Taking Stock: January

Today is the last day of my first month of being vegan and I'm using it as an occasion to reflect on what's come to pass over the last thirty days in my training, my body and my kitchen.

Let's start with training. I have accomplished what I hoped to accomplish in this arena: I've reestablished the habit of training regularly, albeit in small bites, and have moved past the initial discomforts of doing so. During the course of the month, I snowshoed for 9.5 hours, run for 8.5 hours, biked for 4 hours, cross-country skied for 2 hours and swam for 40 minutes (a small but meaningful triumph), for a total training volume of 24.5 hours. It doesn't look too bad when summed like this, but pales in comparison to the training volume of 80+ hours that I will carry five months from now.

It's worth noting that I have avoided doing any exciting or dramatic training this month for two reasons. Firstly, it's never, ever a good idea to introduce, or reintroduce, physical activity levels in a manner that amounts to a shock for the body (for the soft tissues in particular; this is one of the main reasons that joint injuries come to visit later in the season). Secondly, in the interest of monitoring my body's reaction to the major shift in diet, I aimed to modestly control other variables. Embarking on a hard training program always leaves one feeling a little pooped; I have sought to evaluate any indication of tiredness or lethargy, independent of the reintroduction of regular training. In other words, I have tried not to blur the lines of causality.

Which brings me to how my body has responded. I have listened to it during and after workouts, while waiting to fall asleep at night, and on waking in the morning. I have listened to it when climbing stairs, walking the hilly streets of Lausanne and after making a mad dash for the train. Now, while I wouldn't describe my previous self as a crazed steak-eater, I did eat chicken, fish and dairy products on a daily basis. I rarely started my day without yogurt or cottage cheese with fruit. So I was expecting some sort of adjustment period, some sort of withdrawal or - that great euphemism for withdrawal, cleansing - to happen in the wake of 'going cold turkey', as it were. So nobody will be more surprised than me at the report that my energy levels have steadily increased over the month. I am equally surprised that I have not lost a pound of weight (and have not quite made up my mind as to whether this is a good or bad thing).

There is one other physical response to note from this month: I am sleeping in a little later than usual. Typically, I am bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at 5.30am, but lately I have been sleeping in till the late, late hour of 7.00am. I feel like I've missed half the morning when I look at the clock through bleary eyes. Michael, on the other hand, is taking this as a great silent blessing, rather like a parent who's child has begun to sleep though the night for the first time, I imagine. My body's somewhat unusual wish to sleep-in is not something I am giving much mind to; I think I've experienced this in previous January's (and as some wise person who lives above the 49th parallel once said: if you sleep through January, you haven't missed much) and I'm expecting it to pass as the days lengthen.

Into the kitchen. The kitchen has become a place of unbridled experimentation; a cross between a science lab and a sandbox, the only rule in place being that things have to taste good. Over the course of this month, I learnt how to squeeze milk from almonds, how to grow my own sprouts, how to bake without eggs or butter, and how to prepare dishes that are native to countries I have never visited. My emerging cuisines of choice from January are Moroccan, Indian and Lebanese. I now have spices in my cupboard that I had previously heard of, but never cooked with: cardamom, turmeric and garam masala to name a few. On a fine tuning note, I learnt that the order in which these are added to a dish when cooking actually matters. Who would have thought.

The report from the kitchen brings me to one final item, completing my round-up of the month: the vegan recipe that won my highest regard. I was certain that a particular dried fruit and nut curry, served on a bed of red quinoa, was going to be the winner. Even Michael endorsed it with his vote. But the final judge and jury (me) overturned the majority ruling. This judge has an insatiable sweet tooth, and thus, I have come down on the side of a dessert recipe (and it's worth noting that the final verdict was bolstered by the monumental discovery that coconut cream can be whipped like dairy cream, producing a whipped topping that is much more exotic, and quite frankly, better).

So without further a do, the following is a recipe called BerryBerry Couscous Cake, adapted from www.stevia.com:

Couscous Cake

* 2 1/2 cups water
* 1 cup couscous
* juice of 1/2 lemon
* 3 to 6 drops liquid stevia or a dusting of stevia extract
* pinch of sea salt

Bring water to a boil in a saucepan. Stir in couscous, lemon, and stevia. Turn heat to low and simmer for about 5 minutes. Spread the couscous into a 9" springform pan or shallow non-aluminum baking dish and pat down firmly. Allow to set; about 1 hour.

Berry Topping

* 1 1/2 cups mixed berries, fresh or frozen
* 1 cup water
* 3 to 6 drops liquid stevia or dusting of stevia extract
* pinch of sea salt
* 2 to 3 tablespoons maple syrup (optional)

Bring all ingredients except maple syrup to a boil. Lower heat and simmer for 8-10 minutes. Stir in the maple syrup and allow to cool, then spread topping over the cake. Refrigerate until set, about 1 hour. Once set, the cake will slice much like a baked cake. The reds and blues from the berries will soak down through the couscous layer, giving it a colourful marbled appearance.

Whipped Coconut Cream Topping (this part I made up)

Chill a stainless steel bowl and whisk in the fridge. Skim the cream off the top of a can of organic coconut milk, being careful not to include any of the clear coconut fluid. Add 1 teaspoon of vanilla essence and a touch of stevia, and whisk until stiff peaks form. Serve generously with couscous cake, and think of more tropical places.

And so ends January. I'm glad I didn't sleep through it.

In at the Deep End, And Some Footnotes on Procrastination

Sometimes inspiration can be found in the strangest places. I woke up this morning, made a sharp black coffee, packed my swimming gear and headed to the pool. I paid my francs, marched myself to the deep end, goggled up and jumped in feet first.

Once in the water, the inevitable happened: I was happy as a clam and I didn't want to get out. I put in 2 kilometers, and thanks to a synco swim team practicing in the adjacent pool, was treated to an upbeat underwater soundtrack as I paddled. While Gloria Estefan and Prince would not be my first choice of music to swim to, a remixed version of The Rhythm is Going to Get You helped me pick things up in the last 300 meters. I was also pleasantly surprised to find that during the daytime, the public swim lanes of this particular pool are largely empty (unlike my local pool in Vancouver: located in a downtown neighborhood called The West End, a pretty collection of pink midrise apartment buildings where everybody's grandmother lives, you need to be prepared to swim with a lot of silverbacks if you want to swim during the dayshift. I might add that these silverbacks were often faster than me in the water).

So, it turns out that I have been suffering from nothing more than some garden-variety procrastination about getting back in the pool. But what had me finally take the plunge when I have put off doing it for the better part of a month? I quite simply told myself that if the German government can muster the political will to tell their people it's time to dramatically reduce their meat consumption (see my previous post), I can get my toushy to the pool and swim a few kilometers.

