You may or may not know that I just recently moved to San Francisco, California from Washington, D.C. I made the drive with my Dad last week and you can read about what I ate on the road as a vegan.

What you probably don’t realize is that I now officially have my first two vegan friends living in the same place I live!

While I have a few vegan friends and family members in other parts of the country, none of them lived in DC with me.

That’s ok, I’m used to being the only one refraining from eating meat.

But I didn’t really consider what it was like to have friends that ate the way I did too.

This past weekend me and some of my friends here in Cali rented a car and drove up to Santa Rosa, CA to watch the Tour of California bike race and do a hike. It was me, my buddy, his girlfriend, and his roommate.

My buddy and his girlfriend are both vegan, which means that we actually outnumbered his non-vegan roommate 3-1. I have never experienced that before. I’m always the 1, never the 3.

So we looked up a vegan plant-based cafe in Santa Rosa and had an amazing lunch. We stopped at a vegan Chinese restaurant back in San Francisco for dinner. And even dropped by a soft serve ice cream shop with vegan flavors for dessert!

It was great that we just did these things and didn’t have to worry. It was funny — my friend and his gf were constantly checking with his roommate to see if he was OK with where we were grabbing food, another role reversal, as most people usually have to check with me to make sure I can eat!

Of course he isn’t a carnivore so he found plenty

It was funny how totally normal it felt to have a full menu at my disposal TWICE in one day and have friends eating the same type of food as me.

It was only in retrospect that I remembered that as a vegan my life isn’t usually like that anymore, and it was reminiscent of what it was like to be an omnivore.

If you are vegan, seek out other vegans. Of course don’t only hang out with other vegans. But do find them. Do yourself a favor and make some like minded friends, it goes a long way. Meetup.com is a great place to start. Search for vegan groups in your area. You’ll be sure to meet some good folks that don’t think it’s strange when you order the tofu bowl

Memphis has great vegan food.

Seven days ago my father and I loaded up a Dodge Minivan with all of my worldly possessions and we set off across the country, driving from Washington, D.C. to San Francisco, California.

There are several routes you can take, the most common (and quickest according to Google Maps) is the northern route — through Chicago, then Nebraska and Utah and eventually to California.

I’ve driven several stretches of this route many, many times, so we opted to go the slightly longer Southern route.

This took us through the great state of Tennessee, across Arkansas, through Oklahoma, and criss-crossing the hot desert heat of New Mexico and Arizona.

While this route took us to states I’d never been and places I’d never seen, one thing I didn’t consider was that it was likely the far less “vegan friendly” route.

I mean — the South isn’t exactly known for their plant-based cuisine.

So how’d we do?

Let me just say that 2016 is a great time to be vegan. Through the assistance of the app Happy Cow, we had little trouble finding vegan food in any of the major cities we passed through. The smaller towns were tougher, however we got a nice assist from Yelp. So let’s take a look at what we were able to find out there on the open road:

Day 1: Washington, DC to Nashville, TN

Our first stop was a Greek cafe in Lexington, VA called “Niko’s Grille.” We found this spot with the Happy Cow app and it was a great first meal! They had listed on the menu a vegan sandwich that was super tasty. I always appreciate when a menu flat out labels something as vegan, no need to ask for special requests or how it was prepared!

For dinner we stopped in a tiny little Tennessee town, also at a place we found on the app. They had a separate vegan menu, a surprise for a town of less than 5,000 people! Delicious food too.

Day 2: Nashville, TN to Oklahoma City, OK

Imagine Cafe

For lunch we stopped in Memphis, Tennessee, a town known for their barbecue. Finding a vegan option felt like a tall order, but we ended up finding what was, for me at least, my favorite meal (and restaurant) of the entire trip!

The menu

I cannot recommend highly enough Imagine Cafe in Memphis, TN. A fully vegan restaurant, they made a killer vegan barbecue sandwich platter, and the atmosphere of the whole place was just awesome! This was the only fully vegan restaurant we found on the entire trip, and I can’t tell you how nice it is to have an entire menu to choose from. Definitely check this place out if you’re ever on your way through Memphis.

For dinner we leaned on Yelp to find us Happy Cafe in tiny little Henryetta, OK. I
ordered the orange tofu and the cook who made it personally came out to ask me how it was, I suspect because not many people in small town Oklahoma are ordering the tofu dish! Well she was pleased to learn that it was delicious!

