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I rarely shopped at Wild Oats, but after Whole Foods bought the chain out, I’ve been finding new reasons to fall in love with the new store with each and every shopping trip. Lower prices tops the list, but it’s their hot and cold bars that make me swoon. My husband and I are vegetarian, but we’re bad vegetarians. I am not down with tofu; I am not seitan savvy; I cannot make brilliant bulgar-based meals; I do not even know how to pronounce quinoa. And my inability to follow even the most simplest of directions precludes any possibility of following recipes for such fabulous meals. I also do not keep track if I am getting enough protein or calcium or any of those other nutrients my mother still anxiously asks when I politely decline her breakfast casserole surprise.

I say this to preface why it is seeing vegan General Tso’s chicken on Whole Foods’ deli bar sent me squealing in delight, dropping my bags and speed dialing my husband.

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My sister-in-law, the Weight Watcherer, is probably the pickiest eater I know. She doesn’t like vegetables, she doesn’t eat much fruit. What she seems to live on are those ridiculously expensive 100-calorie preportioned diet junk-food snacks. But yet because she’s managed to lose her baby weight and is now back to what is probably her body’s natural set point range, I’m sure she thinks she’s eating healthy.

At the grocery store last week, the woman in front of me piled the belt high with Lean Cuisine frozen dinners, Weight Watchers muffins, 100-calorie bags of chips, a case of Slim-Fast and those new “diet” vitamin-infused flavored waters. Her loot stood in stark contrast to my fresh fruits and vegetables, brown rice, cans of organic beans and vegetables, Quorn faux chicken breasts, orange juice and bottles of plain ole’ zero-calorie water. Yet in a comparison between the two of us, with no other factors considered, most people would probably judge her to be healthier simply because she is thinner.

As the growing numbers of preportioned snacks reflect, they’re not the only dieters infatuated with what one nutritionist calls “trailer food.” Every snack variety known to modern Western society now comes conveniently packed in “guilt-free” servings. Even Hershey’s makes 100-calorie packs of M&Ms. MSNBC republished an Allure story today on such junk-food dieters:

According to their credo, low-calorie is good; no-calorie is better — even if the food contains more chemicals than a can of hair spray… Many believe ingesting a few artificial ingredients is a small price to pay for being able to eat the things they love while staying as thin as a Pringle… Women who would never carry a fake Birkin seem to not think twice about toting around fake butter.

The story gives short shrift to the actual unhealthiness of such foods, and instead focuses almost exclusively on the inevitable and banal “junk in your trunk” factor. One dieter now drinks an iced nonfat latte in lieu of a healthy breakfast to curb cravings, and is supported by the director of nutrition at Columbia University Medical Center, who additionally cautions readers that if you have one such drink with a healthy breakfast, you can gain up to 10 whole pounds in a year. Oh, the absolute horrors. The director does note that typically, those who eat breakfast are often the most “successful” losers, but for the diet-minded reader, which option sounds more tempting? A healthy breakfast with maximum nutritional benefits that contains real calories, or a diet iced nonfat latte with minimal nutritional benefits, that may or may not encourage weight loss?

I like to say I am about 90 percent vegan, because while I have eliminated most dairy products from my diet, those no-calorie spray butters remain a holdover from my eating disorder days. And since I eat lots of veggies, I tend to use spray butter nearly every day and liberally at that. But according to Laura Slayton, director of a New York nutrition counseling center, this is why I’m fat:

Also easily abusable: I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter! Spray. Most nutritionists aren’t opposed to misting vegetables with it, especially if it gets people to eat greens they’d otherwise avoid. But don’t be fooled by the zero-calorie label. “There are no calories if you spray five times. If you spray 20, it has cumulative calories. Don’t spray and spray and step on the scale and expect miracles,” says Slayton, who knows of one celebrity who gained weight after going through a bottle every three days.

The Food and Drug Administration says any food serving that contains less than half a gram of fat, protein or carbohydrate can claim 0 grams - and thus, 0 calories - for those nutrients. Plus, any nutrient with less than 5 calories can be listed as having no calories on the nutrition label. According to one commenter at 3 Fat Chicks (caution: it’s a diet site), 25 mists of spray butter adds up to just 20 calories; one tablespoon, or 72 sprays, contains just 52 calories. I can burn off the calories of 25 sprays with one good stretch, but still, it’s probably a good thing I don’t step on the scale expecting “miracles.”