Having broken the seal, I came home and cleaned the fridge, scraped the candle wax off the windowsills, made peanut butter cookies, organized my sock drawer, set up a miniature sprout garden in the kitchen (from a grow-your-own-sprouts starter pack I picked up a few weeks ago) and sent Michael an irritating series of 'can you remember to...' emails at the office. And all this before lunchtime.

Having settled down to eat cookies and write about my morning, I took a moment to reflect on the nature of procrastination, with a little help from Wikipedia:

Procrastination is a type of behavior which is characterized by deferment of actions or tasks to a later time. For a behavior to be classified as procrastination, it must be counterproductive, needless, and delaying.

Wikipedia got that much right, but it doesn't take a stab at addressing why we procrastinate. What is behind this curious self-suffering that we enter into, especially when it relates to an activity which, once underway, we know we will find some enjoyment in?

Psychology Today, a website with the comforting subtitle of Here to Help, takes a stab at it:

Procrastination represents a profound problem of self-regulation...it is not a problem of time management or of planning...procrastinators actively look for distractions, particularly ones that don't take a lot of commitment on their part. Checking e-mail is almost perfect for this purpose. They distract themselves as a way of regulating their emotions, such as fear of failure.

Eek. While I wouldn't have described myself as a chronic procrastinator, I am a chronic email-checker. But this is a little more introspection than I was looking for over my tea and cookies, so I am going to enforce a modicum of self-regulation by closing my inbox and finishing the design of my training schedule, which will include regular swimming, for February.

This Just In

Talk about being ahead of the Zeitgeist!

Germany’s Federal Environmental Agency has issued a strong advisory for German people to lower their meat consumption, effectively asking the population to eat meat only on special occasions...more

I'd like to think that my bizarre behavior in German restaurants earlier this month had a small part to play in this.

The First Brick of the Season

Since my first day out on two wheels on that misty morning last week, I haven't been able to stay off my bike. The roads are still too icy to risk a slip-and-slide outing on my road bike, so my mountain bike and I have been exploring the trails that weave in and out of the empty cow fields, breaking through frozen puddles and occasionally getting stuck in the larger ones, each venture no longer than an hour. Besides this being the point when I begin to lose the feeling in my hands and feet, I want to make sure my legs are happy with the reintroduction of this neglected activity to reduce my risk of a too-much-too-soon injury showing up later in the training cycle. So far so good, and in fact, I snuck in an unplanned brick today. The sun was peeking though the clouds as I returned from a 45-minute ride, and I just wasn't ready to go indoors yet. So I parked my bike, counted all my fingers and toes to make sure they were still there, and pulled on my running shoes for an easy 20 minute out and back in the snowy vineyards. There was the usual dead-legged, are-my-legs-even-there sensation for the first 15 minutes, but all cylinders seemed to be firing for the last 5. Now all I need to do is add some swimming, and I have something that resembles an Ironman training program.

I do think about swimming, if that counts. I think about it every day, and then I think about how far away the indoor pool is, how overcrowded the lanes can be, how cold it will feel to come out with wet hair, and I think 'maybe tomorrow'. I was spoiled last summer: our tiny village of Chexbres has a 50m outdoor pool that's a 5 minute walk from my back door. I swam almost every day, clocking an average of 8 km a week at my training peak, and got a really good two-piece tan while doing it. My hair air-dried in the sun as I lay on my towel, reading my French grammar book ('je nage, tu nage, nous nageons...', 'I swim, you swim, we swim...'), eating fresh peaches and listening to the village children heckle each other to jump in at the shallow end ('si tu saute pas, je te pousserai, idiote!', 'if you don't jump I will push you, you idiot!). I learned a lot of useful phrases from those kids. Ah, the days of summer. Swimming in the winter just isn't the same; it calls for a herculean motivational effort that I haven't been able to muster this January, but I have big plans to get wet in February, really I do...

Speaking of heckling, I have been receiving a lot of off-line inquiries for recipes from a surprising number of closet vegans amongst my readership (you know who you are). I've been hesitant, mostly out of fear that I'll be mistaken for a Vegan Housekeeping columnist, but I suppose the odd recipe won't hurt. So, I will be posting the best vegan recipe that I discovered at the end of each month. I currently have two strong contenders in mind for January's recipe - one's a curry and one's a cookie - but they could both be toppled by the Spanish Vegetable Hotpot on tonight's menu (intriguingly called 'Buried Treasure'), which has a chardonnay from the winemaker next door waiting to be paired with it.

Is it any wonder that I am not losing weight as a vegan?

A Vegan's Grip Strength

It’s been a while since I sequestered myself away for a weekend to read scientific journals. The last time was over ten years ago, while writing my thesis (saying that makes me feel so old). My research began on Friday night, and lasted about ten minutes before I was sidetracked by some interesting anthropological evidence which suggests that Roman Gladiators trained and competed on a vegetarian, if not largely vegan, diet. This turned into a larger detour from my self-mandated task, as I cast my mind back to images of Russell Crowe’s not-so-wispy figure battling Bengal tigers and such in Gladiator and led me into a labyrinth of websites (doesn’t online research always go this way?) that depict some rather arresting images of what can happen when you lift weights and eat too many plants.

While scaring me just a little, this particular line of inquiry served to remind me how much I miss going to the gym. For the cost of a gym membership here in Switzerland, one could rent a small commercial space, buy a second-hand treadmill and some last-season dumbbells, and not have to share any of it with others. Prohibitive costs aside, the gyms here open after 8am, close early on Saturdays and are closed all day Sunday, which means they are open at precisely all the times that I do not wish to workout (which reminds me a bit of the Swiss grocery stores: closed at lunchtimes, closed in the evenings, and closed on Sundays, which is precisely all the times that I would like to grocery shop). All of this to say that I am not expecting to look like a the female counterpart to General Maximus anytime soon, but I do miss my morning workouts with the rest of the other Lululemon-clad sprites in my hometown of Vancouver.

I quit my research at this point, in order to go squeeze the milk from my puréed almond mixture for my cereal in the morning (there is something extremely satisfying about this process, and I’ve developed an addiction to the veritably sublime, frothy, creamy elixir that results from my efforts. Needless to say, the kitchen is beginning to look like a small-scale nut processing plant).

