Train for Your Fall Marathon or Half-Marathon with PCRM’s VegRUN Program!
The VegRUN marathon and half marathon training program is a great way to get ready for your fall races and help support PCRM’s lifesaving work. VegRUN runners will have access to Matt Frazier’s No Meat Athlete Marathon or Half Marathon Roadmap and will receive helpful training tips, favorite plant-based training recipes and advice from celebrity coaches such as Scott Jurek, Brendan Brazier, Rich Roll, Rip Esselstyn and Chirstine Vardaros. Participants can also share their training stories, questions and pictures with our online community in a running forum monitored by running experts, nutritionists and your fellow VegRUN runners. Runners will also have the opportunity to earn several prizes such as a VegRUN technical t-shirt, a selection of books and products from our celebrity coaches and other running gear and products.
Train with PCRM for your fall marathon or half marathon and everybody wins!
To register today, go to vegrun.org. For more information, contact P.J. Murphy at 202-527-7372 or pmurphy@pcrm.org.
US VegWeek
Just a little over a week till US VegWeek! DC Vegan is excited to be a sponsor for the event! We will be hosting DC Vegan Drinks during this week at Casa Oaxaca. This is one of many other events that will be happening during the week.
VegWeek is seven-day celebration highlighting the many benefits of choosing vegetarian foods—for our health, the planet, and animals—and thousands of people nationwide are taking the 7-Day Veg Pledge as a fun way to discover new and delicious meat-free meals! Sign up today–and we’ll even send you a Starter Pack loaded with recipes and product coupons.
To see all the events planned, sign up to take the 7-Day Veg Pledge, and help spread the word, visit http://usvegweek.com.
Vegucated premiere in DC!
Vegucated is a self described “guerrilla-style documentary that follows three meat- and cheese-loving New Yorkers who agree to adopt a vegan diet for six weeks”. Created by Marisa Miller Wolfson, Vegucated is doing its part to further awareness of the serious health and societal issues that are a direct result of eating animals. I don’t know about you, but I have a real soft spot for anyone/thing working to encourage positive change through education and self awareness, so naturally I’ve got two Vegucated tickets burning a hole in my pocket. Watch the trailer and I guarantee you’ll be itching for more too!
The film originally premiered in summer 2011 at Vegetarian Summerfest, and is now on a road trip tour across America, announcing new premiere spots along the way. Vegucated will premiere at DC’s E Street Cinema on Wednesday, November 9 at 7:30 pm. Get your tickets here!
Come See “Forks Over Knives” on The Hill
This coming Tuesday, October 25, Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine will be hosting a screening of “Forks Over Knives” on Capitol Hill.
Dr. T. Colin Campbell and Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn, both prominently featured in the film, will be in attendance and available for questions afterward. This event is free and open to the public. Food and drinks will be provided.
If you are planning on coming, please RSVP by calling the PCRM membership department at 202-527-7304 or e-mailing PCRM at membership@pcrm.org.
Hope to see you there!
Visiting Twin Oaks Community as a Vegan
Twin Oaks began as a small income-shared community in 1967 in Louisa, Virginia, a small town two hours away from Washington, DC. They sustained themselves by selling their handmade high quality hammocks, and more recently by selling their community-made packaged tofu. The successful tofu line has been sold in stores and used in restaurants throughout the east coast with flavors like fine and Italian herb, along with their “More Than Tofu” line of prepared spiced tofu and their new “Soysage” line, an almost undetectable substitute for sausage. The members have to work an average of 42 hours a week, the work ranging from laundry, cooking meals, repairing buildings, working in the garden, shelving the numerous community libraries, working with the tofu and tofu related products, and making hammocks. Their organization stops nowhere; every week the community creates a daily labor list of who will make bread and granola for everybody, who will do the community laundry, and every task that needs to be done and by what day.
The community’s openness stems from its year long visitor program: A new group of visitors stay at the community for three weeks, immersing themselves in the community’s norms and rules. The visitor group cooks, cleans, gardens, joins groups and activities, helps make hammocks and tofu, and spends time with everybody in the community. By the second week, the visitors can request certain types of shifts or what activities they want to be a part in, and the labor schedule assigner can almost always oblige. My three-week stay at Twin Oaks gave me opportunities to understand the infrastructure of Twin Oaks, and why the people and their camaraderie make the community thrive.
A small portion of the community's garden.
