how we live & how we eat.

radical love letters | coming out as not vegan on my 20 year vegan anniversary

a soybean field in Ohio.

Content note: brief mention of eating disorders.

This past August would’ve been my twenty year Veganversary. It was the week, back in 2003, before I started college in Chicago, and when I moved into my dorm I knew that I would never bring an animal or dairy product into the tiny little kitchen I shared with two roommates. I have been remembering a lot of things that happened twenty years ago—it’s a weighty anniversary, one you can only have if you’ve lived a lot of life—and of course I thought about this diet label I’d given myself all those years ago. But the truth is, I can’t really tell you a story about being vegan for twenty years, because, very plainly, I now sometimes eat eggs in things. This statement — ‘I now sometimes eat eggs in things’ — feels both entirely boring and insignificant, and also huge. If you have been anything for nearly twenty years and then suddenly you aren’t allowed to say you are, maybe you can understand the heft of it. 

So, no, I can’t write to you about twenty years of a vegan life, but I can write to you about the journey of there to here, and I think maybe there’s something worth it about that too. I don’t think of myself as a failed vegan, I think of myself as an evolving person, and I am curious, in thinking through this, how clearly our diet reveals where we’re at and who we are and what we’re prioritizing. It’s a tell, what we decide to eat—-it reveals our politics, our relationship to pleasure, illnesses, and so much more. “The world begins at a kitchen table,” says the first line of my favorite Joy Harjo poem. “No matter what, we must eat to live.” 

My vegan world begins, maybe, in 4th grade, when I decided I would stop eating pigs and cows. Not “pork” and “beef”, but pigs and cows, an anti-euphemism I’d begun to really sit with. The year before, I was part of a creativity club called Odyssey of the Mind, which involved writing and performing a play from the perspective of an animal who had to solve a problem; our group of rag-tag eight-year-olds transformed ourselves into pigs on a farm who realized they could lose weight to avoid getting butchered. It was full of problematic diet culture and a definitely-misguided understanding of factory farming, but playing the role of that pig inspired my already animal-loving heart to consider a shift in my consumption. No more pigs, no more cows, I declared. Chicken and seafood—not as cute, I admitted as rationalization — were okay. 

It was after I gave up hamburgers and my family’s beloved New Year’s tradition of corned beef when I learned that the music subculture I had just started to dip my toes into valued a move like this. It was 1994 and I had discovered Green Day, Nirvana, The Cranberries, and The Smashing Pumpkins. It wouldn’t be long before Moby and Ani DiFranco joined the mix—the former an unabashed PETA-type, the latter may or may not be, but just as many of us projected lesbian onto her (she’s bisexual), she might as well have been. The alternative culture I discovered was about music, but it was also a lifestyle, and what better way to define how to live than by defining how to eat? It became clear to me that the girls with choker necklaces, midriff baby doll teas, and dark maroon lipstick—the girls I saw as role models, the ones I hoped I’d be someday — were likely vegetarian. Or, more realistically and more interestingly, they were coded vegetarian. I felt mostly content with my chicken- and seafood-only boundaries, but I now had a new aspirational bar. Vegetarianism was on the horizon….

In Alicia Kennedy’s No Meat Required: The Cultural History & Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating, she writes brilliantly about this exact cultural phenomenon. She also had a Moby root, and says that as a teenager, she understood “veganism as the ticket to belonging to that subculture.” Kennedy goes onto to talk about punk culture and veganism, which, incidentally, is where I went in my own life too. (As a plug for the book, her deep-dive into largely white subcultures’ place in vegan history is combined with a necessary and important look into origins of vegan eating in communities of color—often poor, low-income, colonized, or otherwise disenfranchised—across the globe. Kennedy is consistently skillful at illuminating legitimate criticism of veganism as a mostly white, wellness-industry-fueled phenomenon, while simultaneously debunking that narrative as complete.) 

 As I’ve written about before, I went from discovering music on the alternative radio station to the college radio station (via my best friend’s older sisters mix tapes) to the scavenger hunt of the early internet (god bless you, Interpunk.com), then finally, when I was nearly confident enough, to record stores. Maybe even more than the alternative scene, the punk scene was defiantly committed to veganism. There were punk bands who built a whole genre around it; we say “straight-edge vegan hardcore” to describe a type of sub-subculture in the scene. Kennedy interviews zine maker Noemi Martinez who explained that her early entry into punk and veganism overlapped with an entire DIY and anti-capitalist framework: “veganism seemed to come hand in hand with other radical ideas…I could see how living vegan worked with trying to live in our society—nothing was single issue.” My own growing analysis of systems of power as interconnected was thanks in large part to the same scenes. 

