Improved health is just one reason to try meatless on March 20

By Jennifer Brown

Spring rolls around on Friday, March 20, and thousands of people around the globe plan to put down the burgers and chicken in favor of greens and grains. It’s not that they’re ravenous to chew up the first signs of life the second the frozen hell known as winter finally thaws. Rather, they’ll be getting their veg on to celebrate Meatout Day, an event that calls for people to step up and kick the meat habit for 24 hours, and then hopefully work toward cutting back or completely eliminating animal products for the rest of their lives.

Activities around the world—which the Meatout organization helps local volunteers coordinate—include festivals, cooking demonstrations, lectures and feed-ins. In Syracuse, Alto Cinco and Strong Hearts Cafe will provide an information table at their venues during the day. And in Cicero there will be an information table as well as a vegetarian/vegan or “veg” meal and lecture at Speedy Greens Organic Vegetarian Restaurant from 4 to 7 p.m.

“It’s a very festive day,” says Dawn Moncrief, Meatout’s executive director, from her Bethesda, Md., office. “We have it in all 50 states and two dozen countries, and people get to celebrate the joys and benefits of a veg diet. So a lot of people focus on the health and environmental benefits, and, of course, there are a lot of people concerned with the animal side of things.”

Cathy Kelly shows off a Speedy Greens salad.

Sweet dreams: Among the goodies at Sugarpearl is the zucchini sweet pumpkin pannycakes, a vegan carb delight for $4.95.

Founded in 1985 by the non-profit organization FARM (Farm Animal Rights Movement), this will mark the 25th annual celebration of Meatout Day. While it is a huge event for the organization, Meatout doesn’t go into hibernation for 364 days waiting for the next anniversary. Instead, the group pushes year-round for people to exist meat-free, conducting around 1,000 events worldwide including an Earth Day event on April 22, which educates the masses on how destructive meat production is to the environment.

Beyond the events, Meatout also provides tools like a free Veg Kit and a weekly Meatout Monday e-letter, a fun missive providing recipes, inspiration and veg product information, to aid people with their transition to a plant-based diet. Folks can sign up for both the kit and the e-letter at www.meatout.org or call (800) MEATOUT.

While Meatout’s main priority is giving animals a voice and protecting their rights, it also concerns itself with the negative health and environmental effects that go along with eating meat—the increased risk for high cholesterol and any number of cancers, and the depletion of water, grain and land to raise livestock—and fully supports all reasons behind adopting a plant-based diet.

For Moncrief, Meatout’s executive director for the past seven years, one of those reasons was a way to protect animals and become proactive about reversing world hunger. A vegetarian from the age of 19, Moncrief had the basic idea of what it meant back then, but she didn’t fully understand the implications of not eliminating all animal products. While in graduate school studying world hunger issues, someone clued her in that cutting out meat alone isn’t enough to stop animal suffering.

“{My friend} says, ‘Oh, if you really care about the animals you should go vegan, because the things they do to animals for eggs and dairy is worse {than just slaughtering them}.’” As Moncrief delved deeper into her friend’s claim, she discovered just how bad industrial-farmed dairy cows and hens have it. According to the Action For Animals Web page (www.afa-online.org), both industries keep their dairy cows and hens constantly impregnated and boarded away in cramped stalls and cages until they’re no longer of use to the farmers. The hens and dairy cows then join the fate of other cows and chickens and are sent off to the slaughterhouse to die at a fraction of their natural life expectancy.

Moncrief also discovered that in order to feed all of these farm animals, food is taken from the poorest of countries to sustain the livestock. “{That got me} wondering, ‘Why isn’t anyone talking about how food can be more accessible to the poor if we weren’t outfitting it to create food for the wealthy?’” Moncrief says. “And so that became my mission to get the United States in particular, but also globally, to reduce their meat consumption, preferably to eliminate it.”

Things have shifted toward a more veg-friendly world, a trend Moncrief has been pleased to witness. Veganism is no longer a foreign word or casual lifestyle; more and more people want what they eat to be a reflection of their ideals and morals. People realize the benefits of fueling their bodies with pure foods. According to the Meatout Web site, more than 30 million people have at least tested the waters of a meat-free diet and U.S. consumption of beef and veal has gone down by 20 percent and 70 percent, respectively.

