Okay, clearly I lied when I said I would have a real post soon

And I'm thinking I might have to give up the conceit that I am actually blogging here. While I ponder, here's some stuff to read.

Okay, it's been awhile...

...and I will have an actual post sometime remotely soon.

But there have been a bunch of interesting things published lately that I wanted to share.

The New York Times seems to be obsessed with food politics this week.

And here's yet another reason (if you needed one) to cut out processed foods: they can give fatal illnesses to the folks who work in the processing plants.

The word of the day is "orthorexia."

oh-are-tee-aitch-oh-are-eee-ex-eye-ay.

orthorexia.

No, I don't really think I'm orthorexic. I ate a frackin' burger the other night (it was organic/humane—and the first meat I've had since I had that spate of cravings, which, oddly, seemed to abate just when I was getting ready to embrace them).

But it's a fine line. I certainly think obsessively about food, where my next meal is coming from and what it is, and what's okay for me to eat, ethically and for my own personal health (not long-term health, though— more the fact of how I will feel after eating whatever it is). Too much thinking can drive me crazy. But not enough thinking makes me beat myself up a bit. And then I am all too aware of just how self-indulgent it is to even be spending so much energy on this topic.

The other day I had a 45-minute conversation/negotiation with my mother about what she is willing to serve (not veggie matzoh ball soup) and what i am willing to eat (not factory-farmed roast chicken) at the Passover seder I'll be home for next week. Sheesh.

Now that the week of obsessively documenting my food movements is over...

Since starting this blog I've been meaning to post more about the rules, how I developed them, how they shift over time, how much I stick to them (or, more to the point, don't), and why I have them in the first place.

This is all feeling extra important right now, because

1. in cataloging every single thing that passed my lips last week, I realized how very uncommitted I have been to my rules lately, mostly in the realm of where cheese comes from.
2. I have been craving meat, after about a six-month period of being grossed out by the very idea of it.
   

And I need to think really carefully about how I'm going to handle it. Periodically over the time that I've been eating this way, I realize that I'm either shifting my beliefs in a certain area, or drifting away from my intentions—and generally what I do in response is to shift my guidelines to be more in line with my evolving beliefs, or recommit to my rules and make a conscious effort to do better. Right now I'm having a lot of internal conflict over what's both realistic and ethical (as well as not overly rigid and full of self-denial, which for me—as I think I've said—is a really, really bad combination).

First of all, I want to point out that the rules can easily be divided into two types, and it makes a huge difference to me which kind of rule I'm breaking. There are the no-factory-farmed, local-only rules, which are about ethics: How is my food being produced, and what kind of impact is its production having on others (farmworkers, animals, the enviroment generally)? Obviously I don't think that eating meat or other animal products is categorically wrong; but I'm striving for a light footprint, and that guides my decisions. Then there are the as-unprocessed-as-possible rules, keeping me away from sweets and other stuff that makes me feel like crap. Of course, there's some overlap—and there's definitely a solid argument to be made that high-fructose corn syrup is part and parcel of an environmentally unsound system—but for the most part, I see these rules as about self-care rather than ethics, so breaking them is really just about whether it's worth it to me to maybe get a sugar headache from those Ginger-Os, or have a food-additive hangover from that snack mix.

So, on the first kind of rule: Why not just be totally vegan and be done with all the hairsplitting and hamster-wheeling about which cheese is okay when? Well, aside from the fact that I don't think I could stand to cut any one thing out of my diet completely (least of all some things I love love love and depend on nutritionally [more on that in a sec]: eggs, yogurt, or cheese), the fact of something's vegan-ness doesn't mean it was ethically produced or environmentally sound. (There's tons of vegan junk food that is overpackaged, overprocessed, and over-everythinged that's wrong with our industrially based food system.) So, basically, it fits in just fine with my ethics to eat some organic yogurt that came from pastured cows on a relatively small farm about 60 miles from where I live instead of some soygurt made from soybeans that were grown absolutely no closer to me than the Midwest—and maybe as far away as China. (Not that I don't use soygurt in the filling of my vegan lasagna—or that I always know where the soybeans that went into my tofu came from.)

