Demand for vegetarian cooking classes at the New School of Cooking in Los Angeles has been on the rise for several years. There are many contributing factors to this trend.

First, there is a new found appreciation for the importance of eating locally. A growing number of authors, cookbook writers and activists including Michael Pollan, Alice Waters, Deborah Madison, and Good Food host Evan Kleiman have helped enlighten us to the importance of eating vegetables in season, and from local sources.

By buying our produce from any of the dozens of Los Angeles area farmer’s markets, we are contributing to a movement to support local farmers, healthy growing practices and superior food quality. While not everyone who takes a vegetarian cooking class is or plans to become a vegetarian, a growing number of people are trying to get more vegetables on their plates and need a little help knowing how to do that creatively.

In the early days of vegetarianism, many people believed that in order to be healthy, one had to replace the amount of protein found in meat. And that didn’t necessarily help the cause. By assuming you had to get your protein from tofu, rice and beans, vegetarianism looked pretty dreary to carnivores and vegetarians alike. Many scientific studies both in the field and the laboratory have concluded that that premise was entirely flawed. In countries and communities where people consume a mostly plant based diet, there are far fewer instances of obesity, heart disease, cancer and diabetes; and moreover, people live longer. In fact, we now know that most Americans are consuming far too much meat protein. So the current wisdom on vegetarian eating is that there is plenty of protein in a plant based diet.

Another cause for the increased demand for vegetarian cooking classes in Los Angeles comes from an understanding that our current industrial agricultural practices are absolutely and unequivocally unsustainable. The monocultures of corn and soy supported by our government are unhealthy for our bodies and devastating for our planet. Because of subsidies to these crops, we have created surpluses which we have forced onto our livestock. We’ve created unhealthy cows and pigs by feeding them crops that they would otherwise not consume and then are required to treat them with antibiotics and other harmful chemicals to keep them alive.