[Epistemic effort: I thought for five minutes about aspects of my life that make vegetarianism easy for me.]
[Linguistic note: I am using ‘vegetarianism’ inclusively to refer to both vegetarianism and veganism.]
A lot of people who care about animals aren’t vegetarian because they believe that being vegetarian is very hard or will otherwise harm their quality of life. A lot of other people are vegetarian, but find that it’s really hard: they’re sick, they’re struggling with temptation, and if they eat another fucking piece of tofu they will stick someone in the eye with a fork.
I think this is a mistake!
I became pescetarian when I was three years old. Since age twelve, I’ve bounced around from pescetarianism to veganism, and have currently settled on lacto vegetarianism. While vegetarianism has been difficult for me in the past, it’s really easy now! And it’s my opinion that for many people, after a few months of effort, vegetarianism can be easy too.
Should You Be Vegetarian At All?
Some people are ill-suited to vegetarianism. The well-being of animals does not outweigh the well-being of human beings, and if eating meat is necessary for your physical or mental health then there is absolutely nothing wrong with eating meat.
If you are vegetarian, you are leaving out most of one of the five major food groups (protein food). If you are vegan, you’re leaving out another one (dairy). It is perfectly possible to have a healthy diet without a major food group, with a little thought. However, the more limited your diet is, the more likely it is that you’ll have some kind of nutritional deficiency. Therefore, medical conditions that limit your diet will tend to make being vegetarian more difficult. If you can’t have vegetables, fruits, or grains, consider not becoming vegetarian. If you can’t eat soy, nuts, or beans– particularly if you can’t eat any of those three things– also consider not becoming vegetarian, since these are the primary sources of protein for vegetarians. If you have other major dietary constraints, consider not becoming vegetarian. If you decide you want to be vegetarian anyway, please see a nutritionist first; this is well beyond my advice-giving pay grade.
If you are a very picky eater, consider not becoming vegetarian. If your pickiness rules out fruit, vegetables, grains, soy, nuts, or beans, then healthy vegetarianism may be much harder for you than it is for other people. If you want to, you might try expanding your culinary horizons. Maybe you’ll like roasted vegetables? Maybe tofu’s not your thing, but edamame is great? Once your diet has expanded, you’ll be able to be vegetarian safely and healthfully.
If you have any sort of history of an eating disorder, please be thoughtful about whether vegetarianism is the right choice for you. Many people in recovery from eating disorders are vegetarian. But for some people, adopting a restricted diet can trigger more eating-disordered behavior. So know yourself.
Being Vegetarian Healthfully
On nutrition, I basically come from the Michael Pollan school: eat food that tastes good; eat a varied diet; eat lots of plants; eat packaged food and restaurant food in moderation; avoid becoming too hungry or too full; otherwise, don’t worry about it. If you happen to come from a different line of thought on nutrition, you may find my advice misguided. I am also not any sort of doctor, and this is not medical advice.
So the bad news about vegetarianism is that you can’t do the pure Michael Pollan thing. You are going to have to think about nutrients at least a little bit. The best resource I’ve found for vegetarian health is veganhealth.org.
Now, if you’re like me, you’re looking at that website and thinking to yourself “aaaaaaaa! Healthy vegetarianism is impossible! This is so complicated!” Relax. If you sat there balancing all your micronutrients for an omnivorous diet, it would also seem really complicated. But in reality, after a small bit of work, it is all quite simple.
Remember that it’s very possible vegetarianism will improve your health. For many people, going vegetarian means they consume more fruits and vegetables. Since desserts and processed food often contain eggs and dairy, veganism or lacto vegetarianism can be an easy way to moderate your consumption of those things. Vegetarianism is often a lot healthier than the standard American diet; it just requires a little bit of thought.
Here are the basic guidelines for being vegetarian or vegan without nutritional deficiencies:
- Take a vitamin B12 supplement.
- Consume dairy, eat calcium-fortified foods, or take a calcium supplement.
- Consume dairy, eat vitamin-D-fortified foods, spend ten to twenty minutes outside between 10pm and 2 pm each day without sunscreen on a day where sunburn is possible, or take a vitamin D supplement.
- Use iodized salt. If for health reasons you can’t have a lot of salt, eat dairy or take an iodine supplement.
- Eat multiple servings each day of dairy, legumes (beans, soybeans, peas, lentils, peanuts, and their derivatives), seitan, quinoa, amaranth, pistachios, or pumpkin seeds.
- High uncertainty: supplement 300 mg of DHA every one to three days; use oils that are low in omega-6, such as olive, avocado, peanut, or canola (cooked under low heat and for short periods); and consume three halves of a walnut, one teaspoon canola oil, one quarter teaspoon flaxseed oil, or one teaspoon ground flaxseeds daily.
- High uncertainty: supplement creatine.
I know that looks like a lot! But if you break it down it’s really easy. There’s one supplement you have to remember to take. If you’re a lacto vegetarian and only care about things that are relatively certain, then you’re covered! Otherwise, you just have to find a brand of calcium- and vitamin-D-fortified soy milk or orange juice you like, toss your non-iodized salt if you have some, and figure out some good lentil recipes. A few months into being vegetarian, you won’t even think about it.
If you experience intense cravings for animal products, something is wrong. I don’t mean thinking “mm, that smells nice” when someone is cooking bacon here– that’s perfectly normal– but a strong physical desire for animal products. Intense cravings are often your body’s way of signaling that it is missing some nutrients. Even if you’re getting all your nutritional needs met, I believe in easy-mode vegetarianism, and using all your willpower to resist the mouthwatering deliciousness of a burger definitely does not qualify as easy. If you experience a craving, I would suggest taking a multivitamin, eating some high-lysine protein (legumes, seitan, quinoa, etc.) and eating something high in fat (avocado, nuts, olives, etc.). If you continue to crave whatever it is, just have some of it; a 99% vegan diet is much better for animals than falling off the wagon entirely. If you consistently find yourself craving a particular food, consider adding it to your diet regularly.
