Vegan MoFo month has come along at just about the perfect time for me. As you can see, I haven’t done any blogging lately, so having to blog 20 times this month will surely get me back into the habit. And also, I recently celebrated my two year veganiversary, so veganing has been on my mind.
For those of you unfamiliar with my blog, it’s been mostly a mix of restaurant reviews and what I like to call my pseudo-philosophy, which is more or less my thoughts on being vegan. When I first started veganing, it changed my perspective on the world like few things have ever done. Lil ol’ meat-eating me didn’t realize how much the use of animals to provide things for humans was ingrained into the global society of peoples. You can meet someone from just about anywhere on the planet and you automatically have something in common: you both eat and use animal products. And I didn’t see this until I stepped outside it.
Even though I haven’t been blogging much lately, I’ve been posting a lot of vegan phoodographs on Instagram @insufferablevegan and I also tweet @InsufferableV
Part of the reason for my slowdown in blogging was that I Settled In and got used to being vegan. And people got used to me being vegan. So the culture clashes slowed down. Like most things, you get accustomed to it. One of the other things that’s happened in the last two years is that veganism seems to have caught fire. Do I only see it this way because I’m vegan, or do the NVA (Non-Vegans of America) also see it this way? I bet they do. It feels like it’s hard to avoid.
I wrote up a whole page when I started my blog about why I went vegan, and I also have an FAQ you can read, but I’ll give you the basics of vegan me if you care. I’m almost half a hundred years old and ate meat and plenty of it for my first 47 years. I didn’t love the way I ate and mostly thought about losing some weight rather than what I was eating. I could lose 10 to 15 pounds in a month or so with some effort, but over the next six months it would find its way back. This happened a few times. Then I met a friend of a friend who is vegan. She seemed so normal, and cool, so why the hell was she doing this weird vegan thing? To tell you the truth, I wasn’t even sure what the word meant, though I had a pretty good idea. “Are you new-agey?” I asked her, even though she didn’t seem it. “Uh, no” or so came the response. So it got me thinking. Why would a non new-agey person do this? What could possibly be the reason? As I said, I wanted to lose some weight anyway, so I figured I’d try it and see what it was like. I was curious to see the perspective.
And then after about two weeks of this, and eating weird foods, I read Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Eating Animals” book and I knew that I couldn’t go back. And it really made me question myself for not figuring it out decades earlier. After all, my friend-of-a-friend-now-my-friend figured it out in college or so, so why was my head in the sand? Or wherever it was. It didn’t speak well of me. Oh, well.
So here I am two years later and, for those of you who might not be vegan but are considering it, let me tell you, it is easy. I mean it. At this point, I feel like I am not really lacking for anything. Plus, being vegan has one of the greatest fringe benefits you could possibly imagine: when you realize there’s something stuck in your teeth, you know it’s not a dead animal!
I’d like to thank a couple of people in addition to the friend who started it all. There are two people whose early support of my blog made me feel I wasn’t just typing to an empty room, and who encouraged me to keep going. They are myvegancookbook.com and @10ftdoll — thanks so much to both of you!
And thanks to those of you finding your way here via MoFo. I hope it’s a fun month!
insufferablevegan 