The goal of the Vegan Eats Project is to document (and taste test) the best vegan grub I can find around the world, and the lovely folks who make it. I hope to amass a cookbook-worthy collection of recipes, but my particular focus is on the animal-loving people I meet—their philosophies, their lives, their homes and environments. Hopefully learning about and sharing their different perspectives will help illuminate new ways of thinking about animals and food, and fresh ideas about how we live.
A Visit to Mino Valley Farm Sanctuary
August 3, 2017I had the privilege of volunteering for two weeks at Mino Valley Farm Sanctuary in northern Spain this summer. They are doing some truly beautiful and important work [...]
Peepal Farm: Humans Helping Animals
May 15, 2017I spent two weeks volunteering at an all-vegan organic farm and stray animal recovery center in Himachal Pradesh, NE India. I put together this video about my experience with these beautiful animals and compassionate people [...]
What if Meat Was Illegal?
February 22, 2017
At first I thought it was a just a legend. I had heard of it in a late night conversation with a fellow volunteer at an elephant sanctuary in rural Thailand. Somewhere in India, the story goes, is a city where meat is against the law. Within the city limits, no meat is bought or sold, and no animals are killed, or kept captive for the purpose of eventually being killed. The world’s first 100% vegetarian city. Could this be real? [...]
The Buffalo of Palitana
January 18, 2017On the first day of the new year, I made a pilgrimage to the world's first 100% vegetarian city in southern Gujarat, India. I went to Palitana with high hopes of finding a utopian city, free from suffering, but I spent most of my time with some buffalo on a local dairy farm. The first Earth & Eats video feature tells their story [...]
Balance Among the Beasts
December 13, 2016
Or how 75 elephants, 470 dogs, 133 monkeys, 4 bears, and one baby water buffalo taught me how to face the world as it is. ∾ At times the world can be a brutal and unforgiving place, especially for the defenseless among us. And at times this brutality has crushed my spirit and left me desperate for escape. In these times, it's hard to know how to engage the world, or how to take care of myself. I've struggled with these questions quite a bit recently, but the most recent leg of my journey—spanning 46 days, 2 countries, and 4 animal sanctuaries—dare I say [...]
Eating is the Easy Part
September 13, 2016
I can always live on rice and fruit for a while, but coming to terms with a violent world can be an unbearable challenge. ∾ When people ask me about traveling they often ask if I'm still going to be vegan on the road. This innocent but misguided question illustrates a common misconception about ethical veganism. So, briefly, this is the confusion [...]
Refuge: Hope and Furballs in Central Vietnam
September 13, 2016
After a pretty challenging experience in northern Vietnam I was more than ready to head south, which I had heard was more vegan-friendly. I only had to cross half the country before I met Cat, the fabulous founder and doer-of-every-damn-thing at Vietnam Animal Aid & Rescue. VAAR operates a dog, cat, and farm animal shelter, a community clinic, and provides [...]
Hanoi's Best (Vegan) Street Food
August 20, 2016
Upon arriving in Vietnam I had essentially no plan, or idea of what I was doing, except I knew the first couple nights I would be crashing with a young, Russian, aspiring vegan chef. As it happens, it was one of the luckiest choices I've made on the road [...]
Poor Man's Mochi
June 16, 2016
Okay, so maybe it's not poor man's mochi so much as lazy man's mochi—or "lazy person's mochi," but that doesn't have much of a ring to it, now does it? Mochi is a traditional Japanese sweet, typically made from sticky mochi rice. It is a long, labor-intensive process that involves cooking, and then pounding rice into a sticky mush with a gigantic mallet. This recipe, however [...]
A Daily Feast
June 11, 2016
This installment of the Vegan Eats Project comes from Fukui Prefecture, where I stayed for two weeks in a village of only three people (four including me), in the mountains overlooking the Sea of Japan. My hosts are vegan, members of Itadakizen, and I was lucky enough to eat what Akiko-san cooked up three times a day! This was some of the most amazing [...]
Good Old Fashioned Tofu
May 28, 2016
Well I guess I'm really getting back to my hippie roots here. It wasn't my intention to start the Vegan Eats Project with such basic staples, but as the saying goes: "When in Japan, eat all the tofus [...]
Tempeh: So Easy a 3 Year-Old Can Make It
April 19, 2016
The first installment of my Vegan Eats Project, featuring an adorable Aussie kiddo! — Tempeh is a cultured soybean cake—but it’s better than it sounds, I promise. The culturing process holds the beans together, adds flavor, and makes the soybeans more easily digestible by reducing their phytic acid content. Tempeh is a traditional Indonesian staple, but has [...]
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