Food lifestyles

Yeah, soy gives me diarrhoea (even fermented soy). For me the taste of soy milk shouts 'THAT'S NOT FOOD' - I liked the way you put it Jane - 'tastes like putty' - too right!
...oh darn, I can hear my dog drinking out of the toilet as I write this...

I may be unusual but I pretty much avoided soy even in my vegetarian years. Maybe why I did pretty much ok as a vegetarian (but I think somewhat better as an omnivore).

It all seemed so fake (I was like: fake meats? you have got to be kidding me! I'm avoiding meat! yuck meat-like!). And it wasn't anything I grew up eating (other than soy sauce in a stir fry) so it was strange and untrustable. Of course I ate legumes, wasn't avoiding beans, just never trusted the soy thing is all. I do have miso soup sometimes, it's fine, no problems. I use soy sauce sometimes, also fine.

I've never had overt problems with soy, and I'll eat it occasionally (black soybeans in recipes, tamari...) My problem with a vegetarian diet was the high-carbohydrate/low quality fats and proteins part. I was pretty much hungry all the time. For years. There's that "slow learner" thing again. I finally read about insulin production and related issues and changed things around accordingly.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by ApatheticNoMore

I may be unusual but I pretty much avoided soy even in my vegetarian years.

---

Me too--I agree that the answer to eating vegetarian isn't to try to come up with lousy meat replacements--if you go to good vegetarian restaurants, their dishes are fantastic--creative, balanced, tasty--but you won't find any Smart Dogs or Tofurkeys there. Who would want that??

And personally, as a person-who-avoids-meat-most-of-the-time-but-stopped-calling-herself-a-vegetarian, I also think it's very rude to make a host feel uncomfortable about what they serve. I'm not talking about genuine allergies and sensitivities--I'm talking about druthers. I remember when I was hard-core vegetarian, my nephew got married and DH and I traveled to MN to spend time with my brother. We were going to go out to eat, but there happened to be a very bad snow/ice storm in MN (fancy that). So we decided to stay in. My brother said, "I have some frozen filet mignon--I'll just grill them!" I don't know if he knew of my vegetarianism, but I didn't think that that was the right time to tell him.

The generosity and great company of my brother was far more important than sticking to my vegetarian principles. I do remember that that steak was delicious.

I like the points that Gingerella72 posted. Very sensible. I was also struck how many of those could be used to describe religious choices as well.

I definitely see both sides of this issue since I am married to someone allergic to all nuts and who had to severely restrict his food choices for several years while on dialysis. Of course there are legitimate reasons to be "picky." And those reasons should be respected. Pickiness by choice is a different matter, but I believe choices should be respected as much as possible as well. Of course, it's all in the delivery; when people are rude about their chosen way of life, it can be very off-putting, because any kind of rudeness is off-putting, no matter what the topic.

It can feel wearisome, as Miss Cellane talked about, when just trying to have friends over for a simple dinner. The more people you want to invite, the more you restrict your selection of "OK" food. Dhiana's method of "build your own" meals is smart and easy to adapt for lots of situations.

Kara

I have to admit I enjoyed fake hot dogs and hamburgers almost as much as I have always enjoyed the real thing. I also liked seitan and soy meat analogs, particularly at Bamboo Garden (vegan/kosher/Buddhist?) in Seattle. I would have liked it even better had their ethos not proscribed onions and garlic as well as meat.

I find it no difficulty to arrange special meals for people -- even when we have 5 or more "conflicting" diets. IN fact, I find it a lot of fun. . . a nifty challenge!

I don't know. For me, it's just fun.

Also, as a paleo person, I find myself eating "wahtever" when I go to people's homes. I have friends who are vegan, and they might feed us gluten, sugar, and soy all at once. I'm cool with that. For me, it's no big deal to eat "off diet" sometimes. It's not like it's once a week. And for the record, potatoes are included for many paleo people. Some might even include rice!

This weekend, I'm going to a yoga workshop in nelson. I'm going to be eating all kinds of grains because it's pot luck and veryone brings grain-based awesome salads. It's nice. Seriously. It's, like, two meals. I ain't gonna die. :D

Also, we do pot lucks as 'recipe builders" as well. Everyone brings copies of their recipes so that you can take them home. We ask for four or five to be written out so that people can take them home. This is a "nifty/steal" way for people to be aware of all ingredients while simultaneously getting the reicipe to try at home if they wish.

