Adventures in Veganism

I don't care what you eat. I mean I really don't care. If you admitted a recent dalliance with cannibalism, I'd be unimpressed. So I'm not trying to convert you now, or to put you down, or to say I'm better than you. If you manage to read all of this and you feel I've been motivated by any of these reasons, you're wrong.

I only want to get down in writing some thoughts I've worked my way through over the last year, since I adopted a more or less vegan diet. Strictly speaking, I don't call myself a "vegan" because it sounds so political. And the true vegan believers wouldn't claim me because I don't refuse to eat if the only thing I can reasonably expect to find on my plate would contain animal products (say if I'm travelling in a foreign country or am a guest in someone's home). Nor do I go out of my way to avoid honey (I don't deliberately add honey to anything, but, sorry, bees are just insects to me and the substance itself isn't harmful). I haven't purged my wardrobe of leather and don't think about such things when buying shoes or belts.

That being said, I'm now in a tiny minority of Americans, less than one percent, who don't consume animal protein, whether from meat, fish, eggs, or dairy. About a year ago a friend who's a far more dedicated vegan than I'll ever be served as a good example of what was possible, and I decided to give it a try. Ten years earlier I'd attempted to live as a vegetarian and had made it for a whole year, but gave it up because I came to believe that the foul, fatty dairy substances I was eating solely to avoid meat were destroying my health. Funny, at the time it never occurred to me to go all the way and forsake dairy and eggs as well.

Thus I returned to omnivorism and slowly adjusted my mentality back as well. I knew that all life has to consume life in order to survive and that this painful paradox was at that heart of many religious rituals (communion, anyone?). As Joseph Campbell put it, I was kidding myself to think I could absent myself from the dilemma and the sadness of having people slaughter things I would then eat. It was as much a part of being fully human as other problems we face, such as making enemies, having rebellious children, or making your rebellious children into your enemies.

Middle age arrived somewhere in the ten-year period after I quit being a vegetarian. For those who wish to live healthily if not necessarily longer, there appears to be irrefutable scientific evidence that reducing animal protein from all sources is a good way to go. I was especially troubled by dairy products, and had long unconsciously begun to avoid them. I had been putting soy milk on my cereal, for instance. When I began to really think about what it meant to drink the secretions of another mammal intended for their young, it became very easy not only to give up dairy, but also to slip into the nearly accusatory rhetoric I'm now using.

Most of the world's population is lactose-intolerant precisely because we're not meant to drink the milk of another animal. Those of us with ancestors from areas where drinking cow's milk became common thousands of years ago have the evolutionary advantage, if you want to consider it that, of being able to drink cow's milk without getting diarrhea or flatulence. But we're still downing a potent mix of proteins designed to fuel the growth spurt of calves. Even the calves give it up after a while, but many humans continue with milk their whole lives.

Most relatives, friends, and acquaintances have been understanding or even helpful when they find out about my diet. My mother -- my wonderful mother -- has taken it as a challenge to find and prepare a variety of tasty things for me to eat whenever I visit. And has she ever succeeded. She went so far as to order a book on vegan baking so that she could make me desserts. And she, my father, and my brother eat it all along with me (supplemented by the occasional rotisserie chicken in their case).

Any vegan, and probably vegetarian too, could tell you that the first question out of the mouths of the less understanding is usually: "What do you eat?" Since we've heard the question so often, we've had a long time to prepare what we think are witty comebacks. So if you meet one of us, spare yourself the barb and ask something else. I try to be nice and say something simple like "The same things you do, except without the animal products and maybe in slightly greater quantities." We don't all have a refrigerator dedicated to tofu and other soy products, you know. We do, though, all have our go-to foods. The nearly universal one is the peanut butter and jelly sandwich. That's true for me, but I also keep cans of boiled peanuts on hand at all times.

I've heard lots of vegans claim a new burst of energy upon settling into the diet. I can't say that, but I didn't lose any energy either. I can say that my skin, prone to some irregularities, settled down a lot (except for when I made the horrible mistake of not avoiding dairy when on a trip to Italy last spring, and bumps broke out all over. I just as quickly began avoiding all Italian dairy products). An acquaintance's psoriasis went totally asymptomatic when she became a vegan. And there are legions of other anecdotes, none proving anything at all except that making a major change in their lives can make people feel more in control and therefore better. There's plenty of scientific evidence that our risk for various cancers and circulatory disorders is reduced noticeably, even if it's never going to disappear. And we get a perverse joy out of shocking people with our social deviance, for whatever that's worth.

For the record, yes, I believe people were made (or rather, evolved in a more primitive era) to gain advantages from eating meat, and, in some parts of the world, from drinking the milk of other species. Those advantages, however, are solely pointed at reaching the age of reproduction, securing a mate, and producing offspring. Nature doesn't care whether your arteries are clear in your middle and later years or whether your immune system is battling cow proteins as you hold your grandchildren. Either you've done your part by then and passed along your DNA, or you haven't. It's as if you raced your new car for a few years, took every corner on two wheels, fed it the most potent fuel available, and then found out you weren't going to be able to afford a new car to replace it when it began having problems at age five.

Most importantly of all, I'm having fun living this way, and I have no intention of stopping.