December 2003

We did it again! Our Pre-Thanksgiving Feast this year was another success. We had about 160 attendees, the usual amazing array of plentiful and varied food, and not too many leftovers; a good time seemed to be had by all. This feast is of course our annual fundraiser as well as a chance to get together for some serious eating, and our coffers are now reasonably replenished. Also, this year saw an increase in press coverage, with an interview for the MATC student newspaper, a feature in the Bay Viewer, and a TV report on Channel 18’s "News at Nine."

We could never pull this event off without plenty of volunteer help. This year we must extend thanks (in no particular order) to: Pat O’Neill, Robert and Carole Edmonds and their children, Cindy Juds, Jeanne Barnes, Kathleen Mohr, Ray Wreford, Eddie Horowitz, Mohan Embar, Patrick and Jodene and Catherine LeDenmat, Diane Bahr, Jean Groshek, Barb Eisenberg, Dustin Paluch and his friend Adam, and extra most especially David Paluch and Jody Johnson, our unequalled food coordinator.

We extend a welcome herewith to all of you who signed up for further contact with us. This issue of our monthly newsletter comes as a free sample; if you want to keep getting it, you can either send us the form on page 3 along with $9. for a one-year subscription or take it free on the internet by going to our website, http://www.marveg.org. And do by all means come to our potlucks!

I apologize for getting this to you a bit later than normal – I do try to have it in your hands a few days before the first-Sunday-of-the-month (usually) potluck, but visiting my New York family for Thanksgiving made this somewhat difficult this year. I will do better next month, as I’ll have no excuse not to!

Finally, looking ahead, we need to start thinking NOW about what we are going to do for the Great American Meat-Out. It will come up much faster than you think, and whatever we do will need some advance planning.

Sunday, Dec. 7, 5:30 PM, regular potluck at the Friends’ Meeting House, 3224 N. Gordon Pl. (from Humboldt Blvd. in Riverwest, go east on Auer a few short blocks to the parking lot). Focus will be holiday treats – but hopefully at least a couple of people will bring main course food too!

Subsequent regular potlucks will be at the same time and place on Jan. 4, Feb. 1, and March 7.

The December macro potluck will be on Dec. 14 at 5 PM at Allen Owens’ place, 5310 W. Loomis Rd., (414) 421-1725 or 421-1700 (w).

"I’ve already excluded beef and pork from my family’s meals because of the inhumane treatment cattle and hogs receive at the hands of many American producers… will poultry be next?… Next year, I’ll be asking my family, ‘How about some more tofu turkey with that stuffing?’ I can already hear the groans."

Darby Charvat, NY Times letter-to-the-editor, responding to an 11/24 op-ed piece

The problems with meat-eating have not gone away. This month’s quote was one of several that responded to a NY Times op-ed article which detailed the unnatural and miserable lives of turkeys raised on factory farms. The interesting thing was that all of the responses they printed were in favor of alternatives to the agribusiness industry, whether they advocated humanely and environmentally-raised turkeys or simple vegetarianism.

Then there is the issue of eating food from cloned animals. At the end of October, the FDA issued a tentative finding that milk and meat from cloned animals is safe to consume, which would clear the way for minimal regulation and non-labeling of cloned food animals and their products. Of course, cloning is too expensive for cloned meat to be affordable, but prized animals might be cloned for breeding, with their offspring entering the food supply. Whether this should be something to worry about is a question to which no one knows the answer – and an FDA scientific review panel announced the very next week that there is not enough evidence to say either way and more studies should be done before any conclusions are reached.

I found it interesting that the very newspaper page on which this was reported also contained an ad that warned about the presence of antibiotics, colorants, and pesticides in farmed salmon (though it advocated buying wild salmon rather than not buying any…). But speaking of fish, I am happy to report that my letter to the editor of Delicious Living, protesting their advocacy of fish as a health food and suggesting vegetable sources of omega-3 fatty acids instead, was printed in the November issue!

But alas, not even every vegetable food is automatically safe any more. Delicious Living magazine pointed out that even though wine is made from grapes, winemakers do not have to state whether or not they have used egg whites, gelatin, or casein in the making of the wine. If you want to be picky about what you drink, look for a V (vegetarian-friendly) or VG (vegan-friendly) symbol on the bottle.

Then there was the big news about the hepatitis A outbreak in Pennsylvania, which killed 3 people and sickened at least 500, and in which the prime suspect was the green onions (scallions) at a Chi-Chi’s restaurant. The problem was that the onions in question had come from Mexico, and might have picked up the bug either through exposure to dirty water there or through unhealthy handling somewhere between picking and serving. A NY Times article blamed the increase in food-borne illnesses linked to fruits and vegetables in recent years on Americans taking nutritionists’ advice to eat more produce – and getting it imported from abroad even though only about 2% of this is inspected. Authorities responded to the hepatitis outbreak by recommending that all scallions be thoroughly cooked before eating. An alternative to cooking everything including lettuce would be to eat food in season grown in the U.S. rather than imported from countries with lower standards – especially since buying local produce instead of stuff shipped thousands of miles is the environmentally sound option as well.

A final ominous note about what should be good vegetarian food comes from abroad, where 2 Israeli babies died and others were dangerously sickened from being fed a kosher soy-based baby formula which turned out to be deficient in vitamin B1 (even though the label said the vitamin was there). The manufacturer cited human error, fired 4 executives, and announced additional safety measures. In this case (as always with infant food), the animal product known as breastmilk from the babies’ moms would have been safer than the vegan soy formula.

