Kevin's Watch

I'm starting to have really bad feelings about the stuff we put animals through in preparation for the table, but just can't face the idea of a life without meat. Damn I hope they start growing meat in petre dishes soon!

lorin wrote:No.........sigh..........not strictly vegetarian anymore. I just couldn't manage it. I have not eaten red meat, veal, rabbit, goat, lamb but I still eat chicken at times, maybe 1 time a week. And I still eat fish but no shellfish as it seems to give me a gout attack when I do. When I eat chicken I try to buy the free range organic. It makes me eat less ($$$$$$$$). And I eat dairy.

I am not perfect but I have improved. I do, however, buy red meat for my dog at times as she is getting damned sick of salmon. Let me tell you, the biggest improvement is in my dog since she eats a mostly salmon based food with no grains. Her skin is much much better, no more hotspots.

Wow, that's really good! congrats!

For pet food, we buy this brand Orijen. It is very healthy and the animal ingredients are all either wild fish or free walking chickens and turkeys. It's expensive, but has been really healthy for our cats. The vet said our 12 year old was as healthy as a two year old last month when we took her in. Their site has dog food, too. It is a canadian brand, so it should be there in the us too (and maybe less expensive than here- we pay over 640 kronor for a bag which is about 90 USD, but it lasts about two months).

I have known some people who were very strict vegan types who tried to force a vegetarian life on their cats, but that never seemed right to me.

Cats are members of a group known as 'obligate carnivors'. It means they have to obtain at least some [if not the bulk] of their protein from meat scources. They cannot 'transaminate' the amino acids they need from any other scource and if denied meat derived protien they would die. Dogs can be fed exclusively on vegetable protien - but it must be carefully done to ensure they get all the nutrients they need. Fish and rice based dog foods have long been used as a diet to help to controll skin conditions in dogs ['Chappie' was I think the brand most usefull in this respect in the UK]. A cosiderable part of the effect is due to the fact that dogs don't like it much and, like humans, nearly always improve in respect of allergic type conditions, when on a falling weight path or at or around the correct body-weight.

Cats have a shorter digestive tract than dogs. It takes a long time to break down vegetable matter, basically the material passes through before they can get any nutrition from it.

By using fire, we break down food enough to get nutrition from it. I recently read that every human community uses fire in cooking, and that without fire when forced to eat all food raw, we rapidly become malnourished.

Every species is made of it's own distictive protien type which in turn is composed of twenty or so different amino acid building blocks, different in proportion and type for each.

For each species some of these amino acids [that are needed for their own particular protein type] can be made by converting other amino acid types derived from the diet in a process called 'transamination'. Other amino acid types however, cannot be synthesised in this way and must be derived in the form they will be used directly from the diet. These amino acids [known as 'essential' amino acids] are, in the case of the cat, only available from other types of meat protein, not vgetable protein; hence they are known as 'obligate carnivores'. Humans, on the contrary, can derive all of the essential amino acid types from a well selected mixture of vegetables - hence they can survive on a vegetarian diet alone. Such a diet would kill a cat irrespective of it's bowel length, due to it's inability to derive it's essential nutrients.

Speaking of protein for human consumption, audio covenant's special lady shared this on FB.

Damelon wrote:Cats have a shorter digestive tract than dogs. It takes a long time to break down vegetable matter, basically the material passes through before they can get any nutrition from it.

By using fire, we break down food enough to get nutrition from it. I recently read that every human community uses fire in cooking, and that without fire when forced to eat all food raw, we rapidly become malnourished.

Yeah, I talked to the vet about the cat thing some 20+ years ago. Could not convince my vegan friends, though. One of them, a friend of a friend, was a bit on the obsessive side. He would be unable to sleep at night because 'some small animal might be hurt outside' and he would go out and search for injured animals. I used to joke that he was like a fireman who started fires so he could put them out and so was out there punching kittens so he could rescue them. He did not appreciate that joke!

The cooking thing I saw on a documentary about the evolution of humans back at a time when the raw foods restaurants and so became a thing (think it was in the early 90s?) in the vegetarian circles. It did not seem very appealing.

Yes - the digestion of food is in itself an energy requiring process. In it's raw state food requires much more 'digesting' than when partially broken down already by the cooking process. Hence the eating of raw food does not provide anything like as near a 'positive energy balance sheet' as when the food is pre-cooked and leaves the consumer in cosequence, always nearer the malutrition state. {Incidentally - from the most efficient foodstuff point of view the best food you could eat would be to sit down to a well cooked steak of - human. It would have exactly the amino acids you require in exactly the correct proportions and would require no transamination processing at all, thus would require less energy consumption in the digestion process than any other kind of meat.}

Menolly wrote:Speaking of protein for human consumption, audio covenant's special lady shared this on FB.

I'm not sure I understand this poster. Is it how much protein you should eat each day? It's vague.

lorin wrote:I'm not sure I understand this poster. Is it how much protein you should eat each day? It's vague.

No, the chart shows how many grams of protein you get in the listed serving size of each item. The Center for Disease Control says women age 19 and over need around 46 grams of protein a day. According to the chart, you can get nearly all of your recommended RDA of protein in a one cup serving of tempeh.

Now, you may need to add some rice to make it a complete protein, but these are alternatives to meat, fish, eggs, and dairy.

Does anyone have any good veggie burger recipes that they've made and enjoyed? I've been making many variations of my own and they all come out okej, but not great. One thing, though, it can't have much beans to it since my husband cannot handle those well or I will be sleeping on the sofa to avoid the fallout.

I enjoy grilling marinated whole portabello mushroom caps, and then fill the cap with the toppings or cheese to melt. I've heard patties can be made out of chopped mushrooms as the base, with seasonings and some sort of binder, but I have not tried any of those kind yet.

Ananda wrote:Does anyone have any good veggie burger recipes that they've made and enjoyed? I've been making many variations of my own and they all come out okej, but not great. One thing, though, it can't have much beans to it since my husband cannot handle those well or I will be sleeping on the sofa to avoid the fallout.

beef, deer, buffalo...

sorry, did I get the question wrong?

Menolly wrote:I enjoy grilling marinated whole portabello mushroom caps, and then fill the cap with the toppings or cheese to melt. I've heard patties can be made out of chopped mushrooms as the base, with seasonings and some sort of binder, but I have not tried any of those kind yet.

Yeah, you can use mushrooms as a base. I have made several different variations with portabella mushroom as one of the main ingredients. Usually, other ingredients have been things like sunflower seeds, oats, chia seeds, couscous, blended greens such as peashoots, peppers, spinach, garlic, chickpeas, bread crumbs, onion, leek, soja flour, herbs, spices and so on.

This is one of the main reasons I was thinking of getting a food processor. I have a hand mixer thingie, but it tends to liquify/paste things and I don't really want that texture.

I love burgers with a big black mushroom for a patty. I like to seal them in a foil bag with rosemary, garlic and balsamic vinegar, then put them in the oven.

--A