If you feel tired or sick all the time, if you’re depressed, or if you start having weird inexplicable symptoms like being really pale or having a sore near the side of your mouth, it might be a nutritional deficiency. Google your symptoms, or just pop a multivitamin. It is possible that you have a deficiency other than the ones that are of concern for most vegans. (For instance, when I went vegan for the first time, I got a B6 deficiency instead of a B12 deficiency, because I am a vitamin deficiency hipster.)
I would strongly advise against adopting a raw food, macrobiotic, or any other kind of highly limited diet. These diets increase your risk of a nutritional deficiency and (in the case of raw food) generally do not have enough calories to support a healthy person.
After this point, I am going to be talking about why I suggested the things I suggest; if this bores you, skip ahead to the next bolded bit.
The most important thing for vegetarians is vitamin B12. There are NO reliable, unfortified plant sources of vitamin B12. Because most omnivores eat far more B12 than they need, a vegan can live for many years off their body’s stored B12; however, it will eventually run out, and in the meantime you’re increasing your risk of heart disease and stroke. All vegans should supplement B12 or consume an adequate amount of B12-fortified foods. B12-fortified nutritional yeast which has been stored in a clear bin or plastic bag is not a good source of B12, because light damages B12. If you are a vegetarian who consumes bivalves, milk or eggs regularly, you may not have to supplement B12, but it is probably best to do so anyway for peace of mind. If you are not taking B12, be aware of the symptoms of mild and overt B12 deficiency. If you don’t supplement and you experience any sort of unexplained fatigue or depression, take some B12.
Vegans often do not get an adequate amount of calcium; it is difficult to get enough calcium without consuming milk or fortified foods. While it is theoretically possible to meet your calcium requirements with greens alone, that is really difficult for most people; on the other hand, drinking a calcium-fortified drink is super-easy. The vegan diet contains essentially no Vitamin D without supplementation and fortified foods. Your body can manufacture all the Vitamin D it needs from twenty minutes daily of full sun exposure; this is probably the easiest method for most people, at least during the summer. However, people who live in cloudy places, hate leaving the house, or are concerned about wrinkles should instead supplement. (Neither Vitamin D nor calcium is a concern for people who regularly drink milk.)
Iodine is typically inconsistent in plant foods. You can get it from seaweed, but sometimes seaweed give you too much iodine. Fortunately, the US has public health measures designed to combat iodine deficiency! A quarter teaspoon of iodized salt daily provides all the iodized salt you need. That is about the amount a normal person puts on their food, but if you’re my husband you can use this as an excuse to put enormous quantities of salt all over your lentils.
There are nine essential amino acids that your body can’t make itself. Since your body uses amino acids to build protein in fairly consistent ratios, a deficiency in any one amino acid can cause you to not get enough protein. (It is not necessary to ‘mix’ amino acids at a single meal, as was previously believed; you just need to make sure to get enough amino acids over the course of a few days.) The amino acid vegetarians are most likely to not get enough of is lysine. If you get enough lysine, you’re probably going to get enough protein. Therefore, be sure to eat lysine-heavy meals. If you are lazy like me, the easy way to remember this is “eat lots of legumes”, but there are other things that are also high in lysine (like pumpkin seeds, which are also delicious).
veganhealth.org considers vitamin A to be a vitamin that needs special attention in vegan diets. However, sweet potatoes, carrots, and dark leafy green vegetables are all rich in chemicals the body can convert to vitamin A; it seems to me that consumption of a reasonable amount and variety of vegetables will cause the average person to eat sufficient vitamin A.
Omega-3 fatty acids are a complicated issue which are not very well understood; they may have a protective effect against heart disease, cognitive problems, and depression. If you’re concerned, supplement 300 mg of DHA every one to three days (depending on exactly how concerned you are); use oils that are low in omega-6, such as olive, avocado, peanut, or canola (cooked under low heat and for short periods); and consume three halves of a walnut, one teaspoon canola oil, one quarter teaspoon flaxseed oil, or one teaspoon ground flaxseeds daily.
A few small studies suggest that supplementing creatine in a vegetarian diet increases IQ, even though it does not appear to increase IQ for non-vegetarians. Creatine also helps build muscles for both vegetarians and non-vegetarians. The evidence is low-quality, but since IQ is of particular interest for many of my readers and creatine is cheap and safe, it might be worth adding.
These Are A Few Of My Favorite Foods
You might be thinking about becoming vegetarian, but you have no idea what to eat!
First of all, you don’t have to give up many of your favorite snacks. Know the Accidentally Vegan Food List. Love the Accidentally Vegan food list. Become one of those obnoxious people constantly telling everyone that Oreos are vegan. But honestly I think that veganism looks a lot less scary when you know you will be accompanied by Ritz crackers and Swedish Fish. (One of several species of vegan marine animals!)
But I’m not going to lie to you: eating delicious vegetarian food is going to involve a little bit of a change in how you eat. I know some people who become vegetarian by eating identical meals, except they swap out the hamburger for a vegan substance that is almost, but not entirely, quite unlike meat. Now, I’m not bashing all fake meat: some of it is absolutely delicious! But having gardenburgers all the time, in my opinion, can be best described by words like “sad” and “depressing” and “a total waste because there is so much delicious, delicious plant food that is not pretending to be meat at all.”
