November 2003

This is it, folks! As I write this we are less than four weeks away from our Pre-Thanks-giving Feast! It’s time NOW to send in your preregistration if you have not already done so, and to call Jody at (414) 764-7262 to volunteer to help either with making bulk food and/or with setting up the hall and/or with serving (we DO make sure servers and helpers get to eat too!), and/or with cleanup. This thing only works if lots of people both attend and pitch in!

I have two items on the subject of mailing list logistics. First, one of you did not get the October issue, because one of the October news-letters was returned to me with the mailing label torn off, obviously undeliverable. If you are the person in question, call me (414) 962-2703, and I’ll send it on to you. The other is that I try very hard to note down renewals of subscriptions as soon as I receive them; if I miss, as can rarely occur, do not hesitate to point this out and I will make the necessary correction. However, sometimes there are misunderstandings because a few of you have occasionally been known to renew quite late (several months after I start putting notes about the need onto your newsletter). I try not to drop people who have renewed in the past, and it has happened that we’ve sometimes gotten renewals only a few months before you start getting messages again. On the one hand, please forgive any mistakes I might make and help me rectify them. On the other hand, if you have decided to start taking this on the internet, and that is the reason you have not sent a check, PLEASE LET ME KNOW! so I can quit harassing you (and wasting postage).

Sunday, Nov. 2, 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 Thai food – bring a Thai-type dish if you like, or whatever else you prefer. We will be discussing the Pre-Thanksgiving Feast.

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

Sunday, Nov. 23, 5 PM, Pre-Thanksgiving Feast at the South Shore Park Pavilion, 2900 S. Shore Drive (= S. Superior St.) in Bay View. If you need a form for pre-registration, call 962-2703. Let’s make this our biggest and best yet!

The November macro potluck will be on Nov. 16 at 5 PM at Lise Meissner and Marty Malin’s place, 6522 W. Wright St. in Wauwatosa, (414) 453-7326.

A person named Sarah Farr responded to E Magazine’s article on animal rights with this letter:

"While the debate over legal rights for animals will unfold over time, we don’t need to wait for laws to be passed to start protecting animals. More than 98 percent of the animals exploited, abused, and killed each year in the U.S. are the ones raised for meat, eggs, and dairy. By becoming vegetarians, we help the environment, the animals, and ourselves."

It isn’t only E Magazine that has recently confronted issues around animal welfare and vegetarianism. World Watch ran an article recently on the horrors of factory farming and why they should prompt a reconsideration of how farm animals are treated, and a letter in response pointed out all the environmental, humane, and health reasons not to raise them at all. And an article in the NY Times about controversy in California over a couple of foie gras farms there (sparked by animal-rights activists’ vandalism at one of them) prompted quite a consensus among letter writers that the wrong-headedness of vandalism does not justify the cruelty of foie gras duck-and-goose-stuffing operations. Also on the subject of nasty animal raising, the Humane Farming Association, while congratulating itself on a 70% drop in veal consumption since it started its anti-veal campaign in the 1980s, is planning a new series of ads aimed at ending confinement veal operations altogether.

Meat-eating is of course bad for the eaters as well as the animals. An Agriculture Department report recently criticized both the department’s own inspectors and ConAgra Company for the mistakes that led to the huge recall last year of contaminated ConAgra meat. And nutritional researchers seem to be closing in on why eating meat is bad for the bones: they now think it is the essential amino acid methionine, which is present in much higher concentrations in meat than plants, that acidifies the blood and causes the body to take calcium from the bones to bring the blood pH back into balance. And sometimes both animals and humans are affected by modern animal agriculture: a NY Times Science and Health report explained how breeding pigs for maximum meat production accidentally bred in a syndrome that makes meat from some stressed pigs unappetizing (what should that tell us?)

Sure enough, water is in the news again. This time Maryland and Virginia are disputing who gets to use the water of the Potomac River, while a bitterly negotiated pact out West will divert to cities some of the water that California uses for crop irrigation (does that mean we’ll have to eat Wisconsin produce after all?).

Codfish live in water, and this month’s news includes a European scientific council’s warning that cod in northern Europe’s seas are so overfished that they are becoming endangered. But Delicious Living had an item asserting that the type of omega-3 fatty acid found in flax (ALA) needs to be converted by the body to forms like EPA and DHA which fish have al-ready made and which the human body converts inefficiently, so fish oil gives you more goodies than flax. This assumes, of course, that large amounts of it are needed.

Assorted other food news items include the reluctance of schools to buy irradiated beef for school lunches, and a parent’s lawsuit in Oregon over the advertising of junk food to children in school. There was an item reporting a new study which found that cooking broccoli in a microwave lost most of its antioxident com-pounds as compared to steaming it. Britain’s largest farming organization has decided to ban genetically engineered food crops on its fields. And a recent anthropological discovery found stone tools for butchering animals in a site almost 2.6 million years old – so vegetarians are apparently going up against an extremely ancient human practice!

