A New Vegan Cookbook (Just Not Really Vegan)

Cookbook author and herbalist Pat Crocker is currently promoting her recent book The Vegan Cook's Bible. I found myself ending up with a somewhat furrowed brow as I read this bit about it via The Canadian Press. In it, Crocker emphasizes that she's "not a strict vegetarian or vegan", but "regularly enjoys [...] dairy products [and] includes a small amount of organic lamb, chicken, beef and fish in her diet once or twice a week". Now, there's no hard and fast rule anywhere that vegan cookbook authors need to be vegan. I mean, even Bryant Terry, whose Vegan Soul Kitchen is all the rage these days in online vegan discussion groups was pretty forthright about his less than enthusiastic take on veganism. In a recent interview with Mother Jones, for instance, he stated that he doesn't "advocate any particular diet for anyone" and "think [s] that's a very personal decision that people have to make".

It still disappointed me, though, to read Crocker's assertions that "cooking without dairy is really difficult" and that "vegans have lost a certain sense of mouth feel and what tastes good and their palates have become accustomed to a pretty bland diet". Cooking without dairy isn't difficult and to assert that vegans have become accustomed to a bland diet is nuts and perpetuates the whole myth that veganism involves a sort of ascetic diet where deprivation rules the day. Whether she really buys into this or is just bullshitting to try to emphasize how super ridiculously tasty her own recipes are compared to the rest of what's out there, we may never know.

I don't have a copy of the book, but this review of it by Roseann Marulli on the SuperVegan site pretty much helped cement my suspicions of it being anything but a bona fide vegan cook's bible. According to the review, in a section of the book on substitutes for white sugar, Crocker suggests using honey. More problematic, though, is that Crocker includes a section on health called the Healthy Body Systems in which she repeatedly advocates the consumption of fish. In a supposedly vegan cookbook. When Marulli asked Crocker about this, Crocker responded by insisting that "'the fact that vegans don't eat fish does not change the fact that fish is an excellent source of, for example, omega3 fatty acids'".

It's one thing to debate the degree to which vegan ethics or politics should be emphasized in vegan cookbooks (and this is something I'd like to wrap my head around down the road in another blog post). On the other hand, to write a book that one feels compelled to call The Vegan Cook's Bible and then fill it with recommendations to eat fish? Um, no. I don't think so, Pat. I'll pass on this one, and hope that other vegans get this heads up before they decide whether to do so, as well.