VEGAN READS: The Veg News Guide to Being a Fabulous Vegan by Jasmin Singer (2020)

The first in my new “Vegan Reads” series.

I’m one of those people who loves to read recipe books. When I’m eating by myself, I sit at the table with my broccoli walnut pasta or tofu stir fry, a cookbook propped up in front of me. I flip through, gaze at the vibrant pictures and skim the descriptions of each recipe’s origins, how long it takes to make, what the ingredients are. I tag the dishes I want to make by folding down the corners of the pages, or marking them with a star in pencil (never pen; I never mark books in pen) and shove a bookmark in them. My oldest recipe book, my copy of the original Moosewood cookbook from the late seventies (printed on brown paper with cute hand drawings of vegetables in place of photos) has the dates noted in my handwriting of when I first made each recipe. It’s travelled with me to more homes than I can count.

As an obsessive reader and dinner-time cookbook flipper, I devoured Jasmin Singer’s The VegNews Guide to Being a Fabluous Vegan in just over a week — even though it’s meant to be nibbled and digested over 30 days. Fab Veg is not strictly speaking a recipe book. It’s so much more. I’ve already been doing the plant-based thing for almost seven years, so some of the advice on how to “look good, feel good and do good” was familiar to me. But…