The Archive
Guides, grocery finds, restaurant tips, and everything plant-based.
Living
Your great-grandmother didn’t go meatless because it was trendy. She did it because a barrel of beef ran $8.00 and her husband carried home $1.32 a day. Between 1870 and 1950, most American families weren’t picking between chicken or fish. They were picking between potatoes or nothing. In the urban tenements of New York, a … Read more
Living
Your great-grandparents fed a family of eight through winter on nothing but what they yanked from the dirt. No meal kits. No Whole Foods run. Just a backyard plot, a root cellar packed with taters and parsnips and kohlrabi, and the kind of stubborn vegetables that shrugged off drought during the worst economic collapse this … Read more
Grocery
You’ve been eating animal parts in foods that have zero business containing them. Not meat. Not chicken broth in soup. I’m talking about fish bladders floating through your pint glass, crushed beetles tinting your yogurt pink, and duck feathers baked into your sandwich bread. The food industry operates on one twisted principle: if a slaughterhouse … Read more
Grocery
Trader Joe’s stocks north of 4,000 products, and roughly half qualify as vegetarian. That’s the upside. The downside? Nobody alive has bandwidth to taste-test all of them, and the store cycles inventory quicker than you can mutter “discontinued.” I’ve burned a shameful number of hours haunting the frozen aisle at my local TJ’s. Sampling. Cross-referencing. … Read more
Is It Vegetarian
A few thousand gummy bears deep and you’ve never once wondered what’s physically holding the thing together. I finally did. Genuinely regret it. Short version: most gummy bears aren’t vegetarian. The full version involves rendered pig skin, insect byproducts, and a candy industry that counts on you never squinting at the back of the bag. … Read more
Living
Your vegetarian friend just RSVP’d yes, and you’re frozen in the meat aisle like someone unplugged your brain. I’ve been there. You’ve grilled burgers since you were old enough to hold tongs, and now somebody’s showing up who won’t touch the one thing you’ve built your entire cooking personality around. Here’s what nobody tells you, … Read more
Grocery
I’ve eaten more frozen veggie burgers than any sane person should cop to in public. Somewhere around patty number 30, my kitchen reeked like a pea protein refinery and my smoke detector had developed trust issues with me. Here’s what I took away from the wreckage: the frozen veggie burger aisle at Whole Foods in … Read more
Restaurants
McDonald’s has been lying to vegetarians for decades. Not with a wink or a footnote. With a full-page newspaper apology and a $10 million check. I remember seeing those golden arches as a kid and thinking fries were fries everywhere. Same box, same oil, same deal. Turns out that’s completely wrong, and the gap between … Read more
Restaurants
McDonald’s runs 40,000 locations across 100 countries, and the vegetarian menu in the US wouldn’t fill a napkin. I went through every meat-free thing you can grab at the Golden Arches, and the tally is so pathetic it borders on comedy. Borders. Here’s what nobody warns you about. McDonald’s refuses to label a single item … Read more
Uncategorized
I chucked a $9 block of cashew cheese last week because it got buried behind a jar of pickles. Painful. What stings more is that I could’ve rescued it if I’d understood the rules sooner. Vegan cheese doesn’t rot like dairy. It doesn’t mature the same way, collapse the same way, or survive the freezer … Read more
Living
Punch “vegan” into Google Images and brace yourself for whiplash. One result is a luminous, ageless creature spooning acai into a coconut shell. The next is a hollow-eyed phantom who apparently hasn’t slept since the first Obama term. Both are genuine. Both have receipts. I’ve watched this fight play out across comment threads, Thanksgiving tables, … Read more
Living
One in four people taste bitterness in vegetables at a level the rest of us will never touch. For them, broccoli doesn’t taste like broccoli. It tastes like punishment. And yet, every vegan starter guide on the internet slaps you with a photo of a salad the size of a laundry basket. I’ve stood in … Read more
Living
Thirty pounds. That’s the average weight gap between vegans and meat eaters in a study of 60,000 people. I spent a long time assuming the explanation was boring. They just eat less, right? Not really. That’s a fraction of the story, and frankly the least interesting part. What’s actually going on under the hood is … Read more