Oprah Goes Vegan-ish, Spurs Debate

Beans, The Final Frontier

Well, if you follow the vegetarian news, you may already have heard that Oprah and her entire staff went vegan for a week, then did a whole show about the experience. While most workplaces going on a diet is not news, when you are Oprah, it’s not just news, it’s time for the Beef Industry to call their lawyers. Her power and influence is such that millions will go where she goes, and if she is going vegan, it will be mainstreamed in no time.

( a link to watch video of the show:)

http://www.oprah.com/oprahshow/Oprah-Goes-Vegan-Video

To be extra careful that she didn’t get into more trouble with Big Beef, the most powerful lady in television invited a representative of Cargill to give a tour of an exemplary slaughterhouse. She also had Michael Pollan on to give his reasoned but non-vegan perspective. Star of the show was Kathy Freston, who guided the staffers in their vegan shopping and dining.

Freston is a 7 year vegan, author of a new book, the Veganist, and the wife of Oprah’s business partner. She is gorgeous, tall, and exactly the kind of person that motivates others to go vegan, in the hope that they can look just a little bit more like her. Her message is inclusive and enthusiastic, and she probably converted a million people through the power of television.

I had forgotten how meat eaters freak out when they get some fiber in their diets. There was a lot of discussion of bowel habits, and jokes about flatulence. There were also some amazing success stories, people who had weight loss and health improvements in just that week. Freston had a bit of an intervention with a staffer who was “addicted ” to fast food, with great success. Junk food does have addictive qualities, and it was a big deal to actually confront this on international TV. ( For a past post on this: https://robincooksveg.wordpress.com/2010/03/)

The internets have been on fire with discussion of the show. Overall, there has been a big debate over the decision to use a lot of convenient meat and cheese substitutes to get people started. As we know, food is nothing if not a subject of debate, and this is a hot issue.

For some, it’s seen as a great step for first timers to get off fast food and industrial meat and switch to tofurkey and faux cheese. For others, it was disappointing that the message was not more about using unprocessed food, and learning to cook with whole foods like beans and grains.

To me, every step made in the direction of eating more mindfully and having a better impact on the body and the planet is good. As long as it leads toward real food in the end. Getting off the Golden Arches and onto some cleaner processed food is certainly a better place to be, as the producer who dropped 11 pounds and stopped having terrible acid reflux discovered.

I don’t think that Freston or anyone on the show intended for people to build a diet on convenience vegan foods for the rest of their lives, it was more of a way to get people through the week. Then, once they survived and felt better, they would have to broaden their horizons. It was just such a radical change for these people that they had to have a stepping stone, in this case, Gardein chicken scallopine and Daiya mozzarella shreds. Some folks like subs like that, others just can’t stop wishing they were real meat and cheese, and will do better to eat other vegan foods. It’s very personal.

In the end, Oprah and many of her peeps felt that it would do them some good to go “vegan-ish,” a term that they used to refer to eating vegan alot but not giving up occasional animal foods. The power of the juggernaut that is Oprah may just have converted more people to healthy eating than I could hope to in my entire career, so more power to her.

How To Cook Dry Beans

A Vegetarian Watches Bourdain

Vegetarians are in the minority, so it often happens that we end up watching food shows and reading food mags that are not really intended for us. We learn to sort out the things we can use, and not take too much personally. Listening to chefs wax poetic about lardo and foie gras doesn’t bother me. I don’t even care that they diss vegetarians. Really.

I’ve always enjoyed reading and watching Tony Bourdain, whether it was his books Kitchen Confidential and the one about Typhoid Mary, or his travel shows. He is a compelling writer and presence. He’s the cool guy, way too cool for you, sharing his cynical take on faraway places. His voice is rebellious, funny, sarcastic, yet sympathetic.

Unfortunately, Bourdain hates vegetarians.

