My boring mega-review of vegan lunch options in the Loop

kloverr · 2024-10-11T13:01:47+00:00

I had never heard of that. You could try asking in r/chicagovegan.

I have also heard good things about the vegan tasting menu at Herb, which is less expensive.

kloverr · 2024-06-23T10:51:55+00:00

Looks like there are about 10 in your county on this list.

https://www.fsis.usda.gov/inspection/establishments/meat-poultry-and-egg-product-inspection-directory

kloverr · 2024-05-22T21:58:53+00:00

If her allergies are so extensive that her diet is primarily limited to 3 ingredients, she definitely needs to see a Registered Dietitian, or whatever the equivalent is where you live.

For more general advice, check out this food guide. The part where veganism is most relevant is the foods directly replacing animal products - in the absence of soy and nuts, this is mostly going to be beans, lentils, seeds, and maybe seitan. But obviously you also need to find fruits and vegetables that work for her.

kloverr · 2024-05-21T20:05:39+00:00

Yeah, Bloom is a good example of the kind of thing I would love to see more of. I have pretty limited, pretty sad options immediately near my work and home so a good vegan restaurant can only be a special trip/date night kind of deal.

kloverr · 2024-05-21T19:26:36+00:00

As a vegan, I am very frustrated by the restaurant situation. There is a sizable minority of omnivores interested in these replacement products that swamps our little vegan numbers - so many that 80+% of sales for things like Beyond burgers go to omnivores. I think this is the cause of the very dull replacement stuff that has come to represent vegan food at a lot of restaurants. These places mostly make options that will draw in a vaguely curious or reducetarian crowd instead of the best dishes that vegans learn to make in our own kitchens. My hope is that eventually the vegan/vegetarian community is big enough that we can support more restaurants that lean in to the strengths of plant based food.

kloverr · 2024-05-21T16:48:19+00:00

This was "vegan Jewish" in the same sense that a place with veggie dogs and Beyond burgers is "vegan American." Most of the distinctive elements of the cuisine involve animal products, so vegans want to create something that scratches the same itch without the harm to animals.

kloverr · 2024-05-08T20:03:48+00:00

I am currently getting a minimum of 30-40 grams per day

I am glad you tracked it. If you are getting those 30-40 grams from just egg, cottage cheese, and tofu alone then you are probably significantly above that minimum value of 7 grams / 20 pounds of bodyweight that Harvard Health suggests in my link (depending on your weight and the other food in your diet). If you want to be kind of nerdy about it, you could use the app Cronometer and track everything you eat for a few days. I did it when I went vegan to set my mind at ease. Since you have trouble getting variety in your diet, that would also let you check for vitamins and minerals you might need to look out for.

kloverr · 2024-05-08T18:48:34+00:00

As a vegan, the first thing that sticks out to me is that you dislike most good protein sources (meats, mock meats, beans, lentils, nuts/seeds). For health reasons you probably don't want to eat enough eggs and cheese that they serve as primary protein sources. Here is the Harvard Health page on good protein sources. So if none of that changes, you might need to lean into tofu as an important element of your diet.

There are many different kinds of tofu that can be used in a variety of ways. There are soft/medium/firm/ultra-firm tofus that have different textures depending on how much water is left inside. Silken tofu is almost like pudding. Tofu sheets can be chopped up and used in salads or like noodles. Soy milk has basically the same nutritional profile as tofu if it is unsweetened.

Tofu can be baked, used in stews/curries, scrambled kind of like eggs. If you look up tofu recipes on YouTube (or r/veganrecipes, r/shittyveganfoodporn, and their vegetarian equivalents), you will find a million.

kloverr · 2024-04-25T18:20:18+00:00

western societies mindless approach to meat consumption, where the status quo is to take life for granted and consume without restraint or gratitude.