In my experience, vegetarian food tends to taste better if it’s food that omnivores also eat. Skip the soy ice cream and try a sorbet instead. For your protein food at a meal, try black beans and rice, microwavable bean burritos, lentil soup, hummus and pita chips, or a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Vegan food also tends to taste better if it’s in the same genre as the meat food you’re trying to replace, without trying to pretend to be the food. For instance, try a Portobello mushroom in your burger: it’s clearly in the genre of “savory grilled umami thing”, but no one is going to mistake a Portobello mushroom for meat. Sorbet is similar here: it’s in the genre of “sweet frozen thing”, but it’s not trying to be ice cream.
Steer clear of recipes that are like “here’s my vegan, fat-free, sugar-free, nut-free, gluten-free, paleo, macrobiotic birthday cake!” While it is sometimes true that recipes like that are good, in general, it is like “I am in awe of the effort you have put into this but also I want to go vomit.”
What about the weird vegetarian foods? It is true that no one is going to make you try any of the weird vegetarian food: I myself have had quinoa maybe five times in my life and until early last year pronounced it “kwin-oh-a”. (It’s “kween-wa.” [ETA: I have been informed it is actually “keen-wa” which I think proves my damn point.) However, it is also true that edamame with iodized salt, tofu stir-fry, and tempeh-broccoli saute are some of life’s little joys. So I’d suggest, if you like cooking, picking up a vegetarian cookbook and trying a few of the recipes that have ingredients you don’t recognize. If you’re intimidated by the weird vegetarian food, consider doing Meatless Mondays for a while before you jump into vegetarianism; it’s a lower-stakes way of figuring out how to cook tofu so it doesn’t taste like crap. (Sauce. The answer is enormous amounts of sauce.)
A word of advice: avoid overly strict veganism. Avoiding the five hundred additives that come from animals massively limits what you can eat, makes your diet way more boring and stressful, makes omnivores less likely to be vegetarian because they think it’s hard and stressful, and doesn’t actually have that much benefit for animals. The vast majority of the benefit you provide animals through being vegetarian comes from avoiding meat and eggs. (You can also flavor food with honey guilt-free.)
But I Can’t Live Without…
So you definitely want to become vegetarian, but you don’t think you could live without smoked salmon. Or sushi. Or bacon. Or macaroni and cheese. Or brie. Or baked goods.
If the thing you can’t live without is a dairy product or bivalve, you’re in luck! Bivalves are, ethically speaking, a kind of plant, and dairy cows produce an enormous amount of milk per cow, making the suffering-per-pound of dairy the best of any animal food. (All the vegans who miss cheese sigh in unison and immediately become lacto vegetarians.) Go and eat cheese and oysters with my blessing.
If the thing you can’t live without is bacon, you have more of a problem. So in my experience, favorite foods fall into one of two categories. Sometimes, people see the food they like and go “ooh! That food is delicious! I want some!” Other times, people have the thought “mm, I could really use some bacon right now” pop into their head.
So I’d suggest going two or three months without bacon. Ask your housemates to keep bacon out of the house. This is crucial! You’ll never be able to tell which category bacon is in if your housemates’ bacon is constantly prompting you with “mmmm, bacon.” In this time, of course, make absolutely certain that you’re eating enough fat and protein: you don’t want to assume that you need bacon when what you actually need is a huge serving of guacamole.
If it turns out that after two months without bacon you still, in fact, want bacon, go ahead and eat the bacon. A 99% vegetarian is a hell of a lot better than a 50% vegetarian. If an occasional Sunday breakfast with bacon improves your life, go ahead and eat the fucking bacon.
Eating Out While Vegetarian
Eating out while vegetarian is easy if you follow two simple rules. First, only eat at restaurants with an ethnicity in the name. Mexican, Greek, Thai, Indian, Chinese, Vietnamese, Ethiopian… whatever it is, it probably has much better and more filling vegetarian options than unlabeled restaurants. (The one big exception to this rule is French food, which is generally bad for vegetarians in my experience.) You might say “but Ozy! This restaurant is a vegetarian restaurant! Can’t I eat there?” While not all vegetarian restaurants are terrible, in my experience they mostly tend to cater to an audience that wants to eat soy that has, through hope and prayer, been transformed into something that vaguely resembles meat. There are some good restaurants that do this (Garden Fresh Chinese in Palo Alto is amazing) but mostly it is sad and depressing.
Second, get used to being annoying to the waiter. Even the ethnicity restaurants will often have cheese or eggs in their meals. Don’t be afraid to ask “is there any meat/cheese/egg in this?” (There is meat in the most surprising things. I myself once ordered macaroni-and-cheese at a diner and there was bacon in it, of all things.) And don’t be afraid to say “bean burrito, no sour cream, no cheese.” Finding something to eat at an American restaurant is often an exercise in creativity. For instance, if there’s a chicken quesadilla, it’s usually possible to order a quesadilla without chicken. Sometimes it even comes with veggies! Of course, if the waiter has had to put up with your nonsense, tip generously.
Finally, many people adopt a don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy about incidental eggs and milk in baked goods: while they don’t bake with eggs themselves and they avoid anything obviously egg-y like French toast (or, God forbid, an omelet), they also don’t question the waiter intensely about whether the bread has eggs in it. This can be a simple way to make eating out much easier. It also makes sense to adjust your level of don’t-ask-don’t-tell depending on your situation: it probably makes sense to be stricter about incidental eggs if you’re at Sweet Tomatoes than if you’re at an airport and your flight to Europe leaves in fifteen minutes and you’re ravenous.
Dealing With Unsympathetic Omnivores
In my experience, the single biggest factor affecting how easy it is to be vegetarian is whether the people around you are vegetarian or vegetarian-friendly.
