Supporting Your Local Veg-Places

So this blog isn’t just about sex and sexuality, though those are the topics I most frequently address.

I want to talk about the importance of supporting businesses that are vegetarian- and vegan-friendly. Even if you aren’t vegetarian or vegan, by keeping places like that in business, you make it much easier for people who ARE to have places to go. You make it so that EVERYONE has easier access to vegetarian/vegan products, and for some people, this is really really important; these are ethical, not just dietary, choices they are making.

Often, I’m of the mind of “CHEAP CHEAP CHEAP! SAVE MONEY!” but one SHOULD put ethics and different types of value (it’s not just about the money, folks) before the cash. My primary partner lives like this. He doesn’t often splurge on goods, especially while living on a meager Americorps salary, but you’ll never see him at, say, a Wal-Mart. He makes purchases from business that somehow align with his ethics, as much as he can manage to do it.

So while my first instinct is to dive into bargain bins and immediately go for the cheap stuff, or go to stores with crazy sales, this summer I have been (and hopefully will continue to be) more discerning, especially since I have my family’s economic support and can afford to do so. When I have to support MYSELF it shall be another issue, since I’ll have to be dealing with my own finances, but for now, this is my plan. Because I hope to stay true to my ethics, though, I’ll try my best to put my money where my mouth is even when I’m the sole breadwinner in my life.

That’s great and all, but how do I know which places are veg-friendly if I, myself, am an omnivore? Well lucky for you, I’ve compiled a list of awesome places you should support! Now it should be easy-peasy.

Suggestions for vegan/veggie-friendly food-places in Rhode Island (mainly in Providence, unsurprisingly):

  • FOO(d) – The AS220 Café
    • Super inexpensive AND delicious (one of my favorite things to get is their crispy chickpeas appetizer). Their priciest dish is only $10, and they have a bunch of vegetarian and vegan options. The atmosphere is fun, though it can get loud when bands are playing in the AS220 performance space. If you like a hip joint with cheap and awesome food, definitely go. One of my favorite places in Rhode Island, hands down. The free WiFi is also nice, and there’s a bar located in the restaurant space too, if that’s your fancy. Depending on when you go, it can be a nice place to read and chill out. They also have outdoors seating, which is great when the air is cool.
  • White Electric Coffeehouse
    • American deli style, with a sweet artsy vibe. Some of my favorite items on the menu? Cranberry-walnut bread, hot chocolate, and cheddar/avocado sandwiches. Om nom nom. Also very decently-priced, and there’s free WiFi! Another great place to go to get some food and catch up on your reading. It’s fairly small, though, so it can’t seat large groups or anything.
  • Fire+Ice Grill & Bar
    • Mongolian BBQ place where you choose your own raw ingredients (vegetarian ones are marked with a green label, and the staff can fry your stuff in a separate pan), put them all in a bowl, and then see them stir-fried right before your eyes. You can also taste the sauces before committing to one for your dish. It’s a fun place with bright colors, and it’s decently-priced. Mondays are college-nights and dinner is $10 with a valid college-ID. This place is good for big groups because it’s huge (seats 326!), unlike most of the others on this list, which are more medium/small-sized. 
  • United BBQ
    • Cheap food, with a variety of vegetarian AND vegan options, all in the style of a typical BBQ place. Check out their menu! If you hate the idea of BBQ places because, well, they do offer meat, maybe skip out. Otherwise, I recommend it.  
  • Julian’s
    • One of my favorite places in Rhode Island, hands down. SO GOOD. SO DELICIOUS. There’s something for every price-range (e.g. dinner stuff ~$8-$28), the restaurant itself is charming and artsy, and the bathroom (yes, the bathroom) is adorable. Everything about this place is awesome. JUST GO. TRUST ME. They serve brunch & dinner, and they have a bar. GO GO GO.
  • The Garden Grille
    • A small, casual restaurant that serves “American” vegetarian food and has vegan options. They’re also a juice-bar, if you’re into that. It’s one of the more expensive v-friendly restaurants in Rhode Island, but many say it’s worth it. Their priciest entrees are ~$15.
  • The Like No Udder ice-cream truck (you can also follow them on Twitter and Facebook)
    • An adorable purple ice-cream truck with none of the dairy and ALL of the flavor. They serve smooth, smooth soft-serve (vanilla and/or chocolate, with a variety of toppings), shakes, floats, candy bars, and nachos. Everything is vegan AND kosher, and they don’t use any hydrogenated ingredients used. Be aware, though: they only take cash!
  • Nice Slice Pizzeria
    • If you’re looking for a place that serves tasty, tasty vegetarian/vegan pizzas and has a super friendly staff, you’ve found the right place. Nice Slice offers vegan cheese and faux-meat toppings (“chicken, bacon, sausage, steak, and pepperoni”) for their pizzas, and they also serve vegan sandwiches. Awesomeness all-around, plus they deliver and stay open late.
Also, remember that many Indian and Middle-Eastern restaurants are vegetarian-friendly! I’ll specifically mention Kabob N’ Curry on Thayer St. because, not only is it fucking DELICIOUS, but they have a sweet meatless buffet on Saturday mornings (11AM-3PM or so) for ~$9.

