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Oct. 26th, 2014 03:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chhotiiToday's outing was to the Boston Vegetarian Food Fest. That I was able to get Sophia to get on warm clothes and shoes and out the door on a Sunday morning to go somewhere via public transit where there would be, yes, food, but no, definitely not anything with meat in it... was an impressive bit of parental persuasion. She is glad she went, though. She thought it was fantastic, and wants to go every year.
As expected, we made a few good food finds. There's a small company starting up to bring allergy-friendly vegan African TV dinners to market named Global Village Cuisine. Sophia loved, loved, loved their chickpea dinner, so we bought a stack of them. Global Village Cuisine has not yet been picked up by any retailers in this area, but they are trying to break in, hopefully they will succeed. Another was Gardein which makes a faux fish that Sophia absolutely adored. She kept sneaking more free samples. They claim to be in a bunch of local grocery stores, even surprising places such as Market Basket, but how many of their products are in any given store I don't know. Also, there's a woman who makes gluten-free banana cocoanut bars that Sophia thought were the best thing ever. So far she has no retail presence and just sells at farmers markets. So look for those at farmers markets. Then there's a restaurant in Cambridge, Veggie Galaxy, which has a BBQ jackfruit slider. About time BBQ jackfruit was invented.
Since it's a vendor exhibit, there were also a lot of useless expensive highly processed products. Personally, I think that taking all these wonderful vegetables, extracting some essence and then packaging that into either something that looks and tastes like medicine, or a chalky-tasting food bar... is kind of missing the point.
Lots of interesting lunch options at the exhibit. But, after we ate a very salty Caribbean black beans and Spanish rice, we suffered from a surprising lack of good beverage options. The vendor who was selling the smoothies with the pretty normal ingredients such as bananas and apple juice was wearing scary eye makeup, so Sophia wouldn't go near that booth. There were bottled smoothies from some company that insists on always including something revolting in each flavor: cucumbers, parsley, and celery. Way, way too much celery. Eww, celery. When I told the vendor that celery tastes bad to us, hoping she would break out some non-celery flavor for us to try, she started giving us some malarkey about "whatever tastes bad to you is exactly what your body needs", her "evidence" for this being that her health improved after she started drinking the cilantro smoothies even though she's one of those people for whom cilantro tastes bad. Uh-huh. In the end we hit the drink machine for bottled water.
I couldn't really find the "children's activities" that were supposed to be there, but Sophia looked at cute pictures of rabbits and films of lion rescue, and this segued into the start of some discussion of ethical philosophy. So, we had fun, even though it was really really crowded. Good to see lots of interest in the subject of eating lower on the food chain.
As expected, we made a few good food finds. There's a small company starting up to bring allergy-friendly vegan African TV dinners to market named Global Village Cuisine. Sophia loved, loved, loved their chickpea dinner, so we bought a stack of them. Global Village Cuisine has not yet been picked up by any retailers in this area, but they are trying to break in, hopefully they will succeed. Another was Gardein which makes a faux fish that Sophia absolutely adored. She kept sneaking more free samples. They claim to be in a bunch of local grocery stores, even surprising places such as Market Basket, but how many of their products are in any given store I don't know. Also, there's a woman who makes gluten-free banana cocoanut bars that Sophia thought were the best thing ever. So far she has no retail presence and just sells at farmers markets. So look for those at farmers markets. Then there's a restaurant in Cambridge, Veggie Galaxy, which has a BBQ jackfruit slider. About time BBQ jackfruit was invented.
Since it's a vendor exhibit, there were also a lot of useless expensive highly processed products. Personally, I think that taking all these wonderful vegetables, extracting some essence and then packaging that into either something that looks and tastes like medicine, or a chalky-tasting food bar... is kind of missing the point.
Lots of interesting lunch options at the exhibit. But, after we ate a very salty Caribbean black beans and Spanish rice, we suffered from a surprising lack of good beverage options. The vendor who was selling the smoothies with the pretty normal ingredients such as bananas and apple juice was wearing scary eye makeup, so Sophia wouldn't go near that booth. There were bottled smoothies from some company that insists on always including something revolting in each flavor: cucumbers, parsley, and celery. Way, way too much celery. Eww, celery. When I told the vendor that celery tastes bad to us, hoping she would break out some non-celery flavor for us to try, she started giving us some malarkey about "whatever tastes bad to you is exactly what your body needs", her "evidence" for this being that her health improved after she started drinking the cilantro smoothies even though she's one of those people for whom cilantro tastes bad. Uh-huh. In the end we hit the drink machine for bottled water.
I couldn't really find the "children's activities" that were supposed to be there, but Sophia looked at cute pictures of rabbits and films of lion rescue, and this segued into the start of some discussion of ethical philosophy. So, we had fun, even though it was really really crowded. Good to see lots of interest in the subject of eating lower on the food chain.
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Date: 2014-10-27 02:18 am (UTC)If you haven't yet been to Veggie Galaxy (they're next door to Mary Chung's), they have a remarkably tasty faux pastrami for their ruben sandwiches.
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Date: 2014-10-27 03:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-10-28 05:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-10-28 05:28 am (UTC)If I'd realized that the Global Village Cuisine folks were actually selling product, I'd have bought some. Hmph. Mostly I was annoyed that the May Wah, Tofettes, Tasty Bite, and certain other savory/proteiny vendors were not there this year, and that there were proportionally too many vegan baked good tables.