Read Veganist: Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World Online
Authors: Kathy Freston
Tags: #food.cookbooks
Money-Saving Tips
Making the switch to a plant-based diet might seem challenging at first, but it’s actually so simple, and a few smart shopping strategies can also help you save on food bills.
1. Buy in season. Produce in season is almost always less expensive than out-of-season produce, because it’s more abundant.
2. Avoid precut, washed, and packaged fruits and vegetables. They’re always more expensive than the whole foods (and a waste of packaging). If you need the convenience (for the office, or if you’re on the road), go for it; just know that you’ll be paying more.
3. Watch produce prices carefully. Locally grown fruits and vegetables sometimes cost less than imported produce, while at other times imported produce saves you a lot—just be on the lookout for the best deals. (And be mindful of the carbon footprint—how far your food had to travel to you and therefore how much fuel was required to get it there.)
4. Shop at farmers’ markets at the end of the day. Farmers’ markets are a great place to find fresh, in-season, and locally grown produce for cheap—especially if you shop at the end of the market day, when growers may be willing to sell their produce at a discount, rather than have to pack it up and take it back home with them.
5. Don’t be afraid to buy frozen vegetables. Frozen veggies (especially store brands) are often cheaper than fresh ones, and they can actually be
more
nutritious, because the veggies are frozen right after they’re picked, preserving vitamins that are lost in transporting fresh veggies from the farm to the store. And of course, keep an eye out for sales and stock up your freezer with veggies that can be tossed into soups, stews, stir-fries, pasta, and many other dishes.
6. Consider the value of your time. For most of us, time is just as valuable as money. We tend to think that eating fast food is less time-consuming—an illusion reinforced by a steady stream of fast-food company advertising. But in reality, the time that you spend driving to a fast-food restaurant and then idling in a drive-through could just as easily be spent at home with your family, cooking a simple meal. All it takes is a small initial time investment in learning to cook a few new meals. Even simpler, you can just convert the meals that you already eat into ones that fit your new lifestyle.
Most families rotate the same menu of dishes every week, for ease of preparation and to simplify grocery shopping. Once you’ve got that set menu of favorite vegan meals, prep time is quick.
7. Veganize the meals you already eat. When my friends Robbie and Colleen made the decision to eat vegan meals, they worried about how they’d feed their family while remaining in their budget. One of the first things that Robbie and Colleen did was to consider how they could take the meat and dairy out of the meals that they already served without spending any extra money.
For example, tacos with ground beef became tacos with seasoned black beans, which worked out to be less expensive, even when they used canned beans, and far healthier than using a package of ground beef. Instead of sour cream and cheese, Robbie and Colleen made a delicious substitution of homemade guacamole—this before they discovered vegan versions of sour cream and cheese. To replace their usual chicken breasts at dinner, they substituted grilled tofu or seitan “steaks,” which are cheaper than a package of boneless chicken breasts. Their kids loved the seitan (made from the protein in wheat) especially, and it quickly became part of the regular rotation.
Spaghetti and meatballs, a longtime favorite of the whole family, became spaghetti with meatless marinara sauce, made either with fresh tomatoes (which can be bought inexpensively at many farmers’ markets) or a delicious sauce made with diced, canned tomatoes (often on sale in their local supermarket) mixed up with crumbled tofu; when the tofu was mixed in, it seemed like the classic Bolognese sauce. Sometimes they used vegetarian meatballs instead, and it was as hearty and delicious as anything they’d had before.
Again, removing the meat from the meal made it no more expensive than if they’d added the fatty, unhealthy meat—with its attendant costly, long-term health problems. For those occasions when they would be pressed for time, Robbie and Colleen took to the Internet to look for some quick, on-the-go vegan options. They found that the nutritional information for every fast-food restaurant was online, and just a few clicks uncovered quite a few vegan fast-food options. The chain Chipotle, with its vegan-friendly menu and have-it-your-way meal options, was always a reliable, inexpensive place to eat. It was even possible to have vegan meals at “standard” chain restaurants—Denny’s has a veggie burger, for instance; and veggie fast-food restaurants seemed to be coming onto the scene, many of them squeezed into strip shopping malls or other convenient places. Often Colleen would just make a huge pot of chili that would last for the week; or Robbie would barbecue skewers of veggies and tempeh on the grill in nearly no time. They made chopped salads or fresh veggies every day to fill out the menus.
