I saw a commercial the other day which made me shake my head in disbelief. It was for Tillman’s Toasty. The tagline on this inventive new product roughly translates to “the meat snack for your toaster”. Oh those Germans…

Mr. Bad Food has just put out a list of the 10 worst foods of 2007 that made me giggle. I’m always wary of new developments in the world of fast or convenience foods, but they’ve really outdone themselves with these items. The creators of these monstrocities scoff at the notion of healthy eating, laugh in the face of calories and saturated fat and cholesterol and sodium.
While one can only assume that consumers actually find these foods tasty, for vegetarians like me they look more like food nightmares. No need to baconize me, thanks all the same, Baconator (#9 on …read more

Bacon and corndog scented ‘air fresheners’. Eeeeeeeeeeeeeew.

I found these beans at the farmers market last week. They look like green beans, smell like green beans, and taste like green beans, but they’re purple. So I guess that makes them… purple beans?
Inside they were green, and the outside color faded from brilliant purple to kind of a greenish-purple while they were steaming. Otherwise they really did taste just like their green counterparts. I served them with a squeeze of lemon juice and some salt and pepper.

Last weekend some friends are I headed out to an asparagus festival on a nearby farm. We learned about how the spears are grown and harvested, and were able to sample several asparagus dishes.
In addition to green and white, the farm grew purple asparagus, too. They are similar in shape and texture to green ones, but they have a much milder flavor. We took some home and enjoyed them grilled.
Although the purple asparagus have a nice color, I think I enjoy the flavor of the green and white more. Still, it’s always fun to discover new varieties of veggies.

One of the swag items I picked up at a conference last month was this little grow-your-own-plant kit. I finally got around to setting it up and planting the seeds last week, and up they came.
I don’t know if it’s the size of the thing, or the fact that I never grow anything that’s not edible, but I just assumed that whatever grew here was going to be something I could eat. I just double-checked the package to see what it was that I was growing, and it said “ryegrass”. OK, you can eat wheat grass, so why not ryegrass?
A …read more

I have been reading a lot recently about how very bad livestock are for the environment and the massive amounts of greenhouse gasses they produce. So I was thrilled to hear about (from my friend Sara) the The Straus Family Creamery and its greenhouse-gas-reducing technology.
The details of the process are not for the easily-queasy, but the idea is an impressive display of innovation. The dairy is able to run itself off of the electricity produced and then some – its electric meter runs backwards as they send electricity out onto the grid.
I wonder if their dairy products are as delicious …read more

This article about celebrity hangover cures caught my eye because of Moby’s answer:

My hangover cure is pretty complicated. Before you go to sleep, you have to have some sort of food that’s quite salty. I have this vegan stuff called Tofurky, a tofu substitute for turkey, which is really good. I make a sandwich with that, mustard and cucumber, followed by a big glass of carrot-orange juice. The next day, when I wake up, I make up a drink that’s a mix of bananas, ginger, carrot-orange juice, spiralina and cayenne pepper. Then, because I’m vegan, I order greasy, vegan Chinese …read more

Liz Kohman has found a way to keep growing her pile of vegetarian recipes without purchasing more cookbooks: joining vegetarian email lists. Her article suggests four email lists that deliver tasty vegetarian recipes to you inbox weekly or monthly.

British animal rights activists clad only in lettuce bikinis (in near-freezing temperatures) campaigned for vegetarianism in Kazakhstan on Tuesday. They also explained how they were different from Borat (I’m guessing their chests are less hairy, too).
This article offers some tips for de-meating your meat-based recipes. Eating vegetarian has never been easier!
Here are some quick and easy tricks for getting children to eat …read more

A website called World Net Daily (whose name cleverly disguises the fact that it is a mouthpiece for right-wing extremists) published a piece yesterday calling soy “a devil food” and claiming that feeding it to young boys can cause them to turn out gay.
Soy is feminizing, and commonly leads to a decrease in the size of the penis, sexual confusion and homosexuality. That’s why most of the medical (not socio-spiritual) blame for today’s rise in homosexuality must fall upon the rise in soy formula and other soy products.
So what point am I trying to make here by quoting this drivel? …read more