And sometimes the rules conflict with each other: Meat substitutes are rilly frickin' processed, so where does that leave me when my choices are meat or fake meat? And what about French cheese? It's much more likely that French cheese isn't factory-farmed (not like all of Europe's agriculture is small-scale and sustainable, but it's a damn sight better than here)—but, duh, it violates the local rules pretty bad.

And then there's the whole nutrional-dependence thang. I really do think I need animal protein sometimes (usually eggs, less usually cheese, and, rarely, meat). Some people do well on a vegan diet, and some don't. I do well as a mostly vegetarian—but I know more than a few folks who get anemic, chronically fatigued, and generally nonfunctional if they don't eat meat often enough. Where's the right balance between needs, wants, and ethics?

Clearly (at least, what's become clearer to me while writing this entry, which by the way has taken three days—only partly because I've had more work this week than the last two), if I recommit to my animal-product-sourcing rules (i.e., quit eating at the Parkway and the Mexicali Rose so much and make a more serious effort to eat vegan when I'm out), then I can indulge these meat cravings at some of the lovely places near me that serve sustainable and humane meat.

Surely I'll have more—too much more—to say about this later.

Shopping, cooking, and eating: day 7 (the final diary day!)

I thought it was going to be a 100 percent eating day, but I did end up in a grocery store after dinner. Here's the list:

• the other apple I bought on Saturday
• two mandarins
• some of the Indian potato stew I made yesterday, over rice from the rice cooker; I thought this would hold me to dinner, but it didn't, so while out at the café working, I had to eat...
• a "raisin bran" muffin, which was the only thing that wasn't basically cake or pastry; doubtless it had some refined flour, but it didn't give me any refined-sugar headache or anything
• a bunch of corn chips that came with my friend/work buddy A.'s burrito (please note that this is not the same A. at whose apartment I ate lots of things on day 2)
• huge glass of genmai cha and a refill on the hot water with the same teabag (the café version of the bottomless cup, essentially)
  
• then, dinner with my date, D. (of the crag rangoon–infested meal with the other A.): a cup of lentil soup and a piece of (white flour) bread that was kinda herby and very soft, yum
• some nachos (chips, black beans, salsa, cheese, sour cream, a pepperoncini on top that he didn't want so I ate it happily)
• part of a quesadilla (white flour tortilla, cheese, salsa, with ample evidence that there was meat grease [mmmmm...] on the grill where it was cooked)
• a glass of house red
  
• post-dinner shopping trip: Fig Newmans (low-fat, which was not my choice but D.'s 'cause the full-fat ones were also wheat free, and he rejected the barley flour therein); Tuscan three cheese–flavored Kettle Chips (also per D.), Pirate's Booty (my idea), six granny smith apples (D. insisted on six even though I assured him I would be at the farmers market many times before he was at my house enough times to eat six apples, but whatever; they're from Washington, which is not that far away)
• midnight snack: some Fig Newmans and a couple of the chips, which were not good—too sweet; give me salt and vinegar any day

Not really a banner day for my food choices. Thank gawd this diary week is over. As much as I relish the obsessive documentation of everything I put in my body, it's a little...much.

Shopping, cooking, and eating: day 6

No shopping today.

Cooking and eating, in order:

• bottomless cup of green tea
• leftover roasted veggies from last night
• a navel orange (not the one I bought yesterday but one I bought last Tuesday, or was it Saturday?)
• the last two of the eggs from D.'s chickens, fried sunny-side up in a little olive oil, and two slices of toasted Russian sourdough (I don't really count this as cooking, but yes, I fried the eggs and toasted the toast)
• a tangelo
• one last hamantasch (yes, that really is the singular of hamantaschen, and no, I didn't know that either until yesterday)
  
