The great vegan experiment is over. To celebrate I went out and tore a steak off of a live cow with my bare teeth.No, I just made that up. I have not yet harmed a cow. But the vegan experiment really is over.In case you missed it, I recently wrote a piece in which I declared 2015 to be the Year of Doing Without. Every month I plan to choose one thing to do without. For January, I decided not to eat anything that came from an animal. That’s vegan.(Some people go hardcore with their veganism and don’t wear anything that came from animals and don’t use anything that was tested on animals. And while I didn’t wear a coat made from baby cows, or intentionally wash my hair with shampoo that blinded fifty rabbits, I didn’t go out of my way to avoid those things either.)I initially planned to begin Vegan January on New Year’s Day. However, my wedding anniversary is on January fourth, and we had plans to go to Eataly on January third, and damnit I’m not going to an Italian mecca and avoiding cheese. Since I’m the one writing the rules anyway, I decided to begin Vegan January on the fourth and go through the third of February.I made up some other rules as well:Beer is vegan. I don’t know whether all beer is vegan or not. I suspect so, but I didn’t bother checking. I didn’t want to know. I wasn’t going to give it up either way.Accidents don’t count. I didn’t intend to eat any animal products, and I exercised extreme caution not to do so. However, during the first week I absent-mindedly ate a few bits of macaroni and cheese that my daughter didn’t eat. The same with a piece of bread that contained dairy whey. And a spatula I used to stir some vegetables in a pan may or may not have been used to flip some barbecue chicken I was making for my kids at the same time.Pizza crust from my favorite restaurant is vegan. I took the cheese off. That’s good enough. Maybe the crust had butter on it. I don’t know and I don’t care. Eating seven or eight small pieces of cheese-less pizza over the course of the month doesn’t scuttle the whole month.Now that you know the rules, I want to share a few observations.--Being vegan is a pain in the ass. This revelation was both surprising and unsurprising to me. I figured it’d be a pain, but it turned out not to be a pain in the way that I expected.I thought it might be difficult to resist butter, ice cream, yogurt, cheese, and even meat. However, I didn’t really find myself tempted by those things. It helps that my wife discovered a vegan cookie recipe and baked the best damn cookies I’ve ever tasted, and that she can work miracles with sriracha and tofu.
Problems arose when I checked ingredients on certain foods. I wanted a handful of sugary cereal, but discovered that there’s gelatin (made from animals) in the marshmallows. That loaf of bread has whey in it. Goldfish crackers contain cheddar cheese. Checking labels becomes tiresome, especially when you’re not necessarily checking for goodness, but rather just making sure animal products are absent.--I’d have no problem being 95% vegan. This stems from the last point. My meat consumption has been declining for over a year. I didn’t eat much butter to begin with, and even though I thought I’d miss yogurt, I never really did.I like eating plants. They taste good and you can do a lot of things with them, so I’ll continue to eat mostly plants. But I’d like to finish my daughter’s half-eaten peanut butter sandwich without worrying about whether the bread is vegan. And although I enjoyed a few pieces of pizza from which I stripped the cheese, it’s much more satisfying with the cheese still on it.My wife and I eat a veggie burger and freshly cooked vegetables for dinner every night. It’s rather annoying to avoid the veggie burgers I like simply because egg white is the second-to-last ingredient.So although I’m not going to be 100% vegan, I suspect I’ll maintain 90% vegan for the foreseeable future.--Vegan does not necessarily mean natural, healthy or good. Just because something is vegan doesn’t mean it’s something you should eat. Oreos are vegan and there’s nothing healthy or natural about those, although they can be good if you’re in the mood for one. Some vegan cheese is so disgusting I’d rather eat a raw oyster. A friend did give us some vegan shredded cheese that my wife used to make buffalo macaroni and cheese that might have been my favorite thing I ate the entire month.--Veganism can be entertaining. My wife came up with the Vegan January idea and began the month on the vegan wagon with me. She lasted ten days before the egg white/ veggie burger problem became too annoying for her, and she quit.She’s a vegetarian so it’s not like she ate a big bratwurst after quitting, but she did enjoy her veggie burgers with egg whites in them, and she ate a couple of ice cream cones. My favorite part of her vegan experience though was the end when she called me on the phone and said about quitting, “It’s liberating. Fuck it, I don’t care.”My kids obviously knew I was trying to be vegan, and I had fun listening to their meat-loving, ice cream-eating reactions, though I’m still not sure what my ten-year-old son meant when he said, “Vegans aren’t even people.”--Veganism can be annoying. Most of my family and friends knew about the vegan thing because of this blog. I’m thankful for that because the most annoying declaration in the English language might be, “I’m vegan.” Often the practical translation of that sentence is “I have very few foods that I’m willing to eat, and I expect you to come up with something that is going to be satisfactory. And don’t try to just shove a bowl of broccoli in front of me.”Most of the world is not vegan. If you want to eat in this world—meaning outside of your own house—you must realize that it might be difficult to find vegan foods that are not just fresh fruits and veggies. Don’t complain. Deal with it.--I’m glad I did it. It wasn’t nearly as difficult as I thought it would be, but I’m still glad that I did it. I found new ways to prepare some foods. I found new sources of necessary nutrients. I reaffirmed my mostly meat-free diet. And I had fun with it. Success.February’s selection for the Year of Doing Without: sweets. This might be tougher than veganism. Check back in March to see how it goes.PREVIOUS POST: Anti-Vaccine People and Ebola DeniersIF YOU LIKED THIS POST I BET YOU'LL ALSO LIKE: 2015 Will be My Year of Doing Without+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++Hey, did you like reading this? If so, you should Share it on Facebook so you can bring joy to others. You can also find tons of other posts by me here. And you can like my Facebook page, Brett Baker Writes. Please.
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