Where Do Vegans Buy Food In Our Town?

[This is hopefully going to be published in our town's online magazine.]

When most people picture in their minds what vegans eat for dinner, they envision a pile of beet greens, raw kale and spinach, maybe with some unshelled nuts on the side!  Although we do try to get our green leafy vegetables, our meals are quite varied and delicious.  Anyone can enjoy vegan meals, but most people have no idea what to put on the plate! 

Although I am not a great cook, I thought I would give some ideas that everyone can use to cut down on meat and dairy.  It just takes a little time to become familiar with how to substitute non-animal products in your cooking and baking.  You too, can help keep animals from being enslaved, tortured and killed.  The easiest way to cut down on meat and dairy is simply to eat more fruits, vegetables and starches.  Starches feed the brain and fill the belly!

I have more food articles planned – only so much will fit in this one post! Let's start with the basics:

First, a huge change is simply to change your milk.  There are many non-animal types of milk, such as soy milk, chocolate soy milk, almond milk, hemp milk (I did not like), and coconut milk. When I first went vegan I was not crazy about either soy or almond milk and worried I would not last as a vegan.  I had been almost addicted to skim milk, drinking four to six glasses a day, so liking the non-animal version of milk was important!  Well, it took me only three days to go from preferring the taste of skim milk to preferring the taste of soy milk and almond milk!  Now the idea of bitter, watery skim milk is revolting. I also cut down to two glasses total per day of non-animal milk, which just naturally happened.   Here is a picture of me loving my generic organic soy milk from Wal-Mart.  Reasonably priced!  [I decided to put my picture on here, because no one I know will find this blog anyway!]

Another change is to use either oils or Earth Balance margarine instead of butter.  Earth Balance is delicious!  It is a little more expensive than regular butter, but who wants too much butter or oil in their systems anyway!  I treat Earth Balance like a delicacy.   

Egg substitutions are trickier for the beginner.  There is a product called Ener-G Egg Replacer that is available at Kroger which is similar to a baking powder mix.  It is stirred with water to make an egg-like substance to take the place of the eggs for baking.







Many people also use applesauce or bananas as a substitute for eggs.  In fact, two of my favorite chocolate chip recipes have applesauce in them, and the great part is you don’t ever have to worry about a child “eating raw dough” when egg is not in the batter!   My son, who is not vegan, always requests the vegan chocolate chip cookies because he feels safer eating the dough!  One other egg mixture you may have heard about is ground flax seed.  I get my Omega 3s from fresh ground flax seeds that I sprinkle on my cereal each morning.  It can also be used as an egg mixture when some is stirred with water.  The amounts of water to flax are listed on recipes, so it is easy.

Another wonderful product is Vegenaise.  I buy the original Vegenaise (you may have guessed it is the vegan version of mayonnaise) at Country Nutrition in the refrigerated section.  It is more expensive than regular mayo, but most people who try it prefer the taste over mayonnaise, even if they are not vegan.  It is lighter in taste.  (This one is almost empty - from my fridge!)

I also depend on my Tofutti sour cream!  I get this non-dairy sour cream at Kroger along with Tofutti cream cheese.  Both are very tasty and if you put the sour cream on your potato, you will not know the difference between the non-dairy version and the dairy version.  I love a dab of Tofutti sour cream on soups and pastas!

Lastly I will list two vegan snacks that I love.  The first is Reduced Fat Wheat Thins.  I eat these in between meals or with some jelly or Tofutti cream cheese (or both).  I never tire of putting several in my mouth and taking a sip of coffee and having the crackers slowly melt in my mouth.  (Simple pleasures are the best, right?)  I prefer the taste of Reduced Fat to regular Wheat Thins.  Avoid the “flavored” varieties of crackers, because milk products are often added.  Vegans become experts at reading labels!  Reduced Fat Wheat Thins can be bought at just about any grocery store.  I like the family size at Wal-Mart.

(Sometimes I wonder what I am doing, giving away where I purchase my products, because I have noticed Reduced Fat Wheat Thins [Family Size] are often missing from the shelves!)

The other vegan snack is what I often have on a car trip (although it makes the steering wheel messy).  Cracker Jacks!  They actually have molasses and seem like a pretty healthy snack.

And just so you do not think I ever eat any fruits or vegetables, I love to cut up generic organic carrots I buy at Kroger (they nearly always taste the best), and slice them into little circles, and pop them in my mouth for a snack.  I go through about three carrots a day at work.  I also try to eat a fresh fruit like an apple, banana or orange, but because I am not huge on fruits, I will eat dried fruit as long as no fat is added (banana chips are loaded with fat).  I eat dried blueberries, cranberries, raisins, cherries and mangos.  The cranberries, cherries and blueberries can actually come in one package, and I buy extra blueberries in another package at Wal-Mart.  Those blueberries are yummy! 