And thanks to a new crush: B, the 20 year-old to my almost-17, knew things. He knew about bands, he knew how to talk about why it was bad that we were going to war with Iraq and Afghanistan, and he knew how veganism was connected to capitalism, ecocide, and white supremacy. I thought reducing meat helped animals, but he told me that it could also help the Earth and low-income workers—disproportionately Black and Brown workers— who were exploited on crowded factory farm floors. The only excuse I had was that I was still homebound, subject to extended-family dinners, and couldn’t see making veganism really work until college. But I made the decision on a date with him at peak 90s veg-centric-hippie-feeling Tommy’s Restaurant to start “vegan weeks.” Practice rounds for Chicago, where I’d be moving after I graduated. 

you just know this place is gonna have Tofutti milkshakes

I managed, with the help of my mom, who was worried about protein but supportive. I discovered LightLife meats which I used as the base for sandwiches for my packed lunch, and mom would print out recipes from VegWeb for various dinners, like Boca tacos with Tofutti sour cream, or pot pies with Gardein chick’n strips. And B, for the short time we dated, would take me to the vegan soul food restaurant for vegan mac n’ cheese, and back to Tommy’s for soy milkshakes. A diet of this kind of mostly-processed food was honestly delicious, and at 18, it didn’t result in any problematic health issues. So I continued like this my senior year, taking weeks without meat and dairy. Once I arrived in Chicago in late August of 2003, I decided I would do that every single day. No more meat, no more dairy, no more animal products whatsoever.  

Chicago made this very easy for me, even in 2003. My decision also helped entrench me in the kinds of music and activist communities in which I longed to feel at home. Saying I was vegan got me a kind of instant cred, though my activist circle was filled less with vegans and more with freegans. ‘Freegan’ was the name some punks and Lefties gave themselves to differentiate their choices from being about consumption; they usually preferred eating entirely vegan or vegetarian, but would prioritize eating what was free. If they dumpstered a giant bag of perfectly good bagels coated in egg wash, they would, of course, still eat the bagels. The problem with eating eggs was less about the energetic connection they’d have to a chicken’s non-consensual labor, and more about financially supporting the industry. These bagels were already made; eating them for free meant less money they had to make, and who wants to work, man? 

I was not a freegan. Once I felt ‘in’ with the punks and activists, I was, thankfully, also able to set some boundaries around what was and wasn’t for me. I would eat dumpstered food sometimes —there was an Odwalla factory close-ish to campus, and I would often lend my station wagon to the bike punks who needed something bigger for their haul; they’d return with perfectly good juices and bars (both happened to be vegan) that gave me lunch for a week — but I strongly preferred eschewing dairy entirely, even if I didn’t pay for it. I also knew that I didn’t want to live like the bike punks in dirty collective houses. I respected it — I still do — but I had tasted poverty as a kid, and I didn’t want anything to do with it as an adult. For as long as I’ve had a sense of my adult self, I’ve always been just as likely to be spray-painting banners at an activist meeting as I am to be at a fancy restaurant in a really good outfit (and asking if I can have the arugula salad without cheese). 

By my sixth year in Chicago, and thus sixth year of being vegan, my diet felt like an afterthought. I knew exactly what I could and couldn’t eat, and I had plenty of options — the cafeteria salad bar, decadent comfort food at the all-vegan Chicago Diner, the Thai restaurant that didn’t use fish sauce, where to get the cheapest soy (and then, almond) milk, which cookbooks to buy (the How It All Vegan series followed me through the last four of my Chicago apartments). It was just a part of me, not a burden or an inconvenience, and still a way to feel connected to my subcultural spaces. I was still in the throes of an eating disorder during this period, but it genuinely feels so completely unrelated to my veganism as to not be even worth mentioning; (I ate exactly what I would’ve eaten otherwise, just less (while restricting) or more (while binging) of it, and usually followed by purging). My senior capstone project—a cookbook combined with political analysis, titled The Political Plate—demonstrated that my diet was still meant to be a reflection of my politics; my eating disorder, on the other hand, was an affront to them. 

old last name, same femme.

I moved to Minneapolis for grad school on the heels of a breakup, and found a yoga studio to help me adjust to the new city, the new workload, and to my wounded heart. The intensity of graduate school was good remedy for my racing thoughts, and I got a little high off the demand of it. After the tumult of my last relationship, and one too many drunken nights my last year in Chicago, I was ready for something different. I started dating a kind and gentle, drama-free man; I worked, constantly, reading and writing for grad classes, reading and grading for the courses I was teaching; I went to yoga, usually finding a way to workout twice a day; there was no time to risk being hungover, so I stopped drinking almost entirely. During the inevitable times I needed a break, I turned to vegan food blogs; this was 2009-2013, which many a culture writer will identify as landing during Peak Food Blogging Era. I loved the domesticity of it — my Facebook profile bio, for years, said “Emma Goldman meets Bettie Page meets Martha Stewart”, which honestly still tracks if we added some kind of witchy forest hippie in the mix — and I loved the challenge of new levels of restriction that I found in the wellness and health food blogosphere. 

