Cole Wardell

Two Weeks of Eating Vegan (without Being-A-Vegan)

20-02-2012

Two confessions

One) I was raised on a lot of fast food. I still have nostalgia for the days when I didn’t think twice about late-night double cheeseburgers from McDonalds.

Two) I hate vegans.

It’s not just because we have different food ethics—and to be clear, I dearly love my vegan friends. But most vegans are preachy, pretentious, and although I’m sure they see themselves as being healthy and holistic, they’re often confrontational and alienating to non-vegans.

It’s the same as any insular community with a strong identity, especially those with a lot of swag (like letterman jackets or W.W.J.D. bracelets). But I’m not sure why “vegan pride” is so often straight-up mean:


Yes, non-vegans think too. Sometimes they even criticize society!	Down, hater. Also: factually untrue. I like to think of my usual, omnivore self as part of a larger recycling system.

To be fair, this sense of pride is probably partly a response to the meat-eating hate that is often directed at vegans, i.e. “but aren’t you protein/calcium/vitamin B12 deficient?” and endless variations of hippie-bashing.

That being said…

My body feels like it needs a cleanse. I don’t eat much meat in general, but I do eat a lot of dairy and carbs—and in general, these things gunk your body up.*

cheese

The medical establishment, the USDA, and most regular American folks vastly overemphasize the amount of protein that a body needs. (When I told my mother about this little experiment, her immediate reaction was to make sure I would get enough nutrition—as though giving up meat and dairy automatically meant that I would be malnourished.)

But Americans (of which I am one) generally eat about twice as much protein as we really need—and we mostly get those proteins from animal products, forgetting that protein comes from a variety of sources (both plants and animals).

On the other hand, we vastly underestimate the need to get enough fruits and vegetables. Today’s food choices include protein in near-infinite forms; almost every dish in every restaurant and recipe book includes either meat or cheese.

But—shocker!— It also turns out that protein also comes in the form of grains, beans, seeds, and nuts. And plenty of straight-up vegetables have a high protein content, like avocados, edamame, green peas, and potatoes.

Mmm, avocados.

So I’m in the middle of this arbitrary personal challenge: to spend two weeks eating technically vegan but in a way that doesn’t affect my budget or social habits, and doesn’t make me go out of my way. I refuse to spend extra money eating out at specialty vegan restaurants or to spend hours finding a recipe that actually sounds appealing.

I just want to eat more simple, densely nutritional meals for a couple weeks. I’m hoping that at the end of this my body will feel adjusted to a more diverse diet, and will rely less on cheese, eggs and yogurt. Easy peasy.

Vague-ish guidelines that I just invented this moment

No imitation meat or dairy. If I wanted to eat cheese, I would eat real cheese. So no scrambled tofu for breakfast.

No specialty vegan restaurants.

No more than 2 or 3 grocery items that I would not normally buy (right now it’s looking like tahini and peanut butter)

________________________

*I also drink too much, but let’s start with baby steps.

Composing a Poem

By: Cole

19-02-2012

Literary, Process, Writing

Bar Poem

I like good pens, good paper; I like a room with good feng sui. But you can’t be too picky over the way you compose and create, or you’ll never create anything. Sometimes grungy bar napkins are just perfect.

Phone poem

This year I’ve been composing more and more poems on my iPhone, which is…strange. There’s something about the lack of multitasking that makes the process feel streamlined and intuitive. It’s something you can’t experience on a computer screen with ten windows open, or even on a piece of paper, with all those cross-outs and inserted lines.

It feels like writing with a microscope, combing each line and targeting every word choice.

Afterward, I print and spread them on a table, seeing napkins and cell phones turned into a body of work.

Printed Poems

Can Gardening Be A Form of Community Organizing?

By: Cole

17-02-2012

DIY, Environment, Food

Last weekend my office offered a two-day workshop called “Growing Communities” based on the curriculum by the American Community Gardening Association. Many people who registered had little idea of what to expect and were surprised to find growing tips nowhere in sight. The focus of the training is on the community part of community gardening; the goal is to provide skills and a framework for people involved with community growing projects to become effective community leaders and organizers.

There’s a misconception that “community organizing” is something that happens only in activist movements at the grassroots, but these skills are necessary for any public, communal project—even supposedly apolitical ones like a community garden.

Trish presentation

The real difficulty of a workshop like “Growing Communities” is that it tries to do two nearly opposite things: first, to empower people who don’t think of themselves as leaders to feel more confident and equipped as organizers, and also to help people who are already leaders to approach community projects more collaboratively. A community garden is a shared resource, after all, and strong leadership is not always authoritative; a successful and sustainable community growing project requires partnership, engagement and flexibility from its leadership.

These two objectives can often sound like two totally conflicting messages, and this was reflected in a handful of tense moments throughout the weekend. But as tends to happen, tension often comes with a breakthrough—and a great number of participants left the weekend with totally transformed plans for their own projects and careers.

Sometimes transformation and inspiration don’t mean visions for new projects, but instead making a current project more meaningful: one woman who had been in the initial planning phases of a community garden decided that she was not going to start the garden after all, and would first spend a couple of years partnering with existing gardens before moving ahead. That, friends, is an ideal outcome.

After an introduction to the principles and resources for successful community gardens, the crowd broke into four smaller groups and prepared to present their own workshop on the second day.

The effectiveness of the workshop is that participants learn leadership skills by —shocker— leading the second day themselves. Each group presented a workshop on a different community gardening topic—Asset-Based Community Development, Leadership Development, Communications & Marketing/Outreach, and Grassroots Fundraising Basics—so the second day is both an opportunity to learn the actual content of each session, and also to observe how each group presents their workshop differently.

At the conclusion of the weekend, every participant is then certified to teach this workshop elsewhere themselves.

Lessons Learned

The curriculum is in need of revision. There is some language that should probably be updated to reflect clearer principles, and some few assumptions about goals and process that probably need a bit more explanation.

There is also great opportunity to make the introductory sessions more participatory, as well as the possibility of bringing in guest speakers (instead of the workshop organizers leading the entire morning).

Also, there’s the basic fact that not all community-based growing projects are community gardens. There are also backyard gardens, urban farms, and guerrilla seed bombers and green graffiti groups. …Ahem. etc.

Thus we’re toying with the idea of seriously revising the framework into several versions of the workshop:

The original two-day workshop (with major changes);
One-day workshops focusing on only one of the topics covered;
An “Advanced” version that would provide more depth around the principles and practices;
And even a four-day-long conference on organizing and community-building around food. (This possibility gets me really pumped!)