This is enough information for now.  I will continue from time to time with specific ideas on how you can minimize the amount of animal products in your diet by making simple choices.

Note sent to the White House

Today I sent this to the White House.  Every once in awhile I send along a good idea, but they may think I am a crazy hippie with this one!  I sent it anyway. 

"We need to take Michelle Obama’s healthy eating plan a few steps further.  I figured this out:  The government pays farmers money in subsidies to abuse and kill animals so we can buy the meat cheaply, to become overweight and possibly sick from diseases due to animal overcrowding and waste, so we will need to buy medicines and make hospital visits, thereby supporting that industry and the health care industry; all the while causing more climate change.  I probably could think of more in this primitive cycle of feeding people via animal slavery.  I do not see anything right with it!  It fits the definition of “a racket” in that those who advocate for it pretend that it does good, when it is harmful.  
We must become more enlightened, more moral, and urge the country’s people to become as close to vegan as they can.  The government can implement this “change for good.”  You can urge farmers to grow grain crops for people’s consumption.  You can stop these subsidies for beef, pork, chicken, turkey and fish.  You can research Dr. McDougall’s many articles on his web site and other doctors who advocate a low fat,  plant based diet.  (We have known meat causes Cancer for 100 years!) 
Now I will throw the Founding Fathers at our present government:  our major Founding Fathers were visionaries who put their enlightenment thoughts into action.  They were bold and progressive, so doing the same ol’-same ol’ is not what our country is about. 
Please bring our country up to standards on morality.  Have them care outside of themselves, outside of their own species.  Teach them to look globally at health issues, food issues and environmental issues.  It will be obvious that meat and dairy must go."

Great New Video by Gary Yourofsky

This is an excellent video!  I am not sure if the interviewer was taking on the role she did on purpose, but she seemed pretty genuine.  Either way, it is effective!

For Christians Who Enjoy Philosophy! Ponder Jesus and God's Names and Images

How do you see Jesus in your head?  Long, wavy hair, pale skin, delicate features?  How about God?  Do you see the gray-white beard and angry look that was portrayed by Michelangelo, or do you have another image of God when you talk to him in your head?

I wonder why God and Jesus do not automatically put an accurate picture of themselves into our minds.  They are all powerful and, according to what most people believe, God made us, so you would think he could easily interject his correct looks into our brains.  While he is at it, perhaps he could divulge his and Jesus’ real names. Because God and Jesus are not right!  The earliest versions I heard in the Christian religion are Yahweh for God and Yeshua for Jesus.  But if you go back further, Yeshua disappears and Yahweh turns into a river god just named Yaw.  (To confuse matters, Jesus was supposed to be called Immanuel according to his mother!  But Mom had little influence on baby Jesus.)  For ease, and since we do not know their names for certain, we will call them God and Jesus the rest of the way through this blog, even though you would think God and Jesus would want to be called by their real names! 

I would hate for people to be praying to me, calling me Susie when my name is Bobbie! If people were praying to me but imagined that I looked like Lady Gaga instead of how I really look, I would be upset about it!  I would think Jesus would get really sick of people imagining him as a very pretty Jesus, when he most likely had a big nose, a short body, short curly black hair and dark skin.  It has to be so frustrating to constantly listen to all the prayers in the world when all the people are to the wrong person and using a wrong name! 

Yet Christians do not seem to mind that they have the names wrong, and will make up excuses in order to keep praying to whom they see in pictures.  Some Christians claim they actually hear God and Jesus’ voices in side their heads, answering them; much like when you mentally test a conversation by carrying it out in your head first.  Other Christians claim they do not actually hear a voice, but get “a feeling” while talking and praying. A feeling is an emotion that comes from the brain and chemicals in the body.  A feeling is manufactured by you, so I do not see that as evidence that anyone is listening. 

I recently saw a picture of an Asian Jesus counseling fellow Asians.  I wonder how many different concepts of Jesus and of God there are!  My mother thought God was “A Force for Good” so I always pictured some strong metal purple-brown sheet as the “Force” – I do not know why.  I wonder who she prayed to when she prayed?  Because she admitted she did pray, mostly as a way to center her thoughts.  Did she picture a purple-brown sheet too or did her “Force for Good” look different?  Would God be offended by being seen as a metal purple-brown sheet? 

