Open Body: Trying Veganism
This piece is inspired by a friend, who recently decided to become a vegetarian. She made the decision public on social media, and inevitably the thread contained a reference to veganism. I tried veganism a few years back and loved it, but returned to being a pescatarian shortly after my summer-long engagement with veganism. I kept a blog, posting updates every week, with pictures and recipes, but (no one read it) — because, blog. The piece below was accepted for publication well over three years ago, and hasn’t seen the light of day so I thought why have it languish in the dark. Good luck with your journey, Bri.
I suspect most have a complicated relationship with what they eat. Food, after all, is a sustaining requirement, a daily preoccupation, and its complications begin early.
Children often are set in their eating ways in those salad days of being someone’s child. Eat your carrots, that sort of thing. The issues began early for me. Since I was a child I was never that interested in eating, and particularly, not all that interested in eating meat. My family — two parents and four older siblings — said it was because I was too lazy to chew! Honestly. We hail from Scotch-Irish tribes if that helps — the potato and deep-fried anything people who can hardly be mistaken for nutritious food role models or food connoisseurs. Scotland is home to the highest rate of heart disease in the world. Deep-fried chocolate bars and Twinkies anyone? The Irish? All their eggs in one historical food basket: the spud. Today, the unofficial national dish for the Irish is the “3-in-1,” an admixture of French fries, rice and curry sauce. I’m not lazy, I made it and was pleasantly surprised at its taste.It’s good, but you feel slightly silly eating it.
No, I’m not lazy. Back then, I could have been pegged as indifferent. My foodie complications arose from stories told around the dinner table to us sprogs to get us to cleanour plates before being excused. Wartime stories made us finish our meals with a sense of gratitude. Mum’s narration was of being forced by nuns she’d found herself under their care as a child, to eat boiled cabbage she’d just vomited up. Food could not be wasted. Dad ate eggs under duress, as a boy shunted out to the Scottish countryside to avoid bombing, also during the war, even though he was highly allergic to them. You’ll eat what you’re given.
I left home with those twin pillars of food theology — nothing is to be wasted and to eat whatever is placed in front of you. I was told there were starving children in China. So of course I did what all recalcitrant youths do away from home and no longer under the tuetelage of their parents — I threw tons of food away willingly and only ate what I wanted to eat, which was more a product of my wallet than my will. Lots of pizza, pizza subs, and salads from pizza joints. Anything really. I began to close myself off from any food narrative, to disassociate my body from what I fed it. There was nothing I craved, nothing I would go out of my way to obtain, no special nights out with my fellow university classmates for tandoori or mise en place sample kitchens. Drinks, different story entirely. Food, meh. Who cared?
Much of what I learned from home, and subsequently my university days, about food, which to be honest was not much, carried through to my adult years. I grew steadily pudgier by what I put in my mouth and gormless by a lack of exercise. A diet of Guinness stout, scorching hot chicken wings dunked and smothered in blue cheese sauce, and Froot Loops did wonders for my figure and intellect. I’m condensing the years and meals, of course, to reach the redemption point where I began to change. I found myself yet again drunk and sitting wedged in an Adirondack chair on the deck, listening to sad country music, a cold tin can in my fist, alone at two in the afternoon. Predictably, my marriage, my career, my personal life was in the toilet, and draining fast. I had to do something radical.
I got up and ran. Two wheezy miles. Hungover.
When I got back to the house sweaty and sober, I gave up drinking. Tossed Guinness tins in the trash. Gave away my Scotch. I got better. In the days that followed, I kept running and in the process of many years slowed my attention on what I ate and drank, and began to be more open to making healthy choices.
Two years later, I gave up eating meat.
Indifference could not be the response of a responsible husband, partner, son, brother, human being. What I had been consuming, had been consuming me. I began to make the connection my body with my health. I choose to be sober, to be a vegetarian and now nearly twenty years later I’ve kept the promises I made. Has it been easy? For the most part, yes. The absence of booze helped the real me to emerge, the authentic one, the one who runs marathons, loves waking up in the morning with the clearest of minds one can assume for a modern man; the one with a PhD, books published and a marriage of over twenty five years. The absence of meat was even easier, since, well, I’m too lazy to chew meat anyway. Plus, and this is the God’s honest truth, I never really enjoyed the taste of hamburger or chicken or pork unless I literally drowned it in sauce. I could have been eating shoe leather (oh memories of Mum’s liver and onions dish reminds me of shoe leather). I’m not without my proclivities though — I still drown things in blue cheese and I’ll quaff anything that involves the marriage of Cheddar, Parmigiano, Provolone (et cetera) and red sauce, extra red sauce, pretty please. I still partake of too many carbohydrates, and popcorn is atop my food pyramid.
Time to time, I do an inventory of my thoughts toward food to deter a return to the stupidity of indifference. Recently, I spent thirty days trying out a vegan diet — no animal products whatsoever. Lost nearly fifteen pounds and garnered a new appreciation for knowing what ingredients are in the foods I eat.
The vegan challenge was not all that difficult. As a pescetarian I already consume fish; it wasn’t terribly onerous to cut other animal products — dairy, eggs — out of my challenge for a month. I’m vain, so losing the weight was awesome, but greater still was the acquired knowledge. For me, the latter is the more important thing.
I can make choices when it comes to food. And the choices don’t mean I lose out. Am I now a full-fledged vegan?: No. I am going to choose to be vegan, where at all possible, but not worry if the shake-out flavor I put on my popcorn contains dairy.
While my upbringing and sombulent salad days closed my body off from an experience of food producing a clear disassociation for me between what fuelled my body and soul, careful reconsideration and discernment gave me back a sense of agency. Writing in Food Rules, Michael Pollan suggests eaters, “… slow down and pay attention to what your body — and not just your sense of sight — is telling you.” I did and in the process I found I could open myself and my body to the joys of healthy eating.
