I feel like I'm actually eating better than I have in years -- and I don't mean more healthily (which may be true, though I ate pretty healthily as a non-vegan vegetarian); I mean more tastily.
Tonight I had Gardein Chick'n Filets. Gardein is a new line of products created with the help of Tal Ronnen, author of the cookbook that helped start me on this path. (The fact that the book is a bestseller can't help but be a huge boost to the company.) I thought the Tuscan Breasts were only pretty good in texture, but the Chick'n Filets are fantastic -- almost as good as the amazing-but-troublesome Quorn "chicken" that tastes like the real thing but that I'll never eat again in my life.
About ten or so years ago, my ex and I discovered Quorn and were completely taken with it. It tasted and felt exactly -- but exactly -- like chicken breast meat. Then one night after eating it, he got violently ill (and I mean vomiting-out-the-car-window ill). It turns out that a documented small percentage of people have that reaction to the fungus-related mycoprotein that Quorn is made from, and he apparently was one of them. At the time, the FDA hadn't actually approved Quorn; it was in the "generally considered safe" category -- that word "generally" kind of gives one pause, no? I haven't checked back to see if that status has changed. All I know is that my ex immediately stopped eating Quorn for good, and I did too; even though I didn't have a negative reaction, I couldn't comfortably eat something that affected other people so frighteningly. (In any case, Quorn also contains egg.)
Gardein products, on the other hand, are made from grains and other familiar ingredients. I don't know what they do to get the texture they achieve, but the ones I've tried are "generally" (ha ha) excellent. In addition to the Chick'n Filets, I love the beefy BBQ Skewers. The first time I had them, I browned them in olive oil on the skewers they come with, then removed them and cut the "meat" into chunks and added it to a sautee of mushrooms and grape tomatoes, splashing the whole thing at the last minute with a glug or two of balsamic vinegar, which caramelized really nicely. I served it with orzo and broccolini (squeezed with a little lemon).
Tonight I dredged the Chick'n Filets in flour, browned them in olive oil while some sliced mushrooms cooked off to the side in the same pan, then dowsed it all with white wine, making a really lovely sauce; again I had orzo as well as a small baby-arugula salad with dried cranberries and a lemon-mustard dressing (lately I prefer lemon juice to vinegar in salad dressing). This used to be my favorite way to cook boneless chicken breasts and thin pork chops way back when I ate meat.
It's so strange -- I almost never actively miss eating meat, and I don't feel compelled to recreate the sensation of it in my mouth at every meal. By the same token, I'm not going to say that the taste of meat revolts me. I always enjoyed it when I ate it. It's the abjectly cruel and horrifically disease-ridden conditions in which most of the world's meat (yes, most) is produced that made me stop eating it -- and now have made me stop eating eggs, dairy, and other animal products.
I'm not sure why these meat doppelgangers I've recently discovered have made me so happy. I guess I've been conditioned from a young age to respond to their taste and "mouth feel." If people never ate meat to begin with, we'd probably never need to reproduce that particular sensory experience.
What's most remarkable to me is that it's possible to get that sensation with a clear conscience.
Friday, January 29, 2010
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Cole Porter, Patron Saint of Veganism
Thanks to my pal Diablo for the blog's goofy title.As we tossed around ideas by text message, I thought this one was more amusing than actually usable, but I kept coming back to it. So I looked up the lyrics to "Begin the Beguine" and found the line that, taken ridiculously out of context, turned out to be the not-so-ridiculous perfect epigraph.
I considered it a sign that Begin the Vegan was meant to be the name.
Tuesday, January 26, 2010
Sustenance
I can think of no better way to explain where I'm coming from -- specifically how my vegetarianism came about in 1997 -- than to reprint here an essay I published a little over ten years ago in a now-defunct magazine called Common Boundary. (Some personal aspects of my life have changed -- chiefly that I'm no longer with my partner of the time and my dog Fred has passed away -- but I've left the story as it was written. I stand by it all even today.)
