I admit, I made a huge vegetarian faux-pas this holiday season. I try to make tamales every December and as we are new to being vegetarians, the challenge was to make a vegetarian or vegan tamale.
Just after Thanksgiving, our family accepted a 30-day challenge to try to stay vegetarian for a month and we did it, going from the day after Thanksgiving until Christmas without buying, cooking or eating any meat – even when we ate in restaurants.
We enjoyed our new meatless lifestyle so much that we decided to maintain it after the 30-day challenge. While my oldest daughter has become an avowed vegetarian, the rest of us plan to stay primarily meatless, avoiding meat in our ordinary day-to-day lives, but making certain exceptions for a few special occasions and holidays (we might eventually decide to become 100 percent vegetarians, but for now we define ourselves as 95 percent vegetarian).
This decision is primarily for environmental and ethical reasons. In 2006, a study conducted by the United Nations found that 18 percent of greenhouse gasses were caused by the livestock sector. When personal meat consumption is cut by just one day a week, it can help reduce greenhouse gas emissions and combat climate change, the organization says.
For ethical reasons, on those occasions when we do consume meat, we plan to buy from local farmers who humanely raise and care for their animals, then slaughter the animals themselves under acceptable conditions. The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is a great source of information about abuses faced by farm animals when they are mass produced then slaughtered under horrifying conditions. The organization says that tens of billions of animals are killed each year to produce food. We have vowed to no longer buy mass-produced meat or meat byproducts.
With those ideals in mind, I set about to make what I thought would be vegetarian tamales. I loaded them with generous portions of masa, corn, green peppers and a spicy chili sauce and they turned out yummy and fine-looking, even if my tamale wrapping technique is in need of work. But as we sat down to eat the tamales and commented on how nicely they had turned out, I ran over the short list of ingredients I had used to make the tamales. Little did I know, one ingredient I had used, lard, was not vegetarian at all.
This surprised me and caught me off guard. I don’t cook too often with lard with the exception of annual tamales and occasionally, if I have some left over, I’ll use it to make biscuits or pie crust. I’ve had so many cooks tell me that nothing works better for pastry dough than lard. Because lard is not refrigerated, I had assumed that it was a vegetable product like Crisco, not an animal product. Oh how wrong I was.
Lard is rendered pork fat and there is no way to get the fat off of the pig without killing the animal. There is no difference eating lard than eating meat, so of course it is not vegetarian. I immediately tossed the remaining lard in the garbage (but shuffled the packaging to the recycling bin) and set about to find a vegetarian alternative to lard. Turns out, Crisco (which I thought was the same thing as lard) or another similar vegetable shortening is similar in texture to lard, yet is made with vegetable oils rather than animal fat.
Another alternative I quickly learned about was to blend vegetable oil and olive oil in a container then freeze it for at least 24 hours. When it is removed from the freezer, it will have the same consistency and texture as Crisco or lard. But it does melt rather quickly, reverting back to its liquid form, so one must work quickly with it.
I whipped up another batch of tamales and for the purpose of culinary experiment, divided the masa mixture into to two batches – one made with Crisco and one made with the vegetable oil and olive oil mixture. They both turned out just as moist and yummy as it would have with lard, but for my taste buds, the vegetable oil and olive oil mixture seemed a little more palate-pleasing.
Sources
1. The United Nations website, visited Jan. 5, 2011: http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=34419&Cr;=greenhouse&Cr1;=
2. The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals website, visited Jan. 5, 2011: http://features.peta.org/govegan/
3. Crisco website, visited Jan. 5, 2011: http://www.crisco.com/About_Crisco/