“We’ve seen a lot of progress,” Moncrief says. “A lot of younger people are exploring new ideas and {becoming aware of} the cruelty that goes on in meat processing. The global awareness movement that’s going on is really pushing a lot of people to go vegetarian and vegan because {according to a November 2006 United Nations report called “Livestock’s Long Shadow”} meat production is the No. 1 contributor to greenhouse gasses—even more than all transportation combined.”

Still, a common concern is whether or not vegs get a sufficient amount of protein. Sudha Raj, an assistant professor and graduate director of the nutrition and hospitality management program at Syracuse University, specializes in vegetarian diets. Raj assures that while there are certain kinds of proteins specific only to meats, you don’t need as much of them as you probably imagine, and you can easily substitute certain greens to get enough protein.

“People have this impression that a large amount of protein is needed, but a small amount of protein at every meal is sufficient,” Raj says. “Also, too much protein is a disadvantage to the body. Plant proteins are a different makeup than animal proteins, and so there are some advantages to plant proteins and some disadvantages. They don’t have all the essential amino acids, and that’s why people have the idea that if you’re eating plant-based food you’re not getting enough protein. But there are definitely ways of getting enough protein if you follow the right combinations.”

As people take more personal responsibility for keeping the environment intact, protecting animals and staying healthy, it would seem that the current increase of people branching into veg lifestyles is just the start of a big wave, and many of the local restaurants in Syracuse are catching it now.

Strong Hearts’ TLT sandwich: Co-owner Joel Capolongo prepares a tofu-lettuce-tomato sandwich with pesto on marble-rye bread; it costs $6.

Strong Hearts Cafe

Going vegetarian or vegan can be the culinary adventure of a lifetime, and finding restaurants around town is part of that adventure. Of course there are the Syracuse staples that carry a large vegetarian/vegan section on their menus, such as the Middle Eastern restaurants Munjed’s, King David’s and Aladdin’s, and Alto Cinco, which dishes up delectable Mexican, vegetarian and seafood meals. However, Strong Hearts Cafe, 719 E. Genesee St. (478-0000), the new kid in town, has become a force to reckon with and is proving just how good a purely vegan restaurant can be.

Located near Syracuse Stage, and thus near SU and downtown, this hip little cafe breaks the idea that vegan food is a concoction of strange, unrecognizable chow by offering a full breakfast menu with waffles and pancakes, “chicken” and grilled “cheese” sandwiches, and pizza on Fridays. But the big draw is the 28 flavors of “milk”shakes, ranging from chocolate to pina colada.

“Once you have one of our milkshakes you’ll be hooked,” claims Joel Capolongo, co-owner of Strong Hearts. “And to be honest, I think there are people who come here and don’t realize we’re a vegan café. They’ll have a chicken salad sandwich and not realize they’re eating a soy chicken salad sandwich.”

Strong Hearts has been open for only nine months, but people have stormed the doors since day one. As the lone 100 percent vegan restaurant in Syracuse, its popularity seems somewhat of a given for people looking for solely vegan options. However, many of the clientele, Capolongo says, wander in looking to taste something different and end up having a tasty meat-free meal.

For Capolongo, a longtime vegan himself, getting non-vegans to dive into the animal-free waters and taste what life’s like on the other side is an important part of his job, because even though the concept of veganism is now mainstream, grasping the idea that you cannot only survive but also thrive on a vegan diet is still somewhat murky to some. He wants to take the mystery out of people’s perception about vegan diets.

“People ask me all the time, ‘Well, if you don’t eat meat or dairy, what do you eat?’ And I’m like, ‘Well, what don’t I eat? I eat so much more food than you do,’” Capolongo says. “So many doors were opened to me once I stopped eating meat because you have to find different things to eat: Mediterranean food and Chinese food and Thai food and all these ethnic cuisines I’ve never tried before because there are a lot of non-meat dishes in those cultures. I really see it as gaining a whole new experience of food and culture rather than losing meat and dairy.”