Whole-Food, Plant-Based Day 11: Okay, we are jumping to a new theme: animals. Each of these reasons carry equal weight for me, but this is the reason I don’t “cheat” now and then. As we explore this topic over the next few days, I promise I will not show images that are disturbing, however, some of the resources I share may get into that if you choose to dive deeper. I will be sure to note that in case you don’t feel comfortable-but maybe it is good to feel uncomfortable.

Research: Have you ever wondered why we eat meat? I have always been an animal lover and feel such deep empathy towards animals. As a kid, I cried in a movie just because a gorilla didn’t have a friend. So how could I feel that way, but knowingly eat animals? Conditioning. Dr. Melanie Joy has done research on this exact topic and has published a book called Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows. Her work gets into how perfectly kind, good people can be okay with murder. The conditioning all stems around defense mechanisms such as denial , hidden information, and information we have been fed about needing meat for good health, but when we look at truth, we can see that this is not an ethical choice.

Resource: This one is pretty brutal starting at 8 minutes and not for the faint of heart. This 17 minute video gets into why we find it acceptable to eat some animals, but not others and how we have been conditioned. https://youtu.be/ao2GL3NAWQU

Recipe: Okay, so I don’t want bacon after seeing that, but I do love the taste of bacon. Today I tried a new recipe that had me marinating tofu in a “bacon-flavored sauce” and then I air-fried it to get it more crispy on the outside. I know I’m not eating bacon, but it tastes so good and no one was hurt in this process. The picture shows chunks on a breakfast bowl with potatoes, “eggs”, and avocado.

Here is a link to some different tofu marinades. I have substituted vegetable broth for oil. https://www.liveeatlearn.com/tofu-marinades/

I tried cutting the tofu in chunks and thin strips. The chunks were good, but for a more true-to-bacon approach, I recommend the thin strips. This would be great for a BLT!