The hardest way to be vegetarian is if everyone you know is incredibly defensive omnivores. You have probably heard about asshole vegetarians (and they do exist, I’ve met them). But far more common– if far less complained about, due to their innocuousness to the average person– are asshole omnivores. You might suddenly find yourself having conversations like this:
You: Excuse me, are there eggs in this? I’m vegan.
Omnivore: Why are you vegan?
You: I’m not sure that this is an appropriate topic for dinner-table conversation.
Omnivore: Come on, I want to know. Is it about your health? Or the environment?
You: (sighing) Well, there’s a lot of animal cruelty on factory farms–
Omnivore: HOW DARE YOU VEGANS KEEP RUBBING IT INTO PEOPLE’S FACES THAT THEY’RE VEGAN UUUUGH JERKS
You might discover a shocking number of people who have suddenly acquired nutrition degrees and now know that it is completely impossible to have sufficient protein without eating meat. (Bonus points if those people never appear to eat a vegetable.) You might get guilt-tripped about how Grandma will have her heart absolutely broken unless you eat her turkey at Thanksgiving and why are you being so completely unreasonable as to decide that you are in charge of what you put in your own body. There might be people who don’t serve a single thing you can eat at the entire dinner and then get mad at you for not eating. You might experience an extraordinary number of jokes about how your tomato had a home and a family and you can hear its little tomato screams. Many, many, many people may want to tell you about the wonders of bacon.
First, it is important to identify whether you are dealing with a true asshole omnivore. Some people are just dickbags, and if you are dealing with a known dickbag feel free to skip this step. But if you know your friend or family member is generally reasonable, try bringing up the subject in a nonjudgmental way first. Maybe you can explain how lysine is the most important amino acid to worry about for vegetarians and show them how you’re eating lots of beans, thus reassuring them that you’ve done your research and you’re not going to suddenly die of malnutrition on them. Maybe you can say something like “I understand we disagree about vegetarianism, but I think it’s wrong to eat animals. So when I’m having a moment of temptation about the sushi, I want you to support me and not try to get me to do something I think is wrong– just like I’d do the same for you.” Or something like “I know it means a lot to you that everyone enjoys your food, Grandma. But I can’t enjoy turkey if I’m thinking about the conditions the animal is raised in the whole time, and I know you wouldn’t want me to pretend to enjoy your cooking. Let’s look through your cookbooks and see if we can find something I can enjoy too.”
There are basically three ways you can respond to asshole omnivores. First, you can try to argue with them. I suggest picking up a copy of the Animal Activist’s Handbook if you’re planning on trying argument; the subject is too long to go into here.
Second, you can practice your best icy Miss Manners voice and say “I don’t really want to talk about this.” Or “This subject isn’t very pleasant. Let’s talk about Star Wars.” Or, in extreme circumstances when a person is behaving in a truly unconscionable way, “Wow” followed by a long and awkward silence. It can help to internalize that omnivores are being assholes to you for their own personal reasons– maybe guilt about eating meat, maybe equating food with love, maybe they’re unhappy about weird people, maybe a hippie bit them as a small child and they’ve been frightened of lentils ever since. Whatever. Point is, it’s not about you. It’s their own shit and for some reason they’ve decided to throw their own shit all over you. The person who’s throwing shit is the one who’s being rude, not you, who is just trying to get through dinner without starving to death.
Third, you can give in while you’re around them. I don’t think this is an unreasonable thing to do! If eating turkey will save you an infinite amount of grief from your relatives about upsetting Grandma and you feel like it’s not worth it to put up a fight, eat the turkey. As I always say, a 99% vegetarian is a hell of a lot better than a 100% omnivore. That said, if you try this strategy, watch for feelings of resentment and guilt– if it winds up poisoning your relationship with Grandma, it might be easier to try to explain your point of view to her.
Whatever you do, if you’re surrounded by unsupportive omnivores, it’s important to find vegetarian friends who can support you. If in a moment of weakness you’re considering eating an entire ham, you want someone who’ll say “hey, let’s go out for vegan Chinese instead”, not “oh come on, eat the ham, it’s not going to kill you, ham is delicious.”
Avoiding Temptation
In my experience, I’ve found being lacto vegetarian and living with people who are mostly on the vegetarian spectrum to be tremendously easier than being lacto vegetarian and living with omnivores.
I am very bad at resisting temptation. If egg-filled baked goods and delicious sushi are there to be eaten, I will probably eat them. However, if they aren’t there, prompting me with their deliciousness, I am almost certainly too lazy to bother going to seek them out.
Right now, my house has three lacto vegetarians (including me), one vegan, and two omnivores, and the only person who cooks a meaningful amount is lacto vegetarian. When people buy candy and share it with the rest of the house, it is usually something I can eat. The delicious tempting snacks on the counter are peanut butter pretzel nuggets, which are both totally vegan and 100% amazing. When the housemate who cooks makes cookies or garlic bread or pasta, they are always egg-free and meat-free. And when I open the fridge there isn’t any fish staring at me and reminding me of the deliciousness of salmon.
Therefore, particularly for novice vegetarians and vegetarians who have a low level of willpower, I recommend trying to live with other vegetarians or with people who consume a primarily plant-based diet. This is particularly important if you share meals with someone. If you share meals with an omnivore, try to convince them to adopt a plant-based diet at home or to primarily consume meat you don’t like very much. It’s possible that you and the people you share meals with have totally incompatible food needs– they might object to all vegetables on the grounds of taste, have one of the health conditions I talked about earlier, or simply believe that vegetarianism is unreasonable. In that case, being vegetarian is likely to be much harder than it would otherwise be, and I don’t have a lot of good advice.
Of course, the problem with living with vegetarians is that part of the benefit of being vegetarian is modeling vegetarianism for omnivores, and if all your friends are vegetarian you will not have this positive influence. I suggest continuing to befriend omnivores but not living with them unless they don’t cook very much.