• a kiwi
• cooked an Indian-style stew (this can be made with any veggies you have around that you think would taste good; I use different things each time, and this was what I had today that seemed right) to eat for lunch tomorrow and over the whole week:
  1. Chop a medium onion.
  2. Heat some olive oil in a smallish soup pot or large saute pan or saucepan over high heat.
  3. Add a few cardamom pods, a couple teaspoons of fenugreek, and a generous tablespoon each of cumin seeds and mustard seeds.
  4. When the seeds start to fry and burst, add the onion. Add salt. Turn the heat down if necessary to keep from scorching.
  5. Chop some garlic (I used four cloves today) and add them to the pot with a generous amount (a tablespoon or two?) of ground cumin and a smaller amount of coriander, and an even smaller amount of turmeric.
  6. Don't burn yourself on the side of the pot, right on your wrist tattoo, while adding the spices. Oops, too late.
  7. Add a bit of water to the pot to keep everything from burning, and turn it down again.
  8. Chop three potatoes and add them to the pot along with more salt.
  9. Separate cauliflower into florets and add to the pot.
  10. Add a big can of garbanzo beans, drained, and then add some water—you can add enough to cover all the veggies, if you want it relatively wet, but I'm not looking for anything super-soupy today so I am going light on the water. If I had veggie broth I would use that instead, but I don't.
  11. Wash a bunch of chard, chop the stems, and add them to the pot.
  12. Simmer for a while, and when potatoes are tender, chop the chard leaves and add them, too.
  13. Simmer a little more and then taste for seasoning. Correct seasoning and simmer some more.
  14. Stick in it the fridge for tomorrow's lunch and beyond. It keeps well and will be even more flavorful after sitting overnight.
  
• cooked some rice in the rice cooker
• (back to eating now) some dried apricots and Ak-mak crackers, oh I love them so
  
• a mandarin from yesterday's market
• a piece of none-too-crisp celery out of the crisper dipped in some peanut sauce I made for a party several weeks ago (that stuff has so much garlic in it, it keeps for months)
  
• some broccoli sauteed with the remaining tofu I marinated on Friday, over some rice from the rice cooker

UPDATE:

• some Mary's Gone Crackers, black pepper flavor
• one of those chocolate truffles I mentioned the other day
• two veeeeery theeeeen slices of Russian sourdough (untoasted), spread with the very last of the Earth Balance
  

Last night I dreamed of Earth Balance

No joke: a huge half-full tub appeared in my fridge alongside the small almost-empty one that's already there.

Shopping, cooking, and eating: day 5

Because my friend M. is coming over to cook dinner tonight, this morning I had to do something I usually avoid: a Saturday farmers market. I went to the Grand Lake one, which is insanely crowded and overwhelming and, in addition to all the farmers and cooked-food stands, features many vendors of items like jewelry, t-shirts, and vibrational healing elixers.

So it's not my favorite place to be, but it was gorgeous out this morning, and I ran into my friends C. and E. (who both said they've been reading, so: Hi C. and E.!) and we gabbed about the great meals we've had lately (me: Suriya; them: the place C.'s stepmother opened recently whose name I can never remember, even though they told me three times this morning and we made plans to eat there next weekend) and it was lovely.

And I bought:

• brussels sprouts
• broccoli
• cauliflower
• a head of garlic
• three onions
• two apples (one pink lady and one fuji)
• three mandarins
• one navel orange
• two white-fleshed sweet potatoes
• a blueberry bran muffin from the best vegan bakery I have ever encountered

The veggies I bought specifically for tonight (except the onions and garlic, which I just needed on general principles), and the fruit because I was enticed by samples.The muffin was breakfast.

In addition to the muffin, I ate a lot of samples, bite-sized tidbits of:

• Brazilian cheese bread (wheat free but clearly refined; it was pleasantly chewy, not particularly cheesy, and a nice bit of thing but not worth buying even if it had fit the rules)
• dried peach
• tomato (decent but watery; clearly, doesn't matter how warm your greenhouse is, out-of-season tomatoes are never going to be worth it)
• navel orange (at two different stands)
• maple-sweetened pecan granola
• lentils from the vegan soul food stand—next time I go to that market I am going to try to be ready for lunch so I can get a whole plate from them
• Argentinian-style beef empanada, with cumin, raisins, and hard-boiled egg, among other things (this was actually not a sample but a bite of what C. bought); yes, I have been quite meat-tastic lately, and in fact I will be writing a whole post about this soon, as I have been craving meat a lot
• a walnut
• a piece of fuji apple and a piece of pink lady apple

Lunch was leftover Thai food over brown rice still warm in the rice cooker form yesterday, and the fuji apple I just bought. There may be some afternoon snacking involving fruit; I'll update tomorrow if necessary.

