Vegetarianism and Voyaging

Credit: Janette Watson

 

Why be a vegetarian voyager? Not that long ago, I would have had to explain the advantages of being vegetarian or vegan in great detail. Mercifully, times have moved on and there is heaps of information about both diets, readily accessible via Wikipedia, Google or your local library. That being so, I’ll stick to the voyaging aspect of the question. What are the advantages to the sailor, of being a vegetarian? Almost everything I say about the advantages of being vegetarian apply to being a vegan. However, while all vegans are vegetarians, not all vegetarians are vegans, so I shall stick with the word vegetarian throughout this blog.

Now, while you may be convinced that vegetarian dining will avoid issues that come with using meat, you may receive a less than enthusiastic response from your carnivorous crew. A little later, I list some of the very real advantages for vegetarianism when you are actually sailing, which should influence most people at least to try out the idea. To help with the changeover, I suggest you try introducing beans gradually into the diet, before you start voyaging, combining them where appropriate, with progressively decreasing amounts of meat. At least people these days tend to be more adventurous eaters than they were half a century ago, so they will have come across beans other than bright orange ones out of a can!  Obvious examples would be to add or substitute whole lentils for meat in chilli con carne, or spaghetti Bolognese; butter beans with lamb in a hot pot; chick peas with chicken curry. A couple of slices of bacon or salami can be introduced into many of the recipes you will find in this blog, which may make meat eaters accept them more readily. Judicious use of the (ahem, carcinogenic) flavourings should appease even the most intransigent of omnivores. They can both be kept for weeks without refrigeration. Beans can also be used to extend either fresh or canned meat, so that even if you can’t convert your mate to true vegetarian eating, you will still be eating both more healthily and more cheaply.  Of course, as well as beans there are nuts, different grains, and such things as tofu and seitan.  The beans, however, have a bulk that is often appreciated and tofu requires refrigeraton.  To be honest, in spite of my best endeavours, I haven't managed to make friends with it myself, although Burmese tofu (of which more in the recipes) is very acceptable.  Seitan is fabulous stuff, although some people aren't that fond of the texture.  I love it and have more than once had carnivores coming back for my seitan chorizo.

Although, as I mentioned, there is heaps of information available about plant-based diets, one thing that people seem to fret about completely unnecessarily, is getting sufficient protein. Considering that most people eating a typical Western diet are getting twice the amount of their recommended daily protein (and considering that many nutritionists reckon that the recommendation is unnecessarily high), I don’t think this is something that one really needs to worry about. The important thing with any diet is to have plenty of variety and to try to eat as much fresh and minimally-processed food as possible.  Many Westerners who are eating plenty of protein have diets lacking other essential nutrients. (Eating fresh food while voyaging is also a lot easier than many people think. In due course I’ll go into this in more detail.) Considering that some of the world’s top athletes are now vegan, I think it’s unlikely that the average yachtie is going to be short of protein. If you’re still worried, I recommend you Google human protein requirements.

I’ve been eating a largely vegetarian diet for 45 years. For the last ten years I have been almost vegan. Even when living with a skipper who enjoyed an omnivorous diet (and cooking and eating what he liked when we could afford to), my milk intake has rarely been more than a litre a week; for years, I never ate cheese. I used to eat about 5 eggs a week, but often fewer, and fish maybe once a week. For years, I went for months without eating a piece of meat and haven’t chosen to eat it for a dozen years. For all my adult life I am pleased to say that I’ve been very healthy, very, very rarely have a cold and have caught ‘flu twice. Cuts heal quickly and my skin and hair are healthy. Beans, cereals, vegetable, fruit, nuts and seeds are what constitute my diet.

If you've been doing some reading and are now worried about ‘combining proteins’ (an idea that has largely been debunked), let me point out that doing so is as simple as falling off a log. In a nutshell, when you combine pulses with grain or potatoes – as in curry and rice, lentils and spaghetti, nut burgers and chips – you have your complete selection of proteins. Eating plenty of eggs, cheese and milk products make many people feel happier when they first ‘go veggie’. But once you start voyaging, it makes sense not to be too dependent on these foods, which aren’t always readily available and are rarely inexpensive.

