Confused about What Vegan Really Is?

Okay...so this story makes me feel a little guilty.  Stick with me!

Earlier this week at work, one of the women from another department brought me a bag of homemade cookies.  She had apparently been passing out little bags of cookies to lots of different people.  When she came to my office, she said, "I know you're vegan, so I made you these special cookies."  I thought that was very sweet.  She started naming off ingredients like quinoa flour and such, and then she said honey.  I couldn't help it, but I just blurted out, "I don't eat honey."  It's true.  I don't.  Most vegans don't.  It's animal protein (even though it's an insect and not a large animal), but I also don't appreciate what bees go through when we steal their honey.  Daniel Hammer, in his article entitled "Is Honey Vegan?", explains it best:

Honeybees . . . are able to experience pain and suffering . . . . Honey, beeswax, bee pollen, royal jelly, propolis and venom are taken from bees for human uses. In the process of acquiring these, beekeepers regularly disturb the bees’ homes by removing the honeycombs from the hive. When this is done some bees will inevitably be injured or crushed, and any bees who sting the beekeepers will also die.

So, anyway, I blurted out, "I don't eat honey," implying that I wouldn't eat the cookies. 

She frowned and said, "What?  You don't eat honey?  Why not?" 

I replied, "It's an animal product." 

She said, "Animal?" 

I then said, "Yes, lots of vegans don't eat honey." 

Again: "Why not?"

"Do you know what they do to bees to get their honey?"

Then her tone completely changed and she said, "Oh.  You're one of those PETA vegans, huh?"

I'd been reading Rory Freedman (an outspoken well-known vegan) earlier that day and felt empowered.  I kept my tone calm and said, "I am vegan for every reason there is to be a vegan--for health, the planet, and animals."

Anyway, both she and I agreed that my carnivorous children would enjoy the cookies, and the next day I composed a Thank You card where I simply thanked her for the thought and told her I appreciated it.  But I felt guilty.  Guilty because I'd looked a gift horse in the mouth.  Guilty because someone had done something so completely selfless and unsolicited.  Guilty because I could have simply just said, "Thank you."  But I didn't.  I told her my feelings.  Even without the honey, I don't eat a lot of sugar anyway.  I suppose it would have been easy enough (I guess) to simply say thanks.  In fact, when I related the story to my husband and daughter, they slapped their foreheads (a la "I coulda had a V-8") and said I should have simply thanked her.

But it's not that easy.

You see, the longer I am vegan, the more firmly I feel about my eating convictions.  And I wanted to set the record straight.  This woman told me a while back that her daughter is vegetarian.  Well, what if her daughter becomes vegan?  If the daughter were to become vegan, well, at least her mom will have a heads up about honey.  And, while we're on that subject, not all sugar is vegan either.  In fact, most cane sugar is not vegan, and it's because of the filtering process.  When I use sugar, I usually use Sugar in the Raw (which is vegan) or Sucanat. If you're curious to learn more, you can read "The Great Sugar Debate: Is it Vegan?"

So, I suppose I need to be calmer, but if you're going to cook for a vegan, you might want to find out what that means.  For example, I would have been perfectly happy with Agave in those cookies!  :)

A Vegan Halloween

(Happy birthday to my hubby!)

What's a vegan to do on Halloween?  Well, she does the same thing she does on any holiday!  She eats what she can and disregards the rest.  Needless to say, she won't be eating any Milk Duds or anything with milk chocolate.  But that doesn't mean she can't eat a little candy with the kids!

Luckily for us, PETA has put together a vegan-friendly list of candy.  However, just because it's vegan doesn't mean it's necessarily healthy, so don't overdo.  But at least you won't feel deprived!

Why Veganism?

I was raised in a meat-eating family. In fact, my dad hunted for food--deer, elk, antelope, and occasionally other animals like rabbits or quail. And it was viewed as acceptable on all levels--the USDA, for example, recommended so many servings of meat/meat protein daily; the Bible says that God had given us animals for food (Genesis 9:3); and my father had come from a very meat-and-potatoes background. Don't get me wrong--they ate lots of vegetables too, but a meal without meat just wasn't considered a meal.

So I was never taught--on any level--that there was anything wrong with eating animals. And understand this as well: I don't judge people who eat meat, but anyone who gets in my face about being vegetarian will get it back from me!