For dinner M. and I are roasting vegetables and making tempeh from a very simple recipe given to me my my friend D., who was so influential in getting me started on my whole whole-foods thang: Toss cubed tempeh with soy sauce, onion powder, garlic powder, and nutritional yeast; fry in a generous amount of peanut oil until browned and crispy. I have a general distate for garlic and onion powder, but for this recipe their fresh or real forms wouldn't really work, so I go with it. You can also use other spices like cumin instead, but I like it this way.

Soundtrack to this post: my friend Kate Isenberg's CD that I bought at her CD release party last night. It's frackin' fantastic.

UPDATE: I ate a kiwi as an afternoon snack after the original post. Dinner was exactly as expected, but with a glass of red wine out of the fridge (open bottle from a party a couple weeks ago) and some unbelievably good homemade apricot hamantaschen that M. brought with her. I'm pretty sure they had butter in them, and I know they had white flour and sugar. Mmmmmmmm.

Shopping, cooking, and eating: day 4

There has been cooking today! Exciting.

I made garlic-ginger tofu with dino kale and brown rice. Here's how:

• put rice in the rice cooker
• press tofu blocks under a weighted plate for about a half-hour (less is okay but the full time is better)
  
• put into a pie plate: one tablespoon grated ginger, one tablespoon minced garlic, three tablespoons sauce, two tablespoons light (untoasted) sesame oil, one tablespoon dark (toasted) sesame oil, some red pepper flakes, and a bit of sugar (optional); mix it all together
• slice tofu into slabs and nestle it into the marinade; let sit for as long as you can (this keeps in the fridge for up to a week; today I left it on the counter for just over an hour)
• wash and chop kale
• heat some of the marinade in a skillet or saute pan on high heat (make sure you get some garlic and ginger in there)
• add kale and saute for a few minutes, until it's about half cooked (you might need to add a tablespoon or so of water to help it steam a bit if it looks like it might burn)
• add some tofu slabs and fry; flip the slabs when they are browned on one side
• when they are browned on the other side, stick some rice in a bowl and put the whole mess of tofu and kale on top

And now I have three small slabs of tofu sitting in marinade for me to eat anytime in the next several days—all I'll have to do is fry 'em up.

Eating:

• bottomless cup of tea (duh)
• two slices of toasted cornbread with Earth Balance (that's it for this loaf of cornbread; these were the heels and it's all gone)
• the aforementioned kale n' tofu
• a kiwi
• a tangelo
• an old apple with some peanut butter; this is the last of my old apples, thankfully—maybe I'll buy some more at the next market, but frankly I have been feeling not so appley lately
• two thin slices of Russian sourdough with Earth Balance (it's almost gone—I have enough for one more slice of toast and then I am free of temptation until someone buys more and leaves it at my house)

Dinner will be Thai food. There will probably also be drinks.

UPDATE: Dinner was something called Gaeng Ho, which I had never seen on a menu before and had more different kinds of vegetables than any one thing I have ever eaten. It was awesome. It had a few cellophane noodles, tofu, broccoli, cauliflower, green beans, spinach, some kind of squash, carrots, baby corn, eggplant, and a chunk or two of zucchini. All with basil and a red curry sauce that was a lot thicker and with way less coconut milk (maybe even none) than your typical red curry. Can I just say this again? It. Was. Awesome. Suriya. Go there. A little more than you're used to spending on dinner, but worth it.

There was no drinking, not even at the bar we went to afterwards for a show. But by the time I got home I was starving, so I had a midnight snack of generic shredded wheat and organic plain yogurt, topped with some dried fruit. And a chocolate truffle from a little package that Boston J. bought for me at the farmers market when she was visiting a few weeks ago. It's one of those truffles that's teeny-tiny but so incredibly good and satisfying that you don't need it to be any bigger (and you can't eat more than one at once).

Shopping, cooking, and eating: day 3, part 2

First, there was some more afternoon snacking:

• a blood orange from the farmers market a week ago Tuesday
• a piece of cornbread toast
• more tea
  

Dinner was not in fact Parkway nachos, but Parkway vegetarian pizza instead (they have vegan pizza there, but that fake cheese is...not okay; there is good, relatively unprocessed fake cheese
in the world, but this is not it). And some popcorn with butter and garlic salt. I should just rename the Parkway the Dairy of Unknown Provenance Hut. (Sometime soon I will explain more fully my feelings about fake cheese, soygurt, and the like, and my feeling that real can be more sustainable/ethical even if it means animal products.) Oh, and a glass of cheap sangiovese.

