Of Omnivorous Thoughts About Being Vegan

Easily one of the grooviest vegan chefs out there is Isa Chandra Moskowitz.  She has written several amazing vegan cookbooks, keeps The Post Punk Kitchen Blog, is dedicated to destroying popular myths about the non-tastiness of vegan cuisine, promotes real cooking by marginalizing the use of fake meats, and is just generally too cool for school.  Well, Ms. Moskowitz has declared October the Vegan Month of Food (or VeganMoFo), I think for the third year running.  In honor of VeganMoFo, I wanted to do a post about my relationship with vegan food, even though I am not myself vegan. 

I grew up in Texas and Montana, respectively; states heavily addicted to raising and eating flesh.  I spent a year in Austria, a country where they love organ meat and garnish beef goulash with more meat . I did a stint at a guest ranch in the High Sonoran Desert, again meat-heavy - think ossobuco and grilled hamburgers.  And, finally, I moved to New Orleans, where lard is still not a dirty word and many people strongly suspect that a vegetarian will still eat seafood.  Locale notwithstanding, I also cultivated my own omnivorous predilections.  I was not a picky eater as a child.  I would devour chicken gizzards and brussels sprouts with equal glee. 

When I moved to New Orleans my first circle of friends worked in the restaurant industry.  In many ways, moving here really inaugurated my concerted interest in food (okay, cohabiting with a couple of chefs along the way didn’t hurt, but I’m going to give myself some credit here, too – I chose to pay attention and ask questions as they cooked, after all).  In New Orleans I ate my first raw oyster and tasted both sweet meats and head cheese for the first time.  I learned the bliss of Adolfo's ocean sauce (half crab and caper, half shrimp and crawfish) served over gulf fish.  I developed an interior battle that rages still today over whether I like catfish or fried shrimp po-boys better.  I have relished every bit of it. 

After about 5 years of living in New Orleans, I developed my own philosophy about meat.  Homo sapiens is a predator, I reasoned.  We occupy a position on the food chain, so there's nothing wrong with meat-eating.  I objected to the removal 21st-century American people tend to have from their meat (I think this was also an offshoot of growing up in -- if not precisely being part of -- the hunting culture of the northwest, where many hunt and butcher their own animals and aren't disconnected at all), so I steered myself toward meat that looked like dead animals - whole fish or crab, crawfish, entrails.  If I was going to eat meat, I wanted to really be reminded of the fact that I was eating the dead flesh of a once living animal.  I wanted it to feel visceral, like consuming a life should.

And even given this, questions and unrestful thoughts still tickled my mind.  Because we can do something, does it mean we should?  We are the most powerful predator on earth, thanks to our technology, but however our distant hominid relatives departed from their great ape relatives and began eating meat, we do not live in those circumstances any longer.  We do not have to hunt to survive and we do not have to eat meat to survive.  We simply like doing it.  What about the inherent violence in eating meat, when I consider myself a pacifist?  I once had a friend who raised an iguana.  His vet told him that a vegetarian diet would create a more docile lizard, where feeding him insects and, eventually, rodents would create a more aggressive animal.  Now, I know I'm not an iguana, but this has still stayed with me for a long time.  Can I really consider myself non-aggressive when I consume the flesh of a once living, breathing creature?  And does being an omnivore mean eating meat for every meal, like many Americans (and probably Europeans) will tell you it does?  So even while eating meat every day, I still carried these kinds of thoughts around with me.

I had also always recognized vegetarianism as a coherent philosophical choice. Especially as a devotee of felines, I could easily see the strange and irrational distinction many humans try to make between animals that are our pets and animals that are our food (not to mention between animals that are us, and all the other animals). Most of us would never think of treating our pet-animals in any way that resembles our treatment of food-animals. This has always struck me as a disingenuous and unthoughtful reality.  In retrospect, I believe I even bothered to cultivate a philosophy about meat-eating precisely because I suspected it was not morally resonant with the rest of my values concerning kindness, non-violence, and human conduct vis-a-vis nature.  It needed a defense.

