Answering questions from non-vegan children

April 6, 2010

This week’s question came from Council member Kim, who asked:
“How do other families talk about vegan choices when other children are over and curious. (For example, a little friend asking “Why don’t you eat bacon? It’s yummy!)”
Without further ado, here’s what some other members of the Council of Vegan Parents had to say:
Be [...]

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4 tips for more beautiful meals

April 5, 2010

Last time around we discussed the idea that ideal meals need to be beautiful: if you’re going to go through the trouble of having something your body craves, in a setting that you love, enjoyed with exactly who you want to enjoy it with, and lasting just how long you want it to last, it [...]

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Ideal meals need to be beautiful

March 23, 2010

I’ve been going on this topic of ideal meals as part of this whole “your ideal life starts with breakfast” thing (more info here,) and I had a few more “aha” moments over the weekend.
An idea meal needs to be something your body craves, in a setting that you love, enjoyed with exactly who you [...]

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Finding a vegan-friendly doctor for your child

March 23, 2010

One of the biggest concerns we’re hearing from expectant vegan parents is about finding a supportive pediatrician and family doctor – it seems to be hard enough to find someone for ourselves, so what about small children? We turned this over to the Council of Vegan Parents: how did they find a veg-friendly pediatrician, [...]

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Animal Factory: comprehensive, but maybe too much

March 20, 2010

David Kirby’s Animal Factory is the most comprehensive accounting of the issues surrounding the American factory farming system that I’ve come across. Spanning about 15 years of “development” of modern agriculture (primarily hog and dairy,) Animal Factory focuses on three families as they evolve into activists to first protect their own communities and later [...]

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Getting started: avoid the weakness trap

March 18, 2010

After spending more than ten years volunteering weekly in a vegetarian resource centre, I think I’ve gotten a pretty good handle on the reasons people adopt a plant based diet, and maybe more importantly, why they switch back.  Here’s the number one failure reason I’ve heard:
“I tried going vegan, but I just ended up tired [...]

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A green smoothie seems fitting today…

March 17, 2010

Happy St. Patrick’s Day, and what better day could there be for a green smoothie?
I’ve been meaning to get into green smoothies for a while, and recent emails I’ve gotten as part of the Taste Better “ideal breakfast” series suggest they’re pretty popular, so I finally went for it – it turns out there are [...]

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What’s your ideal meal?

March 16, 2010

For the past two newsletters, we’ve been going through a concept I call “Your ideal life starts with breakfast.”  You can read part one here and part two here, but basically the idea is that if we can get our meals to be as awesome as we can imagine, a lot of the rest of [...]

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Vegan infant formula: nonexistent?

March 16, 2010

This week’s question was from the Council, to the Council:
“One of our Council members was wondering about baby formula: it appears that there aren’t any vegan versions out there, at least where she lives, since the vitamin D is derived from lanolin (wool) in all of the otherwise vegan varieties. Is anyone aware of [...]

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TGIF: Fresh pineapple juice, rum, and insights!

March 13, 2010

After a week filled with a whole lot of JuicyNothing, (at least!) two big insights last night:
The first is that while clever, the “TGIF” theme of making an alcoholic juice or smoothie has a certain flaw in that it either has to be made in advance or written about the next day, like this post [...]

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