Day 3: Oklahoma City, OK to Holbrook, AZ

We stopped in Amarillo, TX for lunch on day 3, and Happy Cow couldn’t find much for us, so we went with the old reliable, Chipotle, for lunch. One of my favorite restaurants, because not only is it delicious, but it’s uber easy to order vegan!

For dinner we stopped in Gallup, NM for our most interesting restaurant of the trip — an Indian restaurant at a truck stop! Not what I expected to find at a truck stop, but they were more than happy to make me a vegan chickpea dish that was delicious! We found this hidden gem with Happy Cow as well.

Day 4: Holbrook, AZ to Bakersfield, CA

Since we were making such good time and were ahead of schedule we decided to take a few hours off driving and go for a hike in Flagstaff, AZ. We bought some PB&J supplies and had a picnic on the trail. PB&J is one of those meals everyone forgets is vegan when they say “I don’t like any vegan food!”

And for dinner we stopped in Barstow, CA at an authentic Mexican place! Happy Cow gave us no listings, so I had to rely on a trick with Yelp that’s helped me out many times in a bind. For any restaurant you can search keywords in their reviews. I knew we wanted to find authentic Mexican, so I picked a few spots and searched for the word “vegan.” For Lola’s I found a review that someone had posted about how they were more than happy to accommodate and make her a vegan meal, so I walked up confidently to order, and voila — a vegan burrito was delivered and it was delicious!

Day 5: Bakersfield, CA to San Francisco, CA

We routed through Mountain View, CA for lunch so we could stop at Veggie Grill — the all vegan fast food chain! It’s always fantastic — I can’t wait for it to expand nationwide.

And for dinner we ate at Plant Cafe on the Embarcadero, right next to San Francisco Bay, a perfect end to a wonderful (vegan friendly) road trip through the south!

Download Happy Cow today, and don’t forget that Yelp trick! If I could find a tofu dish in Henryetta, OK, you truly can eat vegan anywhere in the country! You just have to be willing to put in a little research

What if I told you there was a single word that could encapsulate the entire production method of a product?

This word was so descriptive and ironclad in its definition that a product, once graced with its letters, would immediately be elevated to a more optimal choice.

What’s better — this term could be applied to products that were made not only in your community or region, but all over the country and even the world, by big companies and tiny mom & pop shops, mass produced and artisanally created.

Essentially, this term would tell you that a product made by your local shop AND by a Fortune 500 company were equally valuable and worthy of your purchase.

Think that’s possible?

Probably not.

Why? Because the manner in which a product is produced matters. And it’s incredibly complex.

How a Fortune 500 company — let’s say Target — makes a shirt, will be vastly different than a shirt you might find at your local farmers market. The former might use methods and labor that you would find appalling. The latter likely crafted their product themselves with care.

Now I am not saying either product is better than the other, I am simply trying to point out that in both cases the shirt-maker has the right to use a particular term that is quite popular these days: organic.

If Target used organic cotton, they get to use that label, even if they used cheap foreign labor to produce it. Likewise, your local shirtmaker can use the term organic too if they used an organically grown textile to make the shirt.

Two wildly different processes, same exact term.

Does organic sufficiently describe the value of the good, then, in this case?

The same holds true for food.

Organic food sales are booming across the country. And while there may certainly be some merits to some of the practices used by these farms, it is equally true that not every organic farm uses every best practice or sustainable method.

Some organic farms are simply behemoths — giant corporate run industrial farms that can use the term organic because they fit the label.

But those giant farms resemble a conventional farm more than they do the image you have in your head when you think “organic.” They’re typically not your small, local, diversified farm run by a nice family with a dog.

They are monocultures.

Organic is just a word, and it tells you very little about the type of system in which your food was grown.

Local

Ok so maybe local food is the answer.

The benefit of local food is that it is produced in your community, typically speaking. The actual definition of local food can vary depending on who you ask.

Here in D.C. we have a “local” grocery store that attempts to only carry locally grown or produced products. They define local as anything grown or produced in the states of the Chesapeake watershed.

In practice this means something grown as far away as Massena, NY (529 miles from D.C.) can be sold at their store as a “local” product. Half a thousand miles doesn’t feel too local…

Now I’m not at all knocking their definition of local food — I am simply pointing out that this term, like “organic,” is a bit loosely defined. Local does not necessarily mean the farm 30 miles down the road that you can visit on the weekend. It may be much further away than you think.

Similarly to the word “organic,” something labeled as “local” doesn’t actually tell you anything about the production methods. The only thing it tells you (and this is even debatable) is that the product likely didn’t travel as far to get to you, compared to other products in the store.

That’s it.

