I attended the Virtual Vegan Fest Alabama. This is the Vegan Fests second year. First of all I applaud their efforts. This group wanted to take being a vegan to the rest of us. Their website stated that this would be like the Food Network only you were able to buy items directly from the suppliers. Everything was in one place. That is one solidly good idea. People do not have time to go running around especially now. I don’t want to go running around. I go to my regular food haunts, shop and basically get in and out as quickly as possible.
We had a very hard time trying to figure out how to connect to VegFest TV. Never in my history of EventBrite tickets have I had this particular problem. This really dampened my enthusiasm. I felt that I had fallen into some kind of computer loop. I was running around in circles clicking on anything that I thought would move me forward. The access event link didn’t work. I scrolled down the page and finally found this link to AlabamaVeganFest.com .
Once you get to VegFest TV, you once again have to click on images. On my computer, the images took more of me scrolling down the page than I would have expected. I mean come on, it was Sunday morning.
After doing these mental gymnastics, I clicked on the Let’s Eat section which provided me with ads for vegan products. It was very helpful that the length of the ad was listed on the video.
I especially enjoyed the Let’s Cook section of the website. Chef Emanuel Smith from Heaven’s Healthy Kitchen provided some interesting YouTube videos about basic cooking tips. Chef Smith modeled excellent knife skills like holding whatever you are going to chop up like you would hold a tennis ball. Another video was about chopping up herbs. I tried to watch his first video about making a vegan cheese dip but there were some technical glitches. In the middle of the video, suddenly the video sped up making the directions unintelligible. It was very funny and I laughed a great deal however this was an important part of the recipe. This video was about 1 hour long. I’m sorry but I can’t wait around for an hour video on making a cheese dip.
If I was just beginning to learn how to cook, Chef’s tips would have been very helpful. He did say that instead of buying pre-cut cheese, it is better to buy a block of cheese (vegan) and cut it up yourself. There will be less additives involved which is healthier for you. I had just thought about that a couple months ago. I tend to like convenience over length of prep time. So that was a very good point. He also discussed where he got his ingredients from.
I think that VegFest TV has a future as some type of app. It is going in the right direction. It provided some basic information that I would have found very helpful when I was first considering changing my diet.
VegFest TV was on from 11am MST to 8 pm. I checked it out for maybe an hour. It has great possibility but it isn’t there yet. I’m going to check it out next year but for free it wasn’t bad. I just expected better production and ease of use.
