Get Ready for Hug a Vegetarian Day!

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Hug a Vegetarian Day, which takes place on September 24, is fun whether you’re a vegetarian or not. After all, who couldn’t use a hug? You might wonder why you should hug a vegetarian anyway, especially if you’re not a supporter of animal rights. Vegetarians help the earth, too—a plant-based diet only uses a fraction of the energy and only creates a fraction of the waste a meat-based diet does. So if you normally hug people who bring reusable bags to the grocery store or who recycle their aluminum, go ahead and hug a vegetarian while you’re at it.

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National Banana Lover’s Day

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Happy Banana Lover’s Day! For those of you who love bananas (like my husband and daughter), today is the perfect day to indulge in your fruity treat. For those of you who can’t stand them (like me—every time I eat one I taste the nasty pink meds my mom laced mine with every time I had to take antibiotics as a kid), you could always just squish them between your fingers for fun.

How to Celebrate Banana Lover’s Day:

Dress up like Brian from Family Guy in his banana costume and do the “Peanut Butter Jelly Time” song.

Make a banana tree house by stacking slices on top of one another with toothpicks. Eat when finished.

Have a banana split for breakfast.

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Dairy Industry Petitions Against Soy Milk, Threatens to Tell Mother

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In a lame attempt at taking a bite out of the soy industry, the dairy industry is calling on the government to stop allowing producers of soy, almond, and other nondairy milks from calling their products milk. This whiny, tell-the-teacher playground tactic is likely in response to the growing use of people refusing to use milk in their products—and rightly so; in some areas of the world up to 90% of the people have milk intolerance, which makes perfect sense. Milk, after all, comes from cows (typically) and is, therefore, intended for baby cows.

Humans are the only species who continue to drink milk beyond infancy—let alone milk from another species, which you have to admit sounds weird when you put it that way—and milk itself is intended for a species that grows to an immense size in a few short months, not humans who already have an obesity epidemic on their hands as it is.

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Delicious, Nutritious Corn Smut!

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American farmers have spent untold millions of dollars trying to eliminate corn smut, which is a fungal disease of corn.  Meanwhile, in Latin America people have been happily eating the corn smut.  And it turns out they were right!

Corn smut is properly known as Ustilago maydis, which infects the developing kernels of corn and transforms them into gigantic gray-black blobs, which look something like a brain made out of mushrooms.  In Latin America the resulting blobs are known as huitlacoche, and are used as a filling.  Corn tumors may not sound very delicious, but a lot of people swear by them!

Well it turns out that the joke's on us, because huitlacoche is incredibly nutritious!  And, if prepared properly (and from a fresh source, not canned) many people swear it's delicious as well.  


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10 Reasons to Ditch Dairy

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June is Alternatives to Dairy Month, and for good reason. Though many of us enjoy dairy, humans are the only mammals that continue drinking milk beyond infancy. We don’t actually need it (like the dairy industry would have us believe) if we eat a diet full of fruits and vegetables, and it can cause more problems than it’s worth. Here are ten reasons to kick the dairy habit.

10. It’s Full of Hormones

Most of us are aware of the hormones given to cows, making them produce hundreds of times the amount of dairy they made decades ago due to our demand. These get into our bodies and can cause serious health problems, like mood swings and decreased libido.

9. It Can Decrease Your Leafy Greens Intake

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Vegetarian Enchiladas

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I loathe canned food as a rule, but enchilada sauce is one of the few exceptions.  Embarrassing as it can be to admit, especially here on a food blog, I honestly think that whoever came up with the idea of putting enchilada sauce in a can deserves some kind of medal!  


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Meat-Eating Environmentalists Must Use Caution

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Much hubbub lately about the conflict between eating meat and attempting to reduce one's carbon footprint.  One speaker making the rounds recently is Nicolette Hahn Niman, a rancher and environmental lawyer who runs the famous Niman Ranch with her husband Bill.  Hahn Niman argues that you can call yourself an environmentalist and eat meat, but only if you eat the right kind of meat.


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Homemade Salsa Fresca

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A Great Way To Eat Your Veggies!A Great Way To Eat Your Veggies!

To celebrate Cinco de Mayo, and to kick off the season for awesome produce, I decided to whip up a batch of salsa fresca.  A bowl of this and a bag of tortilla chips and I'm set for dinner!  If you want something more filling and protein-packed, you can use a can of vegetarian refried beans - either as an additional dip, or to top your chips and bake up a batch of nachos.

You can find a lot of salsa recipes online if you go looking.  But the truth is that salsa is one of those things, like salads, that's more of a procedure than a recipe.  All you need is a mental map of the different elements, and then you can customize it, mix and match ingredients, and skew it towards whatever looks good on the produce aisle today.


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Is it Teaching, Force-Feeding, or Necessary?

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Every day a battle rages within my blood—to do it or not do it? A huge part of me wants to raise my daughter as a vegetarian. She’s four, completely healthy, having come a long way from her premature birth, and absolutely loves animals. Right now she wants to be a veterinarian when she grows up (the same thing I wanted to be at four, actually)—a step up from wanting to be a cat when she grows up, which is what she told me just a year ago!

A vegetarian lifestyle is one of the most humane, ecologically important things I could teach her. It’s about caring for the earth, about being a humane person, and about respecting our fellow sentient creatures. She’s already asking questions and becoming troubled with the responses I’ve been giving her about the chicken and fish she eats. I try to give straightforward responses, too, because therein lies my dilemma—I don’t want to “force” my beliefs onto her.

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Will The Hexane In Soy Burgers Kill You?

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VeggieBurger Super Deluxe!VeggieBurger Super Deluxe!In a word: No.

Next article!

Just kidding.  But surely I can't be the only one who's getting heartily tired of fear-based news stories.  I imagine a primitive time, before the news media learned that fear catches the attention.  When they reported on, you know, NEWS ITEMS.  Instead of just trying to scare the **** out of you at every turn.

The news item here is that a biased research group found trace amounts of a neurotoxin in soy products that didn't belong to their core constituency.  Shock!  Surprise!  

First of all, I also wish that the news media would stop treating "research findings" from "research groups" that are just special interest press release companies as, you know, NEWS ITEMS.  The research group here is the Cornucopia Institute, which supports local sustainable organic agriculture.  


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