We all know that veganism saves the animals, the planet and you… but did you know that cutting out all animal products and anything containing even trace amounts of them means you’ll be eating a wider variety of foods too?
A poll on VeganForum.com asked “Do you eat more or less varied food than you did when you were eating meat & dairy?” Of the 276 voters, 251 (90.94%) said that they eat more varied food as vegans. Eclectic_one summed up this counterintuitive logic best: “I think I read in one of my vegetarian cookbooks that vegetarians eat a much more varied diet than meat-eaters. I’d bet that vegans eat even more variety than vegetarians.”
Any takers on that one? Do macrobiotics eat more variety than standard vegans, and do fruititarians eat even more variety than that? When you prune away one food, do three more shoot up in its place?
It is not only anonymous message board vegans who see it this way. Veg*an leaders agree:
Erik Marcus: “The people who have been vegan for any length of time actually have a diet that’s substantially more diverse and interesting than the typical omnivore,” observes Erik Marcus, author of The Ultimate Vegan Guide: Compassionate Living Without Sacrifice. “You might think that your diet becomes more limited if you get rid of animal foods, but the opposite is actually true.”
Vegan Outreach: In fact, by becoming more conscious of what they eat and by exploring new foods and recipes, many people find themselves with a more diverse diet after becoming vegetarian!
Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine: Vegetarians report more variety in their diet than meat-eaters.
Nathan Runkle: Many vegans say plant-based diets won’t narrow their menus at all. … “Like most people who adopt a vegetarian diet, at first I was left wondering what and where to eat,” says Nathan Runkle, Executive Director of Mercy for Animals in Vegetarian Starter Kit. “I ditched the typical routine of eating greasy hamburgers and fatty fast-food and began to explore the many delicious, cruelty-free vegan alternatives such as grilled veggie burgers, tacos with veggie ‘sausage,’ frozen non-dairy ‘ice creams,’ and sweet rice, almond, and soymilks over morning cereal.” Many vegans say their current plant-based diet is more diverse and delicious than their previous omnivorous diet. Runkle also says he now enjoys eating international dishes such as Chinese, Indian, Thai and Middle Eastern dishes.
Jonathan Safran Foer: Plus, people who eat less meat tend to take on a more diverse diet, and most people would think of a more diverse diet as more pleasurable.
Elysa Markowitz: “Vegan eating does not have to be about deprivation. In fact, people’s diets often become more varied when they become vegans,” chef Elysa Markowitz said.
How to Become a Vegetarian: All vegetarians including vegans enjoy a much more diverse diet than meat eaters do!!
The trouble is, this doesn’t make any sense. Here’s a chart that points out the obvious:
Source: Vegetarianism for Women.
Going by this chart, you would almost think that vegans have the least varied diets. Even ovo-vegetarians have more options. What are we missing here?
For one thing, this chart is arbitrary. The most popular food animals get their own individual columns, but all vegetables, fruits, grains and nuts are lumped together into one. If there is a chicken column, why not a pistachio column? Of course “Traditional Omnivorous” can eat pistachios too, so that wouldn’t help vegans all that much. Any chart comparing diets is bound to show that veganism is nothing if not a reduction in choices. So how can veganism both restrict and broaden, giving vegans more variety than omnivores with less to work with?
Consider this. Art instructors say that limitation is the key to creativity. Give yourself total freedom and you’ll be so paralyzed with options that you won’t finish anything. Or you’ll write Schizopolis. But confine yourself with a distinct premise, a few main locations and a strict three-act structure and voilà, you’ve got The Shawshank Redemption. You’ve also got The Whole Nine Yards, so this process isn’t foolproof.
Restricting food options can also inspire brilliant innovation. Seventh-day Adventist prophet Ellen G. White’s vegetarian revelation (“The Health Reform Vision”) took meat off the plates of devout Adventists. But the devil kept them hungry for protein, which compelled them to invent soy meat. So there you have it — dietary restrictions increase variety.
Not necessarily for the Adventists, though, who dropped all the usual mammals and birds people were eating for the isolated protein of one particular legume. The only group potentially enjoying greater variety here were the omnivores who could now (if they so chose) make a steak sandwich using two large chunks of textured vegetable protein as the bun. No matter how creative vegans get, they can only add to or discover foods in that last column that everyone gets to eat from.
The vegan rejoinder to this is that omnivores can eat anything they want in all their columns — it just so happens that this amounts to virtually nothing besides a few junk staples. Based on Nathan Runkle’s description of “the typical routine,” we see how a vegan might characterize the usual omnivore diet: Bacon cheese burgers for their dairy, red meat and egg (in the bun) all at once, McNuggets for poultry, fish sticks for fish if they have fish at all, Wonder Bread without the crust and taco shells for their grains, a limp leaf of iceberg lettuce and transfat-blasted french fries for veggies, Circus Peanuts for their nut (yes, omnis actually think that Circus Peanuts are a nut) and a red delicious apple as their fruit, which they throw away after the second bite because they see it has a bruise.
Omnivores are stuck in the rut their parents, fast food corporations and their own complacency built for them, barely grazing the surface of what they are allowed to eat, which is every food in the world. Meanwhile, desperation drives vegans to break out of society’s culinary straight-jacket and investigate every little thing their one check mark permits. In fact, say vegans, they so thoroughly utilize their own limited resources that they breeze past omnivores who stand paralyzed, gaping at an endless sea of cholesterol-laden freedom.
For example:
Vegetables: The only vegetables omnivores eat are white potatoes and sometimes spinach. But vegans know better than to rely on that high-oxalate, glorified salad green when kale, collards, dandelion greens and golden beet greens are equally as devoid of animal pieces. As for white potatoes, these are practice tubers for vegans who soon discover sweet potatoes, taro root and cassava (whole and as a cheese replacement).