Meat Is Not Food
My biggest tip for easy vegetarianism is to convince your brain that meat is not food.
There are a variety of interesting things I believe on a system one level. For instance, restaurants typically serve one to three dishes of actual food (and it is very strange and overwhelming when they choose to serve more). Grocery stores devote a puzzling amount of floor space to refrigerating non-food items. When people refer to eating “chicken nuggets” in conversation, they’re referring to vegan chicken nuggets.
All of this means that eating meat doesn’t even occur to me as a possible choice. It is not food. Why would I go around eating not food when there is so much delicious food available?
If you can swing it, becoming viscerally disgusted by meat can help a lot. Think about the fact that you’re eating an animal corpse. Go read Jonathan Foer’s Eating Animals, bookmark all the grossest bits, and reread them regularly. I find that naturally becoming viscerally disgusted by meat happens over time, but that it tends to take a very long time, perhaps a decade of not eating a particular thing. So trying to make it shorter can help.
Thing of Things 
I am not vegetarian but I want to share that (a) delicious vegan baking is totally possible if you rely heavily on bananas, apple sauce, and flaxseed, and (b) there’s a vegan sushi place in SF that I like a lot, called Shizen.
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Also, vegan gluten-free chocolate cake is often the best chocolate cake because you’ve cut out all those pesky extra ingredients and you’re left with mostly chocolate and sugar 🙂
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Great blog post!
My favorite line: “if you’re my husband you can use this as an excuse to put enormous quantities of salt all over your lentils.”
lol!
I also think of soy pretending to be meat as sad and depressing, heh.
I like watching videos on Mic the Vegan’s youtube channel to learn interesting things about being a healthy vegan. I’m currently transitioning to being vegan from being an omnivore, and I’m not too hard on myself if I eat meat once in a while or other animal products infrequently. Trying to go cold-turkey vegan is super hard to do, and this way I can get used to healthier food without hating life. I think even becoming vegan for like 90% of the time is a huge improvement from the standard American diet. Luckily I’m not a picky eater!
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I make an exception for seitan, which I think is pretty good (albeit not meat), and Morningstar Farms chemical bacon, which is not bacon, but closer to some kind of striped, salty, soy candy.
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Not much to comment on the actual post since I know nothing about this, but I wanted to express lots of gratitude for the note about how if you cannot eat nuts or soy or beans or grains then you should not feel bad about not being vegan. I have never seen a veganism post explicitly include such a caveat before. It makes me feel happy and safe and Included. It turns out veganism posts do not have to make me feel bad! This is an excellent discovery! If everyone was as Excellent as Ozy I could stop feeling vaguely threatened by vegetarianism! Basically, thank you for being Excellent.
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I’m mostly pescitarian. Two of my sisters are also, so it’s easy at family gatherings. But when I visit my boyfriend’s family (they’re French) I just eat the damn meat rather than annoy them. They’ve complained about how stupid vegetarianism is in front of me too many times for me to want to bring it up.
Does anybody have insight into whether liver craving indicates any particular deficiency? That’s the only one I really get.
Also, Ozy, how do you typically prepare lentils?
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Does anybody have insight into whether liver craving indicates any particular deficiency?
Iron? And possibly Vitamin A? I remember reading you can get vitamin A poisoning from eating too much liver as that is where it is stored (it happened Arctic explorers who ate polar bear liver) and also a long-ago TV show about a family doctor set in the early 20th century where he was treating a boy for anemia by telling his mother to give him raw liver to eat. And of course cod liver oil as a popular supplement during the 20th century for vitamin A.
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Unsympathetic Omnivore here.
It’s not just vegetarians and vegans. Picky eaters are an unbelievable pain in the ass. I’m not unsympathetic to your particular thing. I’m unsympathetic to pickiness in general. If you invite two picky people over for dinner hard to make something they’ll both like. If there’s three of them it’s virtually impossible. Oh, gee wouldn’t it be nice if I could invite my family over for diner. But no, my sister doesn’t eat meat this month and my dad thinks onions and beans are “weird” and won’t eat anything containing them. I love you both but this is ridiculous.
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That is why restaurants exist, then it’s their problem 🙂
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The one tip I would give to vegetarians/vegans to avoid turning someone into an Asshole Omnivore is:
Do NOT, at the very last minute (as in “just walked in the door fifteen minutes before the meal is served”) when said omnivore is responsible for cooking The Big Traditional Holiday Family Meal for the first time, announce “Oh I’m not vegetarian anymore, I’m vegan” which then means that the vegetarian stuff they cooked for you has to be scrapped as it has things like dairy or egg in, and means that the only option said stressed-out omnivore has is to give you something like raw Brussels sprouts and half a potato to eat. Or murder. Which is looking pretty darn appealing right now and there’s a nice sharp carving knife readily to hand and everything.
Yeah. Not that I’m talking from personal experience or anything, um, it happened to a friend, right? 🙂
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I’m amused and a bit confused that the possibilities that occur to you are (a) bending over backwards to fulfill your guests’ needs even though they did not inform you of them in a timely basis and (b) murder, but not (c) simply saying “sorry, I didn’t know, so I don’t have anything for you” and not going out of your way to accommodate them, which is what I would have thought is the reasonable solution 😛
(Though in practice I tend to think of other people’s needs as things I must accommodate, so I would probably go with option (a), but probably with the understanding that I am doing this because I want to be nice and inclusive, not because I am actually obligated to do it.)
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I’m with Deiseach on this one.
Maybe I’m a jerk, but one of the reasons I cook is that I take pride in my work. It’s a artistic “moral rights” issue – I respect your dining limitations, but within those, please respect my desire to put out a good performance..