A place for over one hundred residences, Twin Oaks ranges in diversity, nationality, age, and sexual preference and orientation. Their welcoming environment provides comfort to all of those with special diets: vegan, vegetarian, gluten free, and no onion, garlic, or oil eaters. The community eats lunch and dinner together every day, meals that result from a continuously busy kitchen. The cooks clearly indicate every food with common allergen labels: “gluten-free,” “vegan,” “spicy,” even “ginger,” “low oil,” and “no salt.” Packages of tofu, loaves of fresh bread, huge portions of homemade granola, and fruits and vegetables straight from their garden appear in the public kitchens and refrigerators. Members will often let visitors help cook, adding to the community’s open policy and love of helping, sharing, and working for each other’s well being. On my fifth night at Twin Oaks, a kitchen manager put me in charge of making cornbread for everybody, which made me feel welcomed and trusted by the community.
I felt perfectly at home as a vegan at Twin Oaks. I never had to explain what I could and could not eat, and I especially did not have to explain why I choose to eat the way I do. Because people of all radical life choices live here, they have created a decidedly non-judgmental environment. In a community where members take full responsibility of the mental, physical, and emotional health of each other, it becomes perfectly acceptable to live vegan, gluten free, raw, or any special diet you live with or choose to follow. Fresh and homemade foods get created for every meal; vegan waffles and biscuits for brunch on Sunday, falafel and hummus on Monday, and beef and veggie burgers with potatoes on Tuesday, the rest of the week’s menu filled with tofu, fresh pita, bulgur, pasta and rice, even cakes and cookies. It does not end at food either; members sometimes make fresh squeezed juice with cantaloupe or watermelon.
A typical member or visitor at Twin Oaks has shifts in the garden throughout the week, seeding and harvesting food that goes straight to the kitchen and into their next meal. Bread and granola get made and then eaten almost minutes later, and if you want to add parsley or mint to your lunch, the herb garden manager can pick leaves straight from the plant. Many members work in the “Tofu Hut,” learning how to clean, make, and package vegan and vegetarian tofu and “Soysage,” being proud of the locally made and organic vegan food that Twin Oaks provides. Cow’s milk drinkers can get their dairy from the community’s barn, and members harvest eggs every morning from their own chickens for egg eaters. Depending on the season, about fifty to sixty percent of Twin Oaks community’s food comes straight from the farm.
I enjoyed my three weeks at Twin Oaks, learning the natural processes of watching food’s beginnings, middles, and ends. Their organic practices represent the community’s virtues of hard work, and cooperation. Their complete tolerance makes vegan eating extremely easy, and also makes you appreciate the “safe” place for people of all kinds that they have created.
Please visit the Twin Oaks website at www.twinoaks.org to see what the community signifies and stands for, and definitely visit http://vegnet.net if you seek vegan or vegetarian communities. If living in a shared community interests you, please visit www.ic.org, or the Fellowship for Intentional Community.
Meatless Makeover, Vegan Cooking Class with Mimi Clark
Meatless Makeovers, Sunday October 16th from 10 a.m. – 1 p.m. at Fairfax Station, VA.
Transform traditional family favorite dishes into healthier meals. Past classes have included some of the following: Beef Stroganoff, Goulash, Pepper Steak, Sweet & Sour Meatballs, Chicken a la King, Chicken Divan, Chicken Parmesan, Chicken Scaloppini, Baked Ziti with Tofu Ricotta Cheese, Stuffed Shells, Shepherd’s Pie, Paella, Sloppy Joe, Meat Loaf, Chocolate Mousse, Chocolate Chip Cake, Cheesecake. Participants are encouraged to bring a favorite family recipe to discuss in class. Pressing tofu will be demonstrated with the convenient TofuXpress available for purchase.
No meat, poultry, fish, eggs, dairy, or honey. $55/person; $100/two people; $50/VSDC, VRG, COK members. Demonstration classes include recipes, organic food samples, manufacturers’ samples and coupons. Gift certificates available. Make checks payable to Mimi Clark, 9302 Hallston Ct., Fairfax Station, VA 22039. Sorry, no phone or email reservations. Seventy-two hour cancellation policy for refund or credit. Class subject to cancellation if minimum enrollment is not met. Email veggourmet@aol.com, or call 703.643.2713 for space availability.
Mark your calendars, November 6th, Meatless Holidays & December 11, Holiday Gifts & Entertaining
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