And now, two hours after getting home, I'm hungry again. My friend J. (okay, it is now officially clear that I have too many friends whose names start with J; this is not the same J. who I went to the Parkway with on Tuesday, neither is it the same J. who asked for the shopping-cooking-eating diary nor Boston J.) thought that an eight-inch pie was enough for the two of us to share. I was skeptical but figured I'd go with it; portion control has never been my strong point. And now I say: curses, J.! I might need to eat some more toast with Earth Balance before bed or my rumbling stomach will keep me awake.

Oh, and we saw Volver. It was pretty great.

Shopping, cooking, and eating: day 3

So my eating routine is a little weird today, since I slept on my friend A.'s couch last night because I was too tired/warm/inert to go out into the cold and catch the last BART home. Usually I start with my green tea (and sometimes a dose of raspberry emergen-c), then have some oatmeal (actually, right now it's six-grain cereal 'cause the Bowl was out of bulk steel-cut oats the last time I went) or toast and then go from there. But I couldn't today, so as I write this it's past 1 p.m. and I'm just now starting to drink my first cup of tea.

In order:

• some wheat-flake and flaxseed cereal that A. had in her house; totally up my alley for its 100%-whole-grain, no-sweetener-of-any-kind nature, but it did not, in fact, taste all that good (shocking, I know)
• one of the tangelos that I bought on Tuesday
• one of the kiwis that I bought on Tuesday
• leftover tofu and string beans from last night, along with the rest of the brown rice that was still warm in my rice cooker from yesterday
• bottomless cup of green tea
• two slices of Russian sourdough toast topped with Earth Balance, which my dairy-allergic friend J. bought when she was visiting last month so she could make her famous Awards Show Pudding for a party we threw (Earth Balance is a dilemma for me: It's vegan and nonhydrogenated, but it's still pretty processed; generally I prefer just to use olive oil [or organic butter when I am feeling spendy]—but I also think the EB tastes soooooo good, and so when it's in my house I tend to look for excuses to slather it on things)
• another tangelo

The prediction for dinner: nachos. I'm going back to the Parkway again, but I'm thinkin' I'm not gonna be as healthy as I was on Tuesday. I know you're on the edge of your seat about this. You can tune in tomorrow to find out.

Shopping, cooking, and eating: day 2, part 2

Dinner last night was veggie potstickers, tofu with string beans, and brown rice from the Yum Yum House. I was still over at A.'s apartment—my date D. came to pick me up and we ended up ordering in. A. ate sweet and sour tofu and crab rangoon (yes, I'll explain what that is in a minute) and D. ate egg rolls and chicken chow mein, which, as a special bonus, came for free because the YYH has one of those buy-two-entrees-get-free-noodles dealies.

And then there was the prodigious after-dinner snacking:

• a whole lot of the Trader Joe's version of Pirate's Booty
• some milk chocolate with hazelnuts
• and, um, a piece of A.'s crab rangoon, which is like a fried wonton filled with cream cheese and fake crab (pollack, D. declared, and he was seconded by A.'s ex-boyfriend A., who had stopped by to...oh, forget it, I'm not explaining the whole situation, this isn't that kind of blog), and seasoned with chives and pepper. How did this happen? Well, A. wasn't gonna eat it, and she offered it to me. I recoiled in horror (I've eaten crab rangoon before, in my I'll-eat-anything, never-really-thought-about-where-it-came-from days, and it's just...weird), and D. made some comment that reminded me of the time last week when I ate bacon-flavored squeeze cheese on a Ritz cracker at his house (and no, I'm not explaining that one, either, 'cause nor is it that kind of blog), after which he said, "I win!" Of course I took that as a challenge, and since the thing was gonna get thrown out if I didn't eat it (D. is allergic to shellfish, and even though it was really pollack he wasn't gonna do it) I saw it as more of a freegan moment than a breaking of the rules. Physically I think I felt worse due to the fried aspect than the cheese/pollack aspect. But, regardless, it was so not a good choice to put that in my mouth. Thankfully I had already forbidden D. to say "I win" after.
  

