowing. "If I feel like I need to eat some meat, I do."

In my year 8 Commerce class Mrs Eng taught us the difference between a need and a want. Guess which is which. Just admit you want it because you want it.

Nonetheless, the article presented a number of positive comments, although I note that most were made by people who have been involved in the vegetarian world for some time, or who really consider the beauty of cooking:

Paul Mathis, who opened Soulmama in St Kilda in 2002, has seen big changes in the business, especially in the diners at his dedicated vegetarian restaurant. "We get big, brutish men coming in now; we didn't have that six years ago," he says.

Mathis believes environmental concerns have sparked the shift. "Reasons to eat less meat are becoming clearer to more and more people through the general media..."

and

Beh Kim Un, chef and co-owner of Carlton's Shakahari, attributes the restaurant's success over more than three decades (it is the only vegetarian restaurant consistently included in The Age Good Food Guide) to its light-hearted approach to vegetarianism and food that balances vegetarian protein and texture in a mainstream way.

"Today 80 per cent of our customers are non-vegetarian; they come to Shakahari to supplement their meat diets," he says. This includes more men and people with environmental concerns.

Un brings produce from his organic farm outside Kyneton to the Shakahari kitchen. "If you have a good apple or beans you don't have to do much, and you don't crave anything else when you eat nutritious food," he says.

This is the other thing that Beh Kim Un said, and I think it deserves italics:

"The food touches people's psyche and they don't know why it is so good."

I might suggest that people who choose not to eat meat do know why, but that the universality of eating food that is as good for you as it is simply good, is a powerful thing.

So, let's get over the happy meat thing. It's okeydokey to be a veg*n whose prime motivator is the environment or health rather than the animals. But this doesn't mean that happy meat is cool. Or that vegetrianism is hard. Or that you should get all pretendy about.

Memed, or: I write a little about myself, as though I don't usually

I was tagged by Lena in a very roundabout manner, and during this long and rainy afternoon at work where the humid morning threw itself before the oncoming train of a drizzly afternoon, I spake thus:


1. Go down to this post. That’s a picture of me. See my hair? It may come as a heart-stopping shock, but that colour ain’t real. The tan is, although it is sadly depleted and dry as I have not yet emerged from my winter burrow.

2. When I was born my father called his Tibetan teacher in Dharamsala, India, and asked him to give me a Tibetan name. The usual way to do this is for parents to ask His Holiness the Dalai Lama to name their newborns, so Tenzin ran up the mountain and asked for a name for his new daughter. I was named Tenzin Lhamo. Most Tibetan children are given a first name which accords with that of the current Dalai Lama (currently Tenzin Gyatso), and Lhamo means goddess. It was also the birth name of the current Dalai Lama, so he gave me his own childhood name.

3. When I was in Prep I was a head and shoulders above the other kids. I had reached down to achieve average by about 17, but I still have an internal image of myself as clunkily towering over everyone like a giantess and taking up more room than I should.

4. I always wanted to be a historian, and I was fascinated with what I learnt in my super-major at uni. I was also very very lazy and very very isolated, and realised that I have neither the intellectual shininess nor the grit-teeth tenacity to succeed in academia. Also I have forgotten almost everything I learnt so I now know I have a memory like sieve with a hole punched through the bottom, except for anything useless or celebrity-gossipy, where I have a God-given gift of lifelong photographic recall (enhanced by my many years of poring over my grandma’s Woman’s Day).

5. I am terrified of slipping and falling, and of spiral staircases. I'm not afraid of heights, or of just falling, but of the slipping and the falling. Spiral staircases are my undoing. I was at Blarney Castle in Ireland in 2000, and a staircase there is so steep that there's a rope (a rope!) instead of a proper metal handrail. There's one tower to go up, and one down. Upon beginning my descent I ran into some people (idiots! nasties!) coming up. I yelled at them until they turned around and went back down again, cos there was no way I was moving in any way even an inch except slowly, slowly, step by step, to the bottom.

6. I have a feeling that this is related to my first memory. I was one. I was wearing some green woolly tights and a dress. My uncle carried me to the top of a wooded tipi in a park. My mum said "Hold on to her tight!". My uncle said "She's fine! She's a good climber!" and

he let go of my dress

and

I

fell

all the way on to the ground.

My uncle says the moment I started to cry was the best moment of his life. I remember lying on the ground, seeing my mum and my uncle's faces, and although I'm sure that chatty as I am I had no conversational language skills at 12 months, I'm sure I remember thinking something like "Don't worry! I'm ok! Don't look so worried".

And then I felt the most splitting pain the back of my head and I started to cry.

I realise I must be recreating some of this. But that's what I remember so that's what I'm sticking with.

7. I need laser eye surgery. R: -5.00; L: -5.25.

Trying out TVP, or: I am a little unnerved

I did not blog about the vegan yum cha/bike ride at Vegie Hut, Box Hill. I did not take any photos either. I did however kick myself very hard under the table because I forgot to put the battery back in my camera, so I am obliged to leave recording of the day in the hands of Michael & Cindy, Lisa, and Kristy & Toby who were not so stupid. Suffice it to say, the food was varied, the company grand, and the ordering prowess exhibited by the experienced Kristy and Toby more than fit the bill (which ended up ridiculously cheap).

After the lunch we had a wander around Box Hill, visiting a vegetarian bakery (vegan items indicated with two - not one, but two! - blue Winne the Pooh stamps) and a vegetarian grocery, the name of which escapes me.

I made a number of mockery purchases there, in line with my recent exploration of mock meat, lugging home some items which will be the subject of a future Mockumentary post and also a very large, very cheap bag of Textured Vegetable Protein.

