By Joe Yonan Food and Dining Editor December 8 at 7:00 AM

If you had asked me this time last year whether I considered German to be a particularly vegetarian-friendly cuisine, I would have laughed. My opinion wouldnt have been based on any actual travel to Germany, only on some limited experiences in German restaurants (including mounds of smoked sausages ingested in central Texas). But since when does the lack of substantive research get in the way of a knee-jerk reaction?

Anyhow, that was all before I knew the name Tim Mlzer. Hes a chef, author and TV host in Germany whose new book, Green Box, has been taunting me from a position on my desk for almost six months now. Hes not vegetarian, and neither is his Hamburg restaurant, Bullerei, but his passion for cooking vegetables radiates from the books colorful pages. Ive bookmarked almost a dozen recipes to try cabbage with pappardelle squares, lemon salad with ricotta cakes, broccoli cannelloni but the book didnt make the leap from desk to kitchen until I needed a nice, easy soup to soothe me after too many weeks of indulgent holiday meals.

Mlzers approach is to give basic-seeming dishes a wow factor, a punch of flavor from an unexpected source. For the chickpea soup that caught my attention, for instance, he spikes the base with a little jalapeo and deepens it with curry, but the transformative touch is a mound of pan-fried sauerkraut, spiced with coriander and rounded out with a pinch of sugar, that goes on the soup after its pureed.

The liquid seemed a little too far on the thin side in consistency, not flavor until the sauerkraut came into play. After I sank it into the brothy soup and stirred in a dollop of yogurt, it was just what I wanted: hearty, nutty, with a pungent tartness. Easy to sip but with a little something to chew on, too. German vegetarian: Who knew?

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Weeknight Vegetarian: A dose of soup from a vegetable-loving German chef

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December 8th, 2014 2:06 pm by Staff Report

Celebritybabyscoop.com

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Vegan diets during pregnancy can be safe if you're careful to get enough important nutrients such as protein, calcium, iron, folic acid and vitamin B12.

We're taking a look at five celebrity moms who were vegan (which means no animal protein including fish, any kind of dairy or eggs) and vegetarian during their pregnancies.

Carrie Underwood:

It was Tofurky for Carrie Underwood this past Thanksgiving.

The mom-to-be, who grew up on a farm and has been vegetarian since she was a teenager, recently talked about remaining meat-free during her pregnancy.

"I have been vegetarian for about 10 years now," the Grammy Award-winning singer, 31, said. "With pregnancy, I am definitely going more on the vegetarian side, but as soon as I am not pregnant anymore I will go back to being vegan."

See the rest here:
Celebrity Baby Scoop: 5 celebrities who were vegan and vegetarian during pregnancy

Mark Poprocki/iStockphoto

Mark Poprocki/iStockphoto

We classify people in all sorts of ways.

Some categories are based on a person's beliefs: A theist, for instance, is a person who believes in one or more gods. Some categories are based on behavior: A vegetarian, for example, is a person who doesn't eat animals. And some categories seem to straddle beliefs and behavior: Being politically conservative could be defined in terms of beliefs, but also in terms of corresponding behaviors, such as voting for conservative political candidates or donating one's time or money to conservative causes.

These different ways of defining categories of people and in particular the category "atheist" form the backdrop to an interesting episode of the Rationally Speaking podcast in which co-hosts Julia Galef and Massimo Pigliucci query astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson on his resistance to identifying (or being identified) as an atheist.

For Tyson, eschewing the atheist label is not a matter of rejecting core atheist beliefs he admits that he's not compelled by any arguments that have ever been put forth for the existence of God, and he accepts Pigliucci's suggestion that we're just as warranted in rejecting the existence of God as in rejecting the existence of unicorns. Rather, for Tyson the matter is one of behavior. The inferences that people make when classifying him as an atheist don't align well, he feels, with his frequent choice of Jesus Christ Superstar as musical accompaniment on family drives, or with his habit of standing for the "Hallelujah" chorus of Handel's Messiah. He has as much interest in meeting with other people to discuss their absence of belief in God as in meeting with non-golfers to talk about their absence of a passion for watching golf. In short, he doesn't take himself to exhibit the behaviors typically associated with being an atheist.

Now, this is a strange response if being an atheist is strictly a matter of belief (or lack of belief, as the case may be). Consider a vegetarian making the opposite move eschewing the label vegetarian based on her beliefs rather than on her behavior. "Sure," she might say, "As an inviolable rule I never eat meat, but I don't have the beliefs that one typically associates with being a vegetarian. For instance, I believe that making animals suffer is perfectly fine. I don't eat any meat ever ... but don't label me a vegetarian."

Part of what makes Tyson's response and that of our hypothetical meat-avoider understandable, if not exactly typical, is the fact social categories often come with baggage in the form of strong cultural associations, not all of which are accurate or positive. Atheists are among the most distrusted groups in America, for example, and people often think that vegetarians are annoyingly self-righteous. (Full disclosure: I am both an atheist and vegetarian, but trust me, I'm not at all self-righteous.) It's natural to want to distance oneself from these associations, even if one fits a category's constitutive core. It might be like the mother of a mother i.e., a grandmother by anyone's definition preferring not to be called "grandma" because she doesn't like to babysit or bake cookies and doesn't feel the label adequately reflects her true passions of motorcycle racing and number theory.

As Galef suggests on the podcast, however, there can also be value to appropriating a label when one doesn't fit the stereotypical mold. If a person belongs to a category by definition but doesn't like the cultural associations, why not take an activist stance and help bring about a change in those associations? Why shouldn't atheists enjoy Jesus Christ Superstar? Why shouldn't grandmothers be associated with number theory? Cultural associations are unlikely to change if only those who fit the mold adopt the corresponding label.

But perhaps an even deeper issue is this: Why do we define theism and atheism first and foremost in terms of belief? What would it look like if religious (and areligious) categories were instead a matter of behavior?

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What If Atheists Were Defined By Their Actions?

LUFKIN, TX (KTRE) - An all organic produce and grocery store is opening soon in Lufkin. The community will have access to an array of chemical-free fruits and veggies at an affordable price.

"The Organic Store" will hang the open sign on their front door next week. Inside, the shelves will be stocked full of fruits, vegetables, spices, supplements and more.

"Anything that is organic but predominately produce and grocery," said The Organic Store owner, Lynda Smith. "USDA certified organic means that there has not been any pesticides in that soil for 10 years."

Smith started eating organic several years ago after struggling with weight and health problems.

"[I] started looking into it myself and started a co-op," Smith said. The co-op grew and expanded into The Organic Store on N. John Redditt near Lotus Lane in between Red Ball Oxygen and West Side Garage.

Everything will be certified-organic and non-GMO. No natural foods.

Smith said eating organic food has changed her life.

"Since I have been eating organic I haven't been sick in a couple years," Smith said.

And she wants to pass on the organic lifestyle to others.

"I mean it's a business but it is about the people and about the product and providing something to the people that they don't really realize is an option and then there are people that know about it but didn't have any access to it," Smith said.

Read the rest here:
Organic produce and grocery store opening soon in Lufkin