I was speaking to someone about the vegan project I'm embarking on next month and it got me excited to write about it here.
I was asked what motivated me to make try out veganism after 16 years of sitting comfortably in my state of vegetarianism. It does seem odd, to me anyway, that I would decide to eliminate one animal product from my diet but not any others. Why the divide? What was the difference?
To answer this question I first need to tell a little story about how I became a vegetarian in the first place. If you did the math right, you figured out that I was 13 when I made this lifestyle choice. To say I "made a lifestyle choice" would be a pretty impressive stretch. I was 13. I didn't make lifestyle choices. I am more than willing to admit that at that age I enthusiastically followed trends. I liked what my friends liked and what my demi-god older sister liked (though I would never admit this at the time). So when my friends all decided to declare that they were VEGETARIANS!!! I was more than happy to say "me too!"
So as you can imagine I didn't stop to think about why I should or shouldn't be a vegetarian in that moment, I just did it. I stopped eating meat. I kept at it after the near-immediate realization my mother hated it; I was at the time close to 5 10" and barely 100 pounds soaking wet, the last thing she wanted was for me to stop eating anything. But it stuck.
Since then I have obviously found many reasons to choose this lifestyle - one doesn't stick with something for 16 years just to piss their mom off (at least I don't...I love my mom!) I have since learned a lot about how meat is produced and many of the environmental, social, ethical, and health impacts that this production can have. It has become clear to me that meat is something that I am simply not comfortable eating.
I often get defensive when talking to meat-eaters about my choices when they claim they could never give up meat because "it tastes so good" or they would "miss it too much." I feel like the pleasure of a food shouldn't nullify the negative impacts of its production. And 99% of the time I don't feel deprived of anything by not eating meat. It doesn't have to be about not eating something and can easily be reframed as just eating different things. And I have maintained for a long time that you don't have to give up meat; reducing consumption can drastically impact the many of the negative impacts of meat production, as well as increase your over all level of health. It doesn't have to be hard!
The problem is that dairy and egg production is just as bad. And slowly, in the past 5 years or so, I have moved towards a more vegan diet. Milk was the first to go, and my consumption of dairy in general dropped dramatically - yogurt, cheese, ice cream, etc. Once you let your body show you just how lactose intolerant it really is, you very quickly learn to watch what you eat. More recently eggs have been what I have been hung up on, until I found Eggy Weggs which brings local, happily-raised chicken-laid eggs to my neighbourhood. But still, this move to veganism feels natural in a lot of ways.
The ironic part is that those meat-eater arguments up there are the exact thoughts that have kept me from really giving veganism an honest attempt. Give up goat cheese?! Blue cheese?! But where will I eat? How will I bake? It is going to be such an inconvenience! Etc. etc.
So I just decided to do it. To put my mouth where my...mouth is? That's not right, but you get the point. And I don't know what the end result will be. I may decide to go back to buying my hippy eggs and eating cheese, I may not. But I do think that I owe it to myself to see what my vegan life would look like and what kind of changes it brings about. So am I bummed about giving up goat cheese for a month? Totally. Will it suck? Not at all. I am excited for the challenges of what is sure to be a fun and eye-opening experiment.
No comments:
Post a Comment