Story highlights Diets can be hard, especially in the food industry A chef and 3 food writers describe making the shift from omnivores to vegetarians

As a cancer survivor, he tried all kinds of diets, but the calorie-counting and portion-control did not work for his busy lifestyle, he said.

By comparison, giving up all animal products was easy to understand: "There's no gray area."

Nudged on by his wife, he began experimenting with veganism in June 2014.

Diets can be hard, especially if eating is your livelihood. Surprisingly, perhaps, some in the food world have found the path of least resistance through cutting out meat and, in some cases, dairy and fish.

As their experience shows, changing up your regimen does not have to be an all or nothing proposition. But, if the best diet is the one you can stick to, making a lifestyle change that you believe in might be easier than cutting out one or two things at a time.

Making vegetables 'crave-able'

Vegetable cookery was familiar terrain to Hopkins, a James Beard award-winning Southern chef. Despite the region's reputation for BBQ and fried chicken, Southern food leans heavily on vegetables, even if they are often cooked in fatback or butter. The vegetable plate at his fine-dining eatery, Restaurant Eugene, consistently receives praise from vegetarians and was named one of the best in the South by Southern Living. It also can be prepared vegan upon request.

To eat vegan at home, the challenge was to create vegetable dishes free of animal fat or flavoring that were as "crave-able as BBQ," Hopkins said. As a chef, he was absolutely willing to take matters into his hands.

Instead of butter, he mastered vegetable stocks and glazes for roasting vegetables. He experimented with essential oils of nuts to bring out flavor in sauted vegetables.

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Vegetarian for the new year

By Joe Yonan Food and Dining Editor January 12 at 1:29 PM

Sometimes, more than anything, you need something easy. Easy to make, easy to eat. Maybe its because youre exhausted from holiday traveling, or maybe its because youve just gotten over a little bout of sickness that has left you a little woozy.

Maybe, as was my case a couple of weeks ago, its both.

Was I ever glad to have such an overstuffed (if not exactly well-organized) pantry, fridge and freezer. It meant that when I was tired of road food, then even more tired of eating takeout on the couch as I recovered, and ready to (gently) get back into the kitchen, I had some options that didnt require a trip to the store or an order from a grocery delivery service.

At the top of my list of thank-goodness-I-have-this ingredients are beans, cooked from dried, and refrigerated or frozen in their cooking liquid. I cant stress enough to the unconverted how much different these taste from the canned variety, and how happy youll be to have them if youve planned a little in advance and cooked up a pot. I do it every week or two, and I never regret it.

As it turns out, I had the chance to prove the difference to myself, all over again. A helpful colleague made for me a batch of a potato-bean stew, recipe courtesy of the inimitable Mollie Katzen, using canned (and rinsed and drained) pinto beans. Perfectly satisfying. Then a few days later, I made the same thing, using a few cups of beans I thawed from the freezer, plus the elixir that is almost as good as the beans themselves: the flavor-charged liquid they had cooked in.

This time, it was sublime. And thanks to that overstuffed freezer, it was every bit as easy.

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Weeknight Vegetarian: The freezer and home-cooked beans come to the rescue

Look! Eating veggie style gives you a happy face, and heres the picture to prove it.

Stacia Briggs Monday, January 12, 2015 2:49 PM

Apparently, one of the most popular New Years resolutions for 2015 is for people keen to eat less meat.

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I would desperately struggle with this resolution not because I am an offal-guzzling carnivore, but because I havent eaten meat or fish for more than 30 years. To eat less would involve having some kind of netting fitted to my mouth to prevent kamikaze spiders and insects flying down my gullet.

While I dont eat things with a face or food that had parents, I do, however, wear leather (not all over. I am not Bonnie Tyler) so am a hypocritical vegetarian, although if youd lived through the summer of 1993 living with a plastic-shoe wearing vegan, youd understand. Anyway, you lot have eaten the cow, the least I can do is honour its life by, er, using it as a lovely bag.

There are lots of reasons why people should eat less meat if the world ate 15 per cent less meat, which means abstaining from flesh for one day a week, it would mean the environmental equivalent of taking 240 million cars off the road each year. And as long as one of those cars isnt either of mine, I am completely down with that.

January is also the most popular month for people to ditch meat and fish entirely and come over to the green side, so with this mind, I have compiled a list of essential things you need to know if you want to become a vegetarian. Say goodbye to meals out that dont involve extensive Googling of menus beforehand, bid farewell to marshmallows and the best Haribo and hello to a longer life, better sex, more room in the freezer for ice-cream, less chance of food poisoning and less guilt about the environment, the supply of fossil fuel (it takes more than eight times as much fuel to produce meat protein as plant protein) and super-viruses.

Being a vegetarian isnt a mistake, its only a missed steak.

Things you need to know before you become a vegetarian:

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10 things you need to know before you become a vegetarian

MINEOLA, New York (PRWEB) January 12, 2015

According to a Harris Interactive Service Bureau study commissioned by the Vegetarian Research Group in 2013, approximately 7.3 million Americans are vegetarian; 22.8 million follow a vegetarian-inclined diet; and one million are vegan - those who exclude meat, poultry and gelatin in their diet. Although it may sound unexceptional in a country of 300 million, the research emphasized that the number of vegans doubled from 2.5 per cent in 2009 to 5 per cent in 2013. This statistic is expected to increase in the coming years, not only because of growing advocacy but also by likely active family influence. A challenge, then, is also posed to parents and guardians in helping their kids understand the reason behind the practice.