Food allergies and elimination diets are big here, so it's not at all unusual to have to dig around for unique recipes. :)

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Gingerella72

There is a blogger, Amber at Go Kaleo, I've started following that is very anti-diet-dogma. She preaches not drinking the diet industry's Kool-Aid and doing your own research to find what works for your unique body, and refusing to feel shame or guilt over it.

One of my favorite of her posts:

"How to tell if your ‘healthy diet’ has crossed the line into disordered thinking:


1. You make fun of, or hang out with people who make fun of, people who make different dietary choices than you do.
2. You use your valuable free time to visit other people’s blogs and argue with them about their dietary choices.
3. You’ve completely eliminated foods from your diet that you enjoy eating, and that you have no intolerance to, because your guru has told you they aren’t ‘optimal’.
4. You experience stress, shame or guilt when you eat (or WANT to eat) something forbidden by your diet.
5. You’ve alienated your real life friends and family by constantly criticizing their dietary choices, and you are ok with that because your ‘real’ family is your group of online friends who share your dietary philosophy.
6. You believe that your diet is the one true ‘optimal’ human diet, and that anyone who makes different dietary choices than you simply hasn’t heard the ‘truth’ yet.
7. You focus on diet to the exclusion of other healthy lifestyle choices like regular exercise, proper sleep, stress management and sunlight, and believe that eating the ‘right’ diet can make up for not practicing those other lifestyle choices.
8. You believe that if you just eat ‘right’ all your health problems will go away, and that if someone is still experiencing health problems on your diet they just aren’t ‘doing it right’.
9. You believe, because you’ve been taught by your guru, that the entire medical establishment is out to get you.
10. When your diet is not producing results you keep on doing it because you’ve convinced yourself that you can’t eat any other way.
Your diet doesn’t have to consume your life, produce stress and shame, and alienate your friends and family. There is another way. Diet is just one aspect of a healthy lifestyle, and if your diet is producing negative emotions in your life, it is not promoting health.

My thoughts about food and nutrition have radically changed in the last couple of years. I used to blindly follow conventional nutrition dogma that low-fat and low-calorie anything was healthy, no matter the source. So I drank skim milk, ate low fat cheese, soy products, margarine, Egg Beaters, felt guilty if I ate over 1800 calories a day, and patted myself on the back for making healthy choices. Then I accidentally stumbled across something that said whole milk is healthier than skim because of what is done to make skim milk, well, skim milk. It turned my whole world upside down because it went against everything that has been programmed into my head for the last 25 years. That led to reading about how soy allergies are on the rise because of the prevalence of soy in everything (including food that soy has no business being in, like chocolate and Coke!) and that, too, blew my mind. I started delving into how insidious our industrial food supply has become and how we, the consumer, has been totally duped into thinking all of this crap is healthy.

And in hindsight, how in the world were we convinced that something like margarine is healthier than butter? Margarine - a highly processed concoction of chemicals that have to be made in a lab, versus butter - a totally natural food that can be made in your own kitchen and that mankind has eaten, without harm, for centuries. Thanks to the oil industry which lobbied the USDA to hawk the nutritional value of their "vegetable" oil (which is just a concoction of soy and cottonseed oil) based on faulty science claiming that saturated fat causes heart disease (it doesn't). They didn't give one snit about the health of the nation - they just wanted to sell more oil. And so it is across the board in all of our industrialized food.

The only dietary dogma I follow now is eating real food as much as possible. I eat butter. I drink whole milk (and would drink raw if I could get it). I eat bacon, and saute vegetables in its drippings. I eat as much organic produce as I'm able to source. I eat whole eggs. I eat bread and other grains (organic when possible). I eat meat, as locally and sustainably sourced as I can get, but if it's not always grass-fed and organic, I don't freak out and skip it. I make as much food from scratch as I can, but don't feel guilty or ashamed if we eat out once in awhile.

If you check out Go Kaleo's blog, be sure to follow her on Facebook too - a lot of very interesting discussions about health and nutrition take place there.

---

Gingerella,

Have you looked at real milk.com? Click on "real milk finder" in red font, towards the upper right hand side of the screen. It will show sources of raw milk by state. Raw tastes way better than pasteurized.

Yes, I know about realmilk.com. I know of places in my state that I could buy it, but it comes down to whether or not I want to drive 100 miles to do so. There isn't anyplace within reasonable driving distance from me.