Fred doesn’t know he’s the first animal I’ve ever loved. It doesn’t matter to him that he’s changed my life, that because of him I have a wholly new respect for animals. And he certainly has no idea that he’s the reason I stopped eating meat.
I’m one of the last people I’d ever have picked to become a vegetarian. I used to secretly resent non-meat-eaters for limiting the menu options when I had them over for dinner and making me feel guilty for ordering a hamburger in a restaurant. I was cynical toward animal-rights advocates, too—I even let one new friendship peter out because I couldn’t imagine having enough in common with someone who refused to wear leather shoes.
I grew up in a family without pets. For most of my life, my relationship with animals was reserved for teddy bears from my childhood and characters in Winnie-the-Pooh and The Wind in the Willows. (I’ve always had a thing for fauna that wear waistcoats and have furnished homes in tree trunks.) When I was four, one of my sisters was bitten by a dog, and I rushed to the doctor with her and my mother. I have no memory of seeing my sister’s wound. I’m not even sure I witnessed the accident. I remember little more than walking out of the doctor’s office—my sister holding her bandaged arm in front of her as if it were about to explode. Even so, for years I had to remind myself that I wasn’t the one who’d been attacked, and I’ve always regarded that day as the seed of my fear of dogs.
A St. Bernard roamed unleashed at the end of our street, part of a family we knew as “the Russians.” If Ivar was out front when I passed by, I’d leap wordlessly onto my brother’s shoulders like a circus performer and he’d lug me up the hill to our house. Once, when I was in our front yard, a small dog appeared out of nowhere, sprang onto my back, and started frantically licking my head and face. I flailed as if attacked by a swarm of poisonous bees. For years, whenever I came upon a dog, I’d cower or run or clumsily back away, the animal invariably yelping and panting after me.
I was well into my 20s before I realized that not all dogs bark, relatively few of them bite, and their approach generally involves something more benign than being mauled. When I reached my 30s, all of a sudden men with dogs started catching my eye. I was drawn to something boy-like in their companionship with their pets. Of course, for most of my life, “boy” plus “dog” equaled “terror.” My newfound attraction was, I think, a desire to refigure the equation, to capture a particular sweetness I’d missed.
Instead, it found me.
More precisely, I met Scott; his sleepy eight-year-old basset-beagle, Fred, was simply part of the deal. When I let Scott into my life, I had no choice but to let Fred in, too. The surprise is that not only did I “let Fred in,” but for the first time in my life I found myself loving an animal.
Fred was easy to love—quiet, slow-moving, nondemanding—the perfect starter dog for someone as inexperienced as I. At rest he was a veritable crescent moon of self-containment. Yet whenever I was more than touching distance away, his licorice-marble eyes would look at me and say: What are you waiting for?
The first time I was alone overnight with him was a spring weekend when Scott was out of town. Ordinarily, when Fred was the third party in bed, I found his presence an annoyance. I’d endure the cramped arrangement, but wake up grumpy and sleep-deprived. When it was just the two of us, though, there was plenty of room in bed and I took such unlimited pleasure in him—sighing, smacking his lips, settling in on his own terms with no regard for my comfort, yet facilitating it all the same. Carelessness as heartfelt ministration.
* * *
About a year later, I got into an argument with a friend about capital punishment. While I opposed it, he made exceptions, offering me the boilerplate challenge: What if someone had killed a loved one? I insisted my stance would be the same: Murder is murder.
“What about eating meat?” he said. “Or using animals for medical research?”
We’d had this argument before. We both ate meat, and as for lab animals, I thought we agreed that as long as the conditions were as humane as possible, finding cures for human ailments was justification enough. But he was goading me to verbalize the contradiction, so I fell back on the assertion I’d always relied on: Yes, okay! When you get right down to it, if you have to make a choice, humans are more important than animals.