Beans: Omnivores eat refried pinto beans, and maybe they had lima beans as children. Vegans, meanwhile, eat black beans, cranberry beans, aduki beans, great northern beans, white scarlet runner beans, garbanzo beans and sprouted mung beans.
Fruit: The closest most omnivores get to a daily fruit serving is their morning bowl of Raisin Bran or Blueberry Morning. But when you can’t eat animal products, exotic fruits are an imperative, with young coconuts, jack fruit, prickly pear, durian, cashew apple, persimmon, pomelo, white sapote, yellow raspberries, dragon fruit, lychees and Asian pears topping the list. “What makes an Asian pear so special?” omnivores ask. Go back to your mushy Bosc, omni. You wouldn’t understand.
Grains: The Standard American Dieting omnivore eats plenty of grains, but only in the form of white flour and white rice. That’s too boring for vegans, who trump omnivores yet again with their diverse array of grass seeds and pseudo grains like brown rice, whole wheat, millet, quinoa, amaranth, Job’s tears, spelt, rye, barley, oats and teff (the last one in the form of injera bread). And even if vegans mainly stick to rice and wheat flour in practice, at least they’ve freaking heard of quinoa.
Eggs: Omnivores eat eggs. No, nothing interesting like duck eggs, quail eggs, crow eggs, century eggs or balut — just plain old factory farmed chicken eggs. Kinda paltry compared to the tofu scramble, Ener-G egg replacer (potato and tapioca starch) and flax-seed slurry that vegans use to replace this cholesterol bomb.
Meat: Chicken, pig and cow are good enough to satisfy the undemanding palate of the lifelong omnivore. But vegans are barely content with mock chicken (wheat gluten), mock bacon (soy), mock cow (soy protein granules), mock duck (wheat gluten), mock carnitas (young jack fruit), mock shrimp (soy), mock ox tail (wheat gluten) and mock pig’s blood (soy milk infused with beet juice).
Restaurants: Omnivores eat at McDonalds and Outback Steakhouse. Vegans eat at Indian (chana masala and saag aloo), Ethiopian (veggie combo platter with extra shiro), Thai (Tom Kha soup and a vegetable curry with no fish sauce) and Middle Eastern restaurants (falafel, hummus, tabouleh, tahini and baba ganoush).
There’s no question that vegans more fully exploit the vegan column than most omnivores do (they kind of have to), but does this translate to a more varied diet overall?
One reason some vegans might think their diet is more varied with fewer options is that they see specialty vegan products and substitute foods as innately more diverse. If you put a plate of pork bacon, chicken eggs and goat cheese and a plate of tofu scramble, tempeh bacon and Follow Your Heart Vegan Gourmet soy cheese in front of vegans and had them point to the more diverse plate, many if not most vegans would pick the plate of pure soy.
Vegan food gets diversity points not because it is varied in itself, but because it is so alien from the food most of us grew up on. Vegans aren’t necessarily getting a more balanced array of nutrients than omnivores — they’re just eating weirder foods. This makes veganism seem diverse, even if many of the foods come from the same basic ingredients of soy, rice or wheat, or are variations on a theme (kale, collards, dandelion greens).
As Nathan Runkle said, he ditched real hamburgers and other fast food for veggie burgers (often but not always soy based), tacos with mock sausage (soy or wheat), non-dairy ice cream (soy, rice or coconut), and rice milk, almond milk and soy milk. This isn’t nutritional variety — it’s novelty value.
However, there’s more to the veganism = dietary diversity cliché than treating individual vegan foods as inherently more diverse. Many omnivores do slip into a greasy rut, which veganism helps them break by forcing them to build a new diet from scratch. The mistake that vegans make here is to think that their tiresome pre-vegan diets were an inevitable consequence of eating animal products, or proof that veganism is for everyone. Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin make this error in Skinny Bitch:
Quit whining. We weren’t raised by hippie-crunchy-granola parents on vegetarian communes. Growing up, we both ate meat all day, every day. We scoffed at tofu and spit on vegetables. Really. Kim’s addictions included such delicacies as corned beef hash, canned Vienna sausages, and daily Big Macs. Every single day in 1992, Rory ate a ham, egg and cheese sandwich for breakfast, followed by a bacon double cheeseburger, fries and a soda for lunch. Dinner was always a dead chicken, fish, cow or pig. … So before you say, ‘I could never give up meat,’ realize that nearly every single vegetarian on the planet said those same words. Then shut the fuck up, look at an inspirational picture of a skinny bitch, and clean our your freezer. (52 - 53)
Basically, “If fast food junkies like us who ate low-quality fried corpse patties for every meal can give up Big Macs for veggie burgers, then anybody can.”
Actually, it would be a lot more promising for veganism if all the conversion stories began with someone who ate a moderate amount of high quality animal foods, shunned chain restaurants, ate parts of the animal other than the most popular cuts, knew a good deal about farming and had exposure to plenty of international cuisines. Yet despite understanding everything they would lose by going vegan, they found the arguments against animal use too persuasive to ignore.
As it is, most vegan conversion stories sound more like, “I won a hot dog eating contest, threw up for an hour straight and then went vegan.”
If a daily cheeseburger, fries and a soda for lunch is omnivorism, no wonder veganism seems diverse by comparison. Many vegans highlight their tawdry, meaty past to paint themselves as unlikely vegans, but an over-indulgent and repetitive omnivorous diet is almost a necessary pre-condition for eventual veganism. Something has to give, and it might as well be animal products.
If your omnivorous diet is so unhealthy and uncreative that going vegan could only increase your culinary diversity… you might be a future vegan.
