Vegan Day Three: The Social Not-Eater

I have now been vegan for over 50 hours, and I've already been offered several tasty things I can't eat.  I think that's going to be the hardest part of this whole vegan "adventure."  When someone brings cookies to work, I can't have any.  When a student offers me homemade baklava, I had to turn it down.  Today there were sugar cookies and donuts and chocolate cookies all available at work, and I munched on my carrot sticks, consoling myself by trying to muster up some feeling of superiority.  My superiority's pretty thin, however, since I've only been vegan for two and a half days and I don't think your diet is a good reason to feel superior to anyone anyway.  Vegans are better people in my mind, just more dedicated to an ideal most of us don't feel passionately about.

The only other hiccup in my vegan paradise has been the lack of chocolate and readily available dessert.  I've found a way around part of this problem by resurrecting a favorite dessert from childhood:  cinnamon toast.  I can't use butter, so I slather my vegan bread (I had to go to two stores to find vegan bread!  Stop putting honey in every single loaf people!  You're starving me!) with a little olive oil, then generously pour on the sugar, and then add a few dashes of ground cinnamon.  Pop it into the toaster oven for a few seconds and presto!  Dessert!

The inability to eat 99% percent of what people bring to share makes me feel both sad and guilty, however.  What do I do for the end of year faculty luncheon?  Pack my own sandwich and drink the soda?  What if I get asked on a date?  Do I explain that I can't eat anything, and offer to make him dinner?  Gandhi used to pack his own food or just go hungry if there was no food available that he didn't consider immoral/unwise to eat.  Since my veganism has only a dash of morality behind it, I find the prospect of watching all my coworkers eat while going hungry, or making a first date suddenly very awkward and giving him the impression I'm a rabid hippie.

On the flip side, the inability to eat 99% of processed food means that I'm going to be eating a whole lot more homemade items.  It's easy to make vegan bread, mustard, dessert, and meals.  It's a pain to buy them.  It surprised me to find out that there were a lot of animal products that weren't dairy or meat in most foods you pick up off the shelf.  Riboflavin, for example, is in just about everything and is usually derived from animals.  Carmine Red is made from crushed up beetles.

Other than hunting for vegan bread and refusing food others offer me, I've enjoyed my first three days of being vegan.  I'm looking forward to the next 37 days of dietary adventure.

The Immoral Vegetarian Goes a Step Further

Every year, my sister asks me what my New Year's resolutions are, and every year, I sort of mumble through an answer about all the improvements I'd like to make.  You know, the ones I'm always muddling my way through in a vague sort of way.  I'm not much of a New Year's resolution maker.  I could make up all sorts of excuses for this.  I could say that I don't like the idea of making a new start once a year instead of continually.  I could say that, as a teacher, New Year's always feels like the middle of the year and not the beginning to me, and I'm far more likely to make goals over the summer for the next school year than I am for the calendar year.  I could say that setting up a pass/fail goal is a silly idea, because once you fail (around February), you're done for the year with a goal that should have been the subject of continued progress.  The actual truth about why I don't usually make New Year's resolutions probably lies somewhere along the lines of I forget, it takes too much effort, and the dilemma of what goals to set.  If I set grand goals, I set myself up for failure, which is lame.  If I make easy goals I know I'll reach, then I feel like I'm cheating.  So every year I keep my vagaries, thank you very much.

But not this year.  This year, when my sister asked the familiar question about my goals, I was armed and ready.  This year I actually embarked on some measurable, definable, goals.  These goals I have, for the most part,  managed to keep going.  One of these goals was to be a vegetarian.  I've been a vegetarian before, but it's different this time.  Before, I was a strict vegetarian for one month, mostly because a friend had dared me.  Now I've been a non-strict vegetarian for five months all on my own.  Notice the key word there, non-strict.  Since I'm not going vegetarian for moral reasons about cruelty to animals, I don't feel the need to be strict about it.  I'm an amoral vegetarian.  An immoral one?  Whatever, a vegetarian for non-moral reasons.  I'm vegetarian out of a general concern for what the meat industry does to our planet, what eating that much meat does to our health, and a belief that when the Lord said to eat meat sparingly or in times of famine (D&C 89), he meant it.  So my policy for the last five months has been pretty casual.  If I make it or buy it for myself, I will make a genuine effort to make sure it's vegetarian.  If someone else is cooking or buying, or if Allie and I are putting together a roommate dinner or something, then I let it go.  I try not to even say anything.  I figure that unless I'm allergic to something, no one needs to work around my food preferences.  Sometimes I refer to myself as a "non-annoying" vegetarian.

http://www.topnews.in/people/mahatma-gandhi

I've liked this lifestyle.  But I'm still eating too much meat.  And while I'm eating too much meat, I'm also reading Gandhi's autobiography, during which he takes about a hundred pages to talk about food.  He tried several different diets for various health or spiritual reasons, and for most of his life he ate only fruits and nuts. He placed so much faith in vegetarianism and veganism that he frequently went against doctors' orders to consume dairy or meat products for his or his family's health.  He placed his life on the line for his dietary beliefs on more than on occasion.  He also makes a lot of intriguing arguments for a diet of restraint and self-control.

I am ready to experiment.  I'm not going rabidly vegan.  I'm not joining PETA or protesting chicken farmers or lecturing other people on their evil, animal-killing ways.  But, just for me personally, I'm going to give it a try.  I'm going vegan.  Gandhi at one point urges his readers to experiment to find what will best benefit them, and I'm going to take him up on it.  This will be an experiment only for now.  When it's over, I'll go back to my non-annoying vegetarianism, and will probably settle somewhere into non-annoying veganism.  But for the next little while I'm going to be strictly vegan in the food I consume (I'm not going to through away my leather shoes or my dread wax, though).

I was going to go vegan for a month, but then I decided to be more biblical about it and go for 40 days.  My 40 days begins today, and will last until July 2nd.  I'm making this public, so that I have to be accountable to at least the five people who read my blog.  I'll report back to you with the complaints, realizations, and any great spiritual transformations that happen along the way.

Day One.  I go vegan.  Geronimo!