Shopping, cooking, and eating: day 2

First things first. The update on yesterday's dinner: J. and I went to see Little Children at the Parkway instead of roasting vegetables. So I ate a Left Turn at Albuquerque Combo, which broke three of the rules, but not in the worst way. (This ridiculously named dish is a basket of veggies—broccoli, carrots, cucumber, cherry tomatoes—with olives, pita, hummus, baba ghanoush, and some kind of ranch-esque dip. The pita was white flour, the dip had dairy of unknown provenance, and the cucumber and tomatoes doubtless came from Mexico.)

Oh, and since I was soooo hungry by the time we got to the theater (and I knew the food would take a while), I also had a bowl of popcorn. At the Parkway they do it right: air-popped with real butter (yeah, okay, I know: dairy of unknown provenance; but really, I think no matter what it's better than the usual factory-produced chemical fake butter you find in most movie theaters).

So. Day 2. No shopping at all. This morning I used my rice cooker to make some of the rice I bought yesterday, and roasted all the veggies I was going to roast last night (procedure [too simple to even call a recipe]: cut brussels sprouts in half/broccoli and cauliflower into florets/sweet potatoes and parsnips into chinks; smoosh it all around with some olive oil on a cookie sheet; roast at 500° for 12 minutes; stir/turn all veggies; roast for 6-10 more minutes).

So far I have eaten:

• a bowl of the rice I bought yesterday, with some olive oil, salt, and pepper (breakfast)
  
• a bottomless cup of the same green tea I drink every day
  
• a bowl of roasted veggies with more rice (breakfast part 2)
  
• more roasted veggies (lunch)
• I also attempted to eat an orange out of my friend A.'s fruit bowl, but it tasted like a grapefruit that someone puked on, so I spit it out and threw the rest away, which is something I never, ever do

Dinner is a big open question right now.

On a completely other topic—well, not completely—someone just hipped me to this cute lil video about real vs. fake food.

Shopping, cooking, and eating: day 1

So, my friend J. requested a week's worth of diary entries to explain how I shop and cook (I added the eating part). I think she'd like to cook more, so she wants to see how it works for me, logistically. I'm rilly lucky to have a flexible work schedule (I mostly work from home), and a standing appointment that brings me two blocks from the Berkeley farmers market every Tuesday afternoon. (I also like to spend Sunday mornings squeezing fruit and ogling vegetables at the Temescal market, but usually that's more recreational than practical. Hey, you can stop laughing now.)

So I am obliging J.

Shopping for today (all at the farmers market; sometimes I stop at Berkeley Bowl afterwards if I need olive oil, toilet paper, whatever—but today I didn't):

• a couple pounds of fingerling and yukon gold potatoes (it's frackin' cold and wet today, I'm thinkin' stew or roasted veggies) from Arthur Davis, who also raises free-range chickens that lay lovely eggs
  
• a loaf of Russian sourdough from Vital Vittles, my bakery of choice (they use all whole grains)
• two tiny little blocks of firm tofu from Hodo Soy (their tofu is great and priced the same as most other organic tofu you'll find in the supermarket; their prepared foods are amazing but way spendy—I do recommend splurging on the tofu meatballs or the sesame tofu strips every once in a while, though)
• some brussels sprouts, cauliflower, and kiwis from Swanton Berry Farm, the only strawberry farm in the U.S. that's both organic and union
• some tangelos from a far whose name I don't remember, but Oh My Gawd these are some of the best citrus things I have ever eaten
• a bunch of red chard and a bundle of parsnips from Riverdog Farm
• a 20-pound bag of brown rice from Massa Organics; I first had their rice when I got some through Eatwell Farm, which was my beloved CSA before I was able to get to the farmers market regularly—it is the best rice ever, and you can scoff at that description until you taste it

So far today I have eaten:

• two unbelievably delicious eggs that my new friend D. gave me from her very own chickens (thanks, D.!), fried sunny-side up in a little California-produced olive oil I bought at my local overpriced grocery store, with two pieces of cornbread toast
  
