photos from the May 4th meeting!

Thirteen people, big and small (and one on the way), attended our May 4th meeting of the Orillia Vegetarian Club. We had some great conversations and some great food! Here are some of the photos.

Also, our next meeting will be dinner at Brewery Bay - a local Orillia hotspot. We're meeting at 4:30pm on June 1, 2008.

Please RSVP to orilliaveg@gmail.com by Sunday May 25th.


A delicious salad with chickpeas, red onions, mandarin oranges, spinach and more.










Ben's Black Bean Salsa from How it All Vegan cookbook










Veggie Shepherd's Pie











Chana Masala and Aloo Gobi











Natalie, Jocelyn, and Emmy - chowing down :)

Veggies & protein

The list of upcoming events for the Orillia Veggie group is here.


I don't personally get asked the where do you get your protein from? question very often, but it is something that omnivores tend to ask. It's actually pretty ironic, because when you read the literature, you know that most North Americans actually get far too much protein.

As Mark Bittman (who isn't a vegetarian) wrote in the New York Times recently...

Americans are downing close to 200 pounds of meat, poultry and fish per capita per year (dairy and eggs are separate, and hardly insignificant), an increase of 50 pounds per person from 50 years ago. We each consume something like 110 grams of protein a day, about twice the federal government’s recommended allowance; of that, about 75 grams come from animal protein. (The recommended level is itself considered by many dietary experts to be higher than it needs to be.) It’s likely that most of us would do just fine on around 30 grams of protein a day, virtually all of it from plant sources.

Anyway, even high level athletes can get the protein they need from a vegetarian or vegan diet, and if you want to make a power-packed soup of lentils and chick peas, try this Moroccan Lentil and Chick Pea Soup recipe.

May meeting

The May meeting of the Orillia Vegetarian Club will be on Sunday May 4th, from 4:30 to 6:30p.m.

It will be held at the Friends Meeting House, at 231 Westmount Drive South.

Please bring a potluck dish - enough to serve yourself and 5 others (and please print off and bring copies of the recipe!). You are also asked to bring your own drinks, as well as $2 per person to help cover the cost of the venue (kids exempted).

If you need recipe ideas, there are some vegetarian recipes here, and loads more online - just do searches like vegetarian recipes or vegan recipes.

If you have any questions, just email orilliaveg [at] gmail.com.

future meetings

Please save these dates and plan to join us for one (or all) of our monthly gatherings! The locations and themes are tentative at this point -- so please let us know if you have any special requests or suggestions :)

Note: The monthly event is held on the first Sunday of every month, starting at 4:30pm. Please email orilliaveg@gmail.com or check back here for changes (if the first Sunday is a holiday weekend, we will meet on the second Sunday instead).

May 4th - potluck at Friends Meeting House (no theme)

June 1st – dinner at Brewery Bay in Orillia

July 13th (alternate date because 1st Sunday is Mariposa!) – potluck at Couchiching Beach park (meet at the greenhouse)/bring your own plates, cups, cutlery and lawnchairs

Aug 10th (alternate date because 1st Sunday is long weekend) – potluck and farm tour at Nora, Stephen and Natalie's/bring your own plates, cups, cutlery and lawnchairs. Email us for directions.

Sept 7th – potluck at Friends Meeting House/theme: 100 mile diet

Oct 5th – potluck at Friends Meeting House/theme: Soup Night

Nov 2nd – potluck at Friends Meeting House/guest speaker: Sprouting?

Dec 7th – potluck at Friends Meeting House/theme: Holiday party

Eat food, not too much, mostly plants

Michael Pollan is not a vegetarian. He is however a journalist who has written some powerful pieces that explore, and support, the vegetarian argument.
In his January 2007 New York Times article, Unhappy Meals he uses nearly a dozen pages to prove his opening thesis that we'd all be better off if we ate "food" (real food - apples, not apple derivatives), and only a little bit, and stayed as far away from meat as possible.
His 2006 book The Omnivore's Dilemma examined the different types of meals available to North Americans - a fast food meal vs. an "organic meal" vs. a completely self grown & cooked meal. It was at it's most powerful when examining the factory farming system, and part of this can be read here.

Really interesting reading, especially if you haven't given much thought to food issues & and industrial agriculture before, and want to be introduced to the field by a fairly neutral, but very critical, omnivore.

Thanks to Debris for the picture.