When we changed to a largely vegetarian diet in 1978, the overriding incentive was lack of money. I am not over-endowed with dollars these days, either (indeed, I doubt what I live on would keep a moderate smoker in cigarettes), but to my mind I eat in lordly fashion, because being a vegetarian is still so much cheaper than being an omnivore. If I want a real treat, it’s a lot cheaper to buy an enormous Portobello mushroom (or even two!) than a large fillet steak. If you’re trying to voyage as inexpensively as possible, a vegetarian diet is cheaper than an omnivorous one.

As you travel around the world, you’ll discover that fresh meat is frequently expensive and of course, it spoils easily; canned meat is neither cheap nor readily available in many, places. While British and North American sailors are used to their Fray Bentos steak and kidney pies, or Dinty Moore stews, there are many parts of the world where canned meat is almost unknown or at best comes in a very limited range. Ashore, most people chill their meat, but while it’s possible to have a refrigerator or deep freeze on a boat, it’s an expensive and complex solution. I’m assuming that many people reading this blog will have come to it via my other writing, so no-one should be surprised to hear that I’m a staunch advocate of keeping things simple.

In my opinion, vegetarian food might well have been specifically designed for voyagers. As well as being inexpensive, a vegetarian’s staple foods keep well: dried peas and beans, nuts, grains and seeds, all generally last for several months and frequently longer. Many of them are universally available, with the additional advantage that they’re very compact. A half-cup (120g/4 oz) of uncooked lentils, for example, provides the meat equivalent for two people, but is a third of the weight and takes up a quarter of the space of one can of corned beef. Twenty cups of lentils fit in a 5 litre/5 quart container and need only a fraction of the space required by 40 tins of corned beef.

Cans and salt water are best kept apart, something which isn’t always possible on a boat. A lot of people eat beans from cans, but my recommendation is to use them dry. They take up less room, are less likely to be damaged, are more flexible and are usually available in a wider variety. Good quality, waterproof plastic containers are impervious to seawater, easy to obtain, (cheaply or for free) and perfect for keeping vegetarian supplies. (For those who hate plastic, I would like to point out that it’s not plastic per se that’s the problem, it’s single-use plastic. I have a couple of containers on board that go back to when I owned Sheila, which was sold in 1979! If we all kept our containers for half a century, or refused to buy them if we weren’t going to keep them, then the whole issue of plastic waste would be controllable.)

Flexibility is another advantage for the vegetarian voyager. Whole lentils for example, can be used in salads, soups, stews, pies, pasties, burgers or curry. If there’s an extra mouth to feed, another quarter cup of beans can easily be added to the meal, while opening another can is harder on the budget and supplies. Odds on, it will be more than you need, while stretching the one already opened will give parsimonious portions.

Familiarity with the food that you see for sale is a further advantage, when you’re travelling. While undoubtedly one of the best parts of going to a new country is sampling the local food, when you come to stock up again, it helps if you know what you’re buying. A bean looks like a bean, a sunflower seed like a sunflower seed. You avoid the Russian roulette of trying to decipher incomprehensible labels with the assistance of an inadequate dictionary. You don’t risk finding the cans of meat you bought are unpalatable (to this day I can remember the absolutely revolting ‘corned beef’ that we bought in Guadeloupe. We couldn’t afford to replace it, but even my notoriously mean skipper couldn’t bring himself to eat it. We simply went without). And if you’re in a place where canned meat is uncommon, you avoid the complication of trying to explain exactly what it is you require.

Of course, there are effective ways of preserving fresh meat, and a number of sailors are prepared to invest the necessary time to do so, but most people, used to supermarket shopping, are totally flummoxed when confronted with large lumps of meat, cut apparently at random from a dead animal. Not a few dedicated carnivores turn distinctly queasy in overseas’ meat markets, where locals happily buy and eat all parts of the animal, which are displayed in all their gory glory.

Compactness, economy and familiarity allow you to stock up where the quality is good, enable you to provide a generous margin in case your passage is unavoidably extended, and to use food you are comfortable and confident with when cooking.

Finally, and most importantly, the Voyaging Vegetarian can always make delicious and varied meals, underway or at anchor. Food that is healthy, wholesome and filling. Food that can be raised to elegant heights for special occasions or made simple and sustaining in the worst of gales. Food that is always interesting and will make the main meal the highlight of any day.