It’s funny how when you start a new creative endeavor, you feel a lot of pressure. Maybe it’s just me, but I always have that sense of pressure, like people are waiting, and that I must perform according to what I said I was going to do, or I will be failing.

But I suspect the reality is that there’s no such pressure. No one is waiting with bated breath for the pearls of wisdom that will flow from my fingers through this keyboard into this computer to be “uploaded.”

As I alluded to before, I’m not sure about the direction to take my own posts, or, to be honest, the necessity of this blog. Our Vegan Odyssey sounds so big and important, and like I mentioned, I just want to live.

Here’s how I’ve been living as a non-ovo/non-lacto vegetarian:

     I have to be careful on errand days because it’s not easy to find something to eat after we’ve been out for hours and we still have more errands to do. There’s no good vegan quick snack/drive-through/restaurant choices. Oh, the reason I have to be careful is that I become an insane crabmonster if I get too hungry. So, yes, planning ahead is critical. Since we’re doing some exercising at the beginning of errands, we are trying to get into the habit of bringing nuts in the car. That’s a good food to eat after exercise, and it’s enough calories etc to hold me over until we get done with errands. That, and our errands usually (for some reason ;) ) put us in the position to buy these. Srsly good.

None of the above was any different when I was eating animals (I have always become an insane crabmonster if I go too long without eating), except that back then I could get a Wendy’s Double Stack or a bag of Cheetos from the gas station and think I was feeding myself.

     Our church is starting some Lenten Small Groups. Since I love our church and I love small groups, I’m very excited about this prospect. But when Pastor Judy announced the groups, she talked about how the groups would include a meal of a “simple soup.” She proposed (and wisely so, in my opinion) that people might be more likely to come if there’s food. For a nonvegan me, that prospect raises no concerns whatsoever. But for me now, I have to speak up and ask her for something. I have to ask that even the concept of vegan soups be considered in this endeavor. And that’s not an easy thing to ask. I don’t want to make “special” requests in a situation like this! But I have to speak up, right?

     Valentine’s Day is this weekend. Here’s something brief I wrote about VDay back in aught-six. So Pants and I are trying to figure out what to do, and, frankly, I think it’s up to him. But guess what….where we spend the day and evening is influenced by whether we think we’ll be able to find something decent to eat for lunch or dinner. From now on until forever, this will be a consideration when we make plans. Makes spontaneity kind of difficult.

All this means this: I’m not changing back. I don’t regret my choices for even one second. My reasons and reality outweigh (by a huge proportion) my inconvenience. But I can’t help constantly wishing the world was more friendly to this choice. And I can’t help praying for the day it will be. I don’t care if it’s Vatmeat, the Pills of Nutritional Completeness, or something that we haven’t even conceived of yet. I just wish there was as little suffering as possible caused by humanity vis-a-vis diet. I’m not starry-eyed, I know that even plant agriculture causes suffering. But I truly believe the world could thrive on a plant-based diet, and I wish I could see that in my lifetime.

We belong to a local CSA, so we get a box of produce every week. We used to pick it up on Mondays when we did errands, but doing errands on Monday was making me go crazy because it started the week at a too-frantic pace. So, we changed our pickup day to Wednesday, now errands are Wednesday (which includes grocery shopping), so meal planning is Tuesday night/Wednesday morning. (To be honest, it’s usually right before we need to get going!)

See what we do? We plan our meals for the week after we know what’s coming in the produce box (the list posted online at the beginning of the week), but before we do our grocery shopping. It was like a revelation, this meal planning concept. I had no idea how much stress it would relieve! Before we start our lists, we do a quick pantry/fridge inventory to see what we can make from what we have, and then we buy staples and any recipe necessities.

Here’s a tiny sample of this week’s planning:

We have a tube of pre-made organic polenta. I know polenta is very simple to make (it’s cornmeal and water, maybe a little salt), and one day I will definitely make a batch, but until then, the little vacuum packed tubes are a good size for the two of us. I really love polenta, and could probably eat one of those tubes myself, but I won’t. This time. Anyway, I remembered last night that we have this polenta, and I want to have it, so I carefully and scientifically evaluated what would be the most nutritionally optimizing foods to eat with it. Just kidding, I just picked something at random that I knew we had in the fridge: a pound of mixed greens already cleaned and prepared!! So, here’s the meal that will make: braised greens with pine nuts and sliced olives over pan-toasted polenta slabs. Slabs doesn’t sound all that appetizing, now you know why I’m not a cookbook author.