I mostly get irritated at my family when I’ve cooked for a few hours and they don’t show up in time to eat the food at the right temperature or resting time, so this one hits a little close to home. 🙂
Vegetarians and people with allergies are often a plus – they let me expand my range and work within some unusual constraints – but avoidable last minute announcements would grate, no pun intended.
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“figuring out how to cook tofu so it doesn’t taste like crap”
Pffft, the secret to tofu that doesn’t taste like crap is to buy proper Asian brand tofu and not crappy salad bar tofu.
Wrap-and-steam all sorts of delicious things in Tofu skins! Use Tofu skin knots as a pasta substitute! Use you-doufu in soups or stir-fries instead of disgusting large block chunks! Eat inarizushi! Agedashi that shit! Dou hua dessert/breakfast!
…and then, yes, even most Asian tofu dishes are heavy on sauce and stuff. But it’s no different from how much they season/marinate meat dishes.
But yeah, there’s like an entire continent that has had millenia of refining soy recipes, so they’re probably a good source of finding already-vegetarian food. Beyond tofu, you’ve got soy in miso, Korean soy pastes, PROPER ASIAN SOY MILK not tryna pretend to be dairy milk, natto, soy sauce/teriyaki, etc.
And then there are plenty of traditional recipes involving mung bean, adzuki bean, and/or runner beans.
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Two quick points:
* There are twenty amino acids, but only nine are always essential. An additional six are essential in rare cases, like certain metabolic disorders and in developing fetuses.
* Proton pump inhibitors are a very commonly prescribed drug that make B12 deficiency more likely. I managed to become B12 deficient while only being 95% vegetarian (and drinking several litres of milk each week), probably due to the influence of PPIs. It’s possibly a good idea to talk to your doctor if you wish to become vegetarian on PPIs. Likewise, it’s the sort of thing you should mention if you are being prescribed PPIs.
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My tofu secret is to slice it thin (3-5 mm) and cook it in a pan with a little olive oil. It has a wonderful chewy texture. And yeah, get a good sauce on it. I also agree that it is easier to eat vegetarian dishes that are meant to be that way, not ones that are desperately trying to be meat dishes.
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My tofu secret is to drown it in tomato sauce seasoned with garlic. Mix in sautéed onions and peas; serve on top of pasta.
I frankly don’t make it that often, though – when I cook vegetarian, I usually prefer beans and/or cheese.
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@Senalishia
Wow, now I really want tofu, and I’m an omnivore who doesn’t even like tofu very much. I will try your method sometime.
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Minor correction: it’s 9 essential amino acids humans can’t synthesize, 6 conditionally dispensable (maybe not with certain illnesses), and 20 in total.
The nutrition section is good! I can also recommend http://veganhealth.org for in-depth research. The related http://theveganrd.com has more practical info – esp. check out the sidebar on the left. Both are prudent and seem to stick with mainstream science.
I’d add:
* AFAIK most adult vegans don’t consciously pay attention to all this advice, and IME – except for B12 and maybe omega-3 (ALA, without the DHA) – do well even after years (though see Ozy’s caveats re: very picky/restricted eating). The recs are for optimal health – which may not be what you have been striving for before.
* Take B12 as >25µg/day or 1000µg twice a week, as cyanocobalamin (smokers may need Methyl-, but then in higher doses)
* If you don’t eat much dairy or eggs, you might still want to take B12 longterm.
* Vitamin D is a problem for the general population, esp. away from the equator. There’s evidence that supplementing 2000IU/d is a good idea for everyone: http://www.direct-ms.org/pdf/VitDGenScience/Heaney%20vit%20D%20requirement%202005.pdf
* Flaxseed oil goes rancid super quickly, tastes disgusting, and can’t be used for cooking. 1tsp of uncooked canola oil is probably the easiest way to get uncooked ALA/omega-3.
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Correction: It’s about 2000IU/day *overall intake*, not additional to what is consumed now. (Still way higher than the 400-600IU recommended to prevent overt rickets, though.)
I also cited the wrong paper. http://direct-ms.org/pdf/VitDGenScience/Optimal_25D_level_AJCN%20Bischoff.pdf says 2000IU/day would get 85% over 75nmol/L 25(OH)D; half of that dose would get 50% there.
(That’s still below the ~110 found in East Africans living ~ancestral lifestyles, necessary for producing breast milk with enough Vit D, and from whereon mortality risk stops dropping.) I skimmed some papers, but I’m mostly parroting Michael Greger’s judgement here (who is more veganism-for-health-propaganda-y than, say, veganhealth.org): https://youtu.be/I1uoc8ZN0m4
Sorry for getting so longwinded and technical on that sidenote, but I wanted to clarify…
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Your post doesn’t mention iron, even though meat and eggs are the only major sources of heme iron, and non-heme iron is difficult for the body to absorb. (Especially when it’s combined with calcium in some way.)
(This is especially a problem for people who menstruate, and to be fair those are only a minority of rationalists, but I think this is still relevant.)
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Yeah, probably worth considering additionally for people who already have problems with anemia, heavy periods, or eat a lot of meat right now. Otherwise I’d guess it probably comes down to picky/restricted eating (beans, lentils, soy, whole grains, greens, nuts) that Ozy already listed as problematic regarding other nutrients?
Probably the biggest trick to know is that vitamin C with meals increases absorption of non-heme iron a lot. If possible, don’t take calcium supplements, or drink coffee or tea with meals.
One egg contains only ~0.5mg of iron (and I’m unsure if it’s even heme?) so eggs don’t seem to be a very good source.
Ultimately I’m hoping that products using GMO hemoproteins (like the burger from Impossible Foods) become cheaper and more widespread soon; though that’s ofc not helpful right now.