8. Think quantity. Nonperishable foods like dried beans, rice, and oatmeal are far cheaper if bought in bulk. If you plan your weekly meals in advance and make a list of what you’ll need—and stick to it when you go shopping to avoid pricey splurges or food that you won’t use up before it spoils—you’ll save quite a bit of money. Dried beans and lentils, for example, cost less than $1 a pound, and they are a great source of protein. Tofu—the “other white meat” of the vegan universe and one of those blank-slate foods, like flour, to which you add flavors to make interesting—usually costs less than $2 a pound. If you are fortunate enough to live near a Chinatown, you can sometimes find super fresh, locally made tofu for less than $1 a pound. If you live near a Trader Joe’s, you can find great deals on healthy, vegetarian foods—and you’ll probably discover some new favorites that your regular grocery store doesn’t carry.
9. Invest in some good vegan cookbooks (my favorites are listed at the back of this book, and there are many week’s worth of recipes in the back of both my
Quantum Wellness
books) so that you’ll be more likely to make meals at home instead of going out to eat or buying expensive convenience foods. There are also great websites that offer recipes for free, and I’ve listed them at the back of this book as well.
Of course, many inexpensive, healthy, and easy-to-make meals don’t even require a recipe. For breakfast, try toast or a bagel spread with vegan butter, peanut butter, jam, or avocado, or have a bowl of cereal topped with sliced bananas. My regular breakfast is cold brown rice (I make enough for a week at a time and keep it in the refrigerator) with chopped dates, raw almonds, and hemp or rice milk (I heat up the milk). A baked potato topped with salsa, baked beans, or vegan chili makes a tasty and filling lunch or dinner along with a salad; tacos loaded with beans, rice, and veggies are inexpensive and delicious. Good old peanut butter and jelly sandwiches or cheesy toast made with soy or tapioca cheeses are a hit with kids of all ages and are easy on the wallet.
Once you find your basics that you can depend on in a pinch, you will find that you can even splurge on some specialty products, such as veggie burgers and mock chicken, and still spend less than you would if you loaded up on beef, chicken, and fish.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in March 2010 the cost per pound of chicken breast, bone-in and boneless, was $2.25 and $3.26 respectively, and the cost of dried beans per pound was $1.36. Buying a pound of beans instead of a pound of chicken would cost you $0.89 to $1.90 less, and a pound of beans will feed you for more meals than a pound of chicken will. In the same month, rice was $0.76 per pound, apples were $1.17 per pound, bananas were $0.56 per pound, and lettuce was $0.86 per pound. Contrast this with $3.10 per pound for ground beef, $5.29 per pound for steaks, and $2.28 per pound for ham.
There’s really no question that you can eat more cheaply on a plant-based diet than on a meat-based one. In fact, that’s the initial reason many college students try a vegetarian diet. But in the end, leaning in to vegetarian fare isn’t only about saving money at the grocery store. There are so many hidden costs to eating meat—from how it makes us feel to the diseases it promotes to the environment and our fellow creatures. The production of meat is a direct cause of climate change (see Promise 6), the annual cost of which in the U.S. alone is expected to reach more than $2 trillion. The Natural Resources Defense Council recently published a report by Tufts University climate scientists indicating that “four global warming impacts alone—hurricane damage, real estate losses, energy costs, and water costs—will come with a price tag of… almost $1.9 trillion annually (in today’s dollars) by 2100.” Animal waste pollutes our waterways, workers are made sick both physically and psychologically by working in slaughterhouses and CAFOs, and we are sickened, too.
It’s easy to see that the hidden costs of eating meat are everywhere—in how you feel day to day, in your prospects for a long life of good health, in the health of the land, the water, the animals, the workers,… and your pocketbook. It’s pretty compelling, isn’t it?
Becoming a veganist is about very consciously choosing to disengage from an industry that makes us sick, abuses animals, pollutes the planet, and squanders precious resources. It’s also about a better quality of life—having more energy and a lighter load (as well as a lighter conscience) and living longer and healthier.
And that’s not something that can be measured in dollars and cents.
Did you know?
A few years ago, the environmental journalist Paul Hawken challenged students from the University of Portland with a thought experiment:
Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if the stars only came out once every thousand years. No one would sleep that night, of course. The world would create new religions overnight. We would be ecstatic, delirious, made rapturous by the glory of God. Instead the stars come out every night, and we watch television.
This extraordinary time when we are globally aware of each other and the multiple dangers that threaten civilization has never happened, not in a thousand years, not in ten thousand years. Each of us is as complex and beautiful as all the stars in the universe. We have done great things and we have gone way off course in terms of honoring creation. You are graduating to the most amazing, stupefying challenge ever bequested to any generation. The generations before you failed. They didn’t stay up all night. They got distracted and lost sight of the fact that life is a miracle every moment of your existence. Nature beckons you to be on her side. You couldn’t ask for a better boss. The most unrealistic person in the world is the cynic, not the dreamer. Hope only makes sense when it doesn’t make sense to be hopeful. This is your century. Take it and run,
as if your life depends on it
.
