This past November marked my second veganniversary. While I had been a lactose intolerant vegetarian for nearly a decade—which landed me pretty close to veganism as is—I hadn’t made the full switch to veganism yet for few reasons. Mainly, I loved cheese. Although it gave me a stomachache, I was pretty addicted to the stuff (as [...]
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This past November marked my second veganniversary. While I had been a lactose intolerant vegetarian for nearly a decade—which landed me pretty close to veganism as is—I hadn’t made the full switch to veganism yet for few reasons. Mainly, I loved cheese. Although it gave me a stomachache, I was pretty addicted to the stuff (as many are). Did you know cheese actually releases dopamine into our bodies - designed to make a baby cow feel connected to his mama? Instead, it was making me feel connected to sharp cheddar.
But one Sunday in November I was holed up in the Barnes and Noble near my college campus, where I liked to spend free hours reading books that weren’t in my budget to take home. I stumbled across Alicia Silverstone’s The Kind Diet and hungrily began to consume it. Two hours and a soy latte later, I had decided to try veganism for the next college semester. I immediately called my roommate, who had also been a dedicated vegetarian for some time, and with whom I often talked food politics, and started reading her quotes from the book, and soon she agreed to take the plunge for a semester as well.
I had read numerous books on veganism before, and am not sure why this one got to me more than the others. Perhaps it was the easy way Silverstone laid out the most important reasons she went vegan, or that she addresses that you don’t have to jump right into veganism because, heck, it’s hard! She goes over ways you can ease into it, being a vegan “flirt” to a full-fledged “super hero.”
My roommate and I spent that semester—my last semester of college—playing in the kitchen. We made miso soup and baked tofu. We devoured cookbook after cookbook—when we couldn’t afford to buy one, we copied recipes on scratch paper in the bookstore. We made dozens and dozens of vegan muffins. We would throw themed food nights, like Mexican night or a “southern cooking” party with collards, biscuits, barbequed tempeh and black eyed peas. (As we were attending college in the south, southern cooking partiers were a big hit even with our non-vegan friends. )
More important than what was going on in my own kitchen was what was going on in the campus cafeteria. Our small liberal arts college had a terrific cafeteria, with a chef who would take suggestions and attempted to have vegetarian options. Our extensive salad bar had won awards. That said, we went to a tiny school where what most students wanted to eat had been through a deep fryer before landing on their plates. Lacrosse was huge, and the 50 lacrosse players would line up in the café piling their plates with grits, fried chicken and gravy. Once I became vegan I realized that there were limited options, as the veg selections had cheese. Some days, there would be absolutely no source of vegan protein available. So I sat down with my school chef and we had a talk about veganism. I was hoping to explain to him the basics behind a vegan diet. After listening politely he looked me dead in the face and said, in a heavy southern drawl, “You’re trying to explain duck hunting to a fisherman.” I laughed because he had just used a hunting analogy to explain to a vegan why he didn’t understand the words piling out of my mouth. He then said, “You give me the recipes, and I will make them.”
Ask and you shall receive. My recipes for Sweet Ginger tofu, sautéed greens, quinoa, vegan lasagna with cashew ricotta—all of these made their way into our cafeteria that semester. He also stocked a small fridge with prepared Amy’s dinners and Tofutti sour cream and cream cheese. I was impressed with our chef’s dedication to serving the students, especially because I came to him solo; it’s not as if I had 100 hungry vegans backing me up. It got me thinking about what would happen if students did this on campuses all over the country. I know schools in other places are making great changes—remember the new vegan cafeteria at the University of North Texas that sprung up earlier this year? What if, instead of a meatless Monday challenge, students all over started participating in vegan semesters?
After graduation, I stayed vegan while my roommate went back to a 90 percent vegan diet, which she found worked better for her. What about you? What’s your vegan story?
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