Yet for weeks afterward, a feeling nagged at me that I no longer believed my own words—the way you find yourself singing along to a song on the radio that you don’t like anymore. I’d go over to Scott and Fred’s house and find the two of them locked in a private face-to-face on the floor, Fred mutely taking in his caretaker’s words of love, absorbing all those everyday, answerless questions about his well-being. Nearly a decade’s worth of intimacy, devoid of self-consciousness or strain.
Later the same evening, out of the corner of my eye, I’d glimpse a rubbery dog yawn. Fred would catch me looking, pause, lock eyes, then lay his head down on his bed. Taking some of me with him, leaving me with more than I had before.
***
How do you describe that moment of recognition that there’s something to be valued, something of substance, in an animal’s being?
n the summer of 1997, I came across a magazine essay—brilliant, argumentative, nearly strident in its passion—by the writer Joy Williams.* At one point she evokes a dismissive skeptic challenging a so-called “animal person”: Does she really believe that animals have souls?
“Yes, I do. I do believe that,” Williams imagines the advocate responding. “Their natures are their souls.”
Some things seem too embarrassingly simple to state in words. Surely, we think, it’s got to be more complicated than that.
Their natures are their souls.
Nothing could have expressed more straightforwardly the fumbling sense that had been growing inside me like a crush that threatens to bloom into something bigger—and permanent. If Fred was capable of expressing love, reliance, fear, curiosity, impatience, loneliness—all of which I had witnessed in his posture, his gaze, his touch, his step—who could say that other animals, whether wild or captive, didn’t? If the human soul was both our individual defining essence and the eternal shared by us all, unbounded by birth and death—indeed, if having a soul required nothing more of us than being human—couldn’t the equivalent be said for animals?
For most of my life, anytime I saw photos of wide-eyed monkeys strapped into chairs, electrodes stuck to their skin like burrs, or pictures of overcrowded chicken coops, the birds’ faces barely visible through masses of matted feathers, I’d recoil but also feel manipulated: They’re going for my heartstrings and my wallet. Sure, this stuff happens, and it looks awful. But that’s the world. What does it have to do with me?
Now it had to do with me. With strange and immediate clarity, I acknowledged something as unadorned as Fred’s nature, and it felt impossible to separate it from that of any other animal. That’s what I was responding to each time he looked at me. From that moment, buying and cooking meat felt nothing less than hypocritical. In short, I had to act upon the disjunction between what I’d found without looking (the love of and for an animal) and what I’d taken for granted (that some animals deserve affection or reverence while others don’t).
I know that plenty of people have pets and don’t feel compelled to swear off meat; one doesn’t logically lead to the other. But my own shift in awareness jarred me so profoundly that I had no choice but to respect it.
The mind, that slow learner, is often one step behind the heart.
* * *
I don’t expect to convert anyone, nor am I trying to. I ate meat for what will probably amount to half my life, so who am I to get sanctimonious? What’s more, I’m not a perfect vegetarian. I’ve been known to eat meat if served it by others who don’t know my preferences, and I’ll order seafood if there aren’t any meatless choices in a restaurant. I just try to be true to my beliefs: As far as my own diet is concerned, I’m not interested in contributing to the business of slaughter.
Not long after I stopped eating meat, Scott did as well. I’ve been giving Fred all the credit, but it was also because of Scott that my lifetime of detachment from animals ended. In his joyous, unguarded voice greeting Fred in the morning— “Hello, little boy!” —in his patience with me as I’ve come to walk in step with a creature who takes the world in slowly but whole, I’ve learned what I may be capable of. I’m glad I could return the favor by starting my feet on a road that Scott chose to follow.
The three of us live together now. Fred is old and has trouble climbing the stairs, so sharing the bed with him is no longer an issue. Instead, he curls up on his own bed at night, still a crescent moon—shining more dimly, but shining all the same. As I say goodnight, I take his soft light in, nourishment I’d never have imagined would fill me up.