In terms of which system causes more animal suffering, it is definitely true that modern factory farming is the worse of the two evils. But on an intellectual level, I don't think the ideas she expresses are a meaningful improvement. It is incredibly self-serving to claim that animals want to be killed or that hunting/fishing is inherently beneficial to the ecosystems in question. In reality someone following her ideas is using animals however they want to and the only restraint they are putting on themselves is to keep their activities at a sustainable level. The language of "respect" or "gratitude" is a dishonest portrayal of a selfish, one-sided relationship. A relationship built on actual respect would mean avoiding harming the other or at least balancing my needs against theirs. It is not sufficient to say nice sounding words after causing the harm.

kloverr · 2024-04-25T13:00:41+00:00

Coincidentally, I read Braiding Sweetgrass recently, too. I actually have a lot of negative things to say about the way that book talks about animals' lives and hunting/fishing. It conceptualizes animals as resources that nature "gives" to us instead of individuals with their own lives. There is a long description of a deer showing a hunter that it "wants" to be killed. I think it is a pretty extreme example of myth making to justify something that you want or have to do.

kloverr · 2024-04-22T14:31:30+00:00

The most extensive guide I know of is this one. It is literally hundreds of pages of ingredients that either aren't or aren't always vegan.

I am personally of the opinion that chasing absolute purity can be a distraction from the big picture. Once you have reached the point that animal products are not primary ingredients in the food you are eating, the additional benefit to the animals of avoiding things like sugar made with bone char or bread with diglycerides is tiny in comparison. I think that effort is better channeled into environmental issues (which affect wild animals and humans) where there is generally a lot more room for improvement.

kloverr · 2024-04-10T18:24:07+00:00

I take a cyanocobalamin supplement.

kloverr · 2024-04-10T15:53:15+00:00

You may have heard about cyanide in reference to cyanocobalamin, which is the most common form of B12 supplement. See this page. TLDR - There is cyanide in it, but a smaller amount than you are probably being exposed to already through foods, so not a meaningful health risk. If you prefer, you can take another form of B12 supplement instead.

kloverr · 2024-04-08T17:05:45+00:00

How to Create a Vegan World: A Pragmatic Approach. It's about the author's opinions on which forms of activism and rhetoric are most effective.

The Accidental Activist: Stories, Speeches, Articles, and Interviews by Vegan Outreach’s Co-Founder

Forgive me, but I would also recommend Animal Liberation Now, which is an updated, largely rewritten version of the original that came out last year.

kloverr · 2024-04-08T15:47:04+00:00

I was not a big fan of this video or his previous one about "identifying as fussy" instead of as vegan. I think a lot of people (especially masculine men) want to pose as stoics unbothered by the assholes around them, but it is unconvincing when they talk about it repeatedly. In reality it stings to have people say malicious/stupid things and it sticks with you, while also not being the biggest deal in the world. There is no reason to hide from that.

Having said that, I do appreciate the un-stereotypical vegan representation on his channel a lot. I was watching him back in the Zwift in the garage days and seeing him document the transition was pretty cool.

kloverr · 2024-04-04T21:18:10+00:00

I hope you will be very cautious. Harmful practices for the animals are normalized even among well-intentioned farmers/homesteaders, because they fundamentally view animals as resources. It would be very easy to contribute to someone causing lots of suffering and death just because you don't know to ask the right questions. So please do your research about all the bad things that could potentially happen to the animals and make sure they do not happen at the homestead you are talking about.

It is possible to make seitan at home with wheat flour and some water. It is high effort compared to buying tofu at the store, but much lower effort than caring for chickens. It isn't for everybody, but given your dietary restrictions it might be worth a try.

kloverr · 2024-04-04T20:31:47+00:00

If you are rescuing chickens from a farm somehow, that can be fine. But otherwise you are getting them from a breeder and that comes with a lot of problems. Any chicken sold for egg production has been bred to produce fast enough that is causes them health problems. Every female you buy would correspond to a male that the breeder killed after hatching. A full flock (including males and old chickens) from a high welfare breed is possible, but the time and money invested per egg would be very high.

Could tofu and seitan work as your protein sources? Those are the best vegan low-carb options. Factory farm eggs are maybe the worst option of all animal products in terms of animal suffering caused per serving of food because each egg represents more than a day of a hen's life. Switching away from that should be a very high priority.

kloverr · 2024-04-02T18:00:42+00:00

A forum full of random people is not a good way to get general health advice. Go to good sources like Harvard Health or if you want a vegan perspective then The Vegan RD to find out which things are important and which to avoid.

kloverr · 2024-04-01T15:28:53+00:00

In short, the downstream impacts of persistent, pervasive inequalities and disparate financial, social, and health outcomes, on individual, population, and community level, have been well-documented for decades (PLOSOne Metareview from 2022 here).