The TVP, defatted soybean for those who read labels, has to be reconstituted with boiling water before being added to cookering. To begin the experimentation I thought it safest and most palatable to add it to dishes that I was already confident making, so I whacked it in a pea and mushroom rogan josh curry, and a pasta (oh! What a surprise! Miss T eating pasta!).

My first mistake was overestimating. The packet said X cups TVP to Y cups water; I decided that (2 x X) would require (2 x Y). Duh-doooowwww! I ended up with an enormous, enormous, humungo-plus, super-size me bowl of wet and sloppy this:

To make the curry I used about 3/4 of a jar of Patak's Rogan Josh sauce. Quelle surprise! I used a pre-prepared sauce! I am a shopper not a cooker. My forte is purchasing. Anyway, it's relatively cheap, tastes good, is low in calories and fat, and requires a whole lot less effort and mess to prepare. Moving on!

Usually the sauce and a tin of minced tomatoes, combined with mushroom and pea, is red and sloppy enough. The addition of the TVP resulted in:


Aha! The addition of more tomatoes resulted in:


... and finally, joined by the love of my herby life coriander, this:


The curry was very good, but I was unnerved by the chewy minceyness of the TVP. It was interesting but, as I should have expected when cooking a dish that I cook often and happily enough, I didn't feel that the TVP made my curry so-extra-fantabulous-I'll-never-make-it-any-other-way-again. I will make it again, just not exclusively. TVP and I will have an open relationship.


With a ridiculous amount of TVP left in the fridge, I knocked up my neverfail can't-be-arsed dinner, generally comprising pasta, tinned tomatoes, whatever veggies are in the fridge but preferably eggplant, and two-day-tongue-burning quantities of fresh garlic. Buzz assisted me in his capacity of general helperer, photographer and passer-of-things-to-me/substitute-pot-stirrer-when-I-need-to-leave-the room guy. I like to think that when cooking I look serious, professional and tidy. This photograph should surely disabuse anyone else of that notion too. Note green sparkly glasses (with non-prescription lenses as I had just bought the frames and hadn't been to the optometrist, but wanted to wear them around anyway); peachypinky t-shirt; hot pink kitchen accessories and nasty kitchen tiles. Nigella I am Not!


As with the curry I needed to add a considerable amount more of tomatoeyness to compensate for the physical bulk and lack of distinct flavour of the TVP. Here I added a tin of minced tomatoes, a tin of cherry tomatoes and a good few dollops of tomato paste.


I can't really remember what meaty spag bol tastes like, but the texture of the TVP in this sauce was eerily familiar. There were a considerable number of veggies in the sauce which offset the mince-like texture and added more familiar flavours, but the TVP added a certain creaminess which reminded me of the cashew cream pasta from Vegan YumYum that Buzz and I made a while ago.


Again, I really enjoyed this pasta but didn't really feel that it added much to what I normally make. I suppose that in general this is my position on meat alternatives/substitutes/replacers - having not eaten it in so long, I really have no need for it. It is more like one of a number of different kinds of artillery in my cookering arsenal rather than my secret weapon. It's something I use sometimes like I use basil or pastry or sugar, not something I rely upon to recreate a dish I only know how to make with the real thing. With that in mind, in the future I think I'll use the rest of the dried TVP sitting in my fridge to make something new, rather than use it to augment dishes that I already think taste just fine without it.

MediaWatch: Cleo magazine, or: where did all the animals go?

While I'm on media reviews, this month's Cleo (yes, I buy it sometimes; yes I tear open the sealed sections with undue haste; no I don't take the quizzes unless I think I'll come out looking good) has an article by Bessie Recep entitled "The Meat Backlash", which is situated in the extra-special-super-duper freebie Body magazine.

It's not a bad article; I quite liked the handy field guide to veggies, although I was unaware of the species Demi Vegetarian, who apparently "stick to a vegetarian diet most of the time", and a couple of other genii which I suspect were cobbled together by a well-intentioned but somewhat confused omni. They included some boxed quotes from poster children Leona Lewis, Alicia Silverstone, Natale Portman and Kristen Bell - nothing like a celebrity endorsement!

The article focusses on the environmental, health and financial reasons for turning veggie, and it does that well. It flat out denies the myth that you need meat for essential nutrients, states clearly that meat farming is ecologically disastrous, and points out that meat is also more costly (in the casharoonie sense).

However, the article leaves out almost any mention of the animal-related reasons that make so many of us choose to ditch the meat and more. Jackie O is quoted on what I will choose to interpret as the farm to fork continuum:

"Some people think it [meat] magically appears on their plate, but there are a lot of processes an animal has to go through along the way. When I thought about it in depth, I thought 'This isn't how I want to eat'."

But that's about it. I realise that in this forum an in-depth, gory, no-holds-barred description of all the details is inappropriate - Cleo is marketed to 18-34 year olds but is frequently read by younger people, and I'm pretty wary of exposing very young people to things they may have had no previous awareness of. I don't think making a little girl cry is really the way we should want to go. Also, the article is placed within a health supplement so a health focus is certainy appropriate. However, having virtually no reference to the animal welfare/rights concerns that are so influential in so many peoples' decisions seems to me to be a bit of a cop out.

Still ... it's nice to have a positive, sensible, accessible and otherwise pretty accurate article out there in a magzine with wide circulation and readers who most likely are as yet unexposed to veg*ism.

Yoga & Yoghurt, or: Channel 7 should get some better researchers.

Hey, Packed To The Rafters, honey & yoghurt are not vegan. Especially not when blended together instead of cake icing. Nor do vegan cakes necessarily have to be made without suagr, and if we were going to use a fruit-based sweetener it would probably be maple or agave syryp, not just fruit juice. Also, not all of us are sanctimonious yoga freaks like the (embarassingly named for me) Rachel character. Just fyi.