    Advertising: Hope, Crying, and Culture

    I often feel a desire to cry during movie previews. Well, not the movie previews, exactly, but some of the ads they play before movies–the ones with swelling music and Spanish words and some bullshit about what it means to be Puerto Rican. The Banco Popular one? Dear lord, it makes me well up like nobody’s business. There’s a longer version out there, but this the version in theaters (and it’s faster-paced):

    Click here for it. Like, I’m watching it right now and I’m tearing up, even though I’ve watched it a bunch of times before. The part where the children’s chorus comes in? Ohhhhh man. If I haven’t cracked by then, that does it. (Of course, I have to be in the zone for the tears to be inevitable; catch me off guard or stressed and I will wave away the ad with annoyance.)

    Anyway, I’ve translated the lyrics for those of you who are Spanish-impaired. 😛

    I’m the light of the morning
    that illuminates new paths,
    that goes flooding the mountains,
    the farmer trails.
    I’m the fruit of the future,
    the seeds of tomorrow,
    planted in pure dung (read: fertilizer)
    of my boricua land.
    I’m a fisherman of dreams;
    I go looking for a sea of spume
    of shells and sands,
    of sirens and moons.
    Of stars and horizons,
    my fortune is composed.
    I’m a sailing seagull and an astronaut of fog.
    Of the bread, I am the yeast that feeds the hope
    of the Puerto Rican man,
    of the awakening of my mother country.
    I bring boricua blood;
    I’m the son of the palm-trees, of the fields and the rivers
    and of the singing of the coquí,
    of valleys and coffee plantations,
    of sugar-cane and pineapple,
    of guava and mampostiales,
    of tembleque and maví.

    I chose to not translate tembleque, maví, and mampostiales. It feels too weird to see them in English, somehow linguistically reduced, or transformed into something else. But, if you MUST know:

    • mampostiales = “very thick, gooey candy bars of caramelized brown sugar and coconut chips, challenging to chew and with a strong, almost molasses-like flavor”
    • tembleque = creamy coconut pudding usually garnished with cinnamon on top
    • maví = “mauby,” a drink! (“The drink or syrup for the drink is made by boiling a specific buckthorn bark, Colubrina elliptica, with sugar and a variety of spices. In looking at individual recipes on how people make mauby, you’ll note spices and flavorings vary exceedingly. Cinnamon is usually included, but then the drink flavoring diverges according to recipe. Some people add cloves, anise, vanilla extract, or cola flavoring. For more info, just check the wiki.”)

    If this doesn’t make your mouth water at least a LITTLE, you should get your salivary glands checked. Anyway. Why do I get so emotional? Part of it is the setting of the theater, of course, that sets the stage (no pun intended); everything is bigger and louder and more intense there, plus the darkness creates an air of intimacy and solitude (that’s more believable when one is not in a packed room with some dingbat kicking the back of one’s seat), or at the very least of uninterrupted connection to what is onscreen. However, even when I’m not in the theater, I can get teary-eyed. It’s the idea of this, well, idealized Puerto Rico. It’s a longing for that, and not coupled with the belief that it’s nonexistent, but with the belief that there IS that beauty and that wonder in the Puerto Rico in which I live–that it’s just a matter of stopping and appreciating it, or finding it, or even just knowing how and when to look. The beautiful visuals and music create an air of hope…and if an ad is going to make me feel something, hope is a fucking fantastic choice. It makes the viewer tune in to that part of themselves, the hopeful part, the part that identifies as Puerto Rican, the part that wants to be proud of the mother country and not ashamed. It’s the part that goes “yes yes yes” during the whole ad.

