By Melissa Li

My family and I are very lucky to live in Portland, Oregon, one of the top vegan cities in the country. You may have read articles about the Vegan Mini-Mall, which features Sweet Pea bakery, Herbivore Clothing Company, Food Fight grocery, and Scapegoat Tattoo. Yes, I hate to rub it in, but it’s a great city to live in, and the vegan businesses are continuing to grow in number and popularity. I love living here!

There are too many veg restaurants to list, and far more that offer dedicated vegan options. I’m very comfortable knowing that when I go out to eat, I’ll undoubtedly have a vegan meal.

I’m particularly lucky that I have all this in reach, because I have a really busy schedule with work, soccer (three, and sometimes four teams), and dogs. I find that I don’t really like to cook, nor do I have the creativity. It’s a catch-22–the more I avoid cooking, the more I fear cooking, and then the less likely I will try it.

I have many cookbooks on the counter, all hidden by bags of vegan snacks–I have yet to make a single dish from any of them–I’m hoping the information diffuses into me like osmosis! And believe me, I’ve tried to dumb down the cookbooks, from The 30 minute Vegan to the 4 Ingredient Vegan–anything to make it easier! This has yet to work.

The farmers markets in this city are reportedly amazing, but I have never even gone because I know I won’t cook the vegetables before they go bad. I’m vegan for ethical reasons not for health–and I’m not a foodie–this may explain my lack of enthusiasm in cooking.

My routine is to have breakfast in the cafeteria at the hospital where I work. It has vegan a la carte options such as vegan burritos and roasted potato wedges. For lunch, there is an amazing salad bar, with kale and pasta salads. There is always a meatless soup option and sometimes it’s vegan. At the grill, there is a vegan burger. On Mondays, my the cafeteria participates in Meatless Mondays.

Dinner is the meal that I have to fend for myself, and I’m comfortable eating essentially the same thing every night. Dinner has slowly evolved from just rice and black beans with salsa to including Daiya cheese, cilantro, red and yellow peppers, red onion, and occasionally chopped Tofurky or Field Roast sausage. With steamed rice already prepared, it used to take only five minutes to make dinner—now it takes a full fifteen!

My weekends are a little more challenging, and for breakfast or lunch, I often have a sandwich with Just Mayo and Tofurky deli slices on top of Dave’s Killer Bread.

I have actually devoted more time to my dogs’ diets than my own. They are also vegan and subsist on Natural Balance Vegetarian Formula mixed with a rotating variety of canned food: Halo Vegan Garden Medley, Nature’s Recipe Vegetarian Stew, Natural Balance Vegetarian Formula, or Honest Kitchen dehydrated dog food. I will add water and brown rice to the mix of canned and dried food.

For daily treats, the dogs get an assortment of Whimzees, 3 Dog Bakery Lick’n Crunch Carob sandwich cookies with peanut butter filling, Buddy Biscuits peanut butter, and Wet Noses biscuits.

I like to keep it simple and routine because everything else in my life takes up so much time. However, I continue to make resolutions to strengthen my cooking skills. It would be nice to have a repertoire of meals, to cook for friends, or to bring treats for non-vegan colleagues at work in order to influence them. We’ll see what happens!

By Toni Okamoto

This week Michelle Cehn of World of Vegan and I made the 100 mile trek to Rohnert Park, CA to visit the brand new Amy’s Drive-Thru — created by popular vegetarian food company Amy’s Kitchen! Everything on the menu can be made vegan and gluten-free, it’s all organic, and it is in the cutest, most sustainable building! Check out the video for a peek inside!

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What vegan finds do you have at YOUR local Dollar Tree?

 

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By Josh Fernandez, Guest Blogger

Halfway through my Starbucks Protein Bistro Box I realized I was eating an egg. A giant hardboiled egg. “Nope,” I thought. “That’s probably not vegan.”

Hello. My name is Joshua Fernandez and I am new here.

So far, the hardest part of being a vegan is eating vegan food. Yes, that sounds really stupid when I write it down, but it’s true. My first week as a vegan was a series of half-eaten mouthfuls of food and mad dashes to the trashcan.

My office-mates probably thought I was suffering from bulimia because I kept running to the bathroom to spit out my lunch.

“Wait,” I’d say into the bowels of the faculty garbage bin. “Was that granola bar vegan?!”

It turns out it wasn’t vegan. At all.

Because milk chocolate chips aren’t vegan. Because they contain milk.

Neither is cheddar cheese. Because it contains cheese.

Yes, old school vegans are probably reading this and muttering, “Psssht, what a stupid newbie.”

But I don’t care. I am determined to get this right.

I love animals. And I don’t want to contribute to their suffering, only to my own, which is why I have sworn off the most delicious foods on earth. Well, there’s only one delicious food on earth, and that’s cheese pizza (goodbye, my old lover. I’ll see you in hell.)

One of the reasons I swore off cheese pizza and became a vegan has a lot to do with my friend Toni. We were on our way back from a friend’s house. The trip took about an hour. At that point, I was a happy pescatarian and felt morally superior to most people on Earth for my choice to not eat chicken or beef. I only occasionally ate fish. But Toni started telling me this horrific tale about what farmers do to the chickens that are too old to lay eggs. I don’t want to go into the gross details of the story, but let’s just say it involved live chickens, a big metal vat and fire.

That image stuck out in my head, shattering my vegetarian comfort into a million tiny pieces that I would never be able to reassemble. Even though I tried. Desperately. I’m really good at rationalizing and lying to myself. When I was a vegetarian I had successfully convinced myself that fish was a plant.

“I can find the farms that treat their chickens with dignity and respect!” I said.

