I'm new to the world of green

Hey guys I just started practicing to be a full on vegetarian. I haven't consumed dairy, meat (accept for salmon), or eggs. I want to know what to avoid, but more importantly I want to know what I can eat and whats good to eat. Thanks guys.

 

I would chose food that can be grown local that way you can see what kind of impact it is having on your own environment. Also local food cuts off alot of the global market and uses less gas.

I would stay away from anything with soybeans right now soybeans are the biggest destructive force to the primitive virgin Amazon forest. So many animals insects plant are destroyed just to fuel the consumer soy craze.
It is sad a lot of these plants have valuable medicine that have never been discovered yet and insects and birds that are still unknown to man. A lot of These things will never be replace they will be lost forever.



Areas the size of Belgium in the Brazilian rainforest are being cleared annually by illegal loggers. The logged land is then used to plant non-GM soy beans. The Brazilians are making huge profits from this illegal activity by tapping into the public demand for GM free foods. Once the soy crops have been harvested, the land becomes useless and nothing is able to grow in these areas again.
The irony is that soy is a common food of vegetarians, many who will be horrified to know that their protein supplement is causing such devastating environmental damage to the rain forest and its animal life.
http://www.looking-glass.co.uk/news/library2003/2003-10-soya-rainforest.htm

to the horror of environmental activists, soybeans are claiming increasingly bigger swaths of rainforest to make way for plantations, The Amazon lost some 10,000 square miles of forest cover last year alone -- 40 percent more than the year before.
http://www.mongabay.com/external/soybeans2003.htm

 

What about hemp seed milk?

 

Does that mean I can't eat to fu?

 

tofu is made out of soybeans. i still eat it though... cause it's yummy. and while i hate it that the rainforests are being cut down... perhaps the best way to go about fixing this problem is not by refusing to eat soy stuff. just try to find stuff made locally instead of just stuff out of the grocery store.

and you can be a vegetarian and still eat dairy and eggs. a vegan doesn't eat (or wear or use) anything animal produced, like dairy, eggs, honey, silk, leather, etc. do some google searches on vegetarianism, veganism, and you'll find a lot of information!

 

Thanks. Well I got a vegetarian starter kit from a site and my friend is becoming a vegetarian too. The problem is finding this stuff locally. I will just have to look around.

 

What are some other meat subtitutes besides tofu?

 

Quorn's good, but that contains egg.

 

Well I'm still eating fish for now until I find a substitute and I m also still eating yogurt and some cheese. I have really altered what I eat by 180 degrees. So I'm going to take it day by day. hahah I don't want to scare my body. I just don't want to eat soy if its responsible for jungle thinning.

 

Any other advice?

 

I think the best way to eat green is research everything you are buying. When you buy something you are supporting the actions that produce what you are buying, I think that is what it is really about.
It is hard to get unbiased info a lot of times the whole “green” movement is very commercialized and a lot of the info that gets put out is just commercialized advertising info.
I guess the only thing people can really do is get as much info as you can on what you are buying and try to figure out what is unbiased and make your own decisions.
Sometime you can do google news searches and get the newest info on a lot of consumer products and also find good key words in articles to do more Internet searches with.

I also find it hard to find a protein replacement for meat that isn’t much more destructive then eggs or beef in the climate I live in. I can get cattle just down the road and I can see the impact it is having on the environment. To import a meat replacement would just be much more destructive and destroy many more animals and environment then local chickens or beef.
When I lived in Hawaii it was no problem you can just go to the farmers market and it was all local and everything imported was nasty processed food in a can. But it is much harder in a northern climate with a small growing season.

 

I'm just getting started too.

I think that my household will still eat meat until our kitchen supplies run out, then restock accordingly. We're phasing out slowly, red meat first then I'm going lacto-ovo from there. I'm hoping to find local sources of eggs and milk (don't want the factory-farmed stuff), but I don't know about the dairy. Everything moo around here is factory, I think. A lot of the local farmers come to where I work, maybe they'll know someone. Oh well, my husband and I are both lactose-intolerant anyway.

As for veggies, I have an indoor container garden that I'm really getting excited about. It's that and the farmer's market.

Incidentally, I did a wikipedia search and got a lot of good info. A friend of mine reccomended a book called the Veganomicon (take a good guess), and I found a site called Post Punk Kitchen. They're both vegan, but the food looks reallt good and lacto-ovo can sirely be added if desired. Yoga Journal Magazine also has a lot of recipies in it.

 

I'm a new vegetarian aswell.
well, I do eat fish and other seafood, but I usually eat that stuff up in maine, cause it's all local, and they just go out in boats and catch the stuff, it's not like their raised in big plants. I don't seem the harm in eating fish caught by local fishermen

I love milk, and it's an awesome source of protein. drink 2 1/2 cups in the morning and you pretty much got half of your DV in that. I'll have that much with a cup of autumn wheat, and a cup and a quarter of milk, so that's 15 grams of protein there too, so that's 35 grams. I make sure I drink milk from organic farms, like the Organic Cow of Vermont, that's a good company. Their cows are treated well and the milk is awesome.

Sometimes I'll get a container of cottage cheese, and the whole thing has 52g of protein, and I can easily eat that in a day.
I'm such a good vegetarian, hahaha. I love milk I mean, I'd drink soy milk, but with the rainforests and all

looking at post above... I never knew sbout lentils... awesome.