When I finally got down to the task at hand, I managed to round up all of the studies that evaluate how a vegan diet affects physical performance. This took me several hours, and turned up preciously…(drumroll)…one. Now I wasn’t expecting to find much, but I was expecting that there would be a slightly larger body of research than this; at least a couple of studies with an introduction to the effect of: “we took 50 vegans, put them on a treadmill with a carrot dangling in front of them, and increased the speed to 8.5 m/hour. Blood lactate levels, respiratory gas exchange values and RPE were measured at regular intervals to the point of voluntary exhaustion. The protocol was repeated with flesh-eating athletes…”

But no cigar. The one study I found is from 1970 (must have been a good year for the vegetable lobby). A group of researchers compared thigh-muscle width, pulmonary function measures, and cardiorespiratory response to submaximal cycle ergometry exercise in 14 vegan and 86 nonvegetarian women. Ventilation responses during rest or exercise did not differ between the groups, and thigh muscle width was similar. The authors concluded that the lack of animal protein did not impair the physiologic response to submaximal exercise. (Cotes JE, Dabbs JM, Hall AM, et al. Possible effect of a vegan diet upon lung function and the cardiorespiratory response to submaximal exercise in healthy women. J Physiol 1970;209:30P–2P.)

So a vegan diet was found to not impair performance at submaximal exercise performance. Big deal. As my previous post indicates, there are a substantial number of high-level athletes who are training and racing on vegan diets. With this amount of empirical data available, why is this not a focus of study using controlled experiments? Yes, it’s reasonable to assume that the vegetable lobby is a little lacking in funding and influence. But there have been a decent number of studies that have pitted vegetarian athletes against meat-eaters, so why not vegans?

For those interested, here’s a snippit of how vegetarians have measured up against meat-eaters in a sample of studies published in peer-revived scientific journals:

Fisher, Irving, "The Influence of Flesh Eating on Endurance," Yale Medical Journal

At Yale, Professor Irving Fisher designed a series of tests to compare the stamina and strength of meat-eaters against that of vegetarians. He selected men from three groups: meat-eating athletes, vegetarian athletes, and vegetarian sedentary subjects. Of the three groups compared, the flesh-eaters showed far less endurance than the vegetarians, even when the latter were leading a sedentary life.

Overall, the average score of the vegetarians was over double the average score of meat-eaters, even though half of the vegetarians were sedentary people, while all of the meat-eaters tested were athletes.

Ioteyko, J., et al, Enquete scientifique sur les vegetariens de Bruxelles, Henri Lamertin, Brussels

Dr. Ioteyko compared the endurance of vegetarians and meat-eaters from all walks of life in a variety of tests. The vegetarians averaged two to three times more stamina than the meat-eaters. Most interestingly, the vegetarians took only one-fifth the time to recover from exhaustion compared to their meat-eating rivals.

Astrand, Per-Olaf, Nutrition Today 3: no2, 9-11

In 1968, a Danish team of researchers tested a group of men on a variety of diets, using a stationary bicycle to measure their strength and endurance. The men were fed a mixed diet of meat and vegetables for a period of time, and then tested on the bicycle. The average time they could pedal before muscle failure was 114 minutes. These same men at a later date were fed a diet high in meat, milk and eggs for a similar period and then re-tested on the bicycles. On the high meat diet, their pedaling time before muscle failure dropped dramatically—to an average of only 57 minutes. Later, these same men were switched to a strictly vegetarian diet, composed of grains, vegetables and fruits, and then tested on the bicycles—they pedaled an average of 167 minutes.

Schouteden, A., Ann de Soc. Des Sciences Med. et Nat. de Bruxelles

Doctors in Belgium compared the number of times vegetarians and meat-eaters could systematically squeeze a grip-meter. The vegetarians won handily with an average of 69, whist the meat-eaters averaged only 38.

Bravo for the vegetarians. These are some impressive results, but as a three-week old vegan with a repressed desire for validation, I am feeling under-represented. The results of this final study are sending me back to the kitchen to see if I can't squeeze some bonus milk from my almonds.

The Dawn of A New Day, and Some Musings on Cows

Today represents a new beginning for many. While I strained the almond pulp out of my chilled raw almond solution before dawn (which produced a beautifully creamy, frothy milk for my coffee and cereal), the Obamas were arriving at their seventh inaugural ball in Washington. Talk about endurance capacity. Here in my time zone, as soon as the sky turned from black to grey revealing a misty but otherwise dry morning, I decided to have a new beginning of my own by pulling my mountain bike out of the storage locker for the first time in two months.

It was like I hadn't missed a day. My legs had more pep than I could beat out of them, in spite of picking the road that goes straight up and over the hill behind our village. It was beautifully still and silent in the farmlands on the other side, with shifting mists that hung over the fields, changing the landscape moment by moment. I caught glimpses of sunlight hitting Lake Geneva below, and as the mists began to rise as dawn became day, I caught a glimpse of a fresh blanket of snow on the French Alps where they rise straight out of the water on the far side of the lake.

When I ran and rode through these fields last summer, I always had company. These are grazing lands for cows in the warmer months of the year and I don't mind admitting that, over time, I developed a bit of an affinity for the cows. My initial encounters with them were a little hesitant; in spite of knowing that they are docile, I couldn't help feeling some trepidation as I approached one of the fenced fields and pushed through the turnstile for the first time. I was on foot this particular day, and once in the field, I kept my pace at a nonchalant jog, trying to maintain a bright and breezy composure while telling myself that the cows won't bat an eyelid at my presence. They did, in fact, do more than bat an eyelid. The herd not only registered my presence right away by collectively lifting their heads from grazing and staring my way, a moment later they erupted into a chorus of moos and to my horror, began to amble over my way. I froze in an instant, convinced that they were alerting one another to my position in the field and were coordinating an attack. Too far from the turnstile to turn back, I bolted to a patch of lightly forested high ground at the edge of the field, where I got myself on the other side of a tree for protection and readied myself to climb it if necessary.

The cows lost interest in me as quickly as they had taken it, and went back to grazing. I ate a cliff bar while surveying their behaviour from behind the tree, and still not convinced of my safe passage through the field, I retreated back through the turnstile and ran the long way around, turning a 3 hour run into a 3.5 hour run.

Michael later told me what common sense should have: that the Swiss government would not put public footpaths through fields with dangerous animals, and the herd had probably mistaken me for the farmer arriving with feed. After a few successful cow-field passages on subsequent runs, I came to realize that cows, especially young cows, are actually just very curious animals. They would come close enough to survey me, but were easily startled if I was moving with any sort of speed in their vicinity.

There were no cows in the fields today, which was a little disappointing since I was looking forward to feeling a particularly close bond with them now that I don't eat them (hey, when you work from home, sometimes you seek fellowship in ways you never thought you would). I can only assume they have been taken indoors for winter, or have now gone to the great cowshed in the sky. Either way, the fields felt a little lonely without them.