The thing is I’m waaaaay too lazy to seek out compassionate chicken farmers. For someone like me, it’s easier to assume that they are all heartless murderers with a lust for dead chickens.

Another problem with veganism is that I’m a marathoner, sometimes clocking in at about 60 miles per week, and I told myself that if I only eat plant-based food I would most likely keel over on mile 25.

I haven’t actually tested that theory yet, but I will find out on December 6, when I run my first marathon as a vegan. And mark my words: If that happens, on my death bed I will write another blog post for Vegan Outreach, entitled, “FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, PLEASE, BUTCHER A COW AND EAT IT IMMEDIATELY.”

I’m kidding.

I have this other friend, Dave, who is a vegan and he runs ultramarathons. Sometimes he only eats fruit, which he calls fruitarian, a word that my spell check doesn’t even recognize. Most humans don’t even recognize that word. I don’t even think it’s a word. Maybe Dave isn’t even real. Like he’s just some hallucination I’m having from being so protein deficient.

But that, of course, is another misconception. I get all the protein I need from beans, avocados, fruits and nuts. I’m actually gaining
weight because I eat burritos filled with black beans, potatoes, spinach, onions, garlic, avocados and cashew cheese about 700 times a week.

I suck at being a vegan. I really do. I tried to make vegan lasagna and at once burned and overcooked it while forgetting half of the ingredients. A better name for that dish would be “Black, floppy noodles with some crusty red crap on top.”

Sometimes I feel so hungry and lazy that I’ll just lick almond butter off a spoon for lunch.

Also, I’m sort of a poser. I mean, sure, I love animals and I don’t want them to suffer, but I really want to be a vegan because I want to wear vegan themed clothing. Like, who doesn’t want to wear a shirt of a carrot riding a bike that says, “Go Vegan”?

I also want to be a vegan because people keep telling me not to be a vegan. If there’s one consistent motivator, it’s people telling me I can’t do things. Which, now that I think about it, is probably why I got kicked out of high school.

Anyway, I have no idea what I’m doing, but I have a network of good vegan friends who are helping me—inspiring me to live cruelty-free.

As I sit here in my office, waiting for a student to come into my office hour, I’m writing this blog post and sipping my
–Wait, is this coffee vegan?!

*runs to bathroom*

*regurgitates latte into trash can*

Review by Josie Moody, Office Manager

Project Animal Farm by Sonia Faruqi is not an easy read, but it is an important one. It is painfully and necessarily graphic. There’s no way to sugarcoat the subject matter, and that’s why it is so powerful.

Project Animal Farm is a project Faruqi set about unintentionally after she lost her position as an Investment Banker during the American recession. After lots of reading during her time off, she decided to put her free time to good use by volunteering on an organic dairy farm in Canada. After reaching out to dozens of farms, only one agreed to take her on as a volunteer, and, as they say, the rest is history.

Rudely awakened from her fantasy of what life on a modern farm would be like, Faruqi is disturbed by the mistreatment of the animals at these operations and the apathy of the humans who work there. She then uses her connections and experience at the dairy farm to investigate if this is an isolated incident, or a widespread practice.

Unfortunately she finds the same horrors at the chicken, pork, turkey and veal operations she subsequently visits. By the books end, she has explored agribusiness in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Belize, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates. I have read books, visited websites and seen footage that exposes what happens on factory farms over the past four years, and was distressed to learn of more torturous practices she uncovers in this book that I had been previously unaware of.

Writes Faruqi, “I found that the pattern of factory farming everywhere follows the trajectory of the United States. Chickens and egg-laying hens are confined and commoditized first, followed by pigs, then by cows. It’s as if the industry starts with animals it considers least sentient first, then works its way up the ladder.”

At the end of the book she concludes,“The agriculture industry claims to be strong and healthy, but upon inspection one finds that he is not a vigorous young man bursting with life, but a paranoid and senile old man who lives in terror that any encounter with outsiders will spell his death.”

If you’re interested in reading it, you can buy it here: http://amzn.to/1Ygu5IU

By Toni Okamoto

Michelle and I snagged my family’s Costco card so we could show you all the vegan options they offer! As you can see in the video below, they have TONS of stuff! Everything from a wide selection of non-dairy milks, to animal crackers, Hodo Soy products, frozen foods, and much more.

Different Costco locations carry different products, but the Sacramento one was fantastic! Let us know in the comments below the best scores you’ve found!

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By Cynthia King, Guest Blogger and VO Supporter

How thrilling–more vegan food joints in New York! Terri‘s third location in Midtown East is a breath of fresh air–currently under some standard-issue NYC scaffolding. I went with my son on Wednesday last week, their second day up and running. The place was bright and bustling and the staff was warm and welcoming.

I dug right in to an amazing Kale Superfood salad, which was bursting with fresh kale, avocado, sweet potato, quinoa, chickpeas, and a thick yummy lemon tahini dressing. It was huge, filling, and delicious!

My son thoroughly enjoyed his Breakfast Scramble wrap, which was filled with scrambled tofu, Italian “sausage,” and Daiya Cheddar Style Shreds (he had them hold the spinach and hot sauce). He described the tofu as savory and fluffy–similar to the one at another of our regular vegan haunts, Champs in Brooklyn. The “sausage” was flavorful and the Daiya added great texture and taste.

We also tried the Protein Bowl and Southwestern salad, and they were both scrumptious. There was an assortment of cookies, brownies, and other vegan treats. We had Banana Walnut Bread for dessert, which was deliciously moist and sweet.

We look forward to returning soon for their famous Butterfinger Shake and Breakfast Slam. Being vegan is so simple, and with more incredible places like Terri’s to satisfy anyone’s appetite, there’s no reason for anyone to not go vegan! Remember, “Peace begins on our plates.”