How Many Vegans Does It Take to Make a Cupcake?

Well, the answer is it depends on the cupcake.  Is it a raw cupcake, made from ground almonds and dates, promising eternal youth? Or a macrobiotic on made with brown rice flour and apple juice as a sweetener, promising to be as dry in the mouth as it looks?  Or a decadent concoction piled high with sugary icing, sinful enough to tempt any kid-at-heart, made from the pages of some of the popular vegan baking books today?

The many approaches to a vegan diet generally reflect the philosophy behind why the person chose to go vegan. I've heard a lot of vegans, especially young ones, say, "I don't care about eating healthy.  I'm doing it for the animals."  But wait.  You don't eat meat because you don't want to hurt animals, but remember 1) you want to be around long enough to take care of the animals, and 2) a lot of processed vegan foods (meat substitutes made from chemical soy proteins, sugary snack bars, etc.) use more energy and resources than whole, natural, unprocessed vegan foods (things you can make in your kitchen, not a laboratory), rendering the planet less sustainable, eventually compromising the environment for both you and the animals.

But now I'm lecturing.  All I really want to say is, like your grandmother, eat your vegetables.  Be a vegan or vegetarian that actually eats vegetables.  It's scary, but I know a lot of them that really don't.  They start the day with some vegan pop tarts, go on to a Boca burger (is ketchup a vegetable?), and then have a plate of pasta with olive oil for dinner.  Yesterday, I was in the produce section of Safeway and overheard a middle-age lady tell an acquaintance she ran into that she was going to go vegan the first of the year.  Her acquaintance actually fit the part of the stereotypical picture the general public has of a vegan - gaunt with long, scraggly hair, sort of hunched over and unhealthy looking. I fully expected him to congratulate his friend for finallly taking the step, but he quipped, "Why are you doing THAT?  I was vegan for awile and I got really sick. You have to remember what your heritage is, where you come from.   We've been eating meat and potatoes for generations - that's what people like us are supposed to eat."

At this point, I wanted to jump in and ask him what the heck he had been eating when he was a vegan.  But I knew.  If he had previously eaten a meat-and-potatoes diet and simply taken away the meat, his already unhealthy diet was probably going to stay pretty unhealthy.  Whether you're vegan or not, the daily fare of many people is fairly limited in variety, featuring the same staples day after day.  Variety is the spice of life, and according to the Japanese Health Ministry that recommends eating thirty different foods per day, it's also the spice of health.  In other words, eat from a wide variety of foods each day, including several kinds of vegetables, fruits, grains, legumes, nuts, seeds, fermented foods, and sea vegetables. Yes, sea vegeables, AKA seaweed.

Sea veggies are packed full of nutrients, even more so than their land counterparts, and are really not as weird as one might think. So, here I offer up instructions for something I call "Green Rice" that features a readily available variety of seaweed called wakame.  I offer this as a way to get some veggies into the diet of those only-starch-eating vegans (or anyone!) as a tasty way to eat rice.  It's not really a recipe, but just simple instructions that can be modified.

Green Rice

Go to an Asian grocery store and buy some wakame, a dried seaweed sold in little packets.  The variety that is in little pieces (called cut wakame at times) is best.  This can be reconstituted in water and will increase about ten-fold and can be added to salads, but it can also be used in a powdered form in this easy dish.  Start with hot, cooked rice (short grain).  Take about a cup of the dried wakame and place it in a blender.  Pulverize until powdered. You will have on about 1/4 cup now.  Now, for each cup of hot rice, mix in about one tablespoon of the wakame powder and season with a little salt or soy sauce, and if desired,  a drop of sesame oil.  Serve.  If you think about it, that 1cup of wakame you started with was equivalent to about 10 cups of fresh or reconstituted wakame, which is already more nutrient-rich than many land vegetables.  If you eat one cup of green rice, that's like eating 2 1/2 cups of this very nutritious vegetable, and you won't even know it.  And please, eat your veggies!