Ovo-pesco-whuh?

I don't know whether it's official or not, but October seems to be the month for food-related events. Last weekend was the Boston Local Food Festival which GP and I attended. It was a huge event full of local vendors and organizations with lots to eat and drink! There was a special local craft brew tasting event held at the Daily Catch where you paid $25, got a cup and got two hours to taste as many samples of local beer, wine, mead and cider as you could handle. Considering we hadn't eaten breakfast when we showed up, we took it a little easy, but it was still delicious and fun.

Coming up, October 24 is National Food Day, sponsored by the Center for Science in the Public Interest. I've been excited about this event since last winter when I first learned about it, and I'm glad that there are going to be a number of events taking place around Boston that day. There is no standard event, the CSPI is simply encouraging organizations, restaurants, schools, governments and the public to host events, large and small which highlight food and the myriad issues surrounding it, namely diet-related disease, farming, hunger, environmental health, junk food marketing to children, and farm labor. The CSPI has been holding monthly webinars which touch on each of the issues and I have been listening in. The CSPI functions as an independent consumer advocacy organization who are basically the watchdogs of the food industry and the government. They step in to advocate for public and environmental health and seek to educate the public about major food issues. I'm appreciative and excited about the work they are doing and about the Food Day events which are in the works. Because it's on a Monday, unfortunately I won't be able to go to any daytime events, but I plan on going to a documentary film screening at Harvard - I'll update once it's happened!

Then there's even more! The weekend after Food Day, October 29-30 is the Boston Vegetarian Food Festival, which as GP rightly assumed, I plan on going to. So yeah, I don't know if it's because of the harvest season with it's last hurrah of agricultural yield before the New England snow hits and the color green disappears from the natural world for a solid five months, but everyone is celebrating food this month. I'm not complaining :)

As for my cooking adventures at home, I finally watched one too many documentaries about the numerous health, moral, economic and environmental woes that arise from eating meat (this one actually) and took the inevitable leap to cutting out red meat and poultry from my diet. A little bit about my dietary history, I've always eaten a pretty average, not extremely unhealthy nor uber-healthy American diet. In high school I was a 'loose' vegetarian for two years, trying it out to support animal welfare and lose weight but I was never fully dedicated to it. I was 'loose' because I'd allow myself a meat-filled dinner of takeout Chinese food or a burger about once a month. I eventually gave it up entirely. My diet changed again when I studied abroad in China for five months. While there, I didn't eat any dairy (it's not part of the traditional diet and is pretty hard to find) and I ate a great deal more fresh fruits and vegetables, along with smaller amounts of less-processed meat. I lost 30 pounds without trying to. Since I returned home two years ago I've tried to maintain the same diet more-or-less which has had it's difficulties. Even if I ate the same kinds of bread and meat as in China, it was inevitably more processed and less fresh, and of course cheese is pretty much inescapable in the U.S., so I've slacked a little and allowed myself a bit of fromage here and there.

But no longer. I'm putting my foot down. Since GP and I have gotten our own place it's much easier to control my whole diet, and with my new healthy food obsession we've been eating better and better. The only junk food we buy is some chocolate and tortilla chips, and the majority of our dinners are vegetable and grain-based Asian cuisine (Indian, Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai). I've been balancing our meals as 50/50 vegetarian, so without dairy, we've been eating a lot of vegan meals for awhile. With this new decision to cut out red meat and poultry, I'm technically eating an ovo-pesco-vegan diet, aka eggs and fish are the only animal products I'll eat. I decided to leave these animal products in because I think a strict vegan diet is a little unpractical for me, I won't have to worry about getting enough protein and vitamin B-12, and can still enjoy the many health benefits of eating fish/seafood.

I didn't expect GP to adopt the diet with me, I was more than willing to cook him his own portions of beef, pork and chicken, but surprisingly, he said he'd make the transition too. He is one of those rare people who enjoys eating healthily. His favorite 'junk' food is bread and he loves vegetables and seafood. He also has no sweet tooth which I simply cannot understand as I pine for a cookie after dinner every night. Also, as he pointed out, this isn't a huge change from how we were already eating.

So there it is, we are ovo-pesco-vegans as silly as it sounds. I'm not sure if the terminology is 100% correct, as we're technically not vegans by including eggs and fish, but we're not ovo-pesco-vegetarians, because that would imply that we eat dairy. Whatever, they're all buzzwords anyway. So what do two ovo-pesco-vegans eat, you ask? I'll be documenting what I eat for a full week (dinners at the very least) and will share it in my next post.

Until then!