It doesn’t tell you anything about how the food was produced. In a post from several years ago I joked about the fact that if you happened to live in a town with a Coca Cola bottling plant that you could sit back and enjoy a “local Coke.”

Including where ingredients were assembled in the definition of “local food” is a bit dubious. At best, the benefit is keeping money in the local economy. “At least Martha down the street is getting my chocolate chip cookie money instead of Nabisco!”

Is that a benefit? Absolutely. But was the cacao in the chocolate chips grown locally? Unless you live in the tropics, probably not. So assembling products from around the planet down the block is hardly a local food, in my opinion.

The point of all of this is not to disparage “organic” and “local” food. It is more to point out that both of these terms probably mean a bit less than you realize.

I think the hope is that each of these words are synonymous with “sustainable.” But when corporate mega-farms can technically use both of these words without issue, I think we’ve elevated them a bit more than they deserve.

What should we eat, then?

It’s at least partially due to these issues that I’ve firmly planted my flag in the vegan and plant-based movement. If we want to work toward a more sustainable food system we have to take the 30,000 foot view.

Sure organic and local food have their place and their benefits. But the far bigger line must be drawn between plant foods and animal foods.

It is simply a law of thermodynamics that growing plant foods for human consumption will ALWAYS be more efficient than raising animals for food.

We can either go

Plants -> Humans, or

Plants -> Animals -> Humans.

When we insert animals into the middle of our food chains we lose A TON of energy in the process. That is inefficiency. That is the reason animal agriculture currently uses more than 50% of ALL land in the contiguous United States. That is the reason you can feed a vegan for a year on just 1/16th of an acre of land while a meat-eater needs 18 times as much land. That is the reason the carbon footprint of a vegan is half that of an omnivore. And that is the reason for 91% of Amazon deforestation — clearing land to feed animals and then us, instead of us directly.

Organic and Local may have their place in a sustainable food system. I am not here to say they are worthless terms. But make no mistake about it — if you want to make a real, measurable impact on the planet and create a new sustainable food system for the future, EAT MORE PLANTS (and less meat).

That’s where the clearest line must be drawn.

Friday is Earth Day.

I say it every single year.

I say it every single year because it is that important, that staggering, and sadly still that unknown.

Going vegan is by far the most important choice you can make to reduce your greenhouse gas emissions and improve the health of the planet.

Animal agriculture accounts for anywhere between 18-51% of total greenhouse gas emissions — ALL transportation combined accounts for 13%.

So you could NEVER take another plane, train, bus, boat, or taxi again in your life.

Or you could just eat plants for the rest of your life.

One is completely unfathomable. The other is a nice way to live. It’s healthier. It doesn’t harm animals. And the impact of the going vegan would be far greater anyway.

If you still need convincing on the environmental benefits of a vegan diet, watch the documentary Cowspiracy. It’s streaming on Netflix right now. It’s amazing. When you’re done, sign up for their Thunderclap campaign to promote the message to your social network online.

So drive less, use less water, buy solar panels, plant a garden. All great things to do for the environment this year. Just know that what’s on your plate is and will always be the most important choice you make for the environment. So choose plants.

Happy Earth Week!

Even given the constraints of a French menu, they have several vegan options and many who work there are vegan. Upon request they can accommodate a vegan with many delicious meals.

That wasn’t enough to stop one particular vegan from tearing into them with everything he had the other day. While dining with some friends, this vegan was hurt and offended that they couldn’t make him the precise meal he was looking for and weren’t “quote” sensitive to his dietary needs.

It sounded like the dude had a straight up temper tantrum, causing a scene, and writing a scathing review on the restaurant’s Facebook page demanding an apology.

Vegans — this is NOT the way to act.

Learning a new habit isn’t easy. It takes time, and various stages. The goal of any new habit is to get to the “maintenance” phase. That’s the point where everything is clicking. It’s become second nature.

Most people this this is where the journey ends, that this is the goal, the stopping point.

When I was in grad school I had a professor say this to us: at some point in your life, each and every one of your healthy habits will be challenged and you will likely relapse into old patterns.

I was pretty shocked. Every habit will relapse at some point? But she was convincing — the research suggests that any new health habit you acquire is temporary, and at some point, it will fail.

It may be after 5 minutes (like trying to quit smoking), 5 days (a crash diet), 5 months (an exercise program), or 5 years.

It may be after 30 years.

But no habit is safe.

Why is this? Why can we never rest on our newly found laurels? We’ve just spent months or years learning these new habits. We’ve got systems in place. We rely on our routines. Life is good, everything is on autopilot.

