8 weeks of clean living

One of the main changes away from my default lifestyle for this eight weeks has been following a strict vegan diet. For those unfamiliar with the term, vegan is distinct from vegetarian in that all animal products are avoided, even those that don’t kill the animals such as eggs, milk and honey. Environmentally the motivation for being vegan is similar to the motivation for being vegetarian. In general, it takes much more energy to produce milk or egg calories then it does to produce vegetable or fruit calories. Though being vegan seems quite limiting, it has actually only been frustrating or awkward once or twice in the three weeks thus far.

I’m taking a class that involves a weekly dinner at a rotating set of professor’s houses, and on the first week I decided to go to the dinner and just eat what I could. Unfortunately, it’s not necessarily clear what the contents of any particular dish are. I had a suspiciously creamy hummus as well as a very tasty mushroom pesto. Both dishes could’ve had had some small amount of dairy in them, especially the pesto, which I’m pretty sure in retrospect had some Parmesan cheese. In these situations I don’t want to tell the host that I’m being vegan because I don’t want to be a burden on someone who is being so gracious to host a large group. Since that dinner I’ve just eaten before the class at home in order to avoid any trouble.

I’ve only been out to eat once, to meet up with some friends at Pizza Port. I called ahead to Pizza Port and confirmed that their sauce and dough were both vegan and then just ordered a pizza without cheese and with tons of tasty veggies.

The vast majority of my eating has been home cooking, and it’s in this domain that I have really been enjoying myself. There’s one recipe that I love and have been using all the time that I thought might be fun to share with the readers of this blog. I got the recipe out of a book by Mollie Katzen called The Vegetable Dishes I Can’t Live Without that my mom got me for Christmas. I’ve now made several dishes out of the book and I can recommend it highly. Here’s the recipe (at least my slightly modified version of it):

Arugula Pecan Pesto

Put 4 packed cups of arugula, 1 cup of pecans, 2 teaspoons lemon juice and a pinch of salt into a food processor and blend. Once a portion of the items have blended, push the unblended material on top to the side and add 2 tablespoons of golden raisins down near the blades. Cap the food processor and slowly dribble 6 tablespoons of olive oil through the cap while continuing to blend. In my experience the golden raisins cause the processor to kick a little bit, helping items that haven’t yet migrated down to the blades get blended. You might want to stop at some point and push anything that splattered on the sides back down towards the blades. Once the mixture is fully blended, put the pesto into a container with a top and enjoy either on pasta or with bread. If you live in the San Diego area, I particularly recommend thin slices of the Seedy Sourdough baguette from Bread and Cie bakery in Hillcrest (they sell it baked fresh daily at Whole Foods).

Here’s a shot of the arugula pecan pesto in action for a recent lunch, along with some Seedy Sourdough as well as some strawberries and an orange from my CSA box. Very colorful!

Along with being vegan, I’ve been trying to avoid other wasteful eating practices. Recently I’ve been paying a lot of attention to excessive packaging and labeling. I do most of my shopping at Whole Foods, where one would expect good behavior on these fronts, but even there I’ve found several things to look out for. I’ve been buying a fair amount of herbs such as mint and basil and I’ve noticed that there are normally two options when doing so. With mint, one can sometimes find a loose bunch (tied up with a twisty tie and a label) in the general greens section for $1.99, but the much more salient option is a prepackaged plastic box of mint (from the same supplier, Jacobs Farm) that is hung up at eye level with all the other herbs like rosemary and lemongrass. It costs $2.49 for what looks like much less mint. The boxed mint is also more consistently available. The same story plays out for basil. I’ve been able to buy bunched basil for much less than the 2.5 ounce version in a big plastic container, but it’s only every once in a while that I find it. Since I’m trying to reduce waste where possible I’ve been avoiding the boxed versions. In some cases that has led to menu changes when the loose herbs weren’t available.

Obviously buying nuts, grains and raisins in bulk helps cut down on packaging use, but there are actually financial disincentives for doing so. If my memory serves me, pecans are 11.99 per pound in bulk and 8.99 for a 1 pound package in a thick plastic zipper bag. Even when buying in bulk, one is encouraged to use a disposable plastic bag to hold one’s purchase. I have personally been reusing these bags (and the little twisty ties), but it would be nice to see a proper reusable bag with a known weight (to subtract from the weight at checkout) for bulk items. While Whole Foods is loudly proclaiming its intent to eliminate plastic grocery bags on Earth Day this year, I imagine the produce/bulk disposable plastic bags will remain.

The word is slowly starting to trickle out. Unfortunately it’s a non-starter of a debate for many people, so even the committed environmental groups aren’t too enthusiastic about the prospects for change.

One of the changes that I am making over these eight weeks involves practicing strict vegetarianism. In general, I’m a fairly enthusiastic meat eater, whether it be burgers at In n’ Out, sushi at Tadashi down in La Jolla (try the Honey Roll) or crab cakes up at my parents’ place. By and large, people become vegetarian for either moral or health reasons. I’m not particularly disturbed by the moral quandary that eating meat represents, and I don’t believe being vegetarian is some sort of healthful panacea either (though I’m sure those feelings are disputable). Instead, I think the environmental consequences of eating meat are so substantial and so obvious that any blogging self-proclaimed environmentalist like myself would be quite hypocritical to continue the practice.

