Monday, January 25, 2010

How I Got Here

I'd started to hate buying eggs. For years I've been selecting "cage free" eggs, even as I've known that "cage free" is a joke. Ever since I've been a vegetarian, starting in 1997, I've justified my choice not to take the next step and go vegan by telling myself, well, at least nothing I'm consuming is the result of slaughter. No animals died to make this meal. Like so many, I chose not to look in the eye the real suffering, short of actual death (but always, always leading to it eventually), that makes any non-vegan diet possible.

(This would be a good place to note that I've always said I can't get holier-than-though about being vegetarian since I ate meat for 35 years; for similar reasons, I hope I don't get holier-than-though about being vegan -- though I will be opinionated and probably judgmental at times. That's part of the reason for this blog: I need a space in which to be those things.)


This past holiday baking season, I found myself pausing longer than usual in the egg section of the supermarket, taking a deeper breath, feeling the inevitability . . . of something.


In mid-December, D. and I were browsing in Borders, and my eye was drawn to The Conscious Cook, a beautiful vegan cookbook by Tal Ronnen (currently on the New York Times bestseller list). I'm often drawn to beautiful cookbooks, even nonvegetarian ones. I started flipping through. A voice inside me said, "You could do this. This is good food."

D. gave it to me for Christmas. For the first time -- mainly because I'd never really given the issue the attention it deserved -- the prospect of cooking and eating vegan seemed not only doable but exciting and creative. I have a feeling D. (who by his own choice has become mostly vegetarian in the two-plus years we've been together) didn't expect me to be quite as taken with it as I was.

A few days later, I bought another book, and I did so for one reason: I knew it would be the final push I'd need to become vegan. I bought and read it specifically for that reason. I wanted to be pushed.

That book is
Eating Animals, the first nonfiction book by the novelist Jonathan Safran Foer, who is best known for Everything Is Illuminated. Eating Animals is a brilliant work of moral philosophy, memoir, and reportage -- far more moving and empowering (and fair) than I'd ever imagined. (I'll be saying more about it in the future.)

Though the book's essential message did not take me by surprise, and though I specifically chose it to change my life, it was full of surprises, and it did change my life. And for that I'm grateful.

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