Category Archives: Magazines

Time for Thali

June 2005

South India is a vegetarian paradise. With the world’s largest veg population, every street is crowded with restaurants that proclaim VEG (no meat) and PURE VEG (no meat or eggs). Even those places that do serve meat feel compelled to say so in veg terms: NON-VEG. It’s my kind of place. And at the core of the distinctive cuisines of South India is thali, the ubiquitous set lunch. (more…)

Posted in Magazines, VegNews

The People’s Grocery

May 2005

West Oakland isn’t the kind of place you’d expect to find many vegetarians—or even vegetables for that matter. An economically depressed neighborhood of freeways, half-completed redevelopment projects, abandoned factories, and port facilities, the community here seems an afterthought: people living in a place not meant for people.

But in the middle of all this I found a bright orange and purple truck, happy beats pumping out from a solar music system on its roof, and a steady trickle of people walking in and out. This is the People’s Grocery Mobile Market. (more…)

Posted in Magazines, VegNews

Snakes and Rats

June 2004

It was not until I moved into a house near a ketchup factory that I first perceived the all-encompassing, smothering embrace of our national vegetable. When the night was still, a cool inversion keeping the air low to the moist floor of the Central Valley, the aroma would blanket the town. Sweet stewing tomatoes.

We could walk from our house up to the ketchup factory fence. Through the chain link, we could see the trucks roll in and up a ramp. There, they were grabbed by a sort of harness, and the entire truckbed would be lifted and dumped—tons of bouncing red balls rolling into the maw of a stainless steel industrial facility. (more…)

Posted in Magazines, Other Magazine