Maybe it’s only now that I’ve taken on a monthly resolution, but I am noticing a lot more people attempting month-long challenges to build their health and try their will. Even as I languish in my own ill-fated media fast this month, it is inspiring to see this secular-Lent-of-sorts as people try to break old habits and build new ones. One friend at work is abstaining from beer for the month. Another friend is trying their own version of a media fast by ignoring email and news.
However, perhaps the least healthy month-long challenge I’ve seen is Mike Nelson’s bacon fest, in which he will only consume bacon, water, and alcohol all February. Check him out, and offer him some moral support, and maybe some recipes to make bacon more interesting.
One aspect of my resolution last month was harder than almost any other: avoiding refined sugar. While high fructose corn syrup is almost ubiquitous in highly refined foods, it can be avoided with some vigilance. And animal products take only a peripheral attention to avoid. But refined sugar is in almost everything. From Cheerios, to jam, to sauces and dressings, to fruit juice.
My experience last month taught me that avoiding refined sugar can have some really good impacts on your tastebuds and waistline. I lost about 5 pounds last month, and gained an appreciation for new flavors. I also had a lot more lasting energy.
In spite of that, as soon as February hit, I fell off the wagon hard. I ate an entire box of raspberry paczki in twelve hours, and went to town on the Cheerios. I realized it was harder to kick refined sugar in the real world.
But why specifically is refined sugar bad for you? Yes, it is nutritionless – but that doesn’t make it inherently bad.
It IS nutrient zapping, however. Sugar just gobbles up the nutrients. Where the complex sugars in an apple or a beet are naturally complemented by some vitamins and minerals, refined sugar has no nutritional companions and leaches onto the body’s other stores of nutrients to process it into what it eventually becomes – fat. It was this deficiency that led one doctor in the 1950s to classify refined sugar as a poison.
My SO suggested that when we have kids that we should not let them eat refined sugar until they are ten so their palettes won’t get used to the sweetness. I’m all for it. But that also means a lifestyle change for us now so that we are not keeping all that crap around the house.
Tastespotting just posted three really appetizing looking vegan recipes. Where were you when I needed you????
Well, the good news is the rules I crafted for my February media fast do not restrict me from looking at recipes I’ve already found on the web, so I can still experiment with some of these tasties come Sunday.
I can’t really describe what happened this week in the form of a normal blogpost, so without further ado I present you a screenplay for my new short film.
THE DOWNFALL
INT. SUPERIOR COURTHOUSE, NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTION CENTRAL HEARING ROOM, EARLY MID-AFTERNOON
BAILIFF: Hear ye, hear ye. All rise for the honorable Judge Harry Anderson.
An undistinguished JUDGE enters, dabbing rib sauce from the corners of his mouth. He wears a lobster bib and unpacks a lunch box on the bench.
JUDGE: Be seated. Will the defendant please remain standing? I see we have you charged under seven counts of violating your new year’s resolution to be vegan through the end of the month of January. How do you plead?
DEFENDANT: Not guilty your honor.
JUDGE: You have declined court appointed counsel. Have you retained an attorney?
DEFENDANT: No your honor. I will be representing myself.
The PROSECUTING ATTORNEY – who looks like that guy who played the mayor of Gotham in Batman wearing too much eyeliner – rises.
PROSECUTING ATTORNEY: Your honor, I move that we forgo hearing this case and move on to the sentencing.
JUDGE: On what grounds counselor?
P.A.: The people see it as a waste of valuable time and resources given the overwhelming evidence.
Exhibit B: Shark Fin Soup - Exotic!
JUDGE (stern and skeptical): Lay out the case for us counselor. Then we’ll decide.
P.A. stands. The judge cracks a box of BBQ chicken and chews on a wing.
P.A.: Last Tuesday evening the defendant engaged in no fewer than seven violations of his self-imposed vegan diet.
DEFENDANT (mumbles): Allegedly.
P.A.: On the day of the Chinese New Year, the defendant was asked to film a celebration of Chinese restaurant owners and their families at the ornate Asia Grill in Lincoln, Rhode Island. A gourmet chef was brought down from Boston, and a twelve-course meal was served for over 100 patrons. While there, the defendant willingly and with forethought consumed seven different dishes containing meat, poultry, and seafood.
DEFENDANT (forcefully): Allegedly.
JUDGE: Be quiet, sir – you’ll have your turn. Proceed counselor.
I complained earlier this month about the fact that honey was considered on the naughty list for vegans.
Kottkeposted this week an environmental reason for laying off the honey, and again, it has to do with monocultures.
CCD (Colony Collapse Disorder, not Charged Coupled Device, AV geeks) is annihilating millions of bees across the country, and threatening the built-in ecological services our little pollinating friends offer.
Among the possible culprits are a virus, increased vulnerability to disease due to breeding, overwork (hives of bees are trucked around the country for months to pollinate crops), increased exposure to all kinds of insecticides, and perhaps even all of the above.
The fact is, using one or two kinds of bees for all of our pollination and honey-producing needs makes all of these dangers more likely.
In an amazing guest column for the NYTimes Aaron Hirsh suggests using feral bees of many types to pollinate regionally. AND we could still harvest the honey.
So, avoiding honey as a monoculture: It meets the “political” and “environmental” vegan definitions, though not quite the “ethical” vegan definition, since there is nothing suggesting that we shouldn’t go for the honey.
But nonetheless, this is just a good enough reason to Bee good to the Bees! Heh heh… eh…. Too soon?