Nonetheless, it remains a generally sound principle that vegetarian foods are good for you. A Delicious Living article on balancing the immune system so it can keep you healthy suggested a couple of herbs (astragulus and eleuthero), and several vegetarian foods as the best ways to accomplish this: raw or minimal-ly cooked garlic (you can chop it into food after cooking), yogurt or soygurt with active cultures, and mushrooms such as cordyceps, reishi, maitake, and shitake were recommen-ded, as well as avoiding white flour, caffeine, the saturated fats found in animal foods, and trans-fats founded in hydrogenated oils.

Cranberries are of course in season, and are very healthy indeed, reducing gum disease, preventing ulcers, and (most famously) con-taining a substance that helps prevent and cure urinary tract infections by preventing bad bacteria from sticking to cells and organs (I’m waiting for someone to invent cranberry soy-yogurt as the ultimate anti-UTI food). In addition, cranberries’ anthocyanins also seem to fight breast, cervical, and prostate tumor cells in test tubes.

Chocolate is still being hailed for its antioxidents and their free-radical fighting abilities. Delicious Living had a chart listing foods in descending order of value in this regard: dark chocolate led the list, followed by milk chocolate, prunes, raisins, blueberries, blackberries, kale, strawberries, spinach, raspberries, brussels sprouts, and plums (and not a single animal food). The current Prevention magazine adds that honey (if you eat it) is comparable to spinach and strawberries in this department, and tells us that adding cinnamon, allspice, and cloves to apple cider and slowly warming the mix would provide a nice antioxident kick too (as if you’d need a reason to drink this!). Finally, the bread toast, onions, and celery that would go into stuffing all contain plant chemicals that help fight cancer. So enjoy the holidays!

The other side of the holiday coin, of course, is stress, from all the extra activities, shopping, financing the shopping, visiting, cooking, etc., even when it’s enjoyable and especially if it’s obligatory but unwanted. For this too, nutritional cures are starting to be suggested. For one thing, it is known that in general, when a person is under stress, one uses nutrients up faster – so it’s important to eat more nutrient-dense food and fewer empty calories. This ties in with a Delicious Living article that recommends avoiding refined carbohydrates such as white pasta, white rice, bagels and pastries while eating such foods as almonds, broccoli, brown rice and kale. Carbs that are whole foods are digested more slowly, thus avoiding the refined carbs’ spike-and-drop in your insulin and energy. At the same time, though, the whole carbs function to promote the release of the brain-calming chemical serotonin while giving a gentle insulin rise – and the insulin lowers the blood levels of those amino acids that compete with tryptophan, which is serotonin’s precursor. You also need vitamin B6 to convert typtophan to serotonin, which vegetarians can find in green leafy vegetables and legumes. And vitamins A and C (from fruits and vegetables) and vitamin E (nuts, seeds, and oils) and zinc and selenium (nuts and seeds) all boost the immune system, which you definitely need this time of year. Finally, Prevention had advice for anyone depressed by the season: get more omega-3 fatty acids, which vegetarians can find in ground flax seed, flax or hemp seed oil, walnuts, and some other vegetable oils.

The obesity epidemic and what should be done about it are inescapable these days. Whether you read the newspaper or health-oriented magazines like Prevention or even the National Women’s Health Network newsletter, everyone seems to be talking about the fact that Americans, and others who eat like them (from western U.S. dumpster-diving black bears to, increasingly, Europeans) are getting fatter. And that this is bad, causing such chronic, debilitat-ing, and death-dealing illnesses as heart disease and diabetes, not to mention humiliation in all kinds of situations (and, ironically, anorexia in those who overreact to the concern).

In one sense, the problem touches everyone who eats, since there is no doubt that people get fat from what they eat. But of course, exactly what one should eat and avoid eating, and how the problem can best be addressed, are major points of public controversy. In one aspect of it, pediatricians and school authorities are being urged to do something to make families aware of their children’s danger, presumably on the assumption that if parents only know, they will do something about it. Other people suggest that the food industry bears much of the blame, through oversizing of restaurant portions and heavy advertising of low-nutrient, fattening, but profitable edibles and drinks. These folks advocate seriously restraining such advertising, especially as directed at kids. Another aspect of the crisis is the burgeoning of wildly conflicting diet schemes, from diets low in fat and high in carbohydrates to low-carb, high-protein regimens.

This is where being vegetarian comes into contact with the whole brouhaha. For most of the high-protein diets advise eating lots of meat and dairy and avoiding not only the junk-food refined carbohydrates but also the whole grains and many of the vegetables and fruits. Yet we who track on nutritional research have made these whole-food carbs the mainstay of our diets because of the many health advantages of eating them. Further, many of us have lost as much or more weight on a low-fat vegan or near-vegan diet as most Atkins-diet followers have lost on their high-protein low-carb regimens – and we didn’t get constipated in the process, and we did get to eat all those good plant-sourced antioxidents. Yet Chuck and I cannot deny that our daughter and son-in-law, after nearly a year on the Atkins diet, have lost about 150 pounds between them and feel a lot better. And their cholesterol numbers have improved greatly. So what should people really be recommending?