The article goes on to address artificial sweeteners, regularly consumed by as many as 180 million Americans, according to WebMD, who offers a detailed article on them. A recent study done by Susan Swithers and Terry Davidson at Purdue University found that rats given yogurt sweetened with saccharin ate more, gained more weight, and developed more body fat than rats who ate yogurt with sugar. In explaining why, researchers suggest that artificial sweeteners may interfere with the body’s natural ability to count calories based on a food’s sweetness which may make people prone to overindulging in other sweet foods and beverages.

I hypothesize that the reason people may overindulge in other sweets and beverages is not physiological, but psychological: If your body wants chocolate and you try to pacify it with rice cakes, even those 90-calorie preportioned bags of chocolate rice cakes, chances are, your body will still want the real deal. Most people who diet, and nearly everyone with some form of binging-related disorder will tell you that the food they deny themselves usually becomes the one item they most obsess about and even binge on. When is the last time you heard of anyone binging on broccoli? It’s called intuitive eating - listening to your body’s cues signaling satiety and hunger, feeding it what it really wants and being good to it.

With its negligible attention to the actual nutritional shortcomings of much of these diet junk-food products, many diet-minded readers will most likely walk away from this story with a favorable opinion of these often highly-processed, high-sodium, low-anything-else foods. And like all food, diet junk-food is neither “good” nor “bad.” I’ve personally bought the 100-calorie packs of Blue Diamond almonds and also the 100-calorie packs of EatSmart Veggie Crisps.

But while diet junk-food may have its place in a healthy diet, I’m concerned about the growing numbers of people who have come to conflate “diet” food with “healthy” food, and by proxy, thinness with good health and fat with bad health. In our overzealousness to reduce calories and lose weight, there are people who actually believe a 100-calorie pack of Hostess cupcakes is healthier than a 150-calorie potato. Diet junk-food may be low in calories, but shouldn’t the nutritional quality of our diet supercede caloric quantity when it comes to good health? A diet consisting primarily of diet junk-food may make you thinner, but it probably won’t make you healthier.

The vegan organization Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine is offering a drawing of an Ipod to those who take and pass along its pledge to move towards a more vegetarian diet. I have reservations about some of the goals of the organization and the methods by which its members seek to achieve those goals, but I absolutely believe a vegetarian diet to be not only the most healthy diet available, but the most moral, too. Take the Veg Vow today.

Look out for the Veg Vow contest’s fine print: It’s not enough to take the pledge; you have to pass it along to at least one of your friends and family, too.

I knew when I saw the headline “Experts Promote the Global Warming Diet” that this would be yet another study co-opted by the anti-obesity establishment to further attack and discriminate against fat people.

And I was right. Not even two hours later a troll at IP address 141.76.45.34 and claiming the email of awerwea@yahoo.com left a comment to let me know how I - a vegetarian, animal-loving, environmentally-conscious, tree-hugging hippie who buys local and drives less than 12,000 miles a year in a gas-saving economy car - am somehow responsible for the inevitable destruction of planet earth simply because I happen to be fat.

According to the Associated Press story, Americans can simultaneously “save the planet and their health” by walking or biking half an hour a day instead of driving. Oh, and they add, almost as an afterthought, to stop eating so much red meat, too.

The payoffs are huge, although unlikely to happen. One numbers-crunching scientist calculates that if all Americans between 10 and 74 walked just half an hour a day instead of driving, they would cut the annual U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide, the chief greenhouse gas, by 64 million tons.

About 6.5 billion gallons of gasoline would be saved. And Americans would also shed more than 3 billion pounds overall, according to these calculations.

“A simple intervention like walking to school is a climate change intervention, an obesity intervention, a diabetes intervention, a safety intervention,” Frumkin told The Associated Press. “That’s the sweet spot.”

There’s no doubting the benefit of exercise on overall health, although the assumption that exercise naturally leads to weight loss is dubious, at best. Regular exercise is something every health-conscious and able-bodied person ought to partake of not for weight-loss, but for good health.

What I find interesting is how the fatphobes have taken this study and completely distorted it to serve their own agendas, so that it’s reduced to just another case of fatties, by virtue of their larger girth, using up more than their fair share of natural resources, which, in turn, contributes to the destruction of the planet. Fat thus become a euphemism for all forms of overconsumption, not just food.

In fact, the only way to be even more environmentally devastating would be to be the fat owner of a Hummer.

As the AP story mentions (briefly, and at the end) the meat sector of the global economy also bears much of the brunt for global warming. But, anti-obesity doomsayers like Huffington Post blogger Bryan Young seem to focus much more on the “fat people use more gas” argument than on the problematics of meat-eating.

