Woo hoo! New food!

I'm so happy this week. Salad crops are starting to come into season in the UK. I've been eating salad all week - fresh tomatoes, cucumber, peppers, and I bought some amazing lettuce and spinach at Roath Real Food Market yesterday. It's so nice to have a change in diet. Don't get me wrong, I love winter vegetables, but it does get a bit tiresome by April.

I read in yesterday's Metro that the British Prime Minister David Cameron has agreed to more wind turbines being built. For me personally, this can only be good news. There are still lots of NIMBY's against this, icluding 100 MPs. Although I can sympathise with the noise levels which must be loud if you live in an otherwise quiet part of the countryside, I really don't think there is any valid argument against wind turbines. There is one near my house in Cardiff, and I think it is fantastic that we have this beautiful piece of modern engineering to provide us with clean energy. A few weeks ago, I was on a plane that flew over the wind turbines in the English Channel. It was such an incredible, awe-inspiring sight. People say that the turbines are ugly, but I disagree. If you look at the history of traditional windmills, they too were considered big, ugly, dirty machines in their time, yet we now preserve them as a piece of our heritage. I can't help but wonder if in 100 years time out descendants will be desperately trying to preserve the wind turbines that David Cameron's generation built, whilst thinking us crazy for not appreciating their beauty and benefit.

Is it natural for us to eat meat?

A thought has just occured to me. A lot of meat eaters argue that it is natural for humans to eat meat. That we would have the instinct to go out and hunt our food (or select it from Tesco) regardless of what other food is availabe. I don't know about you, but if I was living in the prehistoric world where I had to fend for myself, I would find it a lot easier to dig up a plant than to hunt and kill an animal. Maybe our predecessors only went to the trouble of chasing down other mammals because their plant supplies had dwindled.

Making a Meal Out of Sides

   Today I found myself eating in a chain restaurant with friends where the food is generally reheated rather than served fresh. My first glance at the menu led me to believe there was quite a selection for vegetarians. On closer inspection, however, it turned out that three of the vegetarian meals were the same cauliflower cheese dish that had been included under different course options. The only main I could find that included no animal protein was a jacket potato with baked beans. Tinned beans aren't ideal, I know, but sometimes you have to cheat a bit. With all the will in the world, a jacket potato with beans is never going to be an exciting meal. So, I decided to add a side of flat mushrooms to make it a bit more interesting.
   Making a meal out of starters and sides is a skill that I picked up whilst living in Greece. Whereas Greek main meals generally revolve around meat, the starters (or mese dishes) are usually vegetarian, and a lot are plant-based.
   If you are finding it hard to make a plant-based choice when eating out, why not order a combination of starters and sides instead? It gives you much more variety and your dining companions will no doubt be jealous of your personal buffet!

No-Cheese Pizza

One of the hardest things I’ve found about following a plant-based diet is eating out in restaurants. By the time you’re searched through the menu to find something you can eat, it feels like everyone is looking at you and you still aren’t any closer to getting some food. A neat trick that I have picked up is to order a vegetable pizza with no cheese. Pizza is fairly common in restaurants, most of them are cooked fresh, and it’s not such a big deal for the kitchen to prepare them with no cheese. Plus, they’re really tasty.

Take a Step Together Reminder

   A few weeks ago, I talked about my initiative to 'Take a Step Together'. In a nutshell, the idea is to get together with some like-minded friends or work colleagues and encourage and support each other to lead a healthier, more environmentally aware lifestyle. This has worked really well for me and my work colleagues, but a regression by one of our team has got me thinking that maybe I should post a reminder.
   The colleague in question will remain anonymous, but over the last few weeks the rest of us have noticed that he has taken a couple of steps back in his diet, and he has started making excuses not to got to the gym. The rest of us have banded together to remind him of why we made out pact in the first place, and what he wanted to achieve, and we hope to get him back on track as soon as possible.
   So, why not check in with your 'Take a Step Together' buddies and see how they're getting on. They might just need a little nudge to get them back on track too.

Why freerangecarrots?

I thought I should take a moment to explain where the name Free-range Carrots comes from. I first turned vegetarian when I was nine years old. Unfortunately, it being the late 1980s and a time when everyone listened to their GP unquestioningly, my doctor told my parents they should force me to eat me and they did. For another four years. Then, when I was thirteen, I told my mum that I really couldn’t eat meat anymore. I’d always felt that I was born a vegetarian, and I needed to find my way into the lifestyle where I belonged. My mum’s initial reaction was that I was just being a fussy eater. I’m glad to say her viewpoint has now radically changed and my vegetarianism has in fact encouraged her to eat a healthier diet. Due to health problems when I was born, I’d struggled with food phobias all my life, and even then I could understand her apprehension at my converting to vegetarianism. So me made a compromise. I would take the conversion one step at a time, and together we would educate ourselves about healthy vegetarianism and make sure I was doing everything properly. Red meat was the first to go, and then I gradually gave up white meat, fish, animal fats, gelatine, leather and so on until I was a complete vegetarian.

What I wasn’t prepared for was the reactions you get from people when you tell them you’re vegetarian. I never set out to convert the world, and my belief at that time was that everyone has the right to eat whatever they want. I only told people I was a vegetarian when I had to, i.e. when someone insisted I eat a cocktail sausage at a party or I was in a restaurant when the menu wasn’t labelled for dietary needs. Most people seemed to want to catch me out, to find something I did that proved I wasn’t a real vegetarian. They demanded to know what my shoes were made of (in case it was leather) and quizzed me on what sweets I ate (assuming I wouldn’t know that most jelly sweets contain animal gelatine). Bizarrely, a common response I received was ‘plants have feelings too’. Although this may one day be proved true, my survival comes first for me, and I have to eat something. Ever the sarcastic teenager, and wanting to confuse people before they could drag me into an argument, my stock answer to this comment became ‘Yes, but I only eat free-range carrots’. Hence the name freerangecarrotsJ