Friday, November 18, 2011

Vegetarian Times is the magazine of great food, good health, and smart living. Each issue is packed with mouth-watering recipes that taste great-and are good for you too. You'll find new tastes, old favorites, and tips on how to cook with fewer calories and less fat.First, the disclaimer. I am not a vegetarian. I have, however, planned many vegetarian menus and cooked thousands of vegetarian meals, both professionally and at home.
This magazine has a rather quaint approach to cover art and illustrations that reminds me of magazines that my mom read in the sixties. Apart from its appearance, the recipes are wildly inconsistent. Some are very good, fast, and easy to prepare. Others are bland and lifeless, reinforcing the misconception that vegetarian food is uninteresting and "healthy tasting." Some of the recipes contain obvious errors and omissions or call for such odd proportions that one wonders if they were tested prior to publication.

Vegetarian Times seems to try reasonably hard to avoid the sanctimony and self-righteousness that afflicts so many publications in this genre. Nonetheless, there is enough polemicizing to annoy when it intrudes on the culinary purposes of the magazine.
My final observation is that this magazine has one of the worst advertisement-to-content ratios that I've ever seen. In a couple of recent issues, the ratio of ads to recipes is nearly one to one. I don't mind paying a reasonable price for a useful publication but I do object to paying for the privilege of reading marketing hype.Bottom line? There are better vegetarian cookbooks readily available through Amazon or other dealers.Robin Robertson and Madhur Jaffrey both offer superior alternatives. After admiring Vegetarian Times on magazine racks for countless months, I finally took the plunge and ordered a one-year subscription. VT features numerous helpful product reviews, vegetarian / vegan recipes, health info, interviews, and a spotlight on green restaurants and businesses around the country. The Carrot & Stick section gives kudos to earth-friendly businesses and institutions and shines a light on animal rights violators. For me, this helps me decide which companies will receive my business based on their track record on environmentalism, recycling, and animal right. 

No comments:

Post a Comment