In fact, dietary changes are probably the lowest hanging fruit for reducing one’s carbon footprint. There have been several good articles recently investigating the environmental impact of a portion of beef. Here’s some coverage from The New Scientist and Telegraph concerning a recent study showing that a kilogram of beef produces more greenhouse gas emissions than driving around for three hours with all the lights on back at home. A more general page from the Vegetarian Society (check out the PDF for references, etc.) claims that global meat production is responsible for 18% of global greenhouse gas emissions, as opposed to 13.5% for all human transportation emissions. Considered purely from an efficiency standpoint, producing beef requires around 40 kcal of energy input in order to retrieve just 1 kcal of output in the form of animal protein, which isn’t very efficient at all when compared to plant production (click on return to article at the bottom of the linked page to check out the full article and more details).

Despite the substantial contribution of meat production to several environmental problems, one does not often hear about vegetarianism as a quick and easy way of reducing one’s carbon footprint and being more environmentally friendly in general. I can only speculate that this is due to the quasi-religious status that many people seem to assign to their dietary choices—it’s a touchy subject and no one wants to rock the boat. From an outside perspective, it seems like the pragmatic thing for one to do would be to simply eat as cheaply and healthfully as possible while being environmentally sound, which would probably involving eating very little meat. Nevertheless, there are many myths, such as the myth that a vegetarian diet does not give one all the nutrients one needs, as well as a substantial amount of enculturation around the world that conspire to prevent this from being a more salient option than reducing one’s driving, for example.

After my eight weeks are up, I suppose that I am likely to go back to eating a certain amount of meat in one form or another. In order to mitigate the environmental impact of my diet, I’ll try to seek out organic, grass-fed beef and MSC certified fish, and I’ll try to reduce my meat consumption in general. Unlike in the moral case, environmental vegetarianism can be a question of degree, not absolutes. One can avoid eating meat a couple of days a week and still make a difference, without swearing off the practice entirely.

UPDATE: Green Options has a nice piece on a similar topic with some more tips for hosting green gatherings.

A couple of days ago I took the NCTD 101 up to Solana Beach to visit one of my favorite spots in North County, Pizza Port. Besides having great pizza, Pizza Port is an excellent local brewery with a wide variety of beers to choose from (my favorites include Old Viscosity and Hop-Through-It IPA). Unfortunately, the traditional six pack of longnecks is a somewhat wasteful packaging for beer (though the box and bottles are certainly recyclable), especially if one is enjoying it with a few friends and intends to finish it. Luckily, an alternative and reusable beer transportation device exists: the growler.

Growlers hold 64 ounces of beer in a completely reusable glass container. Besides reducing packaging waste, growlers encourage one to seek out local craft breweries and save the energy required to transport the beer. (Of course if one is driving to the brewery the savings might not be that substantial depending on how far away it is compared to one’s local grocery store.) Also near UCSD (just a few miles east on La Jolla Village Drive/Miramar Rd), we have one of the top craft breweries in the world, AleSmith, with three beers in RateBeer.com’s Top 50. Unfortunately, unlike Pizza Port, AleSmith is very difficult to get to by bus so driving is required. Cheers!

Alongside farmers’ markets, community-supported agriculture (CSA) programs can be a great way to acquire fresh local produce without much hassle or label checking. Most CSAs have a subscription-based structure where one commits to buying a box of produce each week over a certain time period from a community farm. Due to this subscription structure, CSAs make it easier for farmers to plant and grow an appropriate amount of each vegetable or fruit, avoiding some of the waste that can occur at farmers’ markets when a farmer miscalculates demand.

My local CSA is called Be Wise Ranch, located in the Santa Fe Valley approximately 20 miles north of San Diego. I’m signed up to receive a small box of vegetables every week, and this week’s box included onions, beans, carrots, cucumbers, lettuce, strawberries and zucchini. Since one doesn’t get to pick which vegetables are in the box each week, one is forced to find new and exciting recipes for the vegetables one doesn’t traditionally buy at the grocery store. For example, this zucchini soup recipe has been a big hit with me and my friends. Here’s a photo of some of my recent CSA acquisitions from Be Wise.

To find a CSA near you, check out this helpful tool over at Local Harvest. Many CSAs operate primarily through drop spots scattered throughout the communities that they serve. If there isn’t currently a drop spot near you, contact the farm and offer to set one up and manage it! The Be Wise drop spot that I currently use was started by an enterprising graduate student with an interest in local food (and he even receives a free box every week for his troubles).

The La Jolla Farmers’ Market is a great place to pick up some fresh local fruits and vegetables, as well as a surprisingly diverse array of knickknacks, jewelry and other curiosities. I hopped on the MTS Route 30 bus this morning to go grab some lunch and pick up some supplies for dinner.

My favorite place to go for lunch at the market is Belinda’s Cocina. Belinda has a wide array of really great Mexican food (the selection has expanded quite a bit over the last year), and—especially exciting for a vegetarian—she has the best chile rellenos I’ve found in San Diego. She also has containers of homemade salsa that you can purchase. Apparently her recipes have been catching on: she recently catered large gatherings at La Jolla Country Day School and Balboa Park, as well as several house parties in La Jolla. Unfortunately, Styrofoam containers are in pervasive use, so if you’re feeling environmentally minded bring your own plate.

Another great spot is the Petrou Foods booth, selling what Mr. Petrou claims to be the best olive oil and balsamic vinegar in the world. He says that the quality is a result of his long aging process and the fact that Temecula (where his olives are grown) gets “326 days of sunshine a year.” I picked up another bottle of balsamic vinegar to shore up my dwindling supply.

After having lunch at Belinda’s I came home with the aforementioned balsamic vinegar, as well as some fresh pasta from Peggy’s Pasta, a mini ciabatta, two apples, an onion, some Cremini mushrooms, fresh Parmesan and an olive spread that goes perfectly with the ciabatta. To see the rest of the pictures I took, check out my La Jolla Farmers’ Market photoset on Flickr. If you live in the area, you owe it to yourself to check it out!