Vegan month: the official verdict

My vegan challenge has been over for a few weeks now, but the usual chaos of school and being a reporter have prevented me from writing something about it. My apologies. Without further ado, here’s what I learned from a month of eating only plants. (Ok, plus a few food additive chemicals. No one’s perfect.)

The most surprising part of vegan month was that it was pretty damn easy. I’ve always heard vegans say that giving up eggs and dairy isn’t a huge deal, and I’d never really believed them. My twelve years of vegetarianism have largely been spent convincing die-hard meat eaters that it’s not that hard to go without. Still, something about the pervasiveness of dairy and eggs in our food had me convinced that going vegan is a challenge on an entirely different scale. Once I got in the swing of it, though, it wasn’t that hard. You do have to be more vigilant about what you eat, but I found that doing so is actually a pretty rewarding and healthful process.

One of the awesome things about being vegan was that it got me reading food labels in the grocery store. There were many times I picked up something to read the ingredients and double-check that it was vegan. Often, the item in question wouldn’t have any animal products, but would be full of oils, chemical additives or something else that made me pause and think. There were a lot of junk foods I ended up not buying, not because I couldn’t eat them, but because a closer look made me realize that I didn’t actually want to.

Another health benefit came from the challenge of finding vegan junk food. While it’s not that hard—potato chips and French fries are totally allowable—vegans are definitely pushed away from many of our worst offenders, like ice cream. I’ve noticed that gatherings with excessive amounts of junk food are a hallmark of both American culture and college life. Meetings, newspaper production nights and the like are often accompanied by a smorgasbord of pizzas, cookies, brownies and other sorts of sweet, fatty deliciousness. Most people eat a ton in these situations because they’re stressed and the food tastes good. Most people who pig out on junk food have eaten plenty of calories for the day—the junk food is a completely empty addition to the diet that isn’t nutritionally or calorically necessary. Because I couldn’t join in the pigging out, I ended up steering clear of a lot of excess food that I otherwise would have eaten. For me, this was the biggest benefit. I wish I could say that vegan month made me better about this, but since I’ve stopped being vegan, I’ve more or less returned to my usual cookie-inhaling ways.

Of course, not everything was perfect. My largest source of frustration with being vegan was that I became one of those people: obnoxious hipsters who go to the local sandwich place and stare pensively at the menu board for ten minutes before asking, “Do you guys have anything vegan?” I did this once and immediately hated myself so much that I swore off any further dining out, making an exception for Walla Walla’s relatively new vegan café, the Garden. I attended potluck brunches with friends and forgot to eat beforehand, an omission which left me lightheaded as I tried to walk home after a meal of orange juice and cantaloupe slices. I found myself turning down pastries offered to me by a visiting alum and realizing that there’s no way to say, “I’m sorry, I can’t, I’m vegan” without sounding pretentious. This, of course, is about cultural associations with veganism rather than the diet itself. But the further you remove yourself from what society considers “normal” eating, the more you open your choices up to scrutiny.

The fear of being judged as a pretentious hipster and the difficulty in finding places which served vegan food made me more proactive about cooking meals. I planned days in advance, making giant pots of soup on Sunday nights and planning to eat leftovers all week. I solidified my repertoire of a few solid dishes—lentil soup, red lentil curry and chili. (I did manage to adhere almost perfectly to my no-soy-based-fake-meats-or-dairy rule, though I snuck a bite of two of my vegan housemate’s tofu stir-fry one time.) I essentially cemented my understanding of “food” as “home-cooked meal”, which was a welcome transition after spending a semester abroad and having little control over what I ate.

It’s a little hard for me to pin down the concrete effects being vegan had on my body. I got a cold midway through the month—nothing unusual in the winter—but took over a week to recover, which is a long time for me. However, I can’t attribute this to being vegan. It could just as easily have been a particularly nasty virus, the fact that I was overworked and stressed, a lack of vitamin C in my diet or some combination of factors. I definitely lost weight during this month, but a lot of that could have just been me shedding the fat that grew out of the insane quantities of rice consumed in Ecuador. Chester (the temperamental adolescent dragon who lives in my stomach) was also noticeably happier during vegan month than he had been in a while, though I think a lot of that was just transitioning back to the U.S. Though since I’ve started paying attention more to what sets him off, I’m starting to think I may be mildly lactose intolerant.

I  didn’t feel tired or lacking in energy during vegan month, though I did find myself craving food more, especially sweets. I’ve heard that this is pretty common, and that not feeling “full” leads vegans to snack a lot. I think this could have been managed perfectly fine if I’d decided to do this for longer and invest the time in monitoring my nutrients, but since it was only a month, I figured I wouldn’t kill myself if I just played it by ear.