Apartment Therapy articulates some of the good reasons to avoid corn syrup here.
Here are some quick capsule reasons that motivate me:
(1) It is pervasive: Notice how many ingredients lists at your supermarket have high fructose corn syrup. The dependence on corn as a sweetener has been heavily the result of market forces and government subsidies. Farmland used for corn could be used for so many other crops that are nutritionally important, and depletes soil resources. It also makes our farm system vulnerable to massive devastation. In 1996 70 million US acres were used to grow only a few varieties of corn. It would only take one infestation, one disease to spread creating a domino effect of crop depletion that would be difficult to recover from.
(2) It it nutritionally useless: As with everything, moderation is key. Some sweetener, some corn syrup is okay for the diet. But a diet that exposes us to high amounts of highly processed high fructose corn syrup every day which has been connected to obesity, diabetes, and other nutritional problems.
(3) It’s just plain gross: Okay, not a particularly great reason. But visceral. Check out the scene in King Corn where they showed how corn syrup was made by processing corn with hydrochloric acid (which contains mercury and emits toxic fumes!) Nasty.
Give a cheer for our friend Mike who is doing one food-based resolution a month for the year. I like his reasoning. He’s doing vegan this month, but attempting some even more radical approaches over the course of the year including locavorism (food created locally/regionally only) and kashrut (which I actually had to look up – basically means kosher)!
With all of the culinary options available in NYC – Little Italy, Junior’s Cheesecake, Cone’s Ice Cream, the Olive Garden – you’d think I would have been brought to my dairy-loving, sugar-craving knees this weekend in the city. But in fact I ate better than I have in weeks. I made a bee-line for the previously mentioned Thailand restaurant near China town by 100 Centre Street (where I came close to snapping a photo of a recently arrested chain gang – but thought better of it). Mock duck was better than I remembered it. Light, sweet, perfect texture down to the fake feather holes. The next day it was Zen Palette just north of Times Square (the ornate Union Square location sadly closed) where I dined on yam fries, asian tex mex, and free vegan key lime pie (courtesy of our nice server).
But Zen Palette is most known for their Sweet and Sour Sensation (pictured), moist, crunchy jewels of protein covered in a light sweet and sour sauce that my friend Dave Harris originally introduced me to. I ordered a batch to go and saved them for dinner upon my return to Providence. I was halfway through when I realized that the tangy sweet taste reminded me a bit of ketchup, which is often used as a flavoring in Americanized-Asian cuisine. And ketchup usually contains corn syrup. A no-no. I’m putting that on my Sin Debt list just because I’m not entirely sure. But damn, it was worth it.
This image courtesy my S.O. Can you guess what it is?
Technically it is chicken. Reconstituted.
This is what they make Chicken McNuggets out of apparently. It looks creepy. It sounds creepy. It feels creepy. And it’s not just because it looks like what would happen if someone put those “Manna Manna” muppets through a sausage grinder.
But why should this gross anyone out? Why is there such a bias for all things pure and fresh? Is there evidence that reconsituted chicken (or any other product for that matter) is more likely to be infected with bacteria, less nutritious, or more potentially unhealthy?
I’m not saying I’d be likely to eat these, even if I was off my vegan diet. I’m as prone to the fresh bias as anyone. But it is not because that picture disgusts me. It doesn’t surprise me in fact. If it makes it easier to produce, preserve, and deliver the food then of course they’re going to do it.
Part of the aversion may be the intentional whitewashing of the product in name. It isn’t “Chicken” in the sense we think of it. It is actually “Chicken Product” in the same way Velveeta is not cheese but “Cheese Product”. The realization that what you think you have been eating for years is not the same as the conjured image is a startling one. It’s probably akin to what Charlton Heston felt in “Soylent Green”. (”It’s made from PEOPLE! PEEEOOOPLE!!!”)
But I am sure there is a rationality behind avoiding reconstituted chicken, too, beyond the vegan/vegetarian moral rationality. I’d be interested to entertain your thoughts.
For anyone who was worried that I might have broken my VRSFCSF diet to take a crack at the S.O.’s Giant Chicken Boogers from Chili’s last night, not to worry. I’m not even tempted. Obama has given me the strength to resist.
And to anyone interested in the Obama O’s and Cap’n McCains breakfast cereals should go here. Obama O’s Theme Song!
3 bowls of granola with honey = $60
1 serving of bread with honey = $20
1 serving of ketchup (maybe) = $20
1 bad night at Chinese New Year = $100
1 gulp of Gatorade before I noticed = $20
Running Total: $220
Crazy talk show host calls DC hostagetaker "the Warmabomber," says Obama is the same. Ick. To ignore or not to ignore? http://bit.ly/d0WcRl
about 17 hours ago from web
Wind Power causes Higher Workplace Deaths, says Heritage Study http://bit.ly/bVyADa Also, Foxes are best henhouse guards says study by foxes
about 22 hours ago from web
@Aitlincay I started off pretty slow myself. I'm only now beginning to actually use it for blogging.
about 23 hours ago from web
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I complained earlier this month about the fact that honey was considered on the naughty list for vegans.
Apartment Therapy articulates some of the good reasons to avoid corn syrup 
With all of the culinary options available in NYC – Little Italy, Junior’s Cheesecake, Cone’s Ice Cream, the Olive Garden – you’d think I would have been brought to my dairy-loving, sugar-craving knees this weekend in the city. But in fact I ate better than I have in weeks. I made a bee-line for the 
= 
This image courtesy my S.O. Can you guess what it is?
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