Maybe that is too harsh, perhaps he hates the sin but loves the sinner, but he definitely enjoys taking shots at the meat averse. From the very beginning, he was a defensive meat man, deploying his rapier wit on the veg world as a whole. We can’t cook, not even vegetables, according to Tony, and are a bunch of fascists for trying to take his foie gras away. He is ready at any moment to go on a rant about how vegetarians are the evil authoritarians, organizing our sleeper cells for a major assault on meat eater’s rights.

Good thing we are only 3% of the population at best, and in truth, getting us organized would be like herding cats. Good thing we don’t take this stuff personally, as I am sure I am not the only veg watching and buying books, weeding out the smacks.

So the first time that I saw Mr Bourdain’s trip to Argentina in season 3 of No Reservations, I knew there was going to be lots of meat worship and probably veg bashing. I was not disappointed, Tony spent time riding with Gauchos, who claimed that when vegetarians come to visit, they are converted quickly to the carnvorous lifestyle of the cowboy. “You’re doing God’s Work,” he tells them, approving heartily as he gnaws on rabbit and soaks up liquor. Like most of his shows, he journeys from one drink to the next as much as one glorious vista or meal to the next.

One of the drunken cowboys shares a mug of mate-admitting that his no-vegetable, all meat and alcohol diet requires it in order to go to the bathroom. Ahem.

The twist is when Tony goes to watch actual ranch work, and practically falls to pieces at seeing the pain of the cows. Yes, Mr Meat and his crew are such city-fried greenhorns that they actually have never seen the real-life pain of a simple branding-just a little branding, for cripes sake. And a castration. Insert joke here. After all these years of preaching nose-to tail, entrail cookery, junk food like giant greasy burgers made from cheap, factory farmed beef, and complete disdain for the concept of vegetarianism, Bourdain can’t take a little branding.

Seriously, as someone who grew up in farm country, I have witnessed the realities of animal husbandry and been moved, obviously in a different way. I give him credit, he puts the scene in the show, and narrates how uncomfortable he is, at that moment, with participating in the process that causes so much pain and suffering in these animals. He speaks eloquently on how it hits home with him. He is a sensitive guy.

Then he declares that skipping his steak that evening will get him through this crisis of conscience, and the storyline snaps instantly back to the celebration of carnivorism. Hundreds of sides of beef are crucified on metal crosses for the Festival of the Lake, where thousands of Argentinians line up as they roast next to open fires. Tony’s only qualm is that he wants his steak less overcooked than the masses-he makes a point of selecting a choice cut and cooking it nice and bloody.

The pain and fear in the eyes of the calves is forgotten, or perhaps, like many shows, the thing is shot out of sequence, so the ever-so-brief epiphany has not happened yet.

He would not want to ruin his meal, or for that matter, upset his audience by challenging their own choices.

This striking scene really serves to lay bare the kind of duality, putting it nicely, or hypocrisy, to be a little more frank, that goes on in the minds of most meat lovers. I guess I don’t get how you can eat the stuff without being ok with how it got there. The farmers I know who raise meat humanely also kill those animals themselves, without a shred of sadness. They have a lifestyle built on this cycle of birth and death, and if they were troubled by it, they would not be able to live it. As much as I don’t want to participate in the meat part, I can respect the fact that they look it in the eye and don’t flinch.

On the other hand, Bourdain swaggers and trash talks the other side, when he is apparently in huge denial. I don’t even get how he can be so far in denial, with all his years in this business, with all the awareness of the factory farming system that has reached headline status in the professional food world. In another season, he killed a pig and freaked out about that, too. He says he is respecting these cultures, and I get that. The folks he visits are into this, it’s a travel show, we are ugly Americans.

Maybe he is just a guy who doesn’t like to think too deeply on things that might upset his apple cart. Lots of us have those blind spots. Still, give us vegs a break. Some of us would have that moment of empathy for the calf, and maybe, just maybe, at least respect the choice to abstain.