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By Kay Bushnell
If you want to eat a plant-based diet but feel challenged to change your longstanding food habits, you are fortunate. This may be the best time in history to make the change. Moving toward food choices that support caring, sustainable stewardship and health for the earth, for people, and for animals has never been easier.
Nearly everyone today has heard of non-dairy "ice cream" and meatless "burgers," "sausages," "hot dogs," "chicken nuggets," and sliced "turkey." Many folks have tasted them and enjoy them regularly. If you don't have time to cook, you'll find a large variety of plant-based convenience foods that merely require adding water or popping them into the microwave. Organic vegetables and fruits from supermarkets, farmers' markets, or your home garden can round out a meal based on meatless convenience foods.
The transition to a plant-based diet can be very easy, and you will be encouraged as you see the beneficial results. Dean Ornish, M.D., the cardiologist whose studies showed that heart disease can be reversed with a low fat plant-based diet, suggests making "comprehensive changes" (a complete, quick transition to a plant-based diet) in order to enjoy maximum health benefits sooner. For our family, the transition to a plant-based diet was gradual. We reduced the amount of red meat we consumed until we stopped eating it altogether. Next we eliminated chicken and eggs, then dairy products. It became easier and easier.
As we eliminated animal foods from our meals we replaced them with delicious new plant-based recipes. I learned easy new ways to cook and bake with the help of 100% plant-based cookbooks. The ubiquitous eggs in traditional recipes were left out or replaced with EnerG Egg Replacer. Cow's milk was replaced with soy milk or rice milk. Soy-based cheese and yogurt alternatives took the place of cow's cheese and cow's yogurt. At this point we all noticed a significant drop in our cholesterol numbers.
My plant-based cookbooks provided not only new ways to produce superb meals but also introduced our family to new tastes in American and ethnic cuisines. Not all my attempts then or today were successful, but most of them were. We felt good about our new way of eating.
The transition to eating more plant-based meals and fewer meals that contain meat has been a gentle one. It has been easy to improve many of our favorite family recipes by simply leaving out the meat or replacing it with a meat substitute, nuts, or beans. I have discovered that nuts can be used in a wide variety of ways that had never before occurred to me. Tasty, nutritious lentils of various colors have appeared in our stews, dals, soups, salads, and pates. Beans that used to seem boring now star in meals, and I've learned from cookbooks how to make sure that they are digestible for everyone.
No longer is my family fooled by televised commercials designed to worry people about protein and calcium. We have learned that both protein and calcium are widely available in a plant-based diet that includes a variety of grains, legumes, vegetables, fruits, and nuts. Nor do we have to eat special combinations of foods to meet our protein needs. Our old fondness for cow's cheese that we once thought we could never lose has simply disappeared. Meals are simple and much more interesting than before. We eat a greater quantity of food than before yet our weight has stabilized at a healthy level.
We are fortunate to have friends who also are interested in a plant-based diet. It's fun to share meals and recipes with them. All in all, the transformation of our family's meals into delicious plant-based feasts has been a piece of cake - egg-free and dairy-free, of course.
Books such as The New Becoming Vegetarian and Becoming Vegan, both by Brenda Davis, R.D. and Vesanto Melina, R.D., and the set of helpful information sheets on vegetarian nutrition from the American Dietetic Association provide excellent nutritional guidelines for meal planning. (To order the set send a check for $25 made out to DPG#14 to Kristine Duncan, MS, RD, 1307 Sudden Valley, Bellingham, WA 98229.)
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