____
* The Joy Williams essay appeared in Harper's as "The Inhumanity of the Animal People" but was reprinted in her book Ill Nature as simply "The Animal People." I'm unable to find the full text of it online to link to.
Sustenance
Seven a.m. and pouring outside. Fred followed me back into the house after I let him out. Wet-furred and asleep on the rug beside me, he moves his legs slightly, like a not-quite-idle wind-up toy turned on its side. Scott says that when this happens, Fred’s running in his dreams. I can’t say if that’s true, but I take his word for it because I have nothing to base my doubts upon. I’ve given up my doubts to Fred, along with my fear.Fred doesn’t know he’s the first animal I’ve ever loved. It doesn’t matter to him that he’s changed my life, that because of him I have a wholly new respect for animals. And he certainly has no idea that he’s the reason I stopped eating meat.
I’m one of the last people I’d ever have picked to become a vegetarian. I used to secretly resent non-meat-eaters for limiting the menu options when I had them over for dinner and making me feel guilty for ordering a hamburger in a restaurant. I was cynical toward animal-rights advocates, too—I even let one new friendship peter out because I couldn’t imagine having enough in common with someone who refused to wear leather shoes.
I grew up in a family without pets. For most of my life, my relationship with animals was reserved for teddy bears from my childhood and characters in Winnie-the-Pooh and The Wind in the Willows. (I’ve always had a thing for fauna that wear waistcoats and have furnished homes in tree trunks.) When I was four, one of my sisters was bitten by a dog, and I rushed to the doctor with her and my mother. I have no memory of seeing my sister’s wound. I’m not even sure I witnessed the accident. I remember little more than walking out of the doctor’s office—my sister holding her bandaged arm in front of her as if it were about to explode. Even so, for years I had to remind myself that I wasn’t the one who’d been attacked, and I’ve always regarded that day as the seed of my fear of dogs.
A St. Bernard roamed unleashed at the end of our street, part of a family we knew as “the Russians.” If Ivar was out front when I passed by, I’d leap wordlessly onto my brother’s shoulders like a circus performer and he’d lug me up the hill to our house. Once, when I was in our front yard, a small dog appeared out of nowhere, sprang onto my back, and started frantically licking my head and face. I flailed as if attacked by a swarm of poisonous bees. For years, whenever I came upon a dog, I’d cower or run or clumsily back away, the animal invariably yelping and panting after me.
I was well into my 20s before I realized that not all dogs bark, relatively few of them bite, and their approach generally involves something more benign than being mauled. When I reached my 30s, all of a sudden men with dogs started catching my eye. I was drawn to something boy-like in their companionship with their pets. Of course, for most of my life, “boy” plus “dog” equaled “terror.” My newfound attraction was, I think, a desire to refigure the equation, to capture a particular sweetness I’d missed.
Instead, it found me.
More precisely, I met Scott; his sleepy eight-year-old basset-beagle, Fred, was simply part of the deal. When I let Scott into my life, I had no choice but to let Fred in, too. The surprise is that not only did I “let Fred in,” but for the first time in my life I found myself loving an animal.
Fred was easy to love—quiet, slow-moving, nondemanding—the perfect starter dog for someone as inexperienced as I. At rest he was a veritable crescent moon of self-containment. Yet whenever I was more than touching distance away, his licorice-marble eyes would look at me and say: What are you waiting for?
The first time I was alone overnight with him was a spring weekend when Scott was out of town. Ordinarily, when Fred was the third party in bed, I found his presence an annoyance. I’d endure the cramped arrangement, but wake up grumpy and sleep-deprived. When it was just the two of us, though, there was plenty of room in bed and I took such unlimited pleasure in him—sighing, smacking his lips, settling in on his own terms with no regard for my comfort, yet facilitating it all the same. Carelessness as heartfelt ministration.
* * *
About a year later, I got into an argument with a friend about capital punishment. While I opposed it, he made exceptions, offering me the boilerplate challenge: What if someone had killed a loved one? I insisted my stance would be the same: Murder is murder.