• a bottomless cup of wild berry plum green tea (not as fruity as it sounds)
• a tangelo from the same farm I bought from today (though this was the last one from last Tuesday's run)
• a navel orange I bought Saturday at the Ferry Building in San Francisco while on a farmers-marketing date
• an old, old apple with some peanut butter smeared on it

My friend J. (a different friend J. from the one who requested the diary...maybe I'm going to have to start making up names for my friends) is coming over for dinner; my plan is for us to roast a bunch of veggies (the cauliflower, brussels sprouts, and potatoes I bought today, along with a sweet potato and some broccoli I already have) and eath them with rice and maybe some tempeh. But who knows? We might make a tofu curry, some beans n' greens, or something else—or we might go out. Stay tuned.

And this morning I feel kinda...poisoned.

Though it's less likely the fault of the beef enchilada than the three vodka gimlets that came earlier in the evening, I'm not feelin' so great this morning. I wish I were still asleep.

Today: oatmeal, broccoli, brown rice, oranges, emergen-c, green tea. Seriously this time. I mean it.

I had a 100% vegan Sunday—

But my Monday has gotten off to a less-than-auspicious start. And it's not even 1:00 a.m.

See, tonight I found myself needing to have dinner at midnight, and there's only one place I know where that can happen in a way that's at all appealing: the Mexicali Rose. Nothing there's vegan or even remotely not-factory-farmed, but I figured a cheese enchilada would be better than going to bed hungry.

So I get there, settle in with my magazine and my big basket of the best chips on earth, and place my order: one red enchilada with cheese, along with the usual insane mound o' rice and beans. When it comes, it's all good and cheesy on top. Like a cheese enchilada should be. Except when I dig in I find that it's not cheese inside, it's ground beef.

Of course, I could send it back. I ordered cheese. Getting the totally wrong food is pretty much the only reason I would ever think it's acceptable to send something back. And I have actually sent things back before (okay, one time) when they had meat in them and weren't supposed to. But I don't. And, moment of truth: It was only a teeny-weeny bit because I didn't want to be a pain in my waiter's ass. Part of me was pretty psyched. Even though I thought the ribs would last me a good six months, I was happy to be eating the beef—especially since I didn't have to have any ethical conversation with myself before ordering it. Because I didn't order it.

And then the lunch that made me want to start writing...

Yesterday I ate a big plate of meat for lunch. Barbecued ribs from Flints, to be exact. Not organic, not locally or sustainably produced, not at all in line with anything about the way I say I eat.

And. It. Was. Good. Not just that, but I felt good afterwards, too. I've been recovering from a nasty bout with the zombie flu, and my energy has been looooow. A big plate o' meat seemed like just the ticket.

And I had already been planning to eat some meat: curried goat with my new friend D. I was justifying this because, hey, there's no real goat industry in this country, so the meat is likely produced on a relatively small scale. And, of course, with handy-dandy rule no. 8. I've only eaten goat a few times in my life, but damn is it tasty. And you don't see it around the menu every day. When D. and I were having our first lunch together two weeks ago (I kept it veggie then, but not vegan—we were at the Mexicali Rose, where absolutely nothing at all is vegan; I guess in the last post I forgot rule no. 9, which is: If you've gotta eat, you've gotta eat, and you might as well like it), I mentioned a taste for goat, and she told me about her favorite Caribbean place not too far from my house. Obviously we had to go.

Anyway, the goat place was closed. Apparently it's run by stoners. No surprise they run late. We tried another Caribbean place, but it was closed, too. The sign on the door said they were catering some reggae show in Santa Cruz.

By then I was starving (I skipped breakfast in preparation for the heavy meatiness), and primed for meat. D. was thrilled that Flints was still around and might actually be open. It seemed like fate.

And I ate the ribs and I was happy—even though your very much face-to-face with what meat is when you're eating it right off the bone. There were sinews. That tasted good. Oh, my.

As a pretty extreme example in the long line of things I choose to eat that I quote don't eat anymore unquote, it's makin' me think: Is it chickenshit of me to say I have these rules when I break them so much? How can I balance my own needs with the needs of others (meatpackers, farmworkers, people who live near polluting feedlots, cows) and with my own ethics? Am I just not trying hard enough?

Okay, the background...