All these ramblings mean that I have not compiled the results of my inquiry into what studies have been done of vegan diets and athletic performance. In preparation for lunch, I have big plans to turn the byproduct of my almond milk, the almond pulp, into a batch of nut burger patties by combining them with flax seeds, olive oil, balsamic vinegar and sea salt, then grilling them lightly on both sides (a recipe that I've modified from my most favourite cookbook, the Thrive Diet).

I will get around to reporting on some serious scientific data before the week is through, so help me God.

The Who's Who of Vegan Athletes

I decided to get crafty this morning by making my own almond milk. Almond milk is hard to find in Switzerland (quelle surprise), but I'm happy to make my own since it's simple to do.

My online recipe search took me on a red herring that I have not returned from when I came across a video clip of an ardent Carl Lewis in the kitchen, making roasted vegetable lasagna in what looks like some sort of taped home economics class from the late 90's.

It reminded me that I've been meaning to do a round-up of notable vegan athletes, so I've put the almond milk plans aside, done some research and checked and double checked the following list to ensure there are no sneaky cheese-eaters or whey-drinkers in it (the list of vegetarian athletes is much, much too long to include here).

So, here we have the round-up of the athletes of our time who are fueled by plants:

* Carl Lewis, Olympic Sprinter, Winner of 9 Gold Medals
* Dave Scott, 5 time Ironman World Champion
* Martina Navratilova, Former World #1 Womens Tennis Player
* Catherine Johnson, Elite Cyclist
* James Southwood, Savate Martial Artist
* Katie Coryell, Pro Surfer
* Kenneth Williams, Pro Bodybuilder
* Maria Vlasak, Elite Duathlete
* Molly Cameron, Pro Cyclist
* Scott Jurek, Ultramarathoner and 7 Time Winner of Western States 100 Miler
* Tim VanOrden, Mountain Runner
* Adam Myerson, Pro Cyclist
* Robert Cheeke, Bodybuilder
* Brendan Brazier, Pro Triathlete and winner of the Canadian 50K Ultramarathon Championships
* Jason Sager, Pro Mountain Biker
* Keith Holmes, Former World Champion Middleweight Boxer
* Sally Eastall, UK #2 Marathon Runner
* Lucy Stephens, Triathlete
* Pam Boteler, Canoeist
* Tonya Kay, Pro Dancer
* Christine Vardaros, Pro Cyclist
* Mac Danzig, Mixed Martial Arts Fighter
* Schulyer Love, Boxer
* Tim VanOrden, Mountain Runner
* Paul Chetirkin, Adventure Racer
* Ruth Heidrich, Six Time Ironman Finisher and Holder of the World Age-group (60-64) Fitness Record at the Cooper Clinic

For the athletes that I have done some further reading on from this list, all of them had their best performances after becoming vegan; most notably, Lewis won all nine gold medals after he made the switch.

So, is this good evidence that vegan diets are better for athletic performance? No, it isn't. That would be an example of poor logic. What this list shows is that a diet that includes animal products is not necessary for top physical performance (and for the less actively-inclined amongst us, I see no reason why this relationship could not be regressed to the conclusion that eating animal products is not necessary for general good health in the non-athlete; if I have overlooked something in my reasoning here, I welcome comments).

The challenge that this represents to conventional dietary thinking is, I think, enough to chew on for now. Once I have figured out how to make my almond milk, I might spend some time looking for studies that have tested the grander hypothesis.

Spiritually Vegan in France

I have returned home to Switzerland, after first confirming with Michael that the fog on Lake Geneva had lifted and it was safe to return. The first thing I did was make a big protein smoothie; I have to admit that I was getting concerned about the sufficiency of my protein intake over the last few days of my French travels. While I think I have the migrant population (in particular, the Lebanese and Moroccans) of southern France to thank for my lentil, couscous and quinoa haute cuisine, I knew I wasn't covering all my amino acid bases. Plus, there are only so many bean and rice dishes one can enjoy from plastic containers, eating with plastic cutlery. And not specific to the hardships of veganism but a general complaint about the French's neglect of the most important meal of the deal: if I had to look at one more sorry breakfast of white baguette and black coffee...

So I compensated with a very large pear and ginger smoothie using plain Vega powder this morning. I am rashoning my supplies of Vega for such possible deficit situations; I managed to smuggle in two tubs on returning from my last trip to Vancouver and I regard them with the reverence bestowed on a can of spam or a bag of sugar in 1940 London.

Before being whisked off by the TGV from Montpellier, I did have one fabulous sit-down, waited-upon and absolutely gratuity-worthy meal. Being a studenty town, I figured there would be at least one 'alternative' restaurant, which my inquiries at the tourist information office confirmed. Triptikulai is a tiny vegetarian restaurant tucked away in a narrow alley at the quieter end of the old town. The staff welcomed me like I was one of their own, in spite of me being the only person not toting tie-die in the room. After confirming that everyone was on the same page with what 'vegan' meant (and to my delight, the waiting staff freely used the straight-up English word 'vegan'), I left myself in the cook's hands. They served up a hearty plate of carrot, potato and almond curry over rice, and then brought out a chilled chocolate coconut soy mousse that could have induced a conversion experience in the most ardent milk-lover.

When the bill arrived, I had a spiritual experience of a different kind. At 21 euros for a vegetable curry, chocolate mousse and alcohol-free beer, I could only assume that I was paying either a novelty tax or a dumb tourist tax (I believe it to be the former; I found the staff of this restaurant to be too genuine for the latter). Looking around at my fellow diners, who all had a certain anti-establishment je-ne-sais-quoi, I couldn't begin to imagine what they do for a living that affords them such high-price meat-free dining. My guess is that they do their share of lunching on lentil salads from plastic containers, too.

Crustaceans are Animals, too

I felt like a million bucks on this morning’s 50 minute run. It’s the first run of the year where I felt like I could run as far as the trail that stretched out before me would allow, which in this case would have meant running all the way to the Mediterranean Sea.

I’m in the south of France. My run route this morning was the tree lined towpath of the Canal de Midi, a UNESCO-protected waterway that runs from Bordeaux to Sète, connecting the Atlantic to the Mediterranean and joining a hundred tiny towns in-between by waterway. I’m here alone, escaping the ice and fog around Lake Geneva and, I have to admit, chasing a romantic notion of aimlessly traveling around France, eating baguette and brie and drinking red wine on a different hilltop every evening.