It should be noted that Young is among the producers of an upcoming anti-obesity documentary bashing fat folk. No bias there, nope, absolutely none.

According to researchers at the University of Chicago, the typical U.S. diet, about 28 percent of which comes from animal sources, generates the equivalent of nearly 1.5 tonnes more carbon dioxide per person each year than a vegan diet with the same number of calories.

To put it in perspective, gases from animals destined for dinner plates account for nearly a quarter of all emissions worldwide.

According to a Lancet article, 2.2 pounds of beef generates the equivalent of 80.08 pounds of carbon dioxide, more than the equivalent of driving for three hours while leaving all the lights on back home. Multiply this by a U.N. estimation of 233 million metric tons of meat consumed globally each year

And with global meat production expected to double between 2001 and 2050, the resulting increased livestock will mean even more gases like methane and nitrous oxide heating up the atmosphere. Not to mention, higher rates of heart disease and cancer, both of which are linked to eating red meat.

The math is simple: You can lose weight and still emit more carbon dioxide than you would if you gave up eating meat and other animal products and never lost a pound.

So, where are our meat-eating epidemic alarmists? We’ve declared a national war on obesity and obese people; why not wage war on meat-eating and meat-eaters? Why is the slant on these kinds of stories almost exclusively on how fat people are using more than their fair share of natural resources, when really, we are all equally to blame?

Oh, right. For much of the same reasons animal rights folk attack women in fur coats and not bikers in leather jackets. It’s much safer to attack middle-aged society women than it is to try to splash red paint on a bunch of menacing-looking bald men sporting chains and tattoos.

And it’s much easier to make fat people - an already socially, economically and politically marginalized group - the target of our attacks than it is to change ourselves.

Back before graduate school (you know, when I still had a life), I was active in three animals rights organizations including Compassion over Killing, Mercy for Animals and the Cincinnati chapter of Earthsave. But as a committed vegetarian and animal rights advocate, there is one organization I refuse to join: PeTA.

I’ve had some personal experiences in joint protests with PeTA that colored my views early on of the organization as a media-whore, but it’s the organization’s overall outreach tactics that’s really distilled my abhorrence of them.

I could start with how PeTA president Ingrid Newkirk recently wagged her bony finger at Michael Moore, attacking with a cleverly guised fat-based joke. This self-proclaimed vegetarian evangelical advised Moore to go on a vegetarian diet in order to lose weight, so he can avoid all those fat-related illnesses. Yes, the same illnesses which have yet to be conclusively linked to obesity.

I happen to think a vegetarian diet is the healthiest and most humane choice, but it is entirely possible to be a fat vegetarian - and even more shocking, a healthy, fat vegetarian.

But the real beef I have with PeTA is that they’ve long crossed the line from an altruistic horde of Dr. Doolittle’s into, instead, modern purveyors of soft core porn. They gladly exploit the bodies of women in their zeal to promote anti-exploitation of animals.

Take, for instance, their latest tawdry shock stunt below, h/t to EWHAED. This ad is not about promoting a vegetarian or vegan lifestyle - it’s about sex. And does it strike anyone else as ironic that they sexualize Silverstone’s body as a piece of meat in order to promote a vegetarian diet?

(For more on this, see Carol Adams’ The Sexual Politics of Meat)

But next to some of PeTA’s other stunts, this can be seen as tasteful. One of the women I knew from Mercy for Animals was also active with PeTA, and was chosen as PeTA’s “Sexy Pilgrim” several years ago. Basically, the campaign worked as such: The “Sexy Pilgrim” would dress like a stripper, and try to shill vegetarianism to scores of ogling men who were usually interested in far more than sampling a tofurkey breast.

When the circus came to Cincinnati last year, PeTA protested on the city-s Fountain Square, a central location of the city where families frequent. A woman, dressed as a dominatrix, whipped a scantily clad, chained and handcuffed man with a sign reading “Chains belong in the bedroom.”

And who can forget PeTA’s tawdry “Milk Gone Wild” - a spoof of Girls Gone Wild - which even network television refused to air. The spots feature four “udder babes” flashing cow-like udders to leering male patrons in a sleazy bar.

Of course, there’s the classic PeTA ad of a buxom blonde woman in an Uncle Sam outfit - cleavage spilling out of her unbuttoned shirt - with the inscription “I want YOU to go vegetarian.” The blonde featured is Playboy’s Kimberly Hefner and was magnanimously distributed to solders around the world.

Perhaps most disturbing is ad of yet another naked blonde woman, this time in a classroom setting. The model, Dominique Swain, star of Lolita, is partly turned toward the blackboard, with underdeveloped cleavage showing, writing “I’d rather go naked than wear fur.” PeTA’s press release touts her as the youngest star to pose au natural for its anti-fur campaign.

