Foods: A Vegan Thanksgiving

My Thanksgiving this year was like any other Thanksgiving. There was stuffing and cranberry sauce. Friends and family gathered around a big table to celebrate and enjoy a wonderful meal, which included pumpkin pie and carrot cake for dessert. Everything was how it should be...except for the turkey. My younger sister decided that she was going to become vegan. Vegan is when you don't eat any animal bi-products, this includes: milk, eggs, meat, honey, yogurt, cheese, anything that came from an animal. So following suit, my mom wanted to accommodate her decision and instead of basting and stuffing a beautiful bird, she seasoned and salted a Tofurky. The main dish of a Thanksgiving meal was replaced by tofu that was suppose to taste like turkey.



Looks appetizing right?!


I was really hesitant to try this. It looked disgusting to me. Tofu is made up of soybeans and other ingredients for flavor, but mainly soybeans, so its more like a pureed vgetable that has been baked. That's what I tried to remind myself as I took a bite.



The texture was really weird, and the taste was bland but it wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be. All you needed to do was give it some more flavoring and it would have tasted good. It didn't taste like a turkey though. The stuffing inside the Tofurky was delicious though. It was a riced based stuffing with carrots and potatoes. The rest of our dishes were made with almond milk and soy cheese. You really couldn't tell that the meal was vegan except for the Tofurky. Right before we were about to sit down and eat, my dad surprised us and brought in a real turkey he had been secretly grilling outside. My parents embrace my sisters decision, but they weren't going to sacrifice a tradition for it. I was really happy when I saw the real turkey.

I enjoyed trying the new food and lifestyle for one night. My sister has told me all the benefits of becoming vegan and it's definitely appealing. She first got the idea to change her eating habits from the Kind Diet, a book by Alicia Silverstone. Here is the link to the Kind Diet website.

http://www.thekindlife.com/

She gave it to me and I have been flipping through it occasionally. It seems really interesting. Becoming vegan not only makes you feel better apparently, it is scientifically better for you. A long long time ago, humans didn't drink milk. The gene to digest milk evolved beginning with the herding populations, or Europeans. That's why most Asians are lactose intolerant, that didn't have a reason to inherit a gene to digest milk. People who are lactose intolerant were the norm before the gene modifications. But think of it this way too, your drinking other animals breast milk meant to feed their babies. That's disgusting and selfish. The human population, especially Americans try not to put a limit on what we can and cannot do. We are always trying new things and pushing the boundaries. And it appears we not only inherited a milk processing gene but that idea as well. This is my guess for what happened with milk. Somewhere someone saw calfs nursing from their mother and thought it would be a good idea to try it too. Think of how taboo that must have been in the beginning. Living in a population that only drinks water and wine and then someone comes up to you and tells you to try cows milk. It would have been weird, but obviously it caught on and people like it because now we have altered genes to drink it and its a household commodity.