Tokyo VegeFesta 2015

This year’s Tokyo VegeFood Festa was very successful due to a good turn-out of participants and decent weather, despite thunder, lightning and rain predicted for Saturday. The food highlight for me was vegan paella made with fresh vegetables and long-grain rice. It was truly delicious. I also tried Nataraj’s vegetable and soy meat curries with vegan (komatsuna) nan. There were representatives of NGOs, such as Ark, an animal rescue group that is also involved in anti-fur campaigns. I spoke with one of its enthusiastic members there, a beautiful British woman named Nadia McKechnie. It turned out that she was also the organizer of the Vegan Meetup Group in Tokyo. I ended my day at the VegeFesta by purchasing a week’s worth of organic vegetables from a farm in Nagano: Chinese cabbage (known as “hakusai”), carrots, round daikon, and water greens (AKA “mizuna”). The farm apparently ships fresh organic vegetables directly to customers in Tokyo. Such direct, farmer to consumer, arrangements are becoming more common. It's a great way for customers to get fresher vegetables and farmers to get more fair compensation for their hard labor.

You choices of food books

Last week, I asked you all to choose a fiction or nonfiction book that has something to do with food: food production, food consumption, food and health, eating disorders, food culture, or food politics. Today we will share with our classmates a bit about the book that we selected. Also, as I would like to compile a list of the books and your reasons for choosing them, please fill about this form: You'll be able to view the responses of your classmates by going to: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1r-bp_QRDNw7os1F_ZB2m03lfEH4wRfDxOh0WEbaNgU4/edit?usp=sharing

Contributing to a flashcard set on vocabulary in food-related books

In our seminar we'll all be reading different books about food culture and reporting on them. As you encounter unfamiliar vocabulary in these books you should contribute the word (or phrase) and its meaning to a flashcard set that I've set up for that purpose.

Tokyo VegeFood Festa 2013

Despite the chilly, rainy weather on Sunday, the Tokyo Vegefood Festa last weekend was well attended. It just seems to expand and get more diverse each year. Beginning in 2006 as the “Tokyo International Vegefood Cuture Fair” at Yoyogi Park, it's a sign of its maturity that it doesn't need "international" in its title anymore as it is now a matter of course. There were about 100 food stands and shops offering various vegetarian foods and environmentally friendly products. The highlight for me was meeting a British Japanese farmer/ restaurateur from Tateyama, Chiba who farms rice without tilling the soil and grows green papaya. Regrettably, I didn't see any of my students there, but I did meet some old friends.

Using the "Meet up" system to enjoy restaurants and make friends

I would like to recommend a good system that's in place for helping people to meet up and enjoy their common interests together. You may use it to find a good restaurant to go to for the restaurant review you have to do in our seminar. The system is called "Meetup" and it involves using this website to create a group around a particular topic (e.g., eating at Indian restaurants in Tokyo) that people can join and later participate in events related to that topic that are organized by the members.

For example, last night I participated in a side event of the Tokyo Vegan Meet-up Group, which was a Cuban vegan buffet, held at a restaurant/ bar/ art space in Roppongi called the Pink Cow. It was really enjoyable and the buffet offered a good variety, quality, and quantity of food for a really reasonable price. I especially liked the Spanish rice and beans, various dips--from avocado to hummus and miso--and banana (or was it plantain?) morsels. There was also a nice variety of salads, including pumpkin, potato, green, and tofu salads. As it was a buffet, we could go back as many times as we liked to re-fill our plates. While eating, we could enjoy a slide show of photos taken by a Korean amateur photographer who made many trips to Cuba and seemed to love it there.

I hope you can make use of the Meet-up system when you're searching for restaurants to review. Click here to see a wide range of Tokyo meet-ups, many of which concern food in one way or another.

Use these restaurant review criteria when you and a classmate go out to work on the two restaurant reviews that were assigned to you. Along with your review, you will need to submit the criteria you used for judgement and show the ratings that you gave. Especially be sure to create a "Sequence of Service: Time, Event and Comment Log" (refer to page 4 in the PDF).

Starting a New Blog

This is the inaugural posting of a new blog I'm starting about how to eat in a healthy way in Japan. For the last three years, I've kept a blog called "Wailing for Whaling." I still post to that blog occasionally, but I have long thought that it is most consistent and least hypocritical to consider it immoral not only to eat those large, beautiful, and intelligent masters of the sea, but also to consume the four-legged grass chompers and our two-legged nearly-flightless friends, not to mention the non-mammalian sea dwellers. Fortunately, what is morally right is also environmentally sound, and nutritionally superior. Is it right to be against whaling but indifferent to the fates of the billions of animals that are brought into the word just for the exploitation of their flesh, mammary secretions, and "packages" intended to nourish a developing embryo (i.e., eggs)? Therefore, this blog will focus on how to eat both healthily and cruelty-free, hungrily and enjoyably...bon appétit!