Ultimately, I’m really glad I decided to try being vegan. I came in thinking I’d be miserable, and I found out that veganism is pretty damn legit. My usual rants about individual choice being an ineffective weapon for change still apply, but I think veganism actually can have health benefits, in the sense that it reduces junk food and fat consumption. This is something that could also be accomplished with good self-control, incidentally, but I personally find it harder to stick to rules I made up (don’t eat junk food) as opposed to rules that are part of a larger thing (be vegan). I’ve noticed a few permanent changes in my eating habits since then. I’ve stopped eating so much cheese, and my consumption of animal-product based meals has definitely declined. I’ve renewed my appreciation for lentils and beans as protein sources, and stopped making yogurt my default breakfast. I’m definitely eating less dairy overall and being more conscientious about what I do eat.

My next food challenge is going to be a month without processed foods or added sugar. I’m waiting until the summer, when I have the full bounty of summer harvest at my disposal, and my goal is going to be to eat almost entirely local stuff I buy at the Walla Walla Farmer’s Market. I think that my biggest health problem is my addiction to junk food, and while vegan month flirted with addressing it, real food month will hit it head on. I’m excited to report back.

Food showdown, part one: the vegan challenge

I’m headed back to Whitman tomorrow, and as soon as I get there, I’ll be starting my first food challenge for the year: one month being vegan.

I’ve been a vegetarian (or pescatarian, more accurately) for most of the last twelve years, with a brief hiatus this past year to travel (Ghana and Ecuador are not veggie-friendly countries) and explore the world of local, grass-fed beef (which is probably a better choice than processed soy in the long run). Being a vegetarian is incredibly easy for me—while I like the taste of meat, it’s not something I crave or feel that I need to be healthy. I get plenty of iron and protein from other sources, and I pretty much subsist on beans, lentils, yogurt and cheese. (I try to steer clear of soy because of its role in deforesting the Amazon, the way it’s usually grown in monocultures and the way it’s processed using a neurotoxin which can cause severe health problems in workers. But sometimes, you need to have pho or pad Thai.)

Being vegan is a whole different ballgame. I love cheese. It’s like, my favorite food. I recognize that being as outraged as I am by factory farming while conveniently ignoring where my cheese and yogurt come from is hypocritical, and I’ve tried to get better about that in the past year. While I’ll eat cheese when it’s served to me, I try to only buy happy local cheese when I’m in charge of my own food. But the majority of the animal products I do eat come from the same factory farmed sources I’m always complaining about.

I’ve gone into detail about my food philosophy a million times on this blog, but quick recap: I don’t think being vegan is particularly healthy for most people, I think framing veganism as the solution to factory farming is really disingenuous and alienating, I think the ability to be vegetarian or vegan is often a function of privilege (knowledge, cooking facilities, time, money) and I don’t think individual choices are a valid solution to anyenvironmental problems, especially not something as complicated as the industrial food juggernaut. BUT, I’m also a person who thinks and talks about food and food politics a lot, and if that’s a thing I’m going to be doing for my life, I think I should at least know what it’s like to actually be vegan. I figure a month is long enough that I’ll get an idea what it’s like and won’t just spend the entire time counting down to my next quesadilla, but short enough that I can stick it out without being miserable or unhealthy if it doesn’t agree with my body.

I’m interested in exploring how I feel during this month, especially since I’m following it with a no processed foods and no added sugar month (and then going back to being a regular pescatarian). As many of you know, I have an adolescent dragon named Chester who lives in my stomach and likes to throw temper tantrums and/or loud parties. So anything which makes his life a little easier works out well for me too. I’m going to be recording general impressions (do I feel healthy? full? hungry? craving certain foods? well-nourished?), as well as weight (I’m guessing I might lose weight, but probably not much, given that Tim’s Cascade Chips are vegan), energy levels and anything else different that I notice. My hope is that I’ll use this month to explore new recipes and come out of it with some healthier and more conscious eating habits. Stay tuned…

Back to veggie

After a year and a half of thinking about meat, I’ve made my decision. Starting when I get home from Ecuador, I’m going back to being a vegetarian.

When I first went vegetarian, I was in third grade. I was motivated by moral absolutism and fervent idealism. I believed that animals should not be killed to feed humans when we were clearly capable of living without taking life. Over the years, my reasons shifted to a general protest of factory farming. I read Fast Food Nation sometime in middle school and was so grateful that I was largely absolved of responsibility for the horrors described by Eric Schlosser as he toured slaughterhouses and food chemistry labs. I didn’t want to be complicit in the torture of animals, the exploitation of a largely undocumented Latino workforce, the carbon emissions that come from beef, the overflowing waste lagoons that border CAFOs.