Several years ago, just as I was cutting down my sugar consumption and learning more about the evils of things like hydrogenation, shipping vegetables around the globe, food additives, and factory farming, I had a new coworker who was superhardcore in her commitment to veganism and whole foods (as in unprocessed things, not the union-busting grocery chain). We started talking endlessly about the politics and ethics of food choices (and the connections between those politics and seemingly unrelated social justice movements), the health benefits of unrefined food, what looked best at the farmers market, and tasty cooking ideas.

Then another friend made a deal with me: We would do the vegan whole-foods-only thing for a month, cooking and eating together and keeping each other on track, and he would never eat fast food again, ever. So for one month I ate no white flour, no refined sugar, almost nothing processed at all. Lots of brown rice, beans, roasted vegetables, tofu stir fries, etc.

And I felt so much happier and more energetic that I realized I could never go back.

Back to the processed stuff, that is. Just not getting that midafternoon need-to-put-my-head-down-on-my-desk-and-nap feeling was enough to keep me on board with the brown rice, whole barley, whole grain bread, and everything else. And I've always loved vegetables, tofu, and all that. Sure, the sweet tooth was a real issue, but I discovered that the less sugar I ate, the less I wanted it. And things that I used to love started to taste waaaaay too sweet for me. Especially at first, I was so motivated that passing up candy and mass-produced baked good was frickin' easy. (Homemade things, well...harder. More on that later.)

The animal products were a different story. Not actual meat; I'd already been a once-a-month-or-less meat eater, and I'd gone through many vegetarian periods. My problems are cheese, yogurt, and eggs. More accurately, cheese, yogurt, eggs, and rigidity. See, I need some flexibility in my rules, since in my world food restrictions can start with "no animal products" and end up at "you are allowed one piece of toast with a milligram of peanut butter spread on top, and a cup of tea" pretty durn quick. And so I avoid anything that smacks too much of virtuous self-denial, a hallmark of my high-school eating disorder. Or maybe it's just too hard for me to make sacrifices. Urgk. Balancing all these ethical questions is haaaaaard.

I started calling myself an aspiring vegan, but sometimes that's not too accurate, because how hard am I trying if I buy cheese twice a month?

So. What are my rules, then, anyway?

1. Local (and organic) whenever possible. This is when I feel especially lucky to live in the Bay Area: I shop for produce mostly at farmers markets and choose what to cook based on what's there. (If I need something specific for a recipe, I spend a lot of time reading supermarket signs trying to figure out where things came from.) If I'm choosing between conventionally grown and local and non-local but organic, I go with local.
   
2. No factory-farmed animal products. From a practical perspective, this means Straus organic yogurt, Niman Ranch meat (oh so rare), cheese from the folks who make the incredible Humboldt Fog, and any eggs or cheese I can get at the farmers market. And, um, this is the rule that I prolly break with the most frequency.
   
3. Unrefined grains only, unless nothing else is available. Brown rice, whole grain breads, lots o' oatmeal, quinoa, millet. I discovered that I hate amaranth, though. I'm not superfanatical about this rule—there aren't that many tacquerias that have brown rice (and don't kid yourself, even those "whole wheat" tortillas are mostly white flour), and though I prefer Chinese and Thai places that serve brown rice, sometimes they just don't. And I'm not passin' up the garlic noodles at Sunflower, which are totally refined.
   
4. Minimally sweetened things only. Um, most of the time. When people bring delicious homemade brownies to a potluck, I'm not gonna grill them about what they used. I'm not that much of a tool. I don't think. When I bake, I use brown rice syrup, agave, maple syrup, and sucanat. Okay, I know that last one is still basically sugar, but...shut up.
   
5. Absolutely no hydrogenated anything. This one's not that complicated, since anything with hydrogenated anything is going to have so many other anythings that I don't want to put in my body. This one goes along with—
6. Read labels carefully and know which weird ingredients are really fucked-up, and which ones aren't (xanthan gum is okay, disodium inosinate, not so much).
7. When you're a guest in someone's house, eat what's put in front of you. I'm not comfortable making people accommodate my weird and complicated rules.
   
8. And the one that makes it all possible (and possibly meaningless, and definitely complicated): If you really, really want to eat it—go ahead and eat it.