Life happens.

That’s the thing about life. It is inherently unpredictable, uncertain. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either lying or a hermit that never leaves the house.

Life changes, all the time. You move. A relationship starts or ends. Jobs, kids, the economy — it all changes.

That’s not to say you can’t get back to maintenance. That process will likely be easier the second time around — you have a history with this habit, and you can probably find your way back. But you will experience a period where it falters and your old habits reemerge.

For me, I find it very hard to believe that my vegan/plant-based diet will ever change. This feels more than just a habit. But maybe even that isn’t 100% safe. I shouldn’t show such hubris.

One habit that is in flux right now, at the moment, is meditation. I have been trying to build this habit for nearly 3 years now.

For a good year or more I was meditating every morning when I awoke and every night before bed, along with some light yoga.

It was a great habit, and lead to some profound personal growth and discovery. It made me a better, happier person.

But even though the research suggests benefit even with as little as five minutes a day, there is something so challenging about…just…stopping. It’s so antithetical to our western, fast paced culture. With the internet always on, we can be always on.

Taking a break to just sit there quietly with your breath and noticing your thoughts, who’s got the time for that?!

Well I did — off and on for 3 years.

But life happens.

For the past few weeks I have been in transition mode, between apartments and possibly moving cities for a new opportunity. While everything that is happening is both exciting and challenging, the uncertainty is stressful.

Of course, this would be likely the most important time for me to be meditating regularly.

Yet the mind goes elsewhere, old habits come back in. Novel life stress causes relapse in habits, and getting lost in Netflix all of a sudden is way more appealing. I spend all day consumed by the anxiety of my thoughts, why would I want to devote 5-10 minutes a day to listening to them even more intently??

So I have not been meditating. I have relapsed. Relapsed into old patterns, old stress-relievers, etc.

I still carry the lessons I learned from when I was in maintenance of this meditation habit. It still has made me a million times better at coping with this life stress. Those lessons are with me.

I share this story not to scare you but to simply share the reality — no habit is safe from relapse. Instead of having that scare you I hope it helps you feel OK when it does happen. It’s normal. Be gentle with yourself when it happens, dust yourself off, and figure out what you need to do to get back to it.

For me, it starts tomorrow!

….wait. I said that I learned the lessons of meditation.

It starts NOW! (Off to meditate!)

Can you picture it? A vegan world? When will it come?

A lot of people ask me this when they find out that I am vegan.

“Do you really think all human beings will give up meat??”

“How will you convince everyone to give up meat?

I think I have an answer:

Make meat unappealing.

Now I know what you’re thinking. You’re probably thinking that’s kind of obvious, and you’re probably thinking I mean increase the awareness over the animal rights, environmental and health disaster that is animal agriculture.

And while I do think all three of those things are incredibly important to educate people about, that’s not what I mean.

Maybe I’ll put it differently: make alternatives the appealing choice.

Yes, I’m talking about fake meat.

Here’s the deal — meat from animals is inefficient. You pretty much can’t argue this. It’s just physics. It’s ecology. Eating higher on the food chain is inherently inefficient. Eating lower on the food chain will always be more efficient.

Why? Because things higher on the food chain require more inputs (water, food, fertilizer, antiobiotics, etc). Those inputs cost money and resources and are thusly inefficient.

Plants are lower on the food chain and are more efficient, both from a resource perspective and a cost perspective.

So alternatives (yes, I mean fake meat) outperform meat from animals in cost and environmental efficiency. They also obviously outperform meat from animals from an ethical standpoint. No dead cows means a more ethical burger.

The remaining question: taste.

Well if you haven’t tried fake meat in awhile, they are damn good. I’ve fooled many meat-loving peers of mine with fake meat products. I’ve served them without telling them what it was and they’ve been floored. I’ve asked them “if fake meat tasted identical or better to the real thing would you eat it?” I’ve never had a friend answer anything other than “yes.”

Then there’s this: a vegan burger just won Best Burger in the World.

Note: that didn’t say “Best Veggie Burger in the World.” Meat burgers were in the running, but one made from plants won the day.

So if plants can be cheaper, better for the environment, more humane, more nutritious and tastier???

We may not have to convince anyone to go vegan, we merely have to continue to work to make alternatives win in all these categories. If it’s cheaper and tastes just as good, this will be the end of meat and no one will miss it.

For more meat-free products check out Gardein, Beyond Meat, Tofurky, and many others. If you live in the Minneapolis area you can check out the world’s first Vegan Butcher for artisanal vegan meats and cheeses at The Herbivorous Butcher.