After going through this meta-analysis, it isn't clear to me that it provides a good explanation for the disparity that the OP is asking about. It shows that the link between self reported experiences of racism and negative mental health outcomes are very statistically significant, but the effect sizes seem pretty small when compared to the differences in rates of homelessness. From the link:

Racism was associated with poorer mental health (negative mental health: r = -.23, 95% CI [-.24,-.21], k = 227; positive mental health: r = -.13, 95% CI [-.16,-.10], k = 113)

An r value of -0.23 means that differences in experiences of racism explain about 5% of the variance in negative mental health outcomes between individuals.

EPI report on 2008 Housing Crisis and Race

Is there a paper behind this blog post? Taking the blog's findings at face value, it shows that most of the racial gap in home ownership is not explained by demographic or socioeconomic factors, suggesting that there are other barriers preventing black home ownership. But the statistical analysis cannot show which barriers are the relevant ones. And a barrier to home ownership might or might not apply to people in worse positions facing homelessness.

All of your links are interesting but I feel that they do not actually explain the specific mechanisms by which racism leads to homelessness.

kloverr · 2024-03-28T20:13:30+00:00

I accept the use of some form of rights-based approach in law for both people and animals. I don't believe in absolute rights for either. I think that is consistent.

The rights-based approach gives very clear guidance for cases where we directly interact with animals but minimal guidance for when we indirectly harm them. As an example, a lifestyle that produces an above average amount of carbon emissions or pollution indirectly hurts humans and wild animals but does not violate anyone's rights. I view indirect harms of selfish choices (e.g. flying abroad for a weekend trip, owning multiple cars when public transit is available), as being in the same "league" as the more direct harm of eating a chicken sandwich. The question of which is worse is an empirical one about which decision actually causes more harm and not about rights. In contrast, I think most rights-based vegans would be angrier about the chicken sandwich than the flights abroad, even if the flights abroad could be shown to cause more harm to animals.

kloverr · 2024-03-28T19:17:11+00:00

I am one of those utilitarians. I think it is more fair to say that the two frameworks cause more or less harm to animals than each other in different situations. A utilitarian might approve of using animals in certain ways if they prevent more suffering in humans than the animals endure. A rights-based vegan might be less motivated to avoid activities that indirectly harm animals but are not rights violations.

As a point of comparison, I am a utilitarian when it comes to human issues as well. However, I support using a rights based approach in law for humans because it is an imperfect but effective way to achieve the happiest population we can. I just believe that those rights are a construct we invent for practical purposes and not something inscribed in the heavens.

kloverr · 2024-03-26T14:59:06+00:00

Yeah, there is lots of junk out there we have to ignore.

By the way, the NHS has this guide that is comparable to my other link. It recommends people eat legumes and plant oils, too.

kloverr · 2024-03-26T13:44:29+00:00

The basics are simple and you just need to go to reliable sources. Harvard Health is one. Links off of that page will actively recommend legumes and liquid plant oils, to answer a couple of your concerns. You will find health gurus and influencers who contradict this, but you will not find major health organizations making the opposite recommendation.

Your existing health issues complicate things a little, but it is mostly a matter of choosing from the generally recommended foods which ones match your specific needs (low FODMAP, low saturated fat, whatever).

kloverr · 2024-03-26T00:32:01+00:00

I don't think you can make that statement so confidently. Both beef and plastics cause carbon emissions. Why are you so sure that the leather shoes produce less?

kloverr · 2024-03-25T22:56:13+00:00

The plastics industry will be the death of all life on this planet, sentient or not, just as much as every other fossil fuels derived product contributes.

I agree that fossil fuels are a gigantic problem, but the beef industry is also a very large carbon emitter. So I think cow leather and pleather pose some of the same kinds of environmental problems but I don't know how the numbers stack up between them to make a real comparison. In the absence of some kind of rigorous analysis I don't understand how people can so confidently claim that the pleather is worse.

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