How Vegans Are Conceived

There was an unmistakable tip-off that we were going nowhere fast: He never acknowledged the mail I sent him. 

Playful banter on a richly coloured and coyly suggestive Georgia O'Keeffe postcard. (Because who doesn't want to receive snail mail for no reason other than the person you're canoodling with wants you to know she's been thinking about the canoodling?) A note on my for-significant-occasions Crane & Co. monogrammed linen stationery, wishing him well on the international CrossFit competition he had been training so hard for. For all I know he never received either, even though we were still in contact well after both would have reached him at the address I had visited him at several times. 

For a writer to have her handwritten, stamped, and mailed offerings ignored is sorely disappointing, particularly in a day and age when receiving personalized communication by post is so rare. Perhaps I was spoiled by a previous lover, who photographed everything I sent him across the many and mighty miles, usually before and after he opened them, and confessed he read every word I ever wrote at least ten times (in the three years I spent connected to him, my estimate is that there was just under a hundred thousand of them). But really, a simple "Hey — so thoughtful!" would have sufficed. 

When I think back on those few months, however, the thing that sits most uncomfortably with me is not that he had no appreciation for the particular way I express myself. It's that he made fun of vegans.

We met as it seems everyone does these days, on a dating app. We both work professionally in creative industries and spend a good chunk of our personal lives in pursuit of athletic goals, so at a basic level we had much in common and things seemed promising. 

It was on our first day of chatting in earnest via text outside of the dating-app platform that he said he had a random question for me: Did I eat meat, he wondered. 

My response, as they often are, was long-winded.

I told him that I did, but included a long list of caveats and explanations. I said I eat meat rarely and when I do, I try to ensure it's been ethically raised and slaughtered on a farm that practises sustainability and ensures quality of life to its workers (i.e., living wages and benefits). I told him about Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma and farmer Joel Salatin's progressive Polyface Farm and "eat[ing] by the grace of nature, not industry." I confided that when I'm deep into a marathon training cycle, my body has a natural avoidance of meat and dairy. I've always chalked it up to the amount of energy it requires to break those inputs down — when I'm already operating at high capacity for performance and recovery, my body begs for nutrients it can easily digest and transform. What my meandering answer really revealed, though, was just how uncomfortable I'd become consuming animal products.

But the only thing that really mattered to him was that my response wasn't "No." 

"I find the way a person answers that question reveals a lot about them," he wrote back. I wondered what it would have revealed about me had I answered differently, but considering he disclosed being an enthusiastic meat-eater, I could probably guess. Over time I would come to discover that he was staunch on a number of traditional ideas — biological theories of male dominance being one — and so when his disdain for vegans was finally revealed, it really wasn't a surprise. But what was rather astonishing was how poorly I handled that disdain.

They would show up in my Instagram direct messages every so often: memes making fun of vegans, usually from accounts managed by those who ascribe to paleo and keto diets. I can't remember the exact punch line of one of those shared posts, but it sneered at thin, lonely males who presumably ate only limp greens. Another depicted a rotund onion in the top right of the frame, with an army of slender carrots, their wispy root tails still attached, "swimming" their way towards contact. "How vegans are conceived," the caption read. 

It's one thing to debate people who take an entirely different approach to nutrition than you do. But to mock them? Every time one of those messages hit my inbox I'd shake my head in disbelief and exclaim, "How old are you?!' aloud, appalled at behaviour that was no more mature than that of a bully in the classroom, harassing the kid whose lunch contains unfamiliar foods. I'd look over at the my coffee table, where a copy of Brendan Brazier's Thrive Energy Cookbook sat, a compilation of vegan recipes crafted for performance by the Vega founder and plant-based former endurance athlete. I'd think about the Rich Roll podcast, which I listen to religiously each week and which would prompt me a few months later to buy The Plantpower Way, the lifestyle and food resource Roll authored with his partner, Julie Piatt. The book not only offers vegan recipes for athletes and the whole family (Roll is a former Ironman and Ultraman World Championships competitor) but also discusses the ethics of a plant-based life in a captivatingly profound and inspiring narrative that is counter to so much of the moralizing and condescension that accompanies the usual call-to-vegan-arms.

And yet every time I received one of those direct messages, I found myself doing something I couldn’t explain. Every time I received one of those direct messages, I feebly played along.