These are just a few examples - the list goes on and on. How can PeTA, in all good faith, call itself an organization promoting the ethical treatment of anything when they so unethically exploit and demean women?

After six years of pressure from the Organic Consumers Association and its allies, Starbucks has announced it will completely phase out recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone (rBGH/rBST) in all of its company-owned coffeeshops by early 2008.

The coffee-chain’s decision comes on the heels of an announcement from Cincinnati-based food retail giant, Kroger’s, who announced they will ban rBGH in all of their supermarkets by February 2008. Since 2001, the OCA’s “Starbucks Campaign” has been calling on the company to discontinue serving milk from cows that are injected with the genetically engineered growth hormone and to ensure that at a significant proportion of their coffee and chocolate is certified Fair Trade and Organic.

Now, this is something we can all drink to.

As some of you may remember, my husband and I eloped, so to speak, a month ago. We’re planning an informal reception Saturday for our family and friends so that they too can celebrate our commitment.

Both the husband and I are vegetarian – he for health reasons, and I because of moral reasons (I’m Buddhist). I’ve planned an all-vegetarian dinner for our reception and hope to convince our meat-eating families that vegetarianism consists of much more than rabbit food.

Both my mother and brother, who are big-time meat-eaters, are upset at this. In the words of my mother, I am “forcing everyone to eat vegetarian, too.” She thinks I ought to include some meat-based dishes, which I disagree with. My husband and I are footing the bill, both for the wedding and reception, and I don’t think I should be expected to purchase something which I vehemently disagree with and goes against my religion. My mother has also suggested that she will bring her own meat-based dish to share with our guests, which I am opposed to.

This is our day and I think she ought to respect our beliefs. What do you think?

A few months ago Hummer started airing commercials in which a vegetarian standing in a grocery store checkout line with his veggies and tofu checks out the groceries of the man behind him. He looks at his tofu and then looks at the other guy’s huge slabs of blood-red meat.

Cut to the same vegetarian, now purchasing a gas-guzzling, monstrous Hummer big enough to plow through dense forests with ease. “Restore your manhood,” flashes the screen (Hummer later changed the tagline to “Restore the balance” in response to complaints).

Men and meat-eating are as synonymous as Bert and Ernie. Watch any advertisement for meat-filled fast food and chances are, it panders to the caveman mentality. But when McDonalds advertises its new “healthy” salads, it’s almost always women who are shown chowing down on lettuce.

Even NutriSystem has a special diet plan for men, with retired football stars reassuring guys they can eat pizzas, burgers and even beer. Women, on the other hand, can enjoy chocolate every day and gush about now becoming their husband’s trophy wives.

The relationship between men and meat hearkens back to the days of hunters and gatherers. Women dug tubers and collected seeds; men brought back red meat from large kills. And although tribes usually subsisted on the foods women collected as they were more abundant and safer to collect – no one ever got gored by a Mammoth picking grubs – meat was the celebrated center of the feast.

Which is why I’m surprised that this “intrinsic” need wasn’t spelled out more so in the NY Times article, “Be Yourselves, Girls, Order the Rib-Eye.” Thanks to Cthulhu’s Cafeteria for the link.

Instead, the article panders to the age-old caution heeded to us by our mothers to “eat something at home alone before a date, and then in company order a light dinner to portray oneself as dainty and ladylike.” The article expresses surprise that women are now eating foods which are perceived to contain substance – namely, meat.

Of course, it couldn’t be because a woman might actually crave a side of cow’s ass. No, writer Allen Salkin (as if you couldn’t tell by the perjorative of “girls” in the title) presents it not as a case of hunger, but as a new dating “strategy.” Ahh, of course, all the better to land a man. Isn’t that the goal of every sad, single woman?

Said one woman on a first date:

Red meat sent a message that she was “unpretentious and down to earth and unneurotic,” she said, “that I’m not obsessed with my weight even though I’m thin, and I don’t have any food issues.” She added, “In terms of the burgers, it said I’m a cheap date, low maintenance.”

The article goes on to reinforce this correlation - that ordering meat on a date is much more acceptable if you’re a thin woman – not once, but twice. The only “curvy” woman mentioned in the article serves to reinforce the reference that fat woman still order lettuce, thus suggesting that unlike her flesh-eating thin counterpart, fat women do have issues with food.