    To me, advertising is important. Heck, I wanted to GO into advertising for a while! All things being equal, or more or less equal, I WILL give preference to the organization with better ads, not because I believe their product is better, but because I admire their advertising and feel like rewarding them for a job well done. I will purposefully choose to support a company whose ads I like. And speaking of other ads I like, Harris Paints created a CLASSIC with this one:

    Click here.
    This thing was played at EVERY MOVIE SHOWING IN EVERY THEATER (of the Caribbean Cinemas chain, at least, but I’m pretty sure CineVista also played them). It ran for YEARS. People went into a movie and sang along to this during the previews, some in barely audible whispers, others in great, booming voices. It was glorious. They eventually retired the commercial after a bunch of years and everyone got upset. And what does this ad have in common with the Banco Popular one? It invokes our sense of Puerto-Rican-ness AND it has great visuals AND catchy music. It talks about paint colors in terms of Puerto Rican things, colors WE know because we see them every day or we are at least pretty damn familiar with them. Green is not fucking…kelly-green or hunter green or limeade green, it’s “verde quenepa.” Red is this red, of the flamboyán (Royal Poinciana or Flamboyant). Blue is the blue of the cobblestones that line San Juan’s streets. And so on. In fact, here are the lyrics:

    Paint your life
    with the colors of my land.
    Paint your life.
    Piragua strawberry,
    white like coconut,
    mango yellow.
    Quenepa green,
    cobblestone blue,
    flamboyán red,
    turquoise of the sea.
    The colors of my land,
    our colors,
    paint your life
    with the colors
    that Harris gives you.

    Mmm, gotta love appealing to people’s sense of unified culture. I’ll avoid cynicism for now (shocking!). And for clarification, a piragua is like a snowcone, but the top is pointy like a pyramid (not rounded like a snowball). SO yes. Other ads or previews make me cry too, for different reasons. It’s usually the beauty in them, though, that captures me; they’re so intense and beautiful that I just can’t help but tear up. Same thing with music.

    Lose the blubber? More like lose the douchebaggery.

    PETA Save the Whales Obesity Billboard

    Dear PETA:

    Sometimes you have pretty cool campaigns.

    Sometimes you miss the mark entirely and produce crap like this.

    I don’t know who thought “YES, this is a great idea! Let’s use one of the most derogatory words for fat women and put it on a HUGE billboard and imply that women are whales that need to be saved from their gross obesity through vegetarianism (because only meat-eating women are obese)! This will entice people to become vegetarians! GENIUS!”

    No. You fail.

    And “trying to hide your thunder thighs and balloon belly is no day at the beach”?

    Really? Really, PETA?

    I’m not even going to go into their implications that ceasing consumption of meat equal healthiness (because that’s just not true) and that the differences between skinny/fat and vegetarian/omnivore are all caused by the meat or lack thereof in people’s diets. Jeez.

    ————–

    PETA’s press release:

    Jacksonville, Fla. — A new PETA billboard campaign that was just launched in Jacksonville reminds people who are struggling to lose weight — and who want to have enough energy to chase a beach ball — that going vegetarian can be an effective way to shed those extra pounds that keep them from looking good in a bikini. The ad shows a woman whose “blubber” is spilling over the sides of her swimsuit bottom and features the tagline “Save the Whales. Lose the Blubber: Go Vegetarian. PETA.”

    Anyone wishing to achieve a hot “beach bod” is reminded that studies show that vegetarians are, on average, about 10 to 20 pounds lighter than meat-eaters. The meat habit can ruin the fun in other ways too. Consuming meat and dairy products is conclusively linked to heart disease, diabetes, and several kinds of cancer — not to mention higher rates of infertility in women and impotence in men. And not only is following a healthy plant-based diet good for the environment, it is also the best thing that anyone can do to help stop the routine abuse of animals raised and killed for food. Animals on factory farms are subjected to mutilations like debeaking, tail-docking, and branding (without any painkillers) and are often slaughtered and dismembered while still conscious.

    “Trying to hide your thunder thighs and balloon belly is no day at the beach,” says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. “PETA has a free ‘Vegetarian Starter Kit’ for people who want to lose pounds while eating as much as they like.