We all know it so clearly that it almost seems silly to say it: our planet is in trouble. But it’s also critically important to say it—perhaps it’s more important than anything else, since so many profit so much from our forgetting. We need only check the news for a few days, and it’s painfully obvious that Hawken is right in his analysis: As I type, the East Coast is getting ready for the worst storms in decades, and we’ve just survived the craziest winter weather ever recorded—and both events, within a few months of one another in the exact same ecosystem, are directly attributable to climate change.
Everywhere, water is drying up and getting filthier, fires are burning out of control because of hotter temperatures and drought-ridden brush; fish are disappearing (and with them goes the food chain), storms are getting wilder, species are becoming extinct, and the very air itself is making some of us sick. Again, Hawken is right: Time is running out. The time to act is now.
The good news is that we can tilt things in a better direction by shifting the way we eat. It turns out that the single most potent thing we, as individuals, can do for the planet’s well-being is to eat a more plant-based diet. More than changing your lightbulbs, or driving a hybrid car, or turning down the heat, you can do better by the environment by cutting back on animal-based food.
Think of it this way: Just like humans, animals have to eat to survive. You probably consume between 1,200 and 2,500 calories per day, depending on your size, the nature of your job, and how much time you spend exercising. And you burn all those calories off, simply existing. Farmed animals, also, burn the vast majority of their caloric intake off keeping their bodies going. And then some significant portion of their caloric intake produces feathers, skin, blood, and other parts of their bodies that we don’t consume. Once you crunch the numbers, you find that feeding animals for meat, dairy, and egg production requires growing some ten times as many crops as we’d need if we just ate pasta primavera, veggie sausage, and other plant based foods directly (rather than funneling those crops through animals).
On top of this inherent vast inefficiency of the animal foods industries, we also have to transport the animals to slaughterhouses, slaughter them, refrigerate their carcasses, and distribute their flesh all across the country. Producing a calorie of meat protein means burning more than ten times, on average, as much fossil fuel (with all the greenhouse gas emissions and other pollution that entails) as producing a calorie of plant protein does.
Plus, animal agriculture takes up an incredible 70 percent of all agricultural land, and a whopping 30 percent of the land surface of the planet. As a result, farmed animals are probably the biggest cause of slashing and burning of the world’s forests. (More than 95 percent of soy is fed to animals—not human beings.) Today, 70 percent of former Amazon rain forest is used for pastureland, and feed crops cover much of the remainder. These forests serve as “sinks” and are often referred to as the lungs of the planet, absorbing carbon dioxide from the air, so turning these forests into soy fields so that those of us in the first world can have cheap chicken releases all that stored carbon dioxide, further warming the planet.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which won the Nobel Peace Prize for working to raise global consciousness about the issue of climate change, has described the existence of human-caused global warming in its final assessment report as both “unequivocal,” and as having “abrupt and irreversible” effects on global climate. Worse still, these effects are coming stronger and faster than predicted in the panel’s most recent report. Alarmingly, some effects that had been expected to arrive decades from now are already here.
The report warns that hundreds of millions of people are threatened with starvation, flooding, and weather disasters. Rain-fed crop production will fall by half, a quarter of the world’s species will go extinct, and some arctic ice will completely disappear during the summer. We will see more deadly heat waves, stronger hurricanes, and island nations completely obliterated by rising sea levels. It sounds biblical in proportion, and even though the most severe effects have not been directly experienced by most of us yet, things do appear to be getting worse, year by storm-drenched year.
On the issue of climate change, animal agriculture is a nightmare in comparison to producing grains and beans and other plant-based foods. In a 400-page report from the United Nations’ Food and Agricultural Organization, “Livestock’s Long Shadow,” UN agricultural scientists conclude that the business of raising animals for food is responsible for about 18 percent of all warming, and that meat eating is “one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global.” World Bank agricultural scientists rebutted the UN in 2010, arguing that, actually, the number is not 18 percent, but rather at least 50 percent. The most highly esteemed agricultural scientists are saying that animal agriculture is at least one half of the problem of climate change.
It’s a little hard to fathom when you think about a small chick hatching from her fragile egg. How can an animal, so seemingly insignificant against the vastness of the earth, give off enough greenhouse gas to change the global climate? The answer is in their sheer numbers. We slaughter around 10 billion land animals a year in this country alone, and
60 billion
are slaughtered worldwide. Remember that all these animals have to eat—feed mills have to operate, trucks have to tote the feed (and the animals and their carcasses) from here to there. And on and on—producing massive amounts of carbon dioxide (CO
2
). But that’s not the only warming gas that worries scientists.