The author does finally skirt around the association of meat-eating as masculine, but once again, falls flat. He recounts the story of a vegetarian, who wishes she could order meat. Instead she’s thought of ordering shots of Jägermeister to prove that she is “a guy’s girl.”

“Everyone wants to be the girl who drinks the beer and eats the steak and looks like Kate Hudson,” Ms. Crosley, 28, said.

Newsflash to Ms. Crosley: Not every woman.

Sigh, it’s a good thing both the husband and I are vegetarian so we don’t have to play these reindeer games.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about an idiot editorial by fat-hater Jamie O’Neill. Despite the fact that I referred to O’Neill as an “imbecile” and called his piece an act of “sheer ignorance” and I might have even called him on the jackass he is (maybe I only thought that), the post seems to have attracted at least two people who left comments that suggest to me they think I want to have this man’s baby.

In the second comment left only the other day, commenter Sharon Johnson commends O’Neill for “simply stating the truth” about America’s “obesity problem.” She offers her own story of gaining weight (she weighed 208 pounds) and of her efforts to reach 125 pounds (she now weighs 188 pounds).

It’s the same old drivel echoed by those who’ve internalized society’s hatred of fat people and now project it on both themselves and others. But what caught my particular interest was this line Sharon wrote:

“Jamie (if I may refer to you by your first name) your article was honest, interesting and hopefully changed a few people’s mind about eating fried greasy and fattening foods.”

It’s the tired old assumption that fat people are fat because A. they eat too much and B. they eat horribly unhealthy foods. Both are vastly presumptuous and both have been proven to be erroneous.

Both the husband and I are vegetarian and I’m nearly vegan. Nearly vegan, I say, because while I refrain from most dairy products, I do make exceptions for the no-calorie spray butter made with whey and low-carb yogurt. We don’t eat fried foods, eat sugar-filled products sparingly and for the past few months, we’ve even cut down our consumption of the one junk food item we do eat: Lays’ Light Doritos.

Because I am vegetarian, I probably get more than the recommended five servings of vegetables a day. And because I have blood-sugar problems, I tend to eat foods that are low in carbohydrates, which effectively rules out anything fried, greasy or starchy.

So, this might just explain why my body went into near-shock after our first dinner on our honeymoon.

Both the boy and I were famished, after driving for hours and hit up the first pizza parlor we saw. We ordered an appetizer of deep-fried portobella mushrooms, shared an order of fries and split a small pizza. It was nice - we both love pizza but don’t eat it all too often simply because well, we try to eat healthy most of the time.

Almost immediately after, I felt sick - the kind of nausea that I imagine one might get after eating a tub of lard with a spoon. For the rest of the night, I was chewing Tums and trying to stave off the waves of queasiness overcoming my body.

I don’t eat greasy and fried foods and yet I’m still overweight compared to those restrictive BMI standards. Maybe eating these kinds of foods is the way Sharon gained weight, but it certainly isn’t representative of why others gain weight.

It’s this same sort of self-loathing amongst fat people that keeps us from banding together to fight against the marginalization of fellow fat people in society. After listening to others tell us how our bodies are wrong and detested for so long, some fat people not only believe it, but project it onto others.

Any great movement requires strength and solidarity in numbers. I think the greater problem looming in America than that of obesity is: not only is fat the last bastion of acceptable discrimination, it’s often perpetuated by the very people it adversely affects.

Several days ago, The Enquirer ran an Associated Press about how rising beer prices have left German beer drinkers “weeping in their steins,” as farmers abandon barley — the raw material for the national beverage — to plant other, subsidized crops for sale as environmentally friendly biofuels.

Today, the Enquirer’s editorial department asks:

It raises a philosophical and moral issue: In a world where millions starve each year, should food crops be diverted to non-food uses?

I find it highly ironic that only now when beer prices are threatened does the question about food crops efficiency arise. Instead of questioning if crops should be used towards cleaner, more sustaining forms of energy, we need to be asking why food crops continue to fund an industry that starves the planet.

Hunger is not caused by a scarcity of food; it’s caused by a scarcity of compassion.

It takes 16 pounds of grain to produce one pound of beef. Ninety percent of the protein in grain is wasted by cycling it through livestock. On the land it takes to feed one meat-eating person, 20 vegetarians could be fed. Each day, more than 40,000 children starve to death, even though enough grain is consumed by American livestock every day for every human on earth to have two loaves of bread.

If Americans were to cut their meat consumption by a mere 10 percent, it would free enough grain to feed everyone on the planet who is literally starving to death. Imagine if Americans were to cut their meat consumption by, say 40 percent. We might be able to solve world hunger and produce cleaner fuels.