Nonetheless, plant foods are what’s good for you. The October Delicious Living sang the praises of beans, whose folate helps central nervous system function and regulates potentially dangerous homocysteine in the blood, while beans also supply iron and zinc, protein and healthy soluble fiber. The fiber helps lower cholesterol, while beans’ low fat content and low glycemic index help fight obesity and diabetes. Soaking dried beans overnight, and discarding the water before cooking them with a bit of kombu, will help decrease their tendency to cause gas, as will discarding the liquid in a can of canned beans.

Another Delicious Living article, after re-viewing some of the controversy surrounding high-protein, low-carbohydrate diets, weighed in with suggestion of healthy choices for carbs, proteins, and fats. It advocated eating whole-foods carbs such as vegetables, fruits, and whole grains rather than refined grains; it suggested nuts, legumes, and high-protein grains such as quinoa (as well as fish and poultry, oh well) for protein; and identified healthy fats as those from such vegetable sources as nuts, olives, and avocados, and oils of canola, corn, cottonseed, olive, peanut, safflower, and soy-bean.

A really exciting bit of news is that Prevention magazine ran an article on going vegetarian which both recommended doing so and gave sound advice about it. The article described vegetarianism as having "gone main-stream," with 28 schools of public health urging Americans to give meat a miss at least one day a week. It noted that the "overwhelming majority" of scientific studies on the subject of nutrition and chronic disease have recommended diets low in animal foods and high in whole grains, vegetables, and fruits; and that the American Dietetic Association’s endorsement of vegetarian diets discussed their role in reducing risk of obesity, heart attack, stroke, high blood pressure, diabetes, and colon and prostate cancers. The article also offered some good tips on doing it right, such as making a point of not going overboard on vegetarian junk food like potato chips, making sure to eat plant protein foods such as grains, beans, nuts and soy, taking a vitamin B-12 supplement if you go vegan, and making sure to eat a vitamin C food with a plant-sourced iron food to help absorb the iron.

Other pleasant tidbits include the discovery that substances in tea called theaflavins can help lower cholesterol, the fact that carotenoids found in winter squash like pumpkin can help prevent diabetes in men, and that parsnip, a winter vegetable that looks like a big white carrot but tastes sweeter, is a good source of fiber, folate, potassium, and vitamin C.

A new retail shop in Shorewood should be of interest to vegetarians.

Cari Amici sells personal care products (i.e., soaps, shampoos, and skin lotions) and house-hold products (dish soap, laundry soap, cleaning products, recycled paper goods). Every item in the shop is carefully researched, and Chuck and I were very impressed by proprietor Pam’s sincerity, friendliness, and effort to make absolutely sure that each ingredient of every product she carries really is fully vegan. We will definitely be shopping there. And we are pleased to be able to let you all know that, since our Pre-Thanksgiving Feast hall has no dishwashing facilities, and we must therefore use paper plates, we will at least be able this year to buy recycled paper plates from this new vegan shop.

Cari Amici is at 3811 N. Oakland Ave., just south of Shorewood High School. It’s open from 11 AM to 7 PM Tuesday through Saturday; the phone number (414) 961-8920.

THE VEGGIE TABLE

By guest columnist Jan Taylor

There’s a new veg-friendly restaurant in town. Rice Palace Asian Cuisine, at 3730 W. National Ave., opened this summer. The pleasant décor is one of understated elegance, with very soft background music. On a hot summer evening, the air conditioning was welcome (and not overdone!)

The very extensive menu includes soups, salads, fried rice, fried noodles, entrees, and desserts. Nine of the entrees consist of various combinations of vegetables, which can be ordered with meat or with tofu.

Several dishes are spicy, as indicated by a small red pepper next to the menu listing. I was lamenting the fact that the dish I was considering was not spicy, and the waitress said she could bring me a side order of red pepper sauce.

Each entrée is accompanied by a large serving of rice, and a dinner salad that is arranged on the plate very artistically. Servings are very generous, and could easily be shared by two people. Most of the vegetarian entrees are priced at $8.95 or $9.95.

Rice Palace Asian Cuisine is open Sunday, Monday, and Wednesday from 11 AM to 9 PM, and Thursday through Saturday from 11 AM to 10 PM; phone is (414) 383-3156.

We had heard rumors that the U. S. Army has become a veg-friendly place in a way that it certainly was not back in 1970 when Chuck was in it. So we were very interested when a friend whose brother is in the army brought us a sample of a modern army Ready-to-Eat Meal.

The tan plastic bag was labeled Vegetarian Menu # 14: pasta with alfredo sauce. The individually wrapped items inside consisted of the entrée in a foil wrapper so it could be heated, a serving of canned-type pineapple (also in foil), crackers, peanut butter, a fruit bar, a granola bar, an iced tea drink mix, a plastic spoon, napkin, salt, towelette, chewing gum, and matches (but no cigarettes, which Chuck says were still standard issue in his day). There was also a plastic bag with a chemical packet in it and instructions on how to use it to heat the entrée, which Chuck says is also new since his day; we opted to place the foil bag in a pan of boiling-hot water for a few minutes instead – which did warm it to a nice eating temperature.