How will this delectable meal be prepared?

Have all this stuff ready before you start (note: all measurements are approximate — Here’s the truth: use what you like. Pants loves onions, so ours would have more onion. Some might want it more salty or less salty, so adjust the soy sauce. Or eliminate it and use salt if you don’t like that soy sauce flavor! I would probably use more garlic because I like it a lot. Want walnuts and no olives? Great! Want green olives and ripe olives? Great! Try stuff, see what you like! You could make it more Italian by adding chopped tomatoes. You could make it Southern by subtracting the nuts and olives, upping the vinegar and adding sugar or maple syrup, maybe a little liquid smoke and tabasco. Don’t be scared! Go crazy!):

1/2c - 1c chopped white/yellow onion
1-2 garlic cloves, minced
for braising the greens:
     1c water or broth to which you’ve added:
          2t soy sauce
          2t acid (lemon juice or vinegar)
3/4c pine nuts (raw or toasted, your preference)
3/4c chopped kalamata olives (pre-pitted)
add’l small amount of liquid or fat to brown onions/garlic

In a tall pot (like a stock pot) brown some garlic and onions. You can brown them in oil/earth balance/water/broth. Whatever you like. Since we did some McDougalling (extremely low fat vegan), we unlearned some habits like starting every dish with oil. In my opinion, some foods really need to be browned in fat (potatoes & polenta, to name two) but onions and garlic do not. You’d be surprised at what little flavor that fat at the beginning is actually adding! I literally can’t tell the difference in a dish where the aromatics (onion, garlic, celery, carrot, etc) have been started in water or broth vs oil. And since in this dish I know there’s some good veg fat in the nuts and in the olives, I won’t cook with oil except to grill up the polenta.

So, now your onions and garlic are soft and translucent. (PROTIP: start with your onions, give them about a half-minute headstart on your garlic…that helps the garlic not scorch. If things are getting scorchy, add a little more liquid or fat.)

Next, stuff all your cleaned/trimmed/chopped greens in the pot. The heat should be low to medium-low. A pound of greens may look like a lot, but it will cook way down, so far down that you’ll probably wish you had more greens! Pour over the liquid you prepared and give everything a stir. Cover.

Cook on low to med-low heat, stirring occasionally. Keep an eye on them to make sure the liquid hasn’t cooked out since the greens can scorch if that happens. If you’re worried, add more. Test and taste the greens for tenderness and flavor. When you like the flavor and texture, stir in the pine nuts and olives, turn off the heat, and cover to keep warm.

After stirring in the additions to the greens, I’ll pull out that tube o’ polenta and cut it open. It’s packed in water, so if you try one, cut it over the sink. I’m going to slice it lengthwise into planks about 1/2 inch thick. Maybe we’ll get 6 planks or so. I’ll brown them in olive oil until they crisp on one side (maybe 2-3 minutes?) turn and brown the other side. I’m not really trying to fry them, just get some nice browning on the surface. The inside will be creamy and soft. Plate the polenta in a shallow bowl, spoon the greens (with some of the liquid, if you like) over top. Salt & pepper to taste.

Regarding cooking greens like kale, collard, mustard, chard, turnip greens, beet greens: Here is my confession, my shame. There have been cooking greens available nearly every week in our CSA since we moved here. For most of that time (until last fall, I would say) we subbed them out for something else. We were scared of greens and didn’t know what to do with them and I wasn’t sure I even liked them. I honestly don’t know what happened, we just ate them a few times, tried some recipes (some real recipes) with them and KA-BLAOWAM!! Now I LOOOOVE greens. I actually crave them. I want to eat them twice/thrice weekly. We have them in stir-frys. We have them with beans. We have them with grains. We have them braised like this. I would eat this on toast or rice or even savory oatmeal. The other day I made kale chips (massaged ripped up kale with a little oil and too much salt and baked on low heat until they were crispy). I got the salt amount all wrong, so each one was like a crazy crispy Green Salt Bomb. I still ate them, they were awesome.

