I’m a week into my experiment with a vegan diet, and I think I’m falling into a rhythm. I’ve decided that if I’m in control of the food, it’s not that tough to do this. And currently I do most of the meal planning, purchasing and preparation in our home. It also helps that we’re already pretty vegetarian, and the family is supportive. And I’m not stopping them from eating all the cheese, ice cream and milk that they want. And we’ve discovered some amazing new foods, like the raw zucchini pasta primavera (rawsta primavera) that’s pictured above.
I did encounter some periods of hunger. I lost two pounds in this first week. This is in a week in which I ate nachos and calorie-rich coconut-milk ice cream and 500-calorie vegan chocolate chip cookies. I don’t mind slimming down some, but this was too quick for me, so I treated myself to a pint and veggie chili-fries at the university pub.
This calorie drop may also explain some of my mood swings and crankiness a couple of days last week.
I’m amazed at how supportive my friends have been. My dear neighbors worked really hard to make their pear-torte vegan friendly, and when they couldn’t track down Earth Balance spread, they made an extra dessert just for me.
And I think this is one of the things that I’m discovering. Like a lot of dietary codes, vegan restrictions are not difficult to apply in isolation. I don’t know if we’re aware of this as a society, but it seems to me that social eating is something that we experience at a pretty deep, if not quite primal level. I’m amazed at how threatened others feel, at how defensive I sometimes feel, when someone says that they can’t eat something that is an important part of our culinary experience. It’s like we’re saying, “This cheeseburger is my friend, it’s been there for me through many a hard time, if you condemn the cheeseburger, you condemn me!”
And it’s no accident that dietary codes are a primary way of separating people and reinforcing distinct identities: think kosher, Seventh Day Adventists, and the Mormon Word of Wisdom. Based on my limited observation, I believe that adhering to a vegan diet in mainstream US culture does reinforce a sense of separation, of a strong difference in cultural values, of difference and strangeness.
For this reason, I need to take a deeper dive into following a vegan ethic in public spaces: eating out with friends or at friends’, eating with coworkers, eating at restaurants that don’t cater to vegans and vegetarians and interacting with them. So expect to see more of that in coming weeks.
That said, I believe that vegan diets are slowly becoming more popular, better understood, and even more accepted in the US. The following picture represents fewer than half of the vegan cookbooks at the local Borders:
