10 Years Vegan
As of today I’ve been vegan for ten years! (Andrle has me beat by about a week.)
Thank you, CowculatorI post a lot of vegan cooking on here but haven’t talked much about why I’m vegan. Figured this is the perfect occasion for such a post. (This is all my personal thinking.)
Then
For most people there are three big reasons:
- Environment
- Health
- Ethics
When we started ten years ago this was the order that I had in my head; the documentary Cowspiracy that we watched together on Netflix really spoke to me. Health-wise I had started becoming lactose intolerant in my 30s so giving up dairy completely made a lot of sense. Care for animals wasn’t much of a priority for me then, more just a bonus feature.
Now
In the intervening years the environmental part has gotten less important for me (especially as I came to understand that individual carbon footprint was largely a Big Oil marketing campaign to avoid regulation).
Health-wise I’ve learned more from sources like Dr. Gregor about the benefits of a vegan diet, or at least a diet much higher in plant fiber and much lower in processed meat. You can certainly eat an unhealthy high-sugar high-oil vegan diet! There’s also family heart health history I want to manage long-term.
The ethical angle of reducing harm to animals has also become more important to me, and we’ve added regular donations to animal sanctuaries and other advocacy organizations. On some level it does feel like it’s not the most important thing compared to the ongoing fascism, but I think it’s all kinda connected in a general respect for life way.
My sister has also since gone vegan so our family gatherings are usually all vegan. The rest of the family enjoys our cooking! 😂
Easier/Harder
Over these years we saw a surge of vegan alternative food products hit the market (although not all with wide availability); unfortunately the end of ZIRP and no instantaneous disruption of a large segment of the food market seems to have dried up a lot of the investment. The prices have gone up a lot and don’t benefit from billions of dollars in subsidies.
We’re not extremely strict (not everything needs to be certified vegan if we check the ingredients, we’re not worried about shared facilities since that’s more of an allergy angle, we eat at restaurants that have shared kitchens, etc.) and we don’t beat ourselves up if we make a small mistake but we try to eat exclusively vegan. We also try to live the broader vegan lifestyle and avoid other non-food animal products. That said we still have a few leather items from before (chairs, an old pair of shoes) where purging would I think compound the original cost. We also consciously prioritize exceptions for things like vaccines where an animal cell line may have been involved in production but the personal and public health benefits win out over the animal welfare ethics.
In terms of some of the downsides, being vegan definitely makes eating out hard (and we’ve witnessed the end of several favorite restaurants in a local market that is notoriously hard on eating establishments). It can make work lunches a little awkward unless I remind whoever is catering. Travel requires extra planning, and some places may have essentially no options. Halloween comes with some strong envy.
Sometimes I get the classic “how do you get enough protein” even though really the only thing we need to supplement is B-12 (which we often get in nooch in a lot of our home cooking). I also often get questions about weight loss on a vegan diet; I just have skinny genes? It’s kinda weird that this keeps coming up. We definitely pay a little more for some food components (niche product) unless it’s a staple like beans or grains.
Future
While it can at times be frustrating I still find great personal value in it on all three dimensions. Being vegan is a huge part of my daily experience now, hopefully in a non-obnoxious way, and I don’t see ever going back. I don’t imagine this will change much in the next 10 years.
(And yes, I got myself a little treat: a vegan blueberry scone from the Whole Foods near the office.)
Mmm… scone…