In many ways, this was a wildly unhealthy impulse; but during this period, my life was calm: it revolved around work, an introverted partner, grad union meetings, exercise, and obsessing about “clean” food, which I also started blogging about. These things are rarely so black and white, almost never clear ‘before’ and ‘after’’s; the truth is, some parts of that approach to food was good for me. I stopped restricting in the way I used to, I stopped binging, and most liberatingly, I stopped throwing up. For better and for worse, I gave up gluten, sugar, and nightshades. I was not remotely getting enough calories and there were many days those years I felt faint; I remember one time I actually fell over in my living room; my partner practically had to beg me to eat some salt-free brown rice cakes, which felt indulgent at the time (grain was on the ‘No’ list when I would do my monthly cleanse week). None of this was about animal or worker or environmental justice, it wasn’t even (only) about getting thin—it was about gaining some kind of purity, some kind of optimal health that I intellectually knew was a racist, neoliberal, ableist, and impossible project, but the part of my brain that has consistently found some way to hurt me, clung to it. 

Maybe it is no wonder that in freeing myself from that era of disordered eating — a type referred to as orthorexia, or an obsession with healthy food — I decided to give myself a lot more flexibility in what I ate. During my last year of grad school, I let myself confront that I was in a bad place. I started eating bread again, let myself have sugar sometimes, and that Halloween decided, without apology, to have the candy corn that was tempting me in a dish at a friend’s house. “I’m going to break vegan for this,” I announced nervously, reaching my hand towards the bowl. No one even glanced up. 

The “I break vegan for____” list continued to grow, usually for things like this, things that were still technically in the freegan realm: candy corn someone else bought, wedding cake at a wedding, Christmas cookies my aunt made, the butter on the table at a restaurant. At that point I was also living with a vegetarian and occasionally doing the grocery shopping for both of us, which meant that I was, technically, purchasing dairy and eggs. This pattern continued for years; breaking vegan more and more, usually for free (and almost always for baked goods (I like my sweets), and never meat), and purchasing dairy for my partner. My partner at the time, L, was a real pleasure-centric Libra, so sharing bites of his decadent desserts, often not vegan, was common practice. L helped me enjoy a life of food with body-sighs, like sink-back-into-your-chair delight. And what a gift, after so many years of denying myself not dairy, but a sensual relationship to food. It was also in this time period when I asked a hardcore 25+-year vegan where he buys his boots, which looked so much sturdier than any vegan pair I’d found myself. “Oh, these are Docs….They’re leather,” he admitted realizing the impetus of my question. This dude, in leather boots and vegan straight-edge tattoos, still claimed the label. So I kept quietly calling myself one, too. 

For the past three or so years, though, I’ve started to say out loud that I am only “mostly vegan.” Since being back in Cleveland, I frequent a coffee shop that makes an in-house scone with nuts that I find to be a far superior snack on a long work day than the sugary vegan cookie they also carry. So, frequently, I buy the scone. It fills me up more, it’s locally made and usually features a local fruit. For many years, if I forgot to bring a vegan protein bar to the coffee shop on a work day and there was nothing vegan or “healthy” to purchase, I would simply not eat. That doesn’t work for me anymore; (I am making the choice for it to not work for me anymore). Similarly, a restaurant that centers local ingredients makes an incredible hummus that they serve with thick, crunchy, butter-grilled bread; there’s an option to make it vegan by asking for it without the butter. I do not ask for it without the butter. 

When I visited P in Catalunya, we mostly cooked meals together with vegetables from his squatted garden, olive oil from ones he’d harvested himself, spiced with rosemary we found abundantly on our walks, and sometimes drinking wine his friends made themselves. But when we did go out, or when we met up with friends at their homes, I tried to stay open. The tricky part is that people want to be considerate, which is always so embarrassing for me. A thing that often ends up happening is that people hear I’m vegan and they’ll make a whole separate meal for me, and it’s almost always pasta. I’m not gluten-free, but eating a bowl of pasta makes my stomach feel awful. In one instance, the sweetest Croatian mom made me spaghetti while everyone else ate meat and vegetables with a salad and fresh, local baguette to start. I would have felt so content with salad, vegetables, and bread, but of course it was important that I eat the pasta—she couldn’t speak English and I couldn’t speak Croatian, and the offering became a way for us to share something. I was all at once so touched by the gesture, so guilty that she went out of her way, and also I was eating something I didn’t actually want to eat. In that case, veganism became a simultaneous divider and bridge; a way of being a difficult traveler and also an accommodating one.

tending to the squatted garden in Catalunya.