*That burger is 100% vegan. It won Best Burger

A week or two ago I saw a meme on Facebook.

Ok I see lots of memes on Facebook, and to be honest, most are pretty meaningless.

But this one was a quote from the Dalai Lama. He’s a pretty wise man, so I tend to listen to what he has to say.

Take a look:

This meme succinctly describes the hypocrisy of how many modern humans conduct their lives. I’m not here to point any fingers or blame anyone for this imbalance. I merely want to shine a light on it, and suggest that we’ve got it all wrong.

I want to make the plea for health.

We tend to sacrifice a lot of ourselves in the pursuit of attaining more – more money, more status, more clothing, more possessions, etc.

We tend to, as a culture, be over-worked and over-stressed in these pursuits.

We, as the quote suggests, sacrifice our health in the pursuit of wealth, only to, as we get older, use that wealth to try to buy back some health.

As I said, we’ve got this all wrong, and I can prove it.

The future does not exist.

Bear with me for a second here, I am going to get just a bit existential.

The future does not exist. It’s not real. That may or may not sound controversial to you. But it’s hard to argue with.

We can reasonably predict that some future will take place in some way.

Things have continued for however many years we’ve already lived, and with a little luck, we can reasonably assume that we will continue to exist in a relatively similar fashion.

But we have little actual impact on that future. The amount that we control in that future is very very small.

This isn’t to say that we should not work hard or save money. For many life goals, money is essential.

But while the future is and always will be a fantasy, an idea, there is something real that you are experiencing right now.

Can you guess?

It’s… RIGHT NOW.

The present moment is real, it is tangible. You are experiencing it right now, and believe it or not, it’s all you actually have. Even when the future comes you will experience it in the present moment.

So if you are still with me, it stands to reason that we should place more value on what is now than what will be. (Again, I am not saying throw away all planning or forethought toward the future, just stay with me.)

And while a lot of people think that investing in your health is solely for the purposes of attaining more future (increasing the amount of years you have on the planet), the real benefit of health is experienced in the NOW.

Why?

This is the only time when you can experience anything!

That, and because health is a present state of being. I am not a healthy 80-year old. I am a healthy 29-year old, and as such I am fit, in shape, and eat a diet that gives me abundant energy in the moment. It makes me feel good today, not 50 years from now!

If I am fortunate the choices I make today can lead to a better reality for myself in 50 years. But that is simply a fantasy, an illusion. Not entirely unimportant to consider, but not where the real benefit of a healthy lifestyle is conferred.

Look, money, hard work, promotions – these are good things for which to strive. But do not sacrifice your health in their pursuit, because this is a truly foolish trade. You trade your wellbeing now (the only time you can experience wellbeing) for potential future wellbeing. Once this future is achieved, you need to trade back the money you got for the health you gave up in the form of expensive drugs and surgeries.

It’s a raw deal.

Invest in your health TODAY, in THIS MOMENT. It is far more valuable than any sum of money you could possibly dream of.

Now I don’t follow UFC in any way, but I still know who Conor McGregor is. His personality is larger than life. His tattooed bulk frame, Irish accent, and machismo attitude epitomizes the sport of competitive fighting.

McGregor had a fight last weekend against Nate Diaz. Going into this battle, McGregor was undefeated in UFC fights.

He was the Ronda Rousey of male UFC fighters. No one expected him to lose.

But he did.

I don’t really care, since I don’t follow the sport. Sure I know him and his personality well, simply from being a sports fan, but the fact that he lost doesn’t mean a thing.

Except for one fact: Nate Diaz is vegan a plant-based athlete, following a mostly raw vegan diet.

Yes.

A vegan just took down the world’s most accomplished and feared fighter.

Why does this matter?

This probably doesn’t matter to most of you reading this. You probably don’t follow UFC, don’t know who these people are, don’t care.

But you know who does?

The male roommate of one of my friends, who has no real knowledge of or interest in the vegan diet. About all he knows is that vegans supposedly suffer in their search for protein in their measly leaves they eat.

But as we sat around talking about how both of us are vegan and loving it, and trying to open his mind to it, I casually threw out this fact: “you know the guy who just beat Conor McGregor is vegan…”

His ears perked up. I had his attention. This stood out to him.

So no, the result of this UFC fight is not very important to my life. But is is very important to the vegan movement. Not because Nate Diaz needs to be an ambassador for the lifestyle. But because his accomplishments can speak to a demographic that other vegans simply can’t.

The strongest man in the world just got beat by a vegan. Deal with it.