Carbon dioxide counts for about half of global warming gases, and a third is from methane and nitrous oxide. These superstrong gases come primarily from farmed animals’ digestive processes and from their manure. In fact, while animal agriculture accounts for 9 percent of our carbon dioxide emissions, it emits 37 percent of our methane, and a whopping 65 percent of our nitrous oxide. Methane is twenty times as powerful as CO
2
as a planet warmer, and N
2O
is almost 300 times as powerful. By simply raising fewer (or no) animals, we could turn off these climate change spigots.
What we’re seeing is just the beginning, too. Meat consumption has increased fivefold in the past fifty years, and is expected to double again in the next fifty, encouraged by growing global affluence and enormous advertising campaigns by the animal agriculture companies that tell us to drink more milk and eat more meat. We are not only eating ourselves to death, but we are also eating our planet to death.
I often hear people say, “I don’t eat red meat because I know cows give off methane.” But the factory farming of chickens releases tremendous amounts of greenhouse gas emissions as well. Industrial farming of any animals is a problem because, whether for cows, pigs, or chickens, food still has to be grown and turned into animal feed, and extra trucks and factories are operated that would not be needed for plant foods. So if you do indeed decide to cut back on meat, cut back on all meat, because just switching from beef to chicken doesn’t make much of a difference.
And it’s not just a matter of global warming gases: with chickens, as with pigs and cattle, vast quantities of dangerous chemicals are produced, acidic and tainted urine seeps into the groundwater, and bacteria-laden manure infects the soil, thanks to concentrated animal-feeding operations.
In a story about chicken-waste pollution, the
New York Times
reported that “[a]lthough the dairy and hog industry in states near the bay produce more pounds of manure, poultry waste has more than twice the concentration of pollutants per pound.” That’s probably in part because calorie for calorie, chickens are given a lot more drugs than pigs and cattle—because they’re kept in even worse conditions.
When you have the attorney general of a state like Oklahoma battling poultry producers over the industry “wreak[ing] havoc in the 1-million-acre Illinois River watershed, turning it into a murky, sludgy mess” (Associated Press, 2008), it seems pretty clear that all meat—whether from cattle, pigs, or chickens—is a big problem for the environment. There is just no way to raise billions of animals without compromising the environment in myriad ways.
As I struggle to figure out what to include—and what not to include—in this chapter, I am struck by the sheer enormity of the problem. Remember, that UN report is more than 400 pages long. It concludes that meat production contributes to “problems of land degradation, global warming and air pollution, water shortage and water pollution, and loss of biodiversity.” Similarly, books like John Robbins’s
The Food Revolution
devote hundreds of pages to the issue of farmed animal waste and pollution. Please take a close look into those two sources; the information therein is just stunning.
From the United Nations’ Food and Agricultural Organization, “Livestock’s Long Shadow”: eating meat is “one of the most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global.”
I’ll close out this discussion of farmed animal waste and pollution with these few additional facts: Animal agriculture accounts for most of the water consumed in this country, emits two-thirds of the world’s acid-rain-causing ammonia, and is the world’s largest source of water pollution—killing entire river and marine ecosystems, destroying coral reefs, and of course, making people sick. Try to imagine the prodigious volumes of manure churned out by modern American farms: 5 million tons a day, more than three times the fecal waste of the human population, and far more than our land can possibly absorb. The acres and acres of cesspools stretching over much of our countryside, polluting the air and contaminating our water, make the
Exxon Valdez
oil spill look minor in comparison.
Trawlers each as long as a football field clear-cut the ocean floor and can take in 800,000 pounds of fish in a single outing.
I do, however, want to say a few words about the most neglected of all animals we eat: sea animals. Fishing, like farming, isn’t what it used to be. This fact was most clearly hammered home for me when I saw a video that Sir Paul McCartney put out called
Glass Walls
. McCartney is probably the West’s most famous and outspoken vegetarian, and the title comes from the fact that, apparently, Sir Paul is always telling people, “If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian.” Anyway, I have seen quite a few videos—including undercover investigations—that document the cruelties of factory farms, but I had not seen much on the fish industry. Sir Paul’s video (which you can find easily with an Internet search of his name and “Glass Walls”) opened my eyes, and I can’t recommend it highly enough.
Trawlers each as long as a football field clear-cut the ocean floor and can take in 800,000 pounds of fish in a single outing. Obviously, they are scooping up anything and everything that is in their path: dolphins, turtles, and coral reefs get scraped up and destroyed right along with whatever the boat was actually trying to catch. Large chunks of the ocean floor are dredged up as about 30 million tons of dead sea animals (called bycatch) along with fatally injured creatures of all sorts, are tossed back overboard (throwing delicate aquatic ecosystems into disarray). As a result of the growing demand for fish, the populations of some of the most common fish species have dropped by 90 percent in the past fifty years.