new column: baseline vegans in napa

Happy New Year, folks. May 2009 be a good one.

I get back in the saddle with a report on what I did during the holiday vacation: wine sampling in Napa valley. Or, to be accurate, trying to find something to eat that didn't involve meat.

It’s easy to be vegan at home, when you have total control over ingredients, recipes, and cooking methods. Hard, as my wife and I expected on our recent trip to Napa, is venturing out into the world where eating is left to restaurants who are very much geared towards the fat-laden, meat-heavy, dairy-heavy, “Western” diet. Fortunately, we are what I’ve come to term “baseline” vegans, or bVegans, which means that while we use the vegan diet (no animal products) as a daily standard for what we eat, we have the ideological flexibility that allows for pragmatism – ethical, nutritional, and so on. Typically, this means that we normally eat vegan, but we’ll go to vegetarian, or sometimes further (only to fish, however, and only rarely), depending on the occasion.

Read the rest of Baseline Vegans in Napa: A Culinary Adventure Outside the Home Kitchen

Future blog posts will deal with more results from that goth and politics survey I did for Morbid Outlook (promise!) and the usual potpourri of this and that taken from the headlines and whatever whims I happen to be afflicted by.