It’s a little too cold to sit on hilltops right now, and I can’t eat any brie. But I can, and have been, eating a bounty of vegan foods that can be found in the south of France. To start with, there’s a wide variety of fruit in the markets, even in winter, and an accompanying colourful array of vegetables. But since I’m not equipped with food prep facilities, I have had to find some short-cuts to assembling meals for myself. Interestingly, I'm finding this is giving rise to a diet with much more variety than the baguette and brie regime of my dreams.

Two days ago, I sat on the lip of the fountain in a quiet Montpellier park in the late afternoon eating a chilled couscous salad, to which I added a roasted beet and fennel salad, both found in the déjeuner a-go-go section of a minisupermarché. Not bad at all.

A day later, I lunched on fresh baby spinach tossed with carrots and raisins and the largest red globe grapes I have ever seen (like little golf balls), along with a sublime (and cream-free!) sweet potato soup in a Toulouse café. And in between, I climbed up the inner wall of the Medieval Cité in Carcassonne, with a demi-bottle of Bordeaux and some sort of spiced lentil dish (again, a supermarket find) in my backpack, and dined as the sun went down over the sprawling ville basse that stretched out below, legs dangling over the ramparts.

This style of solo, ad lib and al fresco dining is working well for me. Besides the obvious benefit of being cost-effective (but can you put a price on dining at sunset with a view from the wall of Europe’s largest fortified town?), it’s also easy to vet my food choices when I can pick things up from a shelf and read the ingredients’ listing. Ordering that requires interaction still poses challenges, but the only kink to speak of so far came when trying to order in a Carcassonne Thai-hangout at lunch today.

Standing in front of his helpful display fridge, the owner told me (with much animated enthusiasm), that they had a vegetarian option for me. He pointed at a noodle dish that clearly had prawns in it and exclaimed ‘végétarien!’

‘Ummm...mais il y a des crevettes, dedans, non?’ (Ummm...but there are prawns in it, no?)

‘Oui, oui, seulement des crevettes. C’est vegetarian!’ (‘Yes, yes, just prawns. It’s vegetarian!’)

I could see there was some work to do here, but I was hungry and was not about to engage a Frenchman in the philosophical discussion as to whether shellfish are animals, so I ordered the steamed vegetables. Thank goodness there’s nothing ambiguous about broccoli.

My New Look

The very observant amongst us might have noticed that my blog has a new look. I have my good friend and fellow blogger, Vince Hemingson, to thank for this.

Vince was the first (but not the only) to comment that my previous homemade header was more ‘cute’ than ‘sporty’. Vince, who is currently a mature student at Langara College’s Design Program in Vancouver, very generously offered to design a blog header for me. All I had to do was send over some pictures of my ‘sporty’ self. I accepted the offer with the proviso that in the event that I didn’t like his creation and choose not to use it, we would remain friends. He said sure, and went to work (although I later found out that, in one of the best displays of seamless small-scale outsourcing I have ever seen, he farmed the task out to a kid in his class). Luckily for everyone involved, I loved the design creation he sent back, and am beginning to feel like a professional blogger.

Thanks, Vince! I’m glad we can still be friends...

More Peanut Butter in the Snow

It’s been four days since my last post and I’ve received a few emails from concerned individuals, gently inquiring after my well-being. No, I have not been quietly shriveling up like a month-old head of cabbage, shut up in the Swiss mountains, growing pale and limp as my hemoglobin levels plunge and my muscles atrophy.

Rather, I’ve been training - and feeling stronger every day. I’ve also been cooking up a vegan storm in the kitchen. There have been moments of triumph, including a dozen balsamic spinach stuffed mushrooms that I ate like one-bite candies after a day of snowboarding, a batch of homous that (for the first time in my homous-making life) tasted like the stuff of a Greek restaurant, and my second attempt at a lentil and chickpea curry that made a really good dinner, even better next-day lunch, and the rest will freeze well. The greatest triumph of all was realized on Friday night, when I gingerly invited Michael to share a vegan meal with me. I assembled a small smorgasbord (I wanted to give him options): spinach salad with honey mustard dressing, sautéed garlic green beans and toasted almonds, a three-bean salad tossed in a light soy and sesame dressing, an assortment of oven-roasted winter vegetables and the aforementioned triumphant homous and wholewheat flatbread. I was ready to take the proverbial gloves off if he rose from the table to fetch cheese from the kitchen, but he cleared his plate and then proceeded to declare ‘that was really good, and no animals had to die to make it taste that way’. I suspect he surprised himself as much as he surprised me with this insight.

My daily runs, still somewhere between 30-50 minutes at this stage, are starting to feel comfortable. But the ground remains icy around Lake Geneva and worse, a perpetual fog has been hanging in the valley for days, so I replaced today's run with another snowshoe session to break the grey monotony. Michael decided to join me, and we chose Les Paccots as our sun search destination. We were rewarded with blue skies as soon as we ascended above 700m on the drive. Even more rewarding, we were accompanied by one of our few authentically Swiss friends, Francois. Francois was first Michael’s colleague and later became our neighbour when we moved to the village of Chexbres last summer. He has been an invaluable insider for us, helping us integrate into small town Swiss life. We (more specifically, me) have tirelessly peppered him with questions on critical daily-living items such as where to take our household recycling, how to insure our road bikes, what restaurants are open on a Sunday, and how long it would take the other locals to accept us in the community. In response to the latter question, he gave a characteristically glass-half-full answer:

‘Give them time; they are still getting used to you. The Swiss people are not unfriendly, they're just busy.’

I got a less optimistic answer to the same question when I recently posed it to a fellow expat and long-term resident of the region:

“It takes time, lots of time. It took ten years for our neighbours to invite us over for coffee. This year [year sixteen], they invited us to their Christmas party for the first time. Be prepared to wait a couple of years before they entertain a friendship; maybe longer if you’re vegan.”

In light of this, we are always extremely pleased when our friend Francois agrees to accompany us for an outing. In fact, besides enjoying his company and valuing his knowledge of local custom, we secretly harbour the hope that he will help us make further inroads with the locals. However, today we learnt that outings in the snow with Francois are a bit of a challenge. Like most Swiss, Francois was born with skis on his feet. But unlike most Swiss, he embraces a spirit of ad hoc adventure and a freestyle approach to life that makes me feel positively soft and overly urban every time I ask him what he did on the weekend. I’ve heard him use such phrases as “we’ll figure out the details as we go,” and “I don’t make plans that far in advance” that have left me marveling at how he hasn’t been expatriated by his fellow countrymen. So when we arrived at the trailhead and he pointed in the general direction we should go (straight up, apparently), and then shot off in a poof of powder on his touring skis, we took it in our stride. We shuffled along behind on our snowshoes, trying to understand how Francois had skied up an 8% gradient. We thought we were making good time until Francois glided past us on his descent, having already summited and taken in the view. He was now ready for lunch-time fondue and we weren’t even half way up. We shuffled on until we achieved the desired goal of a good two hours of cardio activity and then settled on a viewpoint that seemed as good as any for semi-frozen peanut butter sandwiches.