My own image of God was a very happy fellow with a deep, slightly breathy voice, and a gentle Ho, Ho, Ho chuckle.  He looked kind of like Santa, with a very round face, and he often peeked from behind a cloud.  His speech patterns were just like mine – just slower and deeper – but the cadences were the same.  I think I combined Santa with the sun for my image of God, the image that followed me around for a good share of my life. 

 Where did you pick up your image of God?  Did you make him up yourself?  Does he look and sound like the typical image of God or do you have a variation?  Does your God have the same accent as you and the same pronunciation – just slower and deeper?   How about Jesus?  Does he look like the pictures you have seen or an actor you saw on T.V.? 

If you have such a personal relationship with God or Jesus, wouldn’t you think they both would share what they look like and what their names are with you? 

Why are all of our images of God and Jesus not consistent?  That is a big question right there.  Why does everyone have his/her own idea of what these two characters look like?  Since God and Jesus have not provided their “looks” to us and not spoken to us about their real names, and since we have developed our feelings toward them and developed their personalities based on what little we have read; we can see that everything about them has been created in our imaginations.  Perhaps they themselves were originally created in someone’s imagination!

All the Animals on Noah’s Ark are in Heat!

(Information from talkorigins.org and biblicalnonsense.com)

I am going to talk today about Noah’s Ark, again, but we are going to focus on one aspect of the story – the water.  Because you can’t have a flood without water!  Right?  Believe it or not, Creationists have not figured out any way that all that water could accumulate around the earth, and how the animals could survive the temperature if there were that much water. 

So, we needn’t talk about the size of animals on the ark, how they got from Alaska to the Middle East, the number of “kinds” of animals, how their food could be stored and not get moldy, or what they ate when they got off the ark and everything was barren, how a dove brought back an olive leaf when there would not even be seeds germinating, or the urine fumes on the ark– because they don’t even have the water necessary for this wonderful flood figured out yet!  (Of course it’s fun to discuss the other things too, for amusement!)

Here are all the different ideas Creationists have proposed for where the water originated from. 

First, we will start with the Water Vapor Canopy “theory.” 

In case you are not up on the latest, Answersingenesis now says that the “Water Vapor Canopy ‘Theory’” should not be used, and give credit to their own researchers for this discovery, of course.  The Water Vapor Canopy Theory was an idea from Creationists that all the water was hanging around in the air in vapor form, and then it “somehow” cooled enough to drop onto the earth as rain.  But if it began as a thick layer of vapor, with its accompanying pressure, any water from it would be superheated!  The flood waters would be boiled away very quickly.  Noah’s little family that we are all supposed to descend from?  Poached.  

What about “It rained for 40 days and 40 nights.”  Well, raining for 40 days and nights would raise the atmospheric pressure, which would raise oxygen and nitrogen to toxic levels.  The water beating down on the ark would be at a rate of 6 inches per minute and would quickly become too hot from all the energy.  The heat generated by the impact of the raindrops falling on the flood surface would have been more than sufficient to boil the water and prevent it from rising.  Any way you try to make the fish swim – they won’t be swimming because the water would evaporate from the intense heat.  And you’d have a fish fry. 

Next let’s talk about the Hydroplate theory.  This is where the water came from underneath the ground. The problem with this is that you need much more water than our earth holds.  The earth contains only 1% of the necessary water for the flood covering the highest mountaintop, so 99% would have to fall from the sky.  

This Hydroplate model proposes that the Flood waters came from a layer of water about ten miles underground (Answersingenesis says the water got trapped underground during Creation week), which was released by a “catastrophic rupture of the earth's crust,” shot above the atmosphere, and fell as rain.  But this cannot work, because even one mile deep the earth is boiling hot, and so all the water ten miles down would be superheated. Further heat would be added by the energy of the water falling from above the atmosphere.  As if we needed further heat for it to be too hot!  As with the vapor canopy model, Noah would have been charbroiled.

Creationists describe this water coming from underground as having volcanoes erupting underground.  They try to make it seem all chaotic.  But volcanoes erupting would just boil the water further. 

Next we will talk about what I call the “Rocks Falling from Outer Space ” idea.  Creationists have many different rocks they think are responsible for the “world-wide flood.”

Kent Hovind proposed that the flood water came from a comet which broke up and fell on the earth. He actually did!  Again, this has the problem of the heat from the gravitational potential energy. The water would be steam by the time it reached the surface of the earth.

Even if the water began as ice in orbit, the gravitational potential energy would raise the temperature past boiling.  

