Yesterday I went over to the annual World Veggie Fest with my new friend, Christina. It's somewhat small, but I go mostly every year to check out the free food samples and the great speakers. In the past I've seen Howard Lyman and John Robbins speak. This year there were a bunch of interesting speakers, but we decided to check out Colleen Patrick Goudreau, who hosts a vegan podcast and does cookbooks and things.

I'm not a vegan and frankly, I have no desire to be, but she made some very well-reasoned points about going vegan, or as she calls it, "being compassionate". The point I remember most is that most people say they could never be X because they can't give up Y - like you can't be vegan because you can't give up cheese. She said if you can't do everything, that doesn't mean you have to do nothing. You can go vegan for everything but cheese, or whatever your vice is. It was an interesting thought.
We also saw Rory Freedman, co-author of the Skinny Bitch books.
I have to admit, I had heard of the books but never read them and I had no idea they talked about vegetarianism. I had to leave partway through her talk, unfortunately, so I don't have much of an impression about her or the books, but I'm thinking of checking them out. I think I avoided them because I was turned off by the title or something.
In between speakers, we wandered around the fair. It was mostly vegan and veggie food products, as usual, plus the usual anti-cruelty booths. We tried some good - and not so good - food samples. The next time I make it to Whole Foods, I might pick up a couple of the things we tried. There seemed to be a lot of fake meat vendors this time. I don't really get the point of eating fake meat, but that is just me!
As a bonus, my friend Roni of Daisy Wares was vending at the fair so I got to chat with her for a bit.
I also picked up some of her vegan shea butter in rose.
(Photo from Daisywares.etsy.com)
We also had lunch and I tried a tamale with soyrizo. I'm still debating how I feel about that. Like I said, fake meat isn't really on the top of my list of things to eat, but it didn't taste too bad. All in all, it was a pretty good day except for being freezing! I don't know how we went from 94 on Tuesday to 60 on Saturday!