Speaking of which, I am going to have to bring some variety to my sandwich life. The peanut butter sandwiches travel well and are not so bad at sub-zero temperatures (if I really use my imagination, they are a close cousin of Ben and Jerry's peanut butter swirl icecream), but too much of a good thing is going to lead to an inevitable burn-out. Tomorrow, I'm experimenting with other nut butters (there's a world of nut butters - cashew, pecan, walnut, almond, macadamia nut - that I have yet to explore). I'm hoping these options will see me through to the first thaw.

What I'm Eating, Analyzed

My current training strategy is simple: I am running every day for somewhere between 30-50 minutes at a steady pace. No intervals, no hills, no long runs. I’m just getting my body used to moving and letting my soft tissues make the necessary adjustments that will save me from injury later in the training cycle. I will be adding some similarly moderate biking as soon as the temperatures allow the compacted snow on the roads to melt (that’s supposed to happen this weekend) and swimming will be added as soon as I motivate myself to get wet when it’s cold outside.

This morning I went down to the lakefront path that links Vevey to Montreux to do one of my favourite flat runs of last summer. It’s a 10K out-and-back from the statue of Charlie Chaplin in Vevey to the statue of Freddie Mercury in Montreux (each town being their respective resting places). You couldn’t find two more expressively different figures than these two life-size bronze effigies. Mr. Chaplin, who is shorter than me, is standing in the center of a cheerful rose garden in one of his characteristically comic stances, wearing shoes that look too big and sporting a walking stick. At the other end of my 5K route, Mr. Mercury has been immortalized in one of his classic flamboyant on-stage stances, feet firmly grounded and right fist thrust in the air.

As with all my out-and-back runs, I ritualistically touch the marker at the turnaround point and check my watch. When I reached out my gloved hand to touch the turnaround marker today, I’m sure that, to passers-by, I looked like a die-hard fan reaching out to Freddie for strength. I was spent. I opted to not check my watch (for fear of completely demoralizing myself) and turned around for a significantly slower back half (with the chorus of The Show Must Go On playing over and over and over in my mind). I have never been happier to see Charlie’s goofy figure in the rose garden.

After cooling down, pulling myself together and picking up some vegetables (what else?) at Vevey’s farmers’ market, I headed home with the resolve to do some math. Is there something amiss with my macronutrient intake? At day five of veganism, it’s too early to see signs of protein or iron deficiency. While I have also been mindful of not making the classic new-vegan mistake of cutting out animal products without adding the variety of plant products needed to provide proper nutrition, I think it’s worth doing a check-in on what I’ve been eating to ensure that my painful start to training is not due to anything more than the aforementioned couch potato assimilation in previous months. This seems to be what everyone is most interested in anyway (I thought it would be dull to write about what I’m eating every day, but I obviously don’t know my audience).

So here’s the breakdown of what I ate yesterday (don't squint, click for a larger view):


Now, I did a wonderful (albeit obsessive) thing two years ago and recorded the macronutrient value of every item of food and drink I consumed while training for my second ultramarathon, Stormy Trail. So I have a good set of data with which to compare non-vegan me with vegan me.

Here’s what I ate on May 2nd, 2006:



So, the vegan me seems to be eating substantially less protein, and substantially more fat (but I plead that they are good fats) and my overall calorie consumption is higher (largely due to the calories from fat). According to my calculations, I am still getting the recommended amount of protein for my height and frame size (I should be getting a minimum of 70g for light activity levels – this is one simple protein calculator) and I’m not doing any weight-training, or back-to-back long run days of 30K and 40K respectively, as I was during the time period that the second sample day is taken from. My take-home message to myself: I'll need to do better with my protein consumption when my training volume starts increasing. For now, I am attributing my less-than-inspiring 10K to nothing more than some garden-variety lack of fitness.

I’ve set my mind to doing the statue-to-statue run again in two weeks, and I want to hear a different rendition in my head. If it's something other than The Show Must Go On or Death on Two Legs, I’ll consider it progress.

What I'm Eating

It’s time to talk about what I’ve been eating.

My debut days as a vegan have been conducted on the road in Germany. I am rather surprised, and pleased, with the relative ease with which we grocery shopped, ate out and navigated hotel breakfast buffets over this four day period.

You could say I entered my vegan year with a straight-backed, white-knuckled, clenched-jaw sort of posture. My body had a certain tension every time I entered a culinary establishment; I was convinced that the Germans were determined to slip sausage into my off-the-menu orders when I wasn’t looking (I was armed with a sort of sausage-radar, one could say). I carried a jar of peanut butter, a plastic knife and a snack-pack of ryvita in my handbag everywhere I went, ready to assemble a p.b. cracker sandwich should I find myself in some sort of vegan-emergency.

Michael, who’s been nothing but a good sport about my new lifestyle from the moment I announced my intentions over a decidedly non-vegan breakfast mid-December (the first words out of his mouth were ‘I won’t be joining you in that’; the second were ‘but I will fully support you’), did a stand-up job of translating my interrogations of the waiting staff with unwavering patience.

Some snapshots:

Michael and I are shopping in downtown Munich. Lunchtime is upon us. We approach a cute outdoor soup-selling booth. There are six vats of soup on offer, and amazingly, three of them have labels that suggest they are vegetarian. I am hungry and cold, but try not to get my hopes up. Two helpful-looking girls are peering out from behind the vats, ready to take our order. They confirm that the tomato soup, mixed vegetable soup and carrot and ginger soup are indeed vegetarian.

“Are they, by chance, vegan?” Michael asks in German.

“Yes” the girls reply.

“They answered too quickly,” I growl at Michael. They must have noticed the doubtful expression on my face; they turn to each other for a quick confab, and then turn back and reduce my options from three to one. Michael double-confirms that there are no sausage bits, creams or meat-broths used in the making of the mixed vegetable soup, and we are satisfied.

Perfect weather for patio dining: enjoying vegan soup at -8C in Munich

A restaurant snapshot:

We are looking for somewhere to have dinner in the resort town of Bad Toelz. The name of one particular restaurant is encouraging, Café Sol. It sounds like somewhere that one might find some non-traditional options, and we are indeed rewarded with a substantial salad section on the menu. Having identified one salad that has the potential to be turned vegan without too many alterations, we test the willingness of the kitchen. It’s a mixed green salad with artichokes, olives, sprouts, corn, beets and a medley of different cheeses. If they are willing to remove the various cheeses and include some extra vegetables, as well as substitute the yogurt dressing for oil and vinegar, then I will dine like a vegan queen.