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Huh, this is an interesting article for various reasons, and as a vegetarian myself I had lots of reactions.
1) A lot of the advice did not sound easy at all. I have rather poor executive functioning and at least for me these things sound hard to remember. I /can/ do them, with effort; but the way the post kept talking about how easy they were was somewhat alienating.
2) Bacon substitutes are actually really good! Try Morningstar’s fake microwave bacon; for best crunchiness and taste, follow instructions on the box.
3) Watch out for soups if you do not want to consume animal products. Soups can be really unpredictable; many non-vegetarians don’t realize e.g. chicken stock counts as animal product.
It is good to avoid obsessiveness about not eating meat. That one has been unavoidable for me, unfortunately.
4) (This one is way less relevant, also cw for discussion of meat being viscerally horrible. It’s basically just ~personal feelings~ and a description of meat-as-horrible.
If you think you want to develop more purity instincts towards meat, feel free to continue reading. If not, don’t.)
I have never had the problem of having to resist the temptation to eat meat mentioned here.
I have fairly major sensory aversions to most meat and am repulsed by the idea of eating most meat. It reminds me of eating my own flesh and scares me regarding my own mortality and corporeality. I have occasionally had horrifying alterations of perspective where I saw my mother’s hands as meat to be eaten, and then my own body as meat to be eaten. It no longer felt like a body, but instead as soon-to-be-dead meat.
Whenever I’ve consumed it, chicken broth has felt like a disease. It seeps through me and coats my throat. It is a pestilence.
This is perhaps melodramatic. It is, however, my s1 response.
I cannot eat meat.
(I do, however, eat seafood, milk, and bivalves, because of my lack of a similar emotional response.)
To be clear, I don’t view this as a moral achievement on my part. Just an interesting thing, and possibly useful.
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Morningstar bacon is tasty, but sadly for me not vegan. I’ve had good luck with Lightlife bacon, fried in a pan with olive oil, black pepper, and liquid smoke.
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Can I just mention something about eggs? If you live somewhere you can have a flock of backyard chickens that you keep for the eggs, I think that is a very different thing than eating factory eggs! I keep chickens and they are happy family pets. No guilt about eating eggs when you know how happy the hens that laid them are.
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I’m not remotely a vegetarian, and I am a great fan of certain pork products. On this case specifically, I have found that I consistently overestimate the amount of ham that I want to eat. Were anyone (vegetarian or otherwise) to tell me they want to eat an entire ham, I would advise them to reconsider.
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I mainly care about sustainability and consider a reduction in meat consumption useful, but consider a personal ban on meat products to be a bad optimization (aside from Schelling fence considerations or other psychological mechanisms that I can see being useful for other people).
Animals still die for you if you drink milk, wear leather, etc. Furthermore, there is a huge difference in efficiency between eating a steak and flavoring your food with strategically deployed meat products. For example, chicken stock and separator meat are basically left-overs. L-cysteine is made from hair and/or feathers & gelatin is made from collagen in bones, skin and connective tissues. I’m pretty sure that both are essentially ‘free’ given the demand for meat products. So I can’t help but see a refusal to eat products with these ingredients as deontological purity-maximization, with no or probably even a negative consequentialist improvement.
I also have other strong preferences, like a desire to enjoy eating, limiting my outsider status and to optimize my time. So I don’t feel bad for now and then eating a relatively meat-heavy product in the canteen.
For personal cooking, I especially like to use bacon cubes (which can be bought in the supermarket here) aka lardons, which can add a huge amount of flavor and texture, relative to their quantity. Replacing a slab of meat with those cuts the meat component of the meal by a huge amount.
Anyway, the US has the highest meat consumption in the world, so even cutting it by 2/3s to get to the level of my country or cutting it even more like I do, is already a major gain.
IMHO, too many people feel that it is an all or nothing choice.
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“The well-being of animals does not outweigh the well-being of human beings, and if eating meat is necessary for your physical or mental health then there is absolutely nothing wrong with eating meat.”
I see no justification for this statement from a philosophical standpoint, although it’s obvious that if not eating meat damages one’s physical or mental health, one is much less likely to remain vegetarian or vegan in the first place.
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Well it depends on what your philosophical standpoint is, doesn’t it? Ozy has gone into theirs elsewhere and I believe it’s something like this? A consequentialist Utilitarianish thing, where animal utility and disutility counts less than that of people because they have less of the aspects that make humans matter as moral entities.
(This doesn’t mean we can eat babies or the severely brain-damaged because ‘human’ is a good Schelling point and we don’t get enough utility out of disregarding the personhood of edge case humans to justify discarding the heuristic.)
Ultimately, yes, this comes down to things like ‘consequences are what matters’ and ‘sapience, sentience etc. and such are the correct factors to determine whose utility is important’, but every kind of morality comes down to unjustified assumptions that we basically believe because they intuitively seem right.
I’m a Utilitarian concerning humans but I kinda waver between the following two positions on animals:
1: As I described above, basically. Animals matter, but less than humans. This is not so great a difference that you couldn’t, say, add up a bunch of animals and have that carry the same moral weight as one human.
This is the position that seems logically consistent with my beliefs.
The following is the position that I just sorta instinctively intuitively feel to be right, and is probably what I’d act on in a pinch:
2: Animals matter, but on a totally different scale from humans. Maybe twenty cows are as important as one dolphin, I don’t know, but no amount of dolphins is as important as one human. Stopping animal cruelty is intrinsically good, but impossible to justify spending resources on while humans suffer and could be helped. A human torturing an animal is actually mostly bad because of what it could psychologically do to that human (and make it easier for them to one day do to humans), not because of the suffering of the animal. I would press the button that horrifically murdered every Gorilla on earth to save a single human child, and I’d only hesitate to make sure the ecological consequences wouldn’t somehow lead to too much *human* suffering.