The largely-local, mostly-vegan, socially-mindful way of eating we did in Catalunya feels most aligned with my current values, as is the case back here in Ohio, where we eat vegetables almost entirely from the farmer’s market or our CSA. Of course I purchase plenty of non-local things too— I have a long way to go before I am living entirely aligned with my values (which will require confronting the only two things to which I may have actual addictive relationships: coffee and LaCroix).

What this long reflection on my eating choices reveals to me is that I have, at different points in my life, and in no particular order, cared deeply about the following: animals; a feeling of belonging in subcultural spaces; the environment; worker justice; having fun; feeling pure; feeling light; being thin; pleasure (from either indulging or withholding); god, the gods in everything; being flexible and socially adaptable; being boundaried and principled; the ecological crisis; non-harming/ahimsa; being boundaried around what does and doesn’t feel good in my body; not supporting the meat and dairy industry; not supporting food that requires fuel and plastic to get to me; eating local; giving my money to local farmers and local businesses; the romance of breaking proverbial bread over any food as long as it’s shared with comrades; macros; sacrifice; joy. 

I’m hesitant to say I’m vegetarian, mostly because I don’t have a regular desire to eat anything not-vegan other than these scones I mentioned, and butter sometimes. I don’t want to make myself available to eat pizza or quiche or alfredo, the thought of all of those make me nauseous (not because they’re bad, but because I have some kind of embodied threshold—manifest in visceral reaction— that I simply trust). But I am also, clearly, no longer a vegan. “A local-prioritizing, mostly vegan” will have to do for now. (Bisexuality has taught me to be comfortable with the in-between of identity, and also with people being kind of mad at you.) 

In my early days of veganism, I thought I was doing the revolution on my plate; the politics of everyday life illuminated in how I ate. Then there was a period when I decided that the matter of individual choice was entirely neoliberal, almost completely meaningless in the face of big systems of power. I was still vegan—this was my orthorexic period— but I didn’t think it was doing much of anything to challenge Big Ag. (It tracks that I have leaned more anarchist in some years, and more Marxist in others.) Today, I see my relationship to food as a largely spiritual decision (I have no desire to consume the energy of something that felt fear in the face of death, though I recognize it’s possible plants feel things we can’t comprehend); a somewhat political one (I think it matters, to an extent, that I give money to local workers, local farmers, that I don’t fund the climate-devastating meat industry). Certainly I see it as an existential decision: I want to live a full life, I want to live a life aligned with nuanced values, with a set of beliefs that shift with age and experience and priorities. Today I value harm reduction, and relationality (with humans in my life, with the land I live on, and my animal neighbors), pleasure from date nights at fancy restaurants, and pleasure from cooking local food that will help me sleep well and think sharp and fuel my workouts. I value, deeply, the kind of connection that seems so uniquely and richly conjured when preparing and sharing a meal with new or old kin. I value a life of what the Buddhists call “right relationship,” or a commitment to living in accordance to interdependence; after two decades of working towards that, I’ve concluded—with the help of many teachers who know better than me—that veganism alone is a too-limiting path to achieve it. 

Just yesterday I was at a talk on Food Sovereignty led by members of Little Africa Food Collaborative and Cleveland Fresh; the speakers and attendees spent two hours sharing tips for growing and foraging and also hunting; veganism came up as an option, but not a solution. What I remember most from the talk is when Mikki and Tanisha agreed that their biggest and most important food habit is that they prepare food with love as a way to encourage gathering. “They [the state/corporations/etc.]  know food brings people together and that’s why they’re trying to take food power away from us,” Mikki said. 

Harjo’s poem quoted above, begins with the fact of food as a matter of survival. It ends though, understanding food as something much bigger, something like a portal, or a permission: “At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers. Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms around our children. They laugh with us at our poor falling-down selves and as we put ourselves back together once again at the table.” 

She concludes: “Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.” 

Of course it is all these things, how we live and how we eat—joy and sorrow, and if we’re lucky, something worth savoring. 

farmer’s market peppers, a gifted cast iron, a table that loves friends.

***

Reflecting on this was really nourishing for me. Maybe you too might want to respond to the prompt of what your food choices have revealed about what’s important to you? What has your diet said about your values, past and present? Feel free to respond in the comments. <3