The waitress comes over to take our order. Michael introduces me (I am no longer introduced as ‘my girlfriend who doesn’t speak German’ when we place orders, I now have the even more endearing title of ‘my girlfriend who doesn’t speak German or eat animal products) and he politely asks if they would consider our modifications to the mixed greens salad. She is both accommodating and gracious, and offers to substitute mushrooms for the mozzarella and feta. There is a moment of confusion as to whether parmesan comes from animals, and after everyone agrees that it does, the modified order is taken to the kitchen. I am served a massive plate of mixed greens with a mountain of olive-oil marinated mushrooms on top, which goes very well with the cabernet, and I do indeed dine like a vegan queen.

A supermarket snapshot:

We have a near miss while shopping for lunch items at the ubiquitous Aldi. I feel like soup again, so Michael heads off to the canned goods section to hunt for a vegetarian soup sans meat broth. I wish him luck. I head off on what is ultimately a fruitless search for homous amongst the cheeses and dips. We meet in the salad section where I am grabbing one of everything in sight, and Michael is grasping two soup cans to his chest, looking very pleased with himself.

“I found two safe soups!” he announces.

“Great!” I respond, and we add them to the basket and head to the checkout.

While in the lineup, Michael decides to pass the time by doing a casual reread of the soups’ ingredients, and we learn our first lesson in the importance of due diligence with ultra-long German ingredient lists (given that the average German word is 20 characters long, these lists look like the company’s business plans printed on the side of the can to me). It turns out that one does have to read the words in brackets. Closer inspection reveals that eggs were used to make the noodles in the vegetable noodle soup, and cream was used in the finish of the tomato soup. The soup cans are left next to the batteries on the checkout lineup shelf and I eat a sad lunch of salad and fruit on a cold, cold day. My spirits are lifted later in the afternoon when we find a café that has soymilk options, and I order the largest latte that Europeans coffee shops allow (although I did do some December dry-runs of drinking black coffee in preparation for January; I can only assume it’s an acquired taste).

All in all, not a bad start. I take back much of the fun I made of German culinary culture in advance. Perhaps the most encouraging moment was when I learnt that there is actually a German word for vegan (veganisch), which brings the total number of words in my German vocabulary to nine.

Now I’m back home in the French-speaking region of Vaud, Switzerland, and things might not be so easy. I don’t have my on-hand translator (Michael’s French leaves more to be desired than mine) and there doesn’t seem to be a French word for vegan (although a friend living in Paris has suggested that I could try végétalien, which is only one letter away from the word for vegetarian, végétarien, so I’m forecasting some difficulties here). Still, I live in a village perched on a ridge overlooking vineyards with endless farmland stretching out behind. How hard can it be to find a decent vegetable?

A Bumpy Reentry

I am seriously out of shape.

I don't know why I'm surprised by this; I did my best assimilation of a couch potato through the month of December. There was not much training to speak of during November either; work commitments took me back to Vancouver for a month where I put in long days at the office and attempted to eat my weight in sushi while catching up with friends in the evenings.

So when we woke up to -15C and icy pavements in every direction this morning (we are currently in the German town of Bad Toelz, at the foot of the Bavarian Alps) and Michael suggested that we rent snowshoes and attempt to get a run in on some hard packed trails, I had no idea that I was going to break down after ten minutes at a moderate tempo with a breathless 'let's walk for a bit'. Not good. We managed a gentle jog/hike up to a view point on a soft packed forest trail where we stopped to breakfast on some semi-frozen peanut butter sandwiches and grapes, before high-tailing it back down to hit the hot spring baths for which the town in noted.

Almost at the top

Michael stops for a non-vegan pretzel

I seemed to have trouble kicking up snow behind me while running

On reflection, it wasn't only my training schedule that left a lot to be desired over recent months. Once I had made up my mind to turn my back on some of my favourite things come January 1, I adopted a 'last chance' attitude towards tiramisu/croissants/turkey and stuffing/icecream and anything else I predicted I might miss in 2009. In light of this pre-vegan loading phase, it's not really surprising that I felt like a was wrapping up a brisk 10K after less than ten minutes of snow-running.

Floating around in the outdoor mineral pools, feeling like a baby beluga marooned in the Dead Sea, I took to counting the beer bellies on German women in an attempt to console myself for the morning's disappointing reentry into physical activity. I bolstered that effort by reminding myself that January is always like this, and it always rights itself with a few weeks of solid training and restrained eating.

Still, I think I'm going to need a near-term goal to focus on. An Ironman in September might as well be light-years away in terms of providing the inspiration I need now to crunch out of first gear. Besides, I need to test my vegan progress at an earlier point in the year. I have enough marathons under my belt to benchmark from, so first thing tomorrow, I am looking into what springtime marathons are not yet sold out in Western Europe. There's nothing like a looming 42.2K to get things kicked-started.

The Why

Last night I dreamt that I inadvertently ate powdered skim milk. I was breakfasting at a buffet in some nondescript hotel in an unidentifiable locale. Having passed over the eggs, sausages, bacon, smoked salmon, cream cheese, nutella and yogurts, I carefully selected a bowl of pre-made muesli. Back at the table, I combined it with some soy milk that I had stealthily smuggled in a miniature fish tank inside my handbag (no explanation for why I had chosen this vessel). It somehow came to light amongst the (also nondescript) company at the table that I had mis-read the ingredients listing on the muesli packet, and I was enjoying a cow product in ignorant bliss right before their eyes. I immediately woke in a light sweat, with the shadow of the sinking realization that I had blown it, and everyone knew about it.

You don't have to be an expert in Freudian theory to figure out that this dream was my psyche's way of working out some of the anxiety I am feeling with the knowledge that the world is now watching by vegan foray. The responses to yesterday's proclamation were exciting, and just a little dizzying. Yes, there are indeed now people watching. And yes, I'd better start memorizing the words for every four-legged, two-legged, flying or swimming creature, as well as all their by-products, in all four official Swiss languages, or I am going to get caught out.

In the dust of yesterday's blog launch, people are asking lots of questions. I've been asked what my diet is going to look like, exactly, how am I ever going to get enough protein, what's my plan to ensure my iron levels don't drop and most poignantly, what on earth should people prepare when I come over for dinner? All very valid, and they will all be answered in due course. For today, I promised I would outline why I am doing this. Why would a self-professed foodie who made it her business to evaluate every new restaurant in town by sampling from every section of the menu, decide to give up all animal products? Not just the animals, but all animal products?

