Greentime Episode #2 – Vegan? Almost!
Sustainability doesn’t just start at home…it starts with your stomach! Things we unavoidably consume daily are ripe with opportunities to optimize for a greener tomorrow. We’ve gone and done some digging in the American diet and found out something that’s obvious to anyone who’s eaten out– Americans eat too much meat. So, we’re kicking off our personal projects in sustainability by scaling back significantly. Hear how we’ve made eating only one meat/dairy dish a week work for us, from our personal comfort to our household budget.
It’s a lot to cram into five minutes, so look for future episodes to contain recipe ideas, tips on shopping without breaking the bank, and much more. Don’t forget to email us! We’ll read our mailbag on the show.
Resources for this episode:
- ERS/USDA Briefing Room – Food Consumption
- Earth Policy Institute – Plan B 2.0
Formats available: Quicktime (.mov), MPEG-4 Video (protected) (.m4v)
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Gene Shinai said,
March 29, 2007 @ 12:59 am
Dear Rhett and Amy,
Great episode though I’m not sure I agree with using canned beans, or canned anything for that matter.
http://www.ewg.org/reports/bisphenola/newsrelease.php
On the otherhand what are you going to do for a cheap alternative?
keep this up. I absolutely love the show.
-Gene in Hillsboro, OR.
Nathan said,
March 29, 2007 @ 3:38 am
You guys are so much to say!!
dont lose the magic that pushed you start such a great thing…
learn to make tofu….that for sure will fund for project
Rhett said,
March 29, 2007 @ 6:14 am
That’s some very interesting information, Gene, and thanks so much for passing it along. We’ve been wary of canning for a while, but never had a good way to put our finger on it.
Of course, canned foods also generate more waste than purchasing fresh, so the more sustainable route is to not go that way where possible. The good news is that many of the foods we buy canned can instead be bought dried. Dried beans keep very well and are almost as easy to cook as tinned beans, for example. We hope to do more shows in the future on things like this. I think people don’t go for dried beans because they think they’re inconvenient, but cooking dried beans takes very little attention.
There’s also the option of canning at home, something else we really do want to do a show on. Believe it or not, the town where I was raised had a city-maintained cannery people could use for canning their vegetables and jams.
Thanks so much for continuing to support the show!
Rhett said,
March 29, 2007 @ 7:05 am
Nathan,
Thanks so much for the kind words and support! Part of making this video project is to hopefully not lose the magic. It’s easier to stay “on the wagon” when we have such great supporters urging us on and joining us. We really hope that this blog will grow with us.
We are planning a number of DIY episodes. Making your own food is, of course, infinitely more sustainable. I love to cook and I love making my own staples. Tofu is one that we haven’t had much luck with yet. I know that it’s basically a process of just curdling soy milk, but we can’t buy soy milk in sufficient bulk to overcome the cost of packaging. If we had access to soybeans, we could do it ourselves. The only soybeans we see for sale are either roasted soy nuts or edamame. The latter are expensive beyond belief…can the former be used for soy milk and tofu? This is really something we would like to know more about.
Amy said,
March 29, 2007 @ 9:08 am
Hi Gene,
Thanks for that very useful site on the canned goods. Scary stuff! Here we’ve been using canned and dried beans, but I think that we’ll move entirely over to dried now. I think that canning and other food preservation strategies are good, but perhaps that will have to be a DIY as well.
Amy
irina slutsky said,
March 29, 2007 @ 9:28 pm
hey guys, great vlog. thanks so much. i was wondering if you can talk about “the evils of soy” = i dont know much about this, but my chiropractor keeps talking about it every time i tell him i had a soy latte. which is actually kinda rare, but it does stick in my head.
Rhett said,
March 30, 2007 @ 6:59 am
Your chiropractor is probably talking about something called isoflavone, which is a phytoestrogen. Phytoestrogen is a fancy word that means “plant estrogen”, which is to say that there is a chemical which occurs naturally in soy that acts as an estrogen in the human body. Many plants other than soy produce different phytoestrogens. You can find a phytoestrogen called lignan in flax seed, for example. The discovery of phytoestrogen came from the study of sheep fertility when a certain kind of Australian clover was added to their diet.
Anyway, the isoflavone in soy is a rather controversial topic. There is no scientific concensus one way or the other at this point. Some people believe isoflavone is harmless. Some think it may create conditions in the body that encourage cancer. Others think that isoflavone helps the body regulate hormone production and can protect the body against cancers linked to estrogen such as breast cancer. It sounds like your chiropractor is in the anti-isoflavone camp.
