Vincent J. Guihan - New American Vegan

New American Vegan

by Vincent Guihan

ISBN: 978-1-60486-079-5

LCCN: 2009912455

This edition copyright 2011 PM Press

All Rights Reserved

PM Press PO

Box 23912

Oakland, CA 94623

www.pmpress.org

Layout by Daniel Meltzer

Cover art by Tofu Hound/John Yates

Printed on recycled paper by the Employee Owners of Thomson-Shore in Dexter, Michigan.

www.thomsonshore.com

Introduction:
How I Went Vegan, Why I Stay Vegan & Why the Food Is Central to My Life

Chapter 1:
Terms, Techniques & Tools: A Brief Field Guide to What You Need & What You Need to Know

Chapter 2:
Soup Is Good Food (for Vegans!)

Recipes:

Getting Past the Recipes:
What Makes a Good Soup?

Chapter 3:
Get Saucy!

Recipes:

Getting Past the Recipes:
Dressings, Sauces & Gravies

Chapter 4:
Side Dishes or Plate Partners?

Recipes:

Getting Past the Recipes:
What Makes a Good Side Dish, a Good Appetizer & a Good Salad?

Chapter 5:
Seitan & Potatoes, and Other Soon-to-Be-Traditional Favorites

Recipes:

Getting Past the Recipes:
Addressing the Center of the Plate

Chapter 6:
When Vegan Desserts Attack!

Recipes:

Getting Past the Recipes:
Finishing the Meal

Chapter 7:
Breakfast, Brunch & Brinner

Recipes:

Getting Past the Recipes:
What Makes for a Good Breakfast?

Entertaining as a Vegan:
Brief Notes on Dinner Plans, Booze & Etiquette

Dinner Plans:
Three- & Five-Dish Dinner Suggestions

Veganism & Alcohol:
A Match Made in Heaven

How Not to Be a Nuisance:
Being a Good Vegan Host

In Conclusion:
Improvising & Innovating with Flavors & Textures

Indices:

I promise this will be a short introduction. Im not an especially wordy person and I know youre buying this book for the recipes!

And yet, it all starts decades ago in a large Irish family in a very small town, Waterman, IL. My father was a janitor at Northern Illinois University (about twelve miles away in De Kalb). My back yard was our neighbors cornfield. As a child, I thought De Kalb was huge. It had several fast food restaurants, a few grills, the works! My parents cooked only sporadically, even though the nearest fast-food restaurants were a twenty-minute car ride away. We moved to the southwest side of Chicago when I was eleven. Raised on TV dinners, burgers, pizza, and spaghetti, I spent much of my young adulthood nestled between the delicatessens, greasy spoons, and taquerias dotted around Cermak Road and Cicero Avenue, which helped to build my palate. Of course, I also made sure to provide my palate with serious depth by eating junk food in the bleachers at Cubs games (and the infrequent White Sox game, although Im embarrassed to admit it) with father and my older brothers.

Today, I live in Ottawa, Canadaa city renowned (at least in Canada!) for its cosmopolitan flair in spite of its small sizewhere I eat a great number of things I cant even pronounce. Today, the two most common questions I get as a vegan are Why are you vegan? and What do you eat? This book answers both but with an emphasis on the latter, of course. I started becoming vegan when I was twenty-six by eliminating all animal products from my diet, and then over the next few months eliminating all of my leather, wool, silk, and all the unnecessary cleaning products I had that were tested on animals or used animal ingredients. So, in some respects it was overnight, but in others it was gradual. I had been a vegetarian, and a strict one (not a pescatarian or a no red meat vegetarian) for about a decade before that.

When I became vegetarian, there werent a dozen brands of soy, hemp, or nut milk at my local grocery store, nor the few dozen vegan veggie burgers, hot dogs, and other products you can buy today. A lot has changed in the last two decades in terms of the availability of vegan products, and yet, remarkably little has changed for other animals. For the most part, the conditions of animal use have not changed. The number of animals being used is up. More and more vegetarians and vegans are turning back to eating meat, believing that humanely raised meat doesnt present us with a moral problem. I couldnt disagree more with this view, and it all relates to why I went vegan: a cat named Percy.

To be clear, Percy wasnt exactly my cat. He adopted me at the same time my first wife and my stepchildren did. He came with the family and with three other cats: Sam, an enormous dark grey tom; Butch, a white cat; and Five Fingered Lou, a grey tabby with five fingers. Percy was the smallest of all of them. He was also the most resilient. He had been hit by a car twice (dont let your cats out, people!) and had lost a good part of his tail in the process. The vets generally agreed that he had probably suffered some brain damage as a result of his near-death scrapes.

When I met him, Percy had a low, monotone meow. He sang in a bass voice that would have been perfect for Stepping over Jordan or Swing Low, Sweet Chariot if he had been a human being. Instead, his singing was more like something youd expect in German electro music in the 1990s. But every time the kibble was poured out or the wet food was scooped out, Percy was there ready to eat. He made the best of the life that he had. The prospect that it would be in any way moral to take that life away when it suited meno matter how well he was treated, no matter how much pleasure it might give meseemed wrong. His life became a very important lesson to my own.

When we think of our own rights (what others owe us) and of our own well-being (what makes us happy and healthy), its not that different from other animals. Were all unique. Were all individuals. We all have an interest in living our lives. We all have things that are objectively good for us (e.g., I go to the doctor and my cats go to the vet), even if they are sometimes uncomfortable or painful. Its not just a matter of whether or not other animals suffer when we use them, its a question of whether it is right to use them at all. It was Percy who convinced me that it wasnt right to use other animals.

Over time, it dawned on me that if Percy had such an interest in his life (like I did), then surely other animals did as well. I started to do some research into animal ethology. Noninvasive ethology studies how animals behave themselves when theyre left to themselves. Its an interesting field, and I still try to read up when I have the chance. The gist, however, is that it was clear upon even very basic study that, to paraphrase Gary L. Francione, animals were sentient, they could feel pain, they had an interest in avoiding it, and they had an interest in continuing their lives, just like I did and just like Percy.

Everything I had done up until that point in my life with respect to nonhuman animals had been well-intended but misguided, except for caring for the animals in my personal immediate life. I realized that, in spite of my best intentions, being vegetarian for a decade had been mostly for naught. None of the other animals I wasnt eating had been given a get-out-of-jail-free card. They had just been sold to someone else.