I am going to keep it to a simple outline, and then I am going to do the lazy thing and include lots of links to other sources that can explain it better than I. Here is the simple outline:

1. I think that a plant-based diet is not only better for a human's health, but could actually be an optimal diet for athletic performance (this is, of course, the heart of my blog and the hypothesis that is now under test).

2. I think that switching to plant-based diets would almost instantly solve many of our environmental messes, and even better, it would be easier to do as a civilization than weaning us off our fossil fuel dependence.

In support of the first item above, it is really no secret that decreasing meat consumption and increasing fruit and vegetable consumption protects against two of the biggest diseases of Western civilization, cancer and cardiovascular disease. Then there is the side benefit of curbing our collective weight gain and the host of conditions now associated with excessive body weight. I am not going to examine any of this here; there is a plethora of empirical evidence that indicates that meat consumption is directly linked with our poor health in the West (some good reading on this) and in that sense, it's old news. Similarly, evidence that points to animal products' negative impact on our health has been trickling into the zeitgeist in recent years. Dairy product consumption has close links to cancer (in particular prostrate cancer and breast cancer), cardiovascular disease and poor immune system function. Most of us don't have the necessary enzymes to digest cow's milk, all of us produce an antibody against it, and it's linked to all sorts of issues with children's health, from asthma to diabetes (What's wrong with milk? is a good starting point). Again, this is not really news, regardless of the degree to which it has actually altered our eating habits.

But I'm not just interested in avoiding disease (let's be honest, how many of us under 35 give this serious consideration on a daily basis? Isn't that something we will worry about later - say, after 50?) I am more interested in having a diet that gives me the highest quality of health for my life right now. As an athlete, I'm interested in the optimal diet for performance. I think that plants might just be able to provide all of the protein, iron and calcium I need (and provide them in more digestible forms), as well as a host of other micronutrients that our animal-focused diets are missing, and this will allow me to train more, recover faster between trainings, and ultimately, race better.

My second motivation is less concerned with my own body and has more to do with an interest in how my daily diet is impacting the environment. It is now recognized that animal agriculture is making a much more serious contribution to climate change, air pollution and land, soil and water degradation than we've previously recognized (Livestock's Long Shadow, a report published by the UN in 2007, makes for good bedtime reading on this). 18% of greenhouse gases can be directly attributed to livestock production, making it the second highest contributor to atmosphere-alternating gases, next to energy production. It actually beats transportation. This, combined with my increasing awareness of the kind of lives that livestock animals lead, and the methods used to end their lives (just Youtube 'slaughterhouse practices', but I warn you, this is not for the faint-hearted), sums up what was on my mind when I made the decision to give up eating them.

So, that covers my motivation. This is the ideology that you can expect to permeate the discussion here, but the focus is really on what the real-world results are. With that in mind, it is early to bed to get on with some trianing tomorrow morning. Nobody ever got in Ironman shape by typing.

Firsts

The first time doing anything new is never especially easy. 

'Firsts' have a certain awkward quality to them. There also tends to be a significant amount of second-guessing involved. First dates, first two-wheel rides, first day of a new job, first pair of heels, first blog posts… 

Since whatever I write on this, my first day of a 365-day commitment, will never be as poised and poignant as I want it to be, I have decided to opt for a pragmatic approach to my opening post by heading off a few questions that are likely to arise. 

Firstly, I am going to lay out the ground rules of what I mean by 'being vegan'. My vegan diet involves not consuming any animal meat (sounds obvious), products of animals such as their milk or eggs (also obvious), or by-products from the slaughtering of animals such as gelatin or the ingredient that makes chicken stock taste chickeny (perhaps less obvious). Unlike the strictest practicing vegans – and I make my hat off to them - my version of the vegan commitment does not include any restrictions on wearing animal products such as leather, or consuming foods that animals have synthesized but do not contain any animal ingredients (honey is, in fact, the only example I can think of in this category, so it seems to need its own mention). 

Secondly, for those of you who are wondering whether being vegan while living in Switzerland is a bad idea, I can tell you right now that it is. The only country that I think might be more challenging is Greenland, where the only vegetable in sight is the seaweed found in their stomachs of the marine life that the indigenous diet is comprised of. 

While the Swiss are not big meat eaters (at US$38/lb for sirloin, I'm glad I'm not anymore either), they do have a love affair with the dairy cow that stops just short of giving them a seat at the family dinner table. Cheese, chocolate, cream and butter are rampant in this country; it's difficult to find a dish that has not been permeated with at least one of these. Fondue is not a stereotype; it's a typical Sunday dinner. Sausages (the German influence to the north) and deli meats (the Italian influence to the south) also feature strongly in daily cuisine here. The French neighbors to the west have contributed that inclination to over-represent cream-based sauces at every turn. I'm not sure what the Austrians have contributed in the evolution of Swiss cuisine, but I'm willing to bet it's not green in colour. To be fair, I have seen some restaurant menus that have explicit vegetarian options in Switzerland. As far as I can tell, this just means you get extra cheese. 

In terms of vegetables' place in the local cuisine: the Swiss idea of a salad is some shreds of iceberg lettuce with a few pasty-looking tomato wedges and, when some extra effort went into it, some shredded carrot on top. Cooked vegetables can sometimes be identified under layers of emmental, but I hold little hope for their nutrient value surviving the boiling or baking at high temperatures. The narrow array of fruits on supermarket shelves usually look a little worse for wear, as if they never quite recovered from the journey from Spain or southern Italy. Despite their worse for wear look, you will still pay the we-imported-it-and-you'll-pay-for-that Swiss premium for them. 

I almost forgot about eggs. One of my favourite things to do on the homestretch of my morning ride is to stop at the self-serve butcher at the farm behind our village and pick up half a dozen speckled eggs (complete with the odd feather still stuck to them) while watching the happy hens cluck around the fenceless meadow. While I like to cook eggs for breakfast (Anglo-style), eggs are otherwise important in Switzerland because baking is important in Switzerland. In fact, they are a big contributor to some of the best baked goods I have ever tasted in my life. I've had Swiss-made croissants that could have some straight off a plate in a Parisian café, and cakes and pastries that could go head-to head with Germany's second greatest culinary pride (bratwurst continues to hold onto the number one spot). 

Now I've made my mouth water. It's only day one and I just felt a slight panic at the prospect of the next 364 days without the option of turning to the humble egg when the fridge has little else to yield in the stand-by protein department. This would be a good moment to outline why I am doing this (believe me, I would not be undertaking something so inconvenient without some very good reasons). On second thought, I think that's best kept for tomorrow's post. Like a first date, nobody wants to find themselves seated across from long-winded company long after the plates have been cleared.