The Alaskan permafrost has begun to thaw. This is bad.
As the permafrost melts due to increased temperatures, it will expose centuries-old buried plants that absorbed carbon dioxide and froze before they could decompose. As the no-longer-perma permafrost thaws, it will expose this organic matter, which will then decompose and as a result, release carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere, increasing temperatures further. Read about the thaw here in the New York Times.
What can we do?
For one, eat more vegetables. If you think I sound flippant, consider this: Livestock production generates 14.5 percent of all human greenhouse gas emissions.
Technically, I’m an omnivore who follows the Michael Pollan diet: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” I regularly get questions (and the very occasional nasty comment) about what I eat when I post pictures of food on social media. So I’ve outlined my non-diet diet below for inquiring minds:
- I eat mostly plants.
- I eat organic food.
- I get my eggs from either the vegetarian farmers I live with in my intentional community, the backyard chickens of friends or I happily pay through the nose for pastured eggs at my farmers market.
- I buy dairy that comes from pastured cows or goats only and happily pay through the nose for that as well.
- Occasionally I buy pastured meat for my carnivorous teenager and will eat some. If I ate meat three times a day, every day, she would eat a vegan diet. I don’t want any meat myself and therefore she does (except for pork…she refuses to eat pork…). Rebellion is her job as a teenager.
Most of the recipes on this blog are vegetarian, and the majority of those happen to be vegan, I just haven’t labelled them as such until now. But as my blog grows and becomes more unwieldy, I need to organize it better. Also, people regularly ask if I have vegan recipes. So I’ve tweaked my recipe index slightly using the following legend:
Veg = vegetarian
These recipes contain dairy, eggs or honey. I haven’t broken down the various denominations of vegetarians.
V-able = easily veganizable
By easily veganizable, I mean you can easily omit an ingredient like whey from a ferment or easily replace honey with something like maple syrup, without affecting the recipe much—if at all. I haven’t marked any recipes as V-able if they need something like an egg replacement. I had beginner cooks in mind who may not regard replacing eggs with tofu in frittata as “easily veganizable.”
V = vegan
Because vegetarians can eat vegan, I haven’t bothered to mark the “V” recipes also as “Veg.”
You can view the updated recipe index here.
Bon appétit!