“What about eating meat?” he said. “Or using animals for medical research?”
We’d had this argument before. We both ate meat, and as for lab animals, I thought we agreed that as long as the conditions were as humane as possible, finding cures for human ailments was justification enough. But he was goading me to verbalize the contradiction, so I fell back on the assertion I’d always relied on: Yes, okay! When you get right down to it, if you have to make a choice, humans are more important than animals.
Yet for weeks afterward, a feeling nagged at me that I no longer believed my own words—the way you find yourself singing along to a song on the radio that you don’t like anymore. I’d go over to Scott and Fred’s house and find the two of them locked in a private face-to-face on the floor, Fred mutely taking in his caretaker’s words of love, absorbing all those everyday, answerless questions about his well-being. Nearly a decade’s worth of intimacy, devoid of self-consciousness or strain.
Later the same evening, out of the corner of my eye, I’d glimpse a rubbery dog yawn. Fred would catch me looking, pause, lock eyes, then lay his head down on his bed. Taking some of me with him, leaving me with more than I had before.
***
How do you describe that moment of recognition that there’s something to be valued, something of substance, in an animal’s being?
n the summer of 1997, I came across a magazine essay—brilliant, argumentative, nearly strident in its passion—by the writer Joy Williams.* At one point she evokes a dismissive skeptic challenging a so-called “animal person”: Does she really believe that animals have souls?
“Yes, I do. I do believe that,” Williams imagines the advocate responding. “Their natures are their souls.”
Some things seem too embarrassingly simple to state in words. Surely, we think, it’s got to be more complicated than that.
Their natures are their souls.
Nothing could have expressed more straightforwardly the fumbling sense that had been growing inside me like a crush that threatens to bloom into something bigger—and permanent. If Fred was capable of expressing love, reliance, fear, curiosity, impatience, loneliness—all of which I had witnessed in his posture, his gaze, his touch, his step—who could say that other animals, whether wild or captive, didn’t? If the human soul was both our individual defining essence and the eternal shared by us all, unbounded by birth and death—indeed, if having a soul required nothing more of us than being human—couldn’t the equivalent be said for animals?
For most of my life, anytime I saw photos of wide-eyed monkeys strapped into chairs, electrodes stuck to their skin like burrs, or pictures of overcrowded chicken coops, the birds’ faces barely visible through masses of matted feathers, I’d recoil but also feel manipulated: They’re going for my heartstrings and my wallet. Sure, this stuff happens, and it looks awful. But that’s the world. What does it have to do with me?
Now it had to do with me. With strange and immediate clarity, I acknowledged something as unadorned as Fred’s nature, and it felt impossible to separate it from that of any other animal. That’s what I was responding to each time he looked at me. From that moment, buying and cooking meat felt nothing less than hypocritical. In short, I had to act upon the disjunction between what I’d found without looking (the love of and for an animal) and what I’d taken for granted (that some animals deserve affection or reverence while others don’t).
I know that plenty of people have pets and don’t feel compelled to swear off meat; one doesn’t logically lead to the other. But my own shift in awareness jarred me so profoundly that I had no choice but to respect it.
The mind, that slow learner, is often one step behind the heart.
* * *
I don’t expect to convert anyone, nor am I trying to. I ate meat for what will probably amount to half my life, so who am I to get sanctimonious? What’s more, I’m not a perfect vegetarian. I’ve been known to eat meat if served it by others who don’t know my preferences, and I’ll order seafood if there aren’t any meatless choices in a restaurant. I just try to be true to my beliefs: As far as my own diet is concerned, I’m not interested in contributing to the business of slaughter.
Not long after I stopped eating meat, Scott did as well. I’ve been giving Fred all the credit, but it was also because of Scott that my lifetime of detachment from animals ended. In his joyous, unguarded voice greeting Fred in the morning— “Hello, little boy!” —in his patience with me as I’ve come to walk in step with a creature who takes the world in slowly but whole, I’ve learned what I may be capable of. I’m glad I could return the favor by starting my feet on a road that Scott chose to follow.
