Worth A Look Books

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Worth A Look Books

Here are three books that will be of interest to some vegetarians.

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson wants to help all meat eaters wake up from the dream of denial they are experiencing. He wants to prepare us for what he describes as a "transformative moment," when we look at the meat or animal product on our plate (fish, fowl, mammal, egg, milk, cheese) and acknowledge that it came from a living being, capable, he has no doubt, of suffering and happiness. Like children when they are first told that the drumstick is actually a leg, the tongue is really a tongue, the bacon was once a pig like Wilbur in "Charlotte's Web," Masson hopes, with all his heart, that we will say, "Eeeuwww, yuck."

2. ‘Food Matters: A Guide to Conscious Eating With More Than 75 Recipes’ by Mark Bittman

Here is an excerpt from the following review:

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/27/vegan-before-dinnertime/

Mark made the changes after developing high cholesterol, borderline high blood sugar, bad knees and sleep apnea, and realizing he was about 35 pounds overweight. A doctor suggested he adopt a vegan diet, which means no animal products. But for a food writer, Mark said, becoming a full-time vegan was both unrealistic and undesirable. Instead, he came up with a compromise:

I decided to do this sort of “vegan till 6” plan. I didn’t have huge thoughts or plans about it. I just thought it was worth a try. Within three or four months, I lost 35 pounds, my blood sugar was normal, cholesterol levels were again normal … and my sleep apnea indeed went away. All these good things happened, and it wasn’t as if I was suffering so I stayed with it…. I have not eliminated anything completely from my diet. I haven’t had a Coke in a while, but I didn’t drink that much Coke to begin with.

3. ‘Vegan Soul Kitchen: Fresh, Healthy, and Creative African-American Cuisine’ by Bryant Terry

Here is an excerpt from the following review:

http://www.theoakbook.com/MoreDetail.aspx?Aid=2916&CatId=8

There was a time in high school when Bryant Terry "went off the deep end with junk food." The author of Vegan Soul Kitchen indulged an adolescent appetite for McDonalds, Burger King, and the offerings of other dreck purveyors in his hometown of Memphis. The memory of the satisfaction that came from cheap, fatty food informs Terry's work as a food writer and activist in Oakland some 20 years later. He's not judgmental when he sees a kid tucking into a bag of Cheetos. He just wants the kid to know there's a better world of food out there. … In 2006, he co-authored Grub: Ideas for an Urban Organic Kitchen with Anna Lappe, the daughter of Frances Moore Lappe, who published Diet for a Small Planet in 1971.

‘I Can’t Believe I’m Still a Vegan’

It’s always interesting to read people’s ‘How I Became a Vegetarian’ stories. Here’s on from a journalist who went vegan in his mid-50s, mostly, it seems to lose weight and to maintain a healthy weight: http://www.newsweek.com/id/189291

Here’s the first paragraph of the article:

More than halfway through my sixth decade, I have learned to live with the routine insults and occasional horrors of passing time—the daily aches and pains, the eroding senses (say again?), the too-frequent diagnosis of cancer and other life-threatening illnesses among my peers. I accept these blows, big and small, as the price to be paid for the joys I've known and whatever wisdom I've been able to acquire over the years. I accept them because, well, I really don't have a choice. There is one thing, however I will not abide: getting fat.