So, that’s a small slice of our planning and an example of what we eat. That dish is planned for Sunday. We planned out one week’s worth of dishes, including today. One day (Thursday) is a lunch, since we go to my mom’s for dinner every Thursday. For lunch that day we’re having BLTs on lavash bread (a flatbread that’s thin like a flour tortilla, but more hearty, like a pita). Uh….bacon? Yes….tempeh bacon! Yum!!

I’ve been struggling with myself about how to write what I want here. I want to be authentic, to speak in my “real” voice. But (as I mentioned before) I’m afraid my real voice about this stuff isn’t a very nice voice.

So I’ve been trying to think about who I’d like to have read this. I know people who know and support us are reading this (hi friends), but as far as anyone else — if we ever get a wider audience — it will be people who are already trying to have lifestyle that seeks to cause as little suffering as possible to anyone. I wasn’t in the habit of reading vegetarian or vegan blogs when I was eating animals, so I tend to doubt that people committed to that practice are necessarily searching for vegan blogs to read, right?

I guess that should make it clear to me that the strange burden I am carrying of having to convince anyone is something I can put down. I wish this was a Q&A so that I could honestly and compassionately answer questions asked in good faith about the realities of living as a vegan in a non-vegan world. But no one has those questions, at least not for me, that I can tell. Plus, what am I going to say? Research it yourself, the same as I did! Try this, that, or the other thing, ingredient, or practice. This odyssey is entirely personal and you’ll never truly get how possible it is until you try it for yourself.

Contrariwise, another struggle I’m experiencing is that I just want to live, you know? I am a normal person, I live a normal life. It happens to be in a long skinny house, with a job that allows me to stay home all day, a distinct lack of television commercials, and no meat, milk, eggs, or cheese. Other than all that, it’s normal! I do laundry, drink coffee, get confused about computer problems, get irritated at pets who vomit and at husbands who forget stuff. I want my clothes to look cute, my parents to accept me, and to have lots of fun instead of having no fun.

Ah, I’m rambling. I’m just processing out loud, it’s something I do. Maybe it’s too many blogs for me. Maybe it’s too much compartmentalization. I don’t know. I like having my other blog to write poetry and what not, except as soon as I think of it as “for that,” then I stay away like it has the haitchone. I love this new blog because all I was thinking about and talking about for months before we started it was veganism. Now, I just kind of wish it was the norm. For me and for everyone. Requiring no defense or explanation. Oh, that it could just be understood that to kill a living, feeling, thinking, loving being so that we can eat her is a relic of our barbaric history. Quaint and gross, like the ripping out of hearts on the altars for human sacrifice in Tenochtitlan.

Every once in a while, I feel a twinge of desire for some kind of meat-based product. It usually happens when I’m watching TV. I see someone eating a hamburger, and I remember how much I used to love hamburgers. (Of course, then I imagine ammonia-soaked ground beef patties, and the feeling kind of passes.) And of course, cheese.

This impulse is mostly emotional: it’s about habit and gratification. The habit part, for me, is fading quickly; once animal products are no longer part of your daily life, they lose their hold on you. It’s like being hooked on a TV show. Eons ago, when Friends was still on, I was addicted to that show and watched it religiously. At some point I decided I was spending too much time watching TV, and resolved to go cold turkey. The only hard part of that decision was giving up Friends. The idea of not watching it anymore made me feel panicky. How would I find out what happened to Ross and Rachel? But I did it, and it only took a few weeks before whatever connection I had with that show completely faded. I thought about how anxious I felt about giving it up, and how it was that notion, not the notion of giving up the show, that was incomprehensible to me.

Gratification is harder to deal with, because it’s tied to pleasure/stimulation seeking, which we are hard-wired for, but also to personal happiness, which is a thorny landscape of entitlement, guilt, and all kinds of punishment/reward issues from childhood. For me, the way to deal with issues of deprivation and self-medication through food (“my happiness in life depends on being able to eat this cheeseburger”) is to focus on physical and emotional well-being.

When there’s a void in your life, it’s tempting to fill that void with stimulating food, because food is one of very few pleasures in our culture that is also an absolute necessity for existence. Even if you’re at a low ebb of self-esteem and don’t feel you deserve any other pleasure or joy in life, you can allow yourself food, because everyone needs to eat, right? (Just make sure it’s the most unhealthy, cheap, crappy food available.) So, when Hannahbee and I embarked upon this vegan journey, one thing I was absolutely adamant about was that our mental and