As an aside here, you know that crater called Chicxulub Crater?  Kent Hovind thinks that asteroids hit during this flood wherever we now see craters on earth, including this Chicxulub crater (the one that made the dinosaurs go extinct).  (Yet Hovind claims dinosaurs went on the ark!)  He proposed that asteroids hit along with the flood (so picture that), but unfortunately for Kent Hovind, the heat from the massive impacts would have immediately boiled large quantities of the ocean!  

The last thing we will look at is the idea by John Baumgardner called Runaway Subduction.  He postulates that the earth was all in one piece, the Pangea, 4000 years ago (LOL!), because you see, that helps with their story of how penguins waddled from Alaska to the Middle East. (Another LOL!)  Then he has the plates tearing apart and the continents moving rapidly, by first having the land heat up with friction and then cooling off, just because he doesn’t want things to get too hot. The tearing apart of the layers and twisting, causes the flood to come up from underneath. It sounds so official. But noxious gases like sulfuric acid would erupt.  The runaway subduction process does not work and Baumgardner even admits that it would take supernatural powers to make it work.  He also estimates a heat release of 10²⁸ joules from this runaway subduction process. The lava expected to accompany the subterranean water would also bring the already scalding liquid to its boiling point. The oceans would probably be vaporized!  

So you see, the problems of the water’s source and destination are massive since the entire ocean should almost instantaneously be converted to steam with all their ideas. In fact, the steam rising from the ocean beds would have been concentrated enough to boil off the planet’s atmosphere with the runaway subduction idea.

In closing, Creationists still have got to figure out how to get water for the flood, and find a way for it not to burn Noah, his family and all the animals and fish to death!

The Search for God, and a Great Video about Jesus by Richard Carrier

I posted this video of Richard Carrier because I think it is a very clear look at the belief in Jesus.  Worth watching!

But today, I want to discuss the search for God.  In this quest for God, people used to look just above the clouds and see visions, because God lived on levels in the sky - and occasionally came down on earth to walk around, criticize and command.  We now know so much about our universe; how it can be traced back to simpler organisms, to elements, and on back to the start of the Big Bang.  We even can see the Cosmic Microwave Background when the Universe was 380,000 years old.  As we move further back in time, our Universe gets smaller and smaller. We have theoretical physicists, such as Lawrence Krauss who have evidence that the Universe could start from virtual particles popping in and out of nothing.  So where is God?  People think of God as a huge spirit/being in the sky, starting everything, but Stephen Hawking say that the Universe could easily have begun without God “lighting the match” and that God would just be in the way and redundant.  He continues by stating that with multiverses filling every nook and cranny, there is no room for God.  So the idea of God being huge is perhaps an incorrect idea.  Since we have gotten existence down to the size of virtual particles popping in and out of nothing, what is the next step smaller; the next step backward from virtual particles popping in and out of nothing?  Nothing?  Could that be God?

Red Blood Cells and Evolution

I am going to put what I came up with today – I am pretty certain my information is valid – and if anyone thinks my concepts are wrong, please let me know! 

I was talking about altitude sickness with a co-worker, when he said that people's bodies get used to the altitude by making more red blood cells to carry more oxygen to all parts of the body. This is true.  It occurred to me that this is a very quick adaption to a different environment.  The body adapts - which is a part of natural selection in evolution. 

Here is the definition of natural selection, the very definition that Creationists and “Intelligent Design” proponents want taken out of schools:  “Natural Selection:  The process whereby organisms better adapted to their environment tend to survive and produce more offspring.”

Do you see any reason that should be kept from children and teens?  (South Carolina is another state that is now trying to ban teaching evolution in the classroom, and their reasoning is because they do not want to teach “natural selection.”  So let’s continue examining our example:

Taking the high altitude example further, Wiki says that native Andean and Himalayan populations have better oxygenation at birth, enlarged lung volumes throughout life, and a higher capacity for exercise. (This seems to show a permanent change in the population – evolution at work.)  Tibetans have a sustained increase in brain blood flow, lower hemoglobin concentration, and less susceptibility to chronic mountain sickness than other high altitude populations.  (This change in Tibetans is different than other populations who live in the mountains, so these abilities of theirs may help them survive better than the others.  (Re-read the definition of natural selection, because it sure looks like why the Tibetans have permanently evolved.)  It is thought that the Tibetans may have been on the mountains for a longer period of time and that is why they have developed these advantages.  (Evolution – change over time.)

Do these people who are against kids learning about natural selection actually think that a person does not change, but the environment is made to fit the person?  They always talk about the “fine-tuned” environment.  Do they not realize that some people die because their heart cannot handle the high altitude?  That is not fine-tuned, and the examples of the high altitude populations show natural selection, not fine-tuning of the environment.