The three of us live together now. Fred is old and has trouble climbing the stairs, so sharing the bed with him is no longer an issue. Instead, he curls up on his own bed at night, still a crescent moon—shining more dimly, but shining all the same. As I say goodnight, I take his soft light in, nourishment I’d never have imagined would fill me up.
____
* The Joy Williams essay appeared in Harper's as "The Inhumanity of the Animal People" but was reprinted in her book Ill Nature as simply "The Animal People." I'm unable to find the full text of it online to link to.
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.
(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.
"What, No Cupcakes?"
Last week there was the monthly office roundup for the "January birthdays." Instead of cake, there were cupcakes from one of the artful and delicious cupcake bakeries proliferating around town. I joined my coworkers for the ritual reading of the names and the requisite applause, but this time, instead of descending upon the red-velvet, coconut, and strawberry treats, I slipped back to my office.
A bit later, a coworker -- with whom I'm friendly but by no means intimate -- came by my office and said, "What, no cupcakes for you?" I had no idea it was so noticeable. And by that I don't mean my not partaking on this day; I mean my usual gluttony toward sweets. Even a casual colleague noticed when I didn't grab one? I told her, "I had a big lunch."
It was the truth, as it happens, but a lie just the same.
Only a small handful of people know that, as of the last month or so, I'm a vegan. It wasn't a New Year's resolution per se, though the decision did roughly coincide with the new year. And I'm not even a full-time vegan yet, as I'm still working my way through some baked goods and milk chocolate from Christmas, and I still have eggs in my refrigerator, which I'll use in some manner before never buying eggs again. The child of children of the Depression, I don't like to be wasteful. It will all be eaten -- vegan or not -- and even enjoyed.
Here's the truth: I'm a vegan, and I'm still not out of the closet -- even telling not-quite-the-truth to people whose opinion about me doesn't even matter all that much.
This is the type of thing I'm going to be writing about, along with reflections on the reasons that led me to this point (why this, why now, at age 48 after 12 years as a dairy-and-egg-eating vegetarian?), recipes I'm trying as well as old ones I'm adapting, mistakes I make, jokes I hear, ironies that keep me awake, comments that annoy me, judgments (my own and others') that challenge me, things that excite me, and -- among many other topics -- the liberation, rather than any constriction or limitations, I already feel.
A bit later, a coworker -- with whom I'm friendly but by no means intimate -- came by my office and said, "What, no cupcakes for you?" I had no idea it was so noticeable. And by that I don't mean my not partaking on this day; I mean my usual gluttony toward sweets. Even a casual colleague noticed when I didn't grab one? I told her, "I had a big lunch."
It was the truth, as it happens, but a lie just the same.
Only a small handful of people know that, as of the last month or so, I'm a vegan. It wasn't a New Year's resolution per se, though the decision did roughly coincide with the new year. And I'm not even a full-time vegan yet, as I'm still working my way through some baked goods and milk chocolate from Christmas, and I still have eggs in my refrigerator, which I'll use in some manner before never buying eggs again. The child of children of the Depression, I don't like to be wasteful. It will all be eaten -- vegan or not -- and even enjoyed.
Here's the truth: I'm a vegan, and I'm still not out of the closet -- even telling not-quite-the-truth to people whose opinion about me doesn't even matter all that much.
This is the type of thing I'm going to be writing about, along with reflections on the reasons that led me to this point (why this, why now, at age 48 after 12 years as a dairy-and-egg-eating vegetarian?), recipes I'm trying as well as old ones I'm adapting, mistakes I make, jokes I hear, ironies that keep me awake, comments that annoy me, judgments (my own and others') that challenge me, things that excite me, and -- among many other topics -- the liberation, rather than any constriction or limitations, I already feel.
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