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4 things vegans should talk about, publicly How to get the conversation about your vegan lifestyle to come out of the pantry. The joke—one of them at least—goes like this: Q: How do you know someone’s a vegan? A: Don’t worry, they’ll let you know in 2 seconds. Something that invariably comes along with vegan life is having your lifestyle choice completely misunderstood. Don’t fret, the great American writer and thinker Ralph Waldo Emerson warned that Plato was misunderstood, Newton was misunderstood, Jesus was misunderstood, and that “to be great is to be misunderstood.” But don’t overcorrect, either, dear—sometimes preachy?—vegan. It’s not your duty to change the world. But if you take root in your beliefs, “speak your most latent conviction to the world” as Emerson also advised, you’ll watch the world slowly but soon change around you. Here are some common topics your vegan lifestyle will trigger, and some tips on how to respond. 1. Saving the pocketbook Saving the planet is not a small-talk topic. But talking about our budgets and how it impacts our lifestyle can be. “I saved 20 bucks this week not buying meat” could be a conversation starter when chatting with your carnivorous friends. According to CNBC, nearly 80% of Americans say they’re living paycheck to paycheck these days. That means 8 out of 10 pals will appreciate the cost-savings tip! 2. Woke guilt The common theme found within anti-vegan snark is that vegans are being self-righteous when they talk about the vegan lifestyle. So let’s turn the narrative around. All life—flora, fauna or anything in between—thrives on the backs of the dead. Soil, for instance, is formed when weathered rocks mix with air, water and living organisms. Yes, the fruit you’re eating is there because at some point a living thing died. The late philosopher and anthropologist Joseph Campbell said “a vegetarian for moral reasons is someone who never heard a tomato scream.” So, let’s let our non-vegan friends know we know.
3. Puppy philosophy If you’re in the mood for making a point and you want to avoid controversy, try a backdoor approach to the topic. Lots of pet lovers are carnivorous, but they would never dream—or nightmare—about eating their dog or cat. So when you’re having conversations about how cute their puppy is being or what they think their cat is thinking, mention the funny cow or chicken or pig video you saw the other day that made you giggle. It’s a little backhanded, but keep your intention pure and maybe it will plant the seed of doubt in your meat-eating friend’s mind. 4. Healthy not holy Moral conversations—from environmental protection to the sanctification of one’s soul—are like political discussions. They go in circles and they can kill off a circle of friends in no time. Focus on the health your vegan lifestyle brings you instead. Let friends (who by definition should be happy for you) in on the physical (not mental or spiritual) changes that happened for you when you took meats, dairy and other non-vegan elements out of your diet. “My cholesterol dropped 50 points! I’m off statins now” is something your friend or mere acquaintance wants to hear and wants to know more about. That’s the impetus that will change what they put in their body. That’s the news that will get them considering how a vegan lifestyle could benefit them, not just you. Now, how will you know when they’ve made that change? Don’t worry, they’ll let you know in 2 seconds.
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Playing with flames Jul 28, 2003 By ERIC LEINS GILROY - I'm not exactly an inexperienced chef. I do most of the cooking at home. I watch the Food Network with some regularity. I even have a garlic and rosemary grilled potatoes recipe that could be a Garlic Festival cook-off contender. But I've never handled a 5-foot plume of fire shooting off a 36-inch frying pan - intentionally or otherwise. On Sunday, I did. I got to Gourmet Alley and met up with veteran “pyro chef” Steve Janisch, who was in the midst of grilling up perhaps his 144,000th serving of calamari Gilroy style. Janisch has worked 50 hours every Garlic Festival the past 24 years, and it takes him just more than two minutes to grill up a batch of calamari. Do the math. "Step right in!" Janisch said to me, I think. Between the rock 'n' roll blaring over the loudspeakers, the applause of the crowd, the roar of the flames and the intermittent shouts of "Fire in the hole!," it was kind of tough to hear everything Janisch said. "I'm gonna get this pan piping hot, and when I tell you, throw in this bucket of squid and yell 'Fire in the hole!' " he instructed. We put what must have been a 40-pound pan over the flames and tossed in olive oil from one of those bulk containers. Everything I was doing I had done before in my home, but never to this scale. It felt like someone had put me in the land of giants. As Janisch pushed and pulled the pan around the grill I looked straight at him waiting for the go-ahead to dump squid, knowing that once I did there would be a flame of unknown magnitude I'd have to contend with. Of course, it was at that moment, I noticed how red Janisch's face had become. This was not from the sun, a 1.4 million-kilometer-wide nuclear explosion. Rather, Janisch's bright pink hue was from this year's portion of those 144,000 batches of calamari. Suddenly, I realized the future of my skin tone was in my hands, literally, along with a bucket of squid. "It goes away after a little while," Janisch told me later about the red-pink tone. So there it went. I threw the squid, gently, into the pan and watched Janisch slide the pan back and forth to get plenty of oil and squid juice onto the flames below. Janisch's flame hit the wood ceiling above, before falling back down into the pan. A moment later, after Janisch let me take over the pan and stir in the half a dozen ingredients, I felt to the left of me an intense heat that would have made Oppenheimer gasp. Another pyro chef - less than a foot away had managed to outdo Janisch, at least for the moment. I uttered something that can't be repeated here and went back to work on my own batch.Janisch let me do another couple of batches on my own and hounded me to "Keep stirring!" no matter how hard or fast I seemed to move the stuff around. "Stir, stir, stir!"