I can make all sorts of excuses for it: I was disarmed by shock; I didn’t know him that well; I was reluctant to go to war over an ideology that belonged to others. But the truth is that I was scared to wade into an argument I didn’t yet know how to have knowledgeably. In hindsight it would have been perfectly acceptable to simply call his behaviour out for what it was — dickish — with no accompanying argument for veganism needed. But because I wasn’t yet in possession of counter-evidence to all the usual incorrect facts levelled against a vegan diet, particularly for athletes (the most common one being that plant protein is inferior to protein from animal sources, which is ludicrous considering the most powerful animals on Earth are themselves herbivores), I avoided the argument altogether. I responded with laughing emojis and wan humour instead.

I cringe at the memory, ashamed at how I allowed the uncertainty of our relationship status and a lack of knowledge prevent me from doing what I knew was right. And yet I remembered another early exchange between us in which he deemed one of my responses about a past relationship “devoid of pain or emotion” in a way that insinuated I lacked the ability to feel. He backed off that track pretty quickly after I gave him a host of examples, so many of them housed in my public prose, of how I wear the depth and breadth of my beating heart on my sleeve. So if I wasn’t afraid of scaring off a potential match by forcefully defending a position, that left my inability to discuss veganism intelligently as my failing. And it was a failing easily corrected.

Not surprisingly, my connection with the mail-indifferent carnivore fizzled. But in its wake, my relationship to veganism flourished.

I was training in earnest for a marathon for the first time in three years. In a bid to rebuild my body and stave off the injury cycle I had been trapped in, I had added CrossFit personal training twice weekly into my schedule. It was the perfect time to test out the nutrition principles I was reading about.

Rather than just browsing the Brazier and Roll/Piatt books for recipes that appealed to me when I didn’t feel like eating meat, I dug into their explanations of food’s building blocks and how they fuel our bodies. I learned what my body needs chemically before, during, and after performance, and how to most effectively meet those requirements. And most important of all, I encountered recipes, ingredients, and techniques that played to all the textures, flavours, and aesthetics that as a life-long cook and food nerd I had grown to love — and which I think we assume must be eschewed when adhering to a vegan diet.

As I waded deeper into this new way of eating and watched the contents of my refrigerator and pantry change, I also started feeling a deeper sense of alignment between what was happening in my kitchen and my ethics. For every article on how veganism is better for the planet’s health you’ll find another claiming that the positive changes achieved by reducing consumption of resource-intensive meat are cancelled out by other ills, like deforestation to make way for more nut agriculture. But even this critically important environmental issue aside, there was another aspect to this lifestyle change that finally came to the fore for me: Animal welfare.

I adore my dog, Tilda. She came into my life unexpectedly, but she has become one of its foundations. She sleeps on my bed with me. I would put myself between her and any oncoming danger to save her life. I do everything I can to ensure she is healthy and happy. And as our years together have lengthened, it’s become harder and harder for me to justify why I consider her a companion but think of other animals that possess an equivalent level of intelligence and bonding within their own social networks as food.

Am I a perfect vegan? God, no. In fact, I don’t even call myself a vegan yet. I find myself saying things like, “I eat mostly a vegan diet now.” I suppose it’s because it feels as if I’m living with principles that belonged to others for so long. I also suspect it’s because it lets me off the hook when it comes to a few food choices I struggle with. Yogurt is still in my breakfast rotation. I haven’t quite yet conquered vegan baking and keep eggs on hand for doing it conventionally. I was out with my book club recently and ate the cheese on my grilled vegetable sandwich. I have not yet responded to any invitations with a “Yes” when asked if I have dietary restrictions.

So clearly I have a ways to go. But I’m getting closer to closing that final gap.

The Game Changers will open next week. It’s a film that explores the meteoric rise of plant-based professional athletes and roots out the truth about what is science and what is simply marketing when it comes to what we think we know about food and nutrition. Arnold Schwarzenegger is one of the producers and I wonder what the aforementioned Mr. Carnivore will think — Schwarzenegger, from his body-building days, is one of his sports heroes.

I wish I knew then what I know now. I wish I could have addressed with intellect and passion the reasons why vegans aren’t sorry losers but committed achievers. But the important thing is I got there, and continue to learn. In the end it wasn’t for me to convince The Carnivore that he was being shortsighted. It was, rather, for him to show me how I was.

Forget onions and carrots. This is how vegans are conceived.

_________________________

Pictured above is the vegan Superfood Pad Thai from The Plantpower Way by Rich Roll and Julie Piatt. Rich’s podcast, which delves into wellness far beyond the narrow topic of food, has been an integral part of my personal growth over the past year.

Brendan Brazier’s Thrive Energy Cookbook and Thrive philosophy have helped to reshape my approach to sport nutrition.