One of my first memories of eating meat is of chewing on a piece of steak. I don't know if it was gristly or not, but I remember chewing and chewing on the stupid thing and it wouldn't break down enough to go down my throat. And I came from an "eat-everything-on-your-plate" family, so I didn't dare spit it out. So I chewed and chewed and chewed some more. I think I might have finally given up. I don't really remember. But even at a young age, I was a vegetable fan. I didn't like green salads too much, but I loved just about any kind of vegetable I could get my mouth wrapped around, even the ones most other kids hated, like spinach, broccoli, and asparagus. Sure, I had my dislikes, but overall, I loved 'em.

When I left the nest to attend college, I found myself eating very little meat. Sure, I ate some. I had more at the cafeteria when I lived on campus (and it was usually in a dish, like Turkey Tetrazzini), but when I moved off campus, my meat eating really dropped. I worked for a pizza restaurant and had the occasional slice of pepperoni or ham and cheese sandwich, but I ate a lot of salads, pasta, and breadsticks. It was at the age of 20 that I realized I wasn't a huge fan of eating meat. I didn't usually admit it out loud, but I knew it in my heart even then.

When I married and had children (again, remember I was taught to cook the meat-and-potatoes way!), I found that ground beef was one of the cheapest meats out there (I didn't know at the time that meat is subsidized by the government so that its price is artifically deflated). So I became a master chef with hamburger, inventing dishes like Meatball Stew and perfecting old favorites like Spaghetti. I bought chicken once in a while and inherited fish and game meat from my parents. After cooking and eating this way for years and years, I began not feeling as healthy as I used to, particularly in the gastro-intestinal sense. My stomach bothered me a lot. I often felt uncomfortable and bloated after eating.  And even after I stopped smoking (YAY!), I still had a lot of stuffy nose-type problems.

My husband asked me to put him on Atkins a few years ago.  Ugh.  It sounded too good to be true and it was.  I lived with eating meat for my entire life, but eating this much meat, cheese, and eggs pushed me over the edge.  Eggs quickly dropped off my list as did ham.  I decided just a month into Atkins that I never wanted to eat those two things again!  I didn't lose any weight (my husband lost a lot, though), and I felt miserable and totally unsatisfied.  After a year of "doing Atkins" fairly faithfully, I decided it was definitely not for me.

Then, one day about a year and a half ago, my husband had been researching healthy eating again, and he came across a PETA challenge to eat vegan for thirty days. I jumped on the chance, as I had been considering vegetarianism anyway. So I prepared. I tried to cook all the meat in our freezer before we started. I bought a vegetarian cookbook. I stocked up on dried beans and frozen veggies. And I planned a thirty-day menu.

Well, a lot of the recipes were lacking flavor, but I was starting to feel better by the end of the month. The rest of my family, though, was feeling deprived. At the beginning of the next month, they resumed eating meat and I did not.

I feel lots better. But I didn't stop there.  It was just the beginning of a long journey for me. I started researching the effects of a vegetarian and vegan diet. I now understand the health and environmental implications of a carnivorous diet. I have become a vocal advocate for healthier eating. I do try not to push my views on others (although my kids and husband will argue otherwise and, in their case, it's true), but I'm always happy to discuss it, and I write articles about vegetarianism regularly. And, let's face it--cheese comes from milk, and milk is taken from cows. Bottom line? It's exploiting cows.

And finally I have made it to being vegan. I said for a long time that I didn't think I could give up cheese (things like milk and eggs were easy), but--in my research--I've discovered that a lot of cheeses are not vegetarian (most cheeses use a product called rennet to culture them; rennet comes from cow and calf stomachs). In addition to that, cheese just really isn't healthy on many levels, from all the animal protein we ingest to its addictive qualities. In addition to that, though, cheese comes from milk, and milk comes from cows. Bottom line (and why many vegans are vegans): eating cheese exploits an animal, whether it's a cow or a goat.  I breastfed all four of my children, and when I think of cows being milked their entire lives, it's very easy for me to say no to milk products.  I felt that it was important that my children be breastfed, but I wouldn't want to breastfeed hundreds of people for the rest of my life!  It's not natural!

So now you know. Am I radical? Maybe. I didn't used to be. But I'm glad I've become vegan. There's just too much stuff out there that we have to dig to find out...about eating meat, drinking milk, how our food is raised, grown, treated. Reading Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation started opening my eyes (I read that a few months before the PETA vegan experiment, so I was primed!), and I keep reading. I urge you to as well!  And if you're becoming vegan and are still somewhat new to it (like I am) or are still considering it, good luck!  It's not too hard once you get started.  And now?  I'll never go back!