Put The Veg Back In Vegan

Yesterday, we got a chance to see the very first screening of a new documentary called Food Fight. It's subject is California Cuisine and how it was the beginning of a food revolution that has really spread to all corners of America since. The film mainly focuses on the positive--lightly touching on the negative (like my mortal enemies, Monsanto), but mostly informing the viewers about the loss of flavor in food and what they can do to find it again. Because I've done a lot of research about food in the last few years, I didn't get a huge amount of new information, but this film did remind me that we have totally been slacking when it comes to the way that we eat. The problem is that it's just as easy to be lazy about food as a vegan than it is as a non-vegan when you have products like Tofurkey brats, flavored soy milk, ABC cookies, Primal Strips and various Asian soy meats at your immediate disposal. I love all of those products, but Food Fight made me realize that they have become much too common in our diet and have all but replaced some of the vegetables that we love. So, we decided that now was the perfect time to return to the foods that made us love being vegan in the first place. Spring in Texas is a pretty great time for produce, so we're going to start making a weekly trip to the Coppell or McKinney farmer's markets for fresh, local produce from grower's only. It's about 40 miles round trip, which seems like a lot to two people who rarely leave a five mile radius. But, if you compare it to the number of miles our produce (mostly Mexican) travels to get to the supermarket, it's a minute percentage. We kind of gave up on the Dallas market after finding nothing but dealers upon the last few visits, but a woman from Slow Food was at the Q & A and talked a little about how Slow Food Dallas was working with the Dallas farmer's market to promote more locally grown food. I'm excited to check it out and support the policy change. We're also going to be a lot more diligent about getting up early and walking over to the community garden for extremely local (3 blocks away) and fresh Asian vegetables. All of this seems to tie in nicely with Vegan Dad's post yesterday about being inspired to put the veg back in vegan. Our goal is to put the mostly organic, mostly local, fresh, tasty veg back in vegan.