localDC.com - Resources for
the Washington DC area area
Vegetarian Restaurants and
Other Resources
We're approaching one year since the
nuclear accident in Japan. Many animals are still alive, surviving on
their own in the 20 km. exclusion zone. You can support UKC Japan, via Paypal, or (if you can figure out the Japanese), through Amazon's Japanese site. The Japan Cat Network is also entering the exclusion zone and rescuing cats.
Many restaurants offer a discount to Vegetarian
Society of the District of Columbiamembers. This
membership can save you a ton of money on all sorts of discounts, including
travel, smoothies, yoga classes, skin care products and cooking classes.
When you
travel, be sure to look for Loving Hut restaurants. These are a
chain of vegan fast food restaurants. By supporting them, you can help
create a future with healthy veggie restaurants everywhere.
Pangea
Vegan Products in Rockville has a
great selection
of products, especially alternatives to leather clothing. Please note
that their retail store is just open on weekends, but you can order
online anytime.
Potomac
Adventist Book and Health Food Store
is a good place to shop for food if you prefer to shop in a store where
all the food is vegetarian. Adventist celebrate the Sabbath on
Saturday, so the store is closed on Saturdays.
If you're interested in learning about raw food
vegan diets, check out the workshops at Alive and Raw in the Richmond, VA area.
"I have
been a vegetarian for 26 years, since I was 14 years old. I read
Frances Moore Lappe’s “Diet for a Small Planet” and the book educated
me on how important it was for the environment to eat lower on the food
chain: raising cows, pigs and chickens to eat is a wasteful way to use
resources, and in a world where the human population is doubling every
42 years, it is essential that we use land efficiently so that everyone
can be fed. For example: if you had an acre of land and you grew
potatoes on it, that acre would yield 20,000 pounds of potatoes. But if
you used that same acre to grow grain to feed cattle, the cattle fed by
that acre would only yield 165 pounds of beef! For every American that
switches to a vegetarian diet, an acre of trees is spared every year.
(Diet for a New America by John Robbins, page 363)
Another
concern is that the livestock for American dinner tables produces 20
billion pounds of excrement EVERY 24 hours. A lot of that waste ends up
in our rivers and groundwater. And speaking of water, over half the
water consumed here in the United States goes to irrigate land growing
feed and fodder for livestock. It takes 100 times more water to produce
a pound of meat as it does a pound of wheat (Diet for a New America by
John Robbins, page 367) – to produce a single pound of meat takes 2,500
gallons of water!
I have
given you a lot of statistics, but perhaps the most important reason to
be a vegetarian is because the way cows, pigs and chickens are kept
before they are killed is terribly cruel. Factory farming, which
enables us to have a steady and cheap supply of meat and fowl on our
table, locks animals up in cramped and horrendous conditions for their
entire lives. To eat meat and chicken is to condone that.
I have run marathons and triathlons on a vegetarian diet. I recently
finished a 6 mile swim race. Being a vegetarian means being strong and
healthy and free of the awful additives they give to animals.
Enjoy the wonderful vegetarian restaurants in DC!"
Dr. Joel
Fuhrman finds that many of his vegetarian and vegan patients are
deficient in the essential fatty acid DHA. DHA may be a factor for
people with depression, post partum depression, and hyperactivity in
children. While most DHA supplements are derived from fish oil, you can
get vegan DHA (liquid) in vegicaps at Pangea
Vegan Productsin
Rockville. You can get a bottle of liquid vegan DHA from Dr.
Fuhrman's website.
Food for Life offers you a way to provide
food relief in disaster areas that is vegetarian or vegan.