With this aim in mind, author Linda Napoli returns to the world of children's literature with "Wild Vegetarians"(published by Xlibris), a colorful picture book that explains vegetarianism to kids in relation to the natural world. The book follows the lively conversation of two vegetarian kids Joseph and Sophia as he tries to acquaint her with the creatures in the wild that have the same vegetarian lifestyle as they do. Along the way, readers are aided with pictures of discussed herbivores with geographical references to their natural habitats. Told in an endearingly friendly and simplified manner, it gives young readers a unique perspective on the philosophy of vegetarianism without being preachy. It is also presented in a comic book style to provide young readers with a more stimulating read.

"I believe that vegetarianism is becoming a lifestyle choice for more families and it is important that children understood what it is about," says Napoli. Through this book, she hopes to enlighten little kids on the vegetarian way of life, explaining the subject in an engaging and entertaining way and to show them that eating their greens is not only normal but also healthy to their bodies and to the world as a whole.

Wild Vegetarians By Linda Napoli Softcover | 8.5x11in | 24 pages | ISBN 9781493165902 E-Book | 24 pages | ISBN 9781493165919 Available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble

About the Author Linda Napoli is a retired reading specialist whose favorite interests are children and literature. She is married with three grown sons and spends her spare time writing, dancing and having adventures of her own. Her inspiration for this story is her niece and nephew who are always asking, Why? Wild Vegetarians is her second children's book.

Xlibris Publishing, an Author Solutions, LLC imprint, is a self-publishing services provider created in 1997 by authors, for authors. By focusing on the needs of creative writers and artists and adopting the latest print-on-demand publishing technology and strategies, we provide expert publishing services with direct and personal access to quality publication in hardcover, trade paperback, custom leather-bound and full-color formats. To date, Xlibris has helped to publish more than 60,000 titles. For more information, visit xlibris.com or call 1-888-795-4274 to receive a free publishing guide. Follow us @XlibrisPub on Twitter for the latest news. ###

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Author Linda Napoli Pens Kids' Guide to Understanding Vegetarianism

Organic food is still a luxury for most Czechs and although forty percent of people say they buy organic food items occasionally, organic products still make up only one percent of overall food sales. Agriculture Minister Marian Jureka blames the high mark-ups that supermarkets slap on bio products as they are known in the Czech Republic.

Photo: Kristna Makov Although organic farming has grown from just two farms in 1989 to around 4,000 today, organic farmers in this country are still fighting for their place in the sun. While in neighbouring Austria organic produce makes up approximately five percent of all produce sold on the market, in the Czech Republic it is still only around one percent. Although most supermarkets now sport a small select line of organic produce the price tag on the goods puts most shoppers off. Bio food is still presented as something exclusive and the profit margins supermarkets slap on them clearly reflect this. While in Germany or Austria organic food mark-ups make up from 10 to 30 percent of the price in the Czech Republic they can be 100 percent or more. One organic farmer complained to Czech Television that the game salami he sells for 100 crowns had been sold for three times as much by the supermarket chains he delivered it to. Consequently he is now trying to sell his own produce.

Sixty percent of Czechs who buy organic produce therefore head for a farmers market or have their own organic farmer somewhere in the vicinity. Increasingly there are also mobile phone applications which are able to locate the closest organic farm with information about what it offers or even the closest farm which has the particular product you are looking for.

A fifth of organic goods sold on the market are dairy products, second in line are fruit and vegs and third meat products which can be quite expensive. A third of consumers say they buy organic because the products taste better and are 100 percent fresh, approximately the same number of respondents said they appreciated the fact that they are pesticide-free and therefore healthier and 11 percent of respondents said they liked buying from a known and trusted source and appreciated that they could support a local farmer in this manner. The vast majority of people who do not buy organic or only very rarely said the main reason was the high price of goods which they could ill afford.

Agriculture Minister Marian Jureka says the way out of this bind is for consumers themselves to buy straight from organic farms or over the internet where possible, but he admits that it will be a long time before the Czech Republic can catch up with Germany or Austria in the range and price of organic food on offer. The ministrys autumn campaign in support of organic farming failed to make a significant difference.

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Organic products still a luxury for most Czechs

As demand for organic products continues to grow among Europeans, the supply of sustainably manufactured and animal-friendly foods is struggling to keep up, experts indicate, warning that a new EU amendment could widen this gap. EurActiv Germany reports.

For several years, the market for organic food products has been booming and not only in Germany, the pioneer of organic farming. Europe has seen the market quadruple in size over the past decade.

According to EU numbers, around 5.5% of total farmland within the bloc is used for organic cultivation. But in recent years, the supply of organic products has not been able to satisfy growing demand.

Organic farming is associated with a greater cost than conventional agriculture techniques and at the same timeyields are lower and subject to more fluctuation.

And these paradoxes could become more severe, critics warn. Several even predict a declining trend in organic agriculture due to stricter EU regulations. Shortly after the Jean-Claude Juncker Commission took office in Brussels, incoming Agriculture Minister Phil Hogan announced his intention to rework the EUs Council Regulation on Organic Agriculture.

>>Read: EU reforms organic farming

In March 2014, the European Commission adopted legislative proposals for a new Regulation. The measure, which is expected to take effect in 2017, contains stricter rules for the production and import of organic products. As a result, it is likely to make it more difficult for conventional farmers to shift to organic agriculture practices, or even cause many organic producers to switch back to conventional farming.

More research instead of stricter regulation

In Germany, displeasure over the new guidelines is considerable. Already in October of last year, all party factions in the Bundestags Committee on Food and Agriculture expressed clear opposition to a complete overhaul of the EU Regulation.

Organic agriculture in Europe has already been progressing far too slowly, critics complained, saying chances for development should not be hindered by excessive legal barriers.

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New EU regulation could curb organic farming