And that is how I lived the first 30 years of my life.  Attempting to be thoughtful about my choices, but mostly just eating as I did because I always had and because I happen to live in a society that condones and even celebrates meat-eating.

And then I met Nicholas.  Nicholas eats vegan  He destroyed all of the worst stereotypes that had been meticulously built in my head about what a vegan is like.  He was atheletic, in good shape, quiet and personal about his choice and non-judgmental of those who did not share it.  He only discussed his dietary choice when the topic was brought to him.  He was respectful, gentle and kind...and I watched as those around us (we met in an office work environment) proceeded, despite all of these aforementioned facts, to treat him as an oddity, tease him, judge him and generally bring up his veganism as though it were his only noteworthy characteristic.  He and I talked about history and humor, about our families and what had brought us to the horrid law firm we were working at.  Veganism came up now and again, but it was simply one more facet of this very interesting, multifaceted individual.  I grew disgruntled on his behalf at the way so many chose to reduce him to one thing, a vegan, and then ridicule it, while he would go out of his way to not discuss it.

I brought cookies to the office for Christmas and I made sure to include a couple of vegan experiments so that Nicholas would not be excluded.  As we started dating and spending more and more meal times together, I bought a vegan cookbook (Moskowitz's Vegan with a Vengeance - I highly recommend it).  I made these efforts in the spirit of inclusion - not because I was sublimating my own habits and not because Nicholas ever denigrated my own dietary choices.  By the time we were cooking together regularly, we generally cooked vegan and then I might add cheese to my own, depending on the dish.  It was easier and didn't prove onerous to me at all.  While I did not miss a meat heavy diet, I let meat be a treat to me - something I would eat on occasion, especially in a restaurant.

Eventually, I stopped enjoying even these treats.  Meat began to smell unappetizing to me.  It began to hit my stomach like a ton of bricks.  It made me feel heavy and overloaded.  I switched from whole milk to soy milk - something I never thought I'd do - for the same reason.  Once I began excluding meat and dairy more and more from my diet, my body's ability to handle these animal products, as well as my palate's taste for them, diminished.  Finally, I began to ask Nick more concertedly about being vegan.  I read a book he recommended (when asked), Animal Liberation by Peter Singer, which has a lot of throught-provoking things to say about human use of animals, not just for food, but for research and testing.  I didn't find it preachy at all, just well-documented and well-written, and, I would recommend it to anyone.

And the short of all this long is that after almost 3 years of dating Nicholas, I still eat cheese and ice cream, I still eat seafood, and on a rare once-in-a-while I'll nibble on some pancetta, prosciutto or salami of some sort.  I am not vegan and not even a vegetarian, and yet I cohabit easily with a vegan.   I continue to notice how he treats his choice as personal, while many others treat it as an affront to them.  I admire and respect Nick's choice, his emotions and thoughts that motivate his choice, his will power and strength of character to stand by his choice.  I feel like he challenges me, just through existing, to be better and more consistent in marrying my actions to my values, something with which I still struggle.  As he has observed many times, everyone comes to things in their own time, and labels of "vegan" and "vegetarian" can as easily be used to pigeonhole and denigrate someone as they can be used as a form of proud self-identity. 

Ultimately, whatever personal changes in my diet I have made or not made, won't make or will make in the future, I have found it enlightening and very fruitful, if sometimes disturbing, to question basic assumptions with which I grew up concerning human beings' place with regard to other animals, how we use them, and whether we should use them, let alone whether we should eat them.  It is often those behaviors, habits and attitudes closest to us that we never even bother to evaluate.  We never really choose them, because we simply continue to do or believe what we were raised to do or believe.  No evaluation or decision is really involved - other than the decision to never ask questions and to ignore even entertaining such thoughts, I suppose.