Eating Vegan with Crohn's Disease

I am going to give you a bunch of recipes for red split lentils. This is one of my all time most favorite foods. They turn into a savory perfect paste of flavor and don’t take super long to cook. You can find red split lentils at Indian groceries, international markets, and Trader Joe’s. Yes, they are way better than the green lentils.

Simple-Ass Lentils

• 1/2 cup red split lentils
• 1 to 1 1/2 cup water or broth
• Salt and pepper to taste

Put all the ingredients in a pot. Bring to a boil then simmer on low 20 mins. The end.

Fancy-Ass Lentils

• Some kinda oil, or water if that’s how you saute
• 1 onion chopped
• 2-3 stalks of celery chopped
• Garlic
• 2 carrots chopped
• 1 bell pepper cut into strips
• 1/2 cup red split lentils
• Enough broth or water to cover all the food in the pot
• Salt and pepper to taste

Cut the veggies. Put in a pot with a drizzle of oil or a little water. Start to saute them. Add the lentils. Stir it all around. Cover with enough broth or water to submerge all the food. Bring to a boil then simmer for 20 mins.

Want to get crazy? Add 1/2 cup rice or quinoa to the above dish and cook as long as the grain needs. Add extra water/broth and cook longer if needed. This is a dish I call The Mush.

Spicy-Ass Lentils

• 1 onion chopped
• 1 inch fresh grated ginger
• Garlic
• 1 bell pepper
• Oil or water to saute
• 1 tablespoon berbere spice blend (or 2 if you like it hot)
• 1 cup red split lentils
• 3 cups broth or water
• Salt and pepper to taste

Saute the veggies. Add the spices. Mix it around to heat up the spices so they smell good. Add the lentils. Stir it around. Add broth or water. Bring to a boil then cook 20-30 minutes or until lentils turn to a mush. Add extra oil or butter if you want it really rich. Serve with injera, Ethiopian fermented flat bread.

I’M SERIOUS ABOUT HOW GOOD RED SPLIT LENTILS ARE. EAT THEM.

I am an unabashed emotional eater. I eat when I’m emotional, and eating makes me emotional. I love food.

We need foods that comfort us when we are sick. When I was too sick to work, I would still walk over to the sushi restaurant a block from my house once a week for supper with a friend. I couldn’t afford it, and it probably wasn’t very good for my bowels, but I needed to eat a food I loved. I needed to enjoy food.

Crohn’s doesn’t just destroy your ability to digest. It destroys your ability to relate to food in a healthy way. No one should be afraid to eat. No one should avoid nourishment because of pain avoidance. But this is what happens with Crohn’s, and for many people the bodily experience of the disease turns you off from food.

How can we eat healthy when we are afraid to eat fruits and vegetables? When we are told to eat low fiber diets and processed foods? The body cannot heal itself without proper nutrition, but it also can’t heal itself if it rejects the foods that are the vehicles for that nutrition.

We have to figure out a way to make nourishing food digestible and palatable. Our food must nourish us and comfort us, so we will rebuild a healthy relationship to food.

In those first months of a flare, we have to figure out what we can tolerate that will still provide us with essential nutrients and healing sustenance. After we are able to eat more variety in our diets, we must nurture this relationship to feel comforted by the wholesome foods — the whole grains, beans, lentils, and starchy vegetables.

I was in the international market the other day, staring at an aisle of legumes. An entire aisle! The noisy din of the store was muffled by the plastic sacs of red split lentils, chaana, mung beans. I felt safe there, surrounded by food I knew wouldn’t hurt my body.

So that’s weird.

But the moral of the story is, as we shift our thinking and our relationship to food, we can find comfort in surprising places. I used to drive to Cane’s or Taco Bell after a hard day of work when I needed to eat something immediately and take a nap, when I needed something hot and rich to hit my stomach lining and release hormones of satiety into my brain receptors.

Now I feel that way about my mom’s three bean salad, sitting in the fridge waiting for me at home.

Calico Salad

• 1/2 sweet onion, diced
• 1 bell pepper, diced
• 1 can red kidney beans, drained and rinsed
• 1 can garbanzo beans, drained and rinsed
• 1 can cut green beans, drained and rinsed
• 1/3 cup olive oil
• 2/3 cup vinegar (I mix white, red, and garlic rice vinegar)
• 1/2 cup sugar (or less, to taste, or you can use honey or maple syrup)
• Salt and pepper to taste

Put all of the ingredients in a large bowl. Mix. Let sit in the fridge for 24 hours. You can add any kind of bean to this. Yellow wax beans are a very nice addition!

I hated canned green beans until I realized they were in this salad. Now my world is different. Give it a try.

What’s the big deal with meat, anyway?

Animals breathe in heavy metals from industrial pollution and eat plants covered in pesticides. These chemicals accumulate in their flesh and consumed by people.

Meat is bad for the environment and speeds climate change. The meat industry heavily relies on fossil fuels. The beef industry requires land for pasture, which requires deforestation. Signal memories of the Amazon burning in Brazil under the fascist Bolsonaro regime.

With factory farms, there is the issue of waste. Mountains of cow poo. Cow pies should be turning into dust on a sunny pasture, not festering in waste ponds, leeching into rivers and streams, and fouling up ecosystems. Furthermore, cows produce 37% of methane emissions, and 65% of nitrous oxide emissions. These are potent greenhouse gasses that directly contribute to climate change.

Growing and feeding animals for human consumption uses massive amounts of agricultural resources that could be used to easily feed all the people in the world. Only 55% of crop calories go to direct human consumption. The rest go to animal feed and biofuel.

This map shows crops grown for human consumption (green) versus crops grown for animal feed and fuel (purple).

Meat costs US taxpayers billions of dollars in subsidies. Most of the subsidies for American farmers go to crops humans don’t eat: feed crops for animals, tobacco, and cotton. Fruits and vegetables for human consumption do not get subsidies. Because of these policies, meat prices are artificially low, and fruits and vegetables are not.

But we’re still paying for the meat: it comes directly out of our paychecks, and we’re paying with our health. Highly subsidized foods make up the majority of calories Americans consume, and also pose significant health risks.

Meat as it is available to US consumers is not a healthy option. The World Health Organization conducted research that shows an association between red meat consumption and colorectal cancer. This has to do with how red meat is prepared, usually cooked over high heat. Red meat was classified as a Group 2 carcinogen. Processed meat, on the other hand, was classified as a Group 1 carcinogen. This means the WHO believes it to be strongly correlated with colorectal cancer. Other Group 1 carcinogens include tobacco and asbestos.

Based on this information, I believe meat and animal products are bad for me, the environment, and global food security. I know that my personal choice to stop eating meat will not change the powerful corporations and highly subsidized industries that make bank on meat.

In order to sustain humanity in the future, we need political and social shifts globally. In America, this starts with repairing our democracy, increasing civic participation in government, and ending corporate campaign finance and lobbying. To do my part, I teach world history, current events, community leadership, and social movements to my students.