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I am a person who cannot be vegetarian, because my partner has no interest or desire in being vegetarian ever and dislikes most vegetarian food, and we barely have the spoons to feed ourselves as it is without trying to cook two different meals for most dinners. I’m kind of half-heartedly reducetarian instead.
That said, I do have to praise Quorn. Most meat-substitutes are icky, but Quorn is very good either as a mince, or in place of chicken in things like curry, crispy fried pieces, stir fry etc. We sometimes eat it despite our omnivorism because it is a cheap low-calorie source of protein that doesn’t suffer from being kept in the freezer for ages.
If the Quorn pieces are too big, it hits my texture twitches, so I could never eat, like, a Quorn chicken breast, but cut up small or as a mince it’s fine.
You can also DIY leaner mince by mixing half and half of the cheaper less lean beef mince with Quorn mince. This works well in bolegnese and burgers and whatnot. Presumably also chilli but when I make chilli it’s a whole production involving from-scratch beef stock and super slow-cooked oxtail and I wouldn’t sully that with Quorn. But if you’re not a purist it would work.
Another way to eat less meat which I adopted for healthiness and cheapness reasons is replacing half the meat with an appropriate legume. So beans for chilli or taco meat, dry peas for British-style stews, lentils or chickpeas for curry, etc.
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I make a hell of a tabbouleh with quinoa.
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“You might discover a shocking number of people who have suddenly acquired nutrition degrees and now know that it is completely impossible to have sufficient protein without eating meat. (Bonus points if those people never appear to eat a vegetable.) You might get guilt-tripped about how Grandma will have her heart absolutely broken unless you eat her turkey at Thanksgiving and why are you being so completely unreasonable as to decide that you are in charge of what you put in your own body. There might be people who don’t serve a single thing you can eat at the entire dinner and then get mad at you for not eating. You might experience an extraordinary number of jokes about how your tomato had a home and a family and you can hear its little tomato screams. Many, many, many people may want to tell you about the wonders of bacon.”
You missed one. The people who hear that you avoid buying leather shoes and say “Why? It’s not like you eat the shoes,” and then act as if they’ve made an incredibly clever point.
Seriously, I last ate meat yesterday (although I am trying to eat fewer animal products) and these people still annoy the hell out of me.
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Seitan is high in protein so has a lot of lysine but lysine is still the limiting amino acid, so I’d be reluctant to call it a high lysine food. You’d need to exceed your protein requirements to get enough lysine if you relied on seitan as the major protein source.
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I fucking love meat, but I became a vegetarian about a year ago. I’ve spoken to other vegetarians/vegans and I feel like none of them enjoyed the taste of meat nearly as much as I did, and I envy them for that. I’ve found a few things that have helped me get around this:
-The year before I became vegetarian I went without meat for 5/7 days a week. It was easier than I expected, because I was able to get most of the way there by adding vegetarian dinners rather than removing meat ones. This also forced me to go out of my comfort zone and discover new and interesting foods. Another knock-on benefit was that it convinced my housemate to do the same thing, and by extension caused one of his friends to adopt a similar strategy for veganism.
-Italian food and curries are your friends. It’s very easy to replace meat in a curry with beans/potatoes/pulses without sacrificing the quality. Pasta also works, because virtually every pasta type has a corresponding vegetarian recipe.
-Befriend at least one vegetarian whose heart you couldn’t bear to break, and practice picturing their ‘just disappointed’ face.
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I feel like I must apologize on behalf of my culture for the vegetarian-unfriendliness of French restaurants. I mean, the cuisine isn’t vegetarian friendly and that’s fine, but if French restaurants abroad are anything like restaurants in France asking for a vegetarian meal will cause the waiter to look at you as if you just had sprouted an extra head, and then maybe offer to bring you a potato with salad.
I like living in a country where food is both good and extremely important culturally, but I just wish people would take a chill pill regarding people who happen to not be interested in some food items. It’s not like anyone is forcing them to give up on anything.
Purely in terms of available foods, I’m surprised that you would not also categorize Italian and Spanish food as vegetarian-unfriendly.
(Not a vegetarian, by the way, although I have moved away from eating mammals.)
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In the US, Italian restaurants almost always can do pasta with tomato sauce and no cheese, and sometimes can do cheeseless pizza. And Spanish restaurants can usually do some bean-and-rice thing.
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As a vegetarian Type 1 diabetic, the assumption that a dish composed entirely of carbs is a good substitute for one with meat frustrates me.
My reaction to things like fried portobellos replacing hamburgers is that food is actually supposed to be fuel: you can’t just replace meat with something that *tastes* similar but has much less protein. Fortunately, I actually love tofu—but I would *not* be happy eating at a restaurant where the vegetarian option was pasta with tomato sauce.
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Two things:
1. Not everyone can convert beta carotene into retinol, the usable kind of vitamin A. Particularly small children can’t. I don’t know how you’re supposed to tell if you’re one of these people, but on the other hand most multivitamins have their vitamin A as retinol, so it would not be hard to supplement.
2. If you eat dairy and crave bacon, smoked gouda is at least twice as good as bacon. Try a gouda, lettuce, and tomato sandwich and I bet you will never crave bacon again. I don’t know any dairy-free, fatty, smokey food, but perhaps you can think of one.
I don’t actually like meat — like another commenter, it skeeves me out because it’s made out of a body, and I also have a body — but I’m not vegetarian because I cook for a family of six, and none of the others can practically be vegetarian. (Some are small children, one doesn’t want to and already can’t have gluten.) I just don’t have it in me to cook two meals for everything. Someday I might go ovo-lacto vegetarian.
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