My personal perspective is that isoflavone probably does not have strong effects one way or the other if it’s not consumed heavily. Isoflavone shows up in a number of different legumes, including garbanzo bean, fava bean, and peanut. So, there’s isoflavone in hummus and peanut butter, too. Tofu and other soy products have been traditional foods for a long time and are eaten commonly in many cultures that don’t show particularly high rates of cancers that the anti-isoflavone camp cite. Many of the isoflavone studies I’ve read have used some sort of concentrated isoflavone, such as a supplement pill, which contains more of the hormone than you’re going to get if you consume soy in moderation.
These days, nutritional advice abounds. We’ve learned the art of picking apart a whole food, such as soy milk or tofu, isolate a handful of chemicals in it, and declare the food good or bad based on what we think of these chemicals. It’s important to put this information back in context. A small component such as a food’s isoflavone content, antioxidant content, or glycemic index is really a nutritional addendum to the more broad and important questions of the calorie content of the food, its protein level, its bulk, etc.
I say enjoy your soy, but be wary of dietary supplements that are selling isoflavone.
Rhett said,
March 30, 2007 @ 6:59 am
Oh, and Irina? Thanks so much for all you do to support vlogging. We’re so proud to count you as a viewer.
Sara said,
March 30, 2007 @ 12:11 pm
Hooray! A lot of environmentalists are averse to (or for whatever reason, don’t) talk about the environmental impact of meat consumption. It’s extremely important, and although I am vegan myself, I don’t necessarily think everyone has to go vegan to make things better. Just eating less meat (and that would not be hard for most Americans) would do a lot of good.
Amy said,
March 30, 2007 @ 12:31 pm
Thanks for your comment, Sara! I couldn’t agree more. I’ve never been a huge meat eater, and there are so many tasty and diverse dishes out there that don’t require meat or dairy, I don’t understand why people are so attached to it. I think most people wouldn’t miss most of the meat they eat.
And you’re right, it’s a huge issue. There is so much focus on oil consumption, but there’s fear of touching the meat issue. We all need to spread the word!
Amy
Catherine said,
March 30, 2007 @ 1:49 pm
I couldn’t agree more with this topic. I actually typically advocate a less extreme approach to my meat-crazed friends, which is the following. Just eat Vegetarian one day a week. I think there would be significant change in American meat consumption if for just ONE DAY a week folks took a damn break from the meat.
I personally eat more like you are describing (largely vegan/vegetarian), but making a small change like ‘veggie night’ in a familys weekly menu would be a great (and easy) thing for most folks to do. Its actually where I think a lot of pro-vegan/vegetarian organizations have it all wrong – target a change you can achieve – like veggie night, not elimination of all meat consumption for everyone. People are going to eat meat – but they should eat it intelligently and in moderation.
Amy W. said,
April 6, 2007 @ 3:47 pm
Hi, Guys! I’m thrilled to have found you…my husband and I have been trying to green up our lifestyle as well, and have found so many wonderful resources on line. Thanks!
I wanted to ask if you have read a book called “The China Study”, by Dr. Colin Campbell. It was an extremely eye-opening book that precipitated our move to a vegan diet. (Which fit right in with our recent “greening”.) It is “the most comprehensive nutritional study ever conducted”, and the information was life-changing. I have a hard time giving a good description, of it because it contained so much information, and had such a far-reaching impact. I’ll shut up now so I don’t sound preachy, but I’ll say that after reading that book, I wanted all my loved ones to read it–just to be able to make informed decisions about their diet. I’ll also note that I am a born skeptic, especially when it comes to scientific study–I know how results can be skewed one direction or another, and easily misinterpreted. So…thank you for listening to my rant, and if you have time, there’s it’s really worth your while to look into that book!
(oh, and thanks Gene, for that info on canned food! aagh! I’m also a nursing mother, and feeding two young boys, too! I guess it’s really worth doing the dried beans from now on…)
Keep up the great work, guys! I’m off to listen to episode 3!
Amy Wagner
Rhett said,
April 7, 2007 @ 8:25 am
Hi, Amy! No problem…we love it when people get on here and rant. Pushing for sustainability is something we all have to do together one bit at a time, and rants keep us focused on our causes.
We’ve not read “The China Study” yet, but we will definitely put it on our reading list. We’re slowly working on rescheduling our weeks to that, every now and then, we can fit a “bonus episode” into our week, and we’ll be using those episodes to review books and whatnot. We always need to expand our reading list.
Besides…my list is down to The Skeptical Environmentalist, which is a weighty book that also has a 248-page rebuttal available for download online, so if I want to read such a book with a balanced perspective, we’re talking about making it 150% longer! Anything that helps me procrastinate on that task is a good thing.