Now, I’m returning to the same label, but with a vastly different underlying ideology. I’m fully cognizant of the horrors of agriculture. I know soy is an environmental nightmare that’s clear-cutting Amazonian rainforest and supporting the Cargill-Monsanto empire. I know that the prairies of the American West have been destroyed to feed the world, that a field of wheat is ecologically no different from a barren, eroding hillside that was once home to an old-growth forest. I understand that animals are necessary for sustainable food production, because the only way we’re going to be able to keep feeding the world is with permaculture, designing systems based on natural processes. And I know that while Americans eat more meat than is healthy for them, humans were designed to eat flesh at least occasionally.

But I also know that the world isn’t black and white. I know that I can hold contradictory beliefs, that solutions aren’t as simple as they seem, that an action can be good, bad or somewhere in between depending on timing and context. And in the food system we have right now, I believe that eating meat does more harm than good for the world as a whole. Most animals, even happy local ones, are fed crops that are grown in the same problematic ways that cause so many environmental problems around the world. Unless they’re managed very specifically to avoid this, cows and other livestock have a dramatically larger carbon footprint than plant-based foods. And because I have the means, knowledge and physiology to be a healthy vegetarian, I’m going to do it.

I’m switching back fully aware of another uncomfortable truth—my individual choice to be a vegetarian will never end factory farming. I’ve said this before, and I’ll keep saying it until the left demonstrates an ability to think beyond personal choices as a venue for activism. But I don’t believe that the impotency of our individual actions as tools for change absolves us completely from personal responsibility. I own a cell phone which contains coltane, a mineral that’s found mostly in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The DRC has been ravaged by war and conflict for years, largely because of desires to control the country’s lucrative mineral resources. Would choosing to not buy a cell phone end the rape and murder that shapes the lives of so many people in the DRC? No. Does that mean that there is no blood on my hands? Absolutely not.

The modern world is rife with stories like this one, and the modern consumer is often painfully aware of the horrors they’re supporting. The socially conscious youth of my generation have been bombarded with guilt-inducing facts about sweatshops, toxic manufacturing processes, the horrors of resource extraction, climate change and social justice. We know that most things we buy are killing the planet, and we also know that trying to avoid buying anything problematic ever is nearly impossible without making a full time job of it. Most of us aren’t willing to invest the time and energy to be perfect—something I don’t believe is the mortal sin many would make it out to be—so we pick our battles, choose the few we really care about, and promise ourselves that we’ll work to build a better world to make up for it.

For me, factory farming is one of those battles. When I was eight, I didn’t want to be complicit in this system. Now, at twenty, I understand that even as a vegetarian, I’m still guilty. Even if I choose to go without meat, I’ve never done anything to challenge the industrial meat infrastructure, whether it’s liberating animals from a slaughterhouse or writing a letter to Congress asking them to make changes to the Farm Bill. Which isn’t to say that factory farming is our fault, collectively—the road to hell has been paved by a very specific set of people with very specific goals, and most of us weren’t among the lucky few. But as long as our society continues to say that these institutions and systems are acceptable, anyone who doesn’t exhaust every available effort and resource to stop them bears some of the burden for their existence. Plus, we (almost) all eat industrial agriculture. Even if you remove the burden of meat, I’m still complicit in pesticides and horrible labor conditions and absurd farm subsidies and the existence of Monsanto.

What this all boils down to is a vegetarianism based on premises of moral conflict rather than moral clarity. Last time I made this choice, I was saving the world. Now I know I’m not, but I’m still unable to close my eyes at the sight of a feedlot, unable to turn away and pretend I don’t know what I know when I eat. Part of me is humble, knowing my actions won’t make a dent in the problem. Part of me still craves the moral superiority of knowing that no animals are directly tortured to provide my food. Part of me wants to lecture and evangelize. Part of me is afraid to go back after tasting and loving my first steak (age 18), my first chicken breast (age 20) and my first bacon in over a decade. Part of me still can’t decide if fish are going to count, if I’m willing to give up my absolute favorite food (sushi) just to make a statement that almost no one will hear. I’ve spent hour after hour of my life thinking about these things. Those of you who’ve been reading my blog for a while have seen me write the equivalent of a full-length novel about the ethics and politics behind meat production and vegetarianism. At the end of the day, though, my choice is simple. I think about cows lined up for slaughter, waiting to have a bolt driven through their brains before they’re hoisted up by one leg to have their throat slit, and something deep inside me just screams no. It’s not the most well thought out argument in the world. But for me, it’s enough.