March Challenge: Nourish

You are cordially invited to the event of the season, a month-long, all-ages fruit and veg fiesta! It’s a parade of produce, a celery celebration, a nutrient jamboree! Am I selling it like the chard body dance squad at the Pawnee farmers’ market?

Maybe not. But how about this: since we’re not wasting food after January’s challenge, the most effective thing we can do for our environment is cutting back on meat and dairy. And if that’s not enough for you to RSVP ASAP to the plant party, how about this? Diet trends come and go, but five out of five doctors agree: more veg = healthier you.

Before you panic, I’m not asking you to go vegan for the month (though you could) or do some sort of kelp cleanse (not recommended unless you are a fish), and I know dietary choices are complicated, psychologically loaded, and different bodies have different needs. Culture, tradition, availability, and affordability all play a role. Diet is not one size fits all. No one, not even me or Oprah, can tell you exactly what your diet should look like. 

But most of us could afford to move vegetables to the centre of the plate more often, and that’s what we’ll aim to do this month. You choose your own adventure, and our month’s challenges are suggestions you can dial up or down to suit your own situation. If you’re already a vegan, there’s not much of a challenge here, but maybe share your go-to recipes with the veg-curious.

First, relevant newsletters for review:

• You don’t win friends with salad

• Unscrambling eggs

Veg it up!

There are so many great ways to reduce the impact of carnivorous consumption, whether it’s eating lower on my favourite chart (below, because who can get enough of it? Pas moi!), trying out more meatless meals, being vegan before six p.m., or simply swapping your snacks for something plant-based.

When my partner and I reduced our meat dinners to two a week, the biggest obstacle was finding new recipes that suited our needs. So this month in our FB group, I’ll start threads where members can share their favourite vegan and vegetarian recipes. But if you’re not on the book of faces, here are a few my go-to vegan meals:

• Smitten Kitchen’s Everyday Yellow Dal

• Smitten Kitchen’s Miso, Sweet Potato, and Broccoli Bowl

• A Pinch of Yum’s Coconut Curry Soup

• Cookie & Kate’s Thai Spiced Rice Bowls

• Well Fed Flat Broke’s Peanutty Soba Noodles with Kale

• Oh She Glows’ African Peanut Stew (I like to omit the kale and put the whole thing in the blender)

• Oh She Glows’ Thai Crunch Salad

• Oh She Glows’ Lemon-Tahini dressing (included in the Protein Power bowl recipe). I’m obsessed it with it: a great thing for dipped veggies or to round out a salad or to just eat with your finger (or so I hear . . .)

• Roast some vegetables (potatoes, beets, carrots, onion, broccoli, peppers — whatever you need to clear out) and eat with homemade hummus

Buy better meat.

If you’ve cut back but are still eating meat, consider reallocating some of your meat budget to better meat. You’ll likely be supporting more humane, more ecological agriculture, but most importantly you’ll be able to see what meat should cost, and I think that’s a crucial mental adjustment — one I’ve been working on for a long time, because as we know I guard my gold more closely than Ebenezer Scrooge.

To buy better in a major chain store, choose organic, which for cows, for example, means they have to get at least 30% of their diet from grazing and must eat organic, non-GMO feed. In the Toronto area, you can have better local meat delivered from Mama Earth Organics, 100 km Foods (that link actually gives you $25 off your first order), The Healthy Butcher, NIKU Farms, Annex Market, and West Side Beef.

Let’s get structural!

It’s great to have a vegetable-forward month, but for a lot of people vegetables are inaccessible for many reasons, such as cost and local availability. To help make sure more people get an invite to our fruit and veg festivities, a donation to incredible advocacy group FoodShare is always a good bet. They do effective structural work, like helping set up affordable food markets in underserved communities, as well as direct assistance — in 2020 they delivered over a million pounds of fresh fruit and veg to people in need.

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Wins of the Week

“For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”
— T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets, “East Coker”

This week, we hoot and holler for

• Kathleen, who is collecting secondhand things for a refugee family arriving soon (a win for people + planet)

• Steph, Lyn, and Sarah Joy, who crushed last month’s challenge by sharing lots of children’s clothes

• My dad, who chose to install a heat pump in the reno he’s working on, which, energy-wise, is a high-impact choice. I haven’t covered them in a newsletter yet, but heat pumps are the future!

As we enter the last month of this infernal season, let’s celebrate all the wins! Email me your small victories or post them in the Facebook group. Also, if you want to talk about how last month’s challenge went, or some eco news you’ve read, or my current fixation with veterinary TV, you know where to find me.

See you in a fortnight, (veg) party people!

xo

JK

Five Minutes for Planet is written by me, Jen Knoch, and edited by Crissy Calhoun. Opening photo by Anna Pelzer on Unsplash.