After my batches were done and I had stepped aside to take some further notes, Garlic Godfather Val Filice graciously welcomed me to my first Garlic Festival and talked to me about the alley's perfect safety record despite the enormous flames. "Safety first is my motto," Filice said as he crossed his fingers and chuckled at me, probably knowing that with a first-time pyro chef on board, he could see that perfect record getting blemished. As much fun as it was, I felt a little inferior. On the far left end, yet another outrageous flame flared into the wood beams overhead. My flames were weak; so weak that our chief photographer, James Mohs, decided to step in and do his own batch. He wanted to show the rookie—that'd be me—how to do it. I'll give Mohs credit. His flame was bigger than mine. It didn't go real high, it just went wide ... kind of like Mohs. Watching Mohs work the flames amid the pyro chef brotherhood reminded me of my first days in Gilroy. I started working for The Dispatch on Sept. 23, 2002. It was the first day of the 3,147acre Croy Fire. Like those three days in September when the blaze burned through the Santa Cruz Mountains toward Gilroy and Morgan Hill, Mohs was there, too. He was photographing another brotherhood of pyros, the firefighters who put out the mammoth blaze. I interviewed a lot of those men and women on the front lines of the fire. I interviewed even more at their base camp—Christmas Hill Park, the site of the Gilroy Garlic Festival, the place where, essentially, my career in Gilroy started. Standing in Gourmet Alley, the heart of Christmas Hill, it hit me that no matter how small a flame I may have lit thus far, I've walked through the proverbial Gilroy fire. I've experienced the worst (the Croy fire) and best (the Garlic Festival) of Gilroy life. And what a blast it has been.
SHORT STORY ‘TALKING TO A ROCK’ By ERIC VALENTINE TRIANGULAR SHAPE. FULL MOON, ON A VOLCANO. SEE THE CLOUDS BELOW. Hiking Mt. Fuji is not a great accomplishment. When you do it, old Japanese ladies—who do it once a week for leisure—pass you by, giggling. You hike Mt. Fuji the way you tour the Colosseum in Rome. Anyone can do it, but not everyone has been. So you do it to say you’ve been. I have proof that I’ve been. It’s a lava rock from the very top of Fuji-san. A quarter-pound chunk of volcano vomit that I learned, after I had brought it home, was bad luck. I was telling this story to my friend Jen, a beautiful young woman totally devoted to the healing arts and making the world a better place. Jen is not a liberal. Jen is not a progressive. Jen is a utopian. “Apologize to the mountain and let it know the rock is in good hands. You’ve been proud to have it. You’ve been taking good care of it. And you want permission to keep it. Maybe even one day you’ll return it,” Jen said. “But you have to go back to that moment when you took it.” Our group of 10 expatriates began the Fuji climb at 11pm. It’s the recommended way to climb Fuji-san. Because leaving the base station at 11pm allows you to get to the top of Fuji right at sunrise. It also makes the hike up one of the most aesthetic nighttime experiences imaginable. Far outside the Tokyo-Yokohama skyline, nearly 13,000 feet in the air, Fuji is the Hubble Telescope of earth-bound stargazing. Never before had I seen so many stars so crystalline. But what drew my attention for most of the hike upward was not the amazing sky. It was the clouds underneath. About two hours into the hike, we were well above cloud-line. And our group noticed a strange triangular dark spot on the clouds below. Some loose references were made to it along the way, but none of us knew what it was we were seeing. After all, it was much easier to focus upward into the mystery of the galaxy than ponder some bizarre cloud formation down below.
A few more hours into the hike, oxygen began to thin. While there were no treacherous moments, taking seven steps, then five steps, then three steps in a row became a challenge. A break was needed. My buddy Mike, a sweet-natured Texan, stood about 6-foot-3 and needed the break the most. He pulled off his backpack, he sat down next to his fiancee Kara, and he looked up at the sky. “Oh. It’s a full moon tonight. That’s why we’re seeing the shape.” Mike said. No one said a word, but everyone looked around, as this silent haiku hit the collective unconscious. TRIANGULAR SHAPE. FULL MOON, ON A VOLCANO. SEE THE CLOUDS BELOW. “Holy crap, Mike!” I said. “Yeah, I think that triangle we’ve been looking at is Fuji’s shadow,” Mike said coolly. “Holy crap, Mike!” I said. I think that when we die, for a second we’re still alive. And during that second, I believe our mind pulls above our body—knowing exactly where we are, knowing exactly where we’re going, knowing exactly content. That’s how we felt on Fuji-san at that moment. Our bodies and minds, at rest. The subtle cues of ambivalent nature revealing themselves in the silence of the world, where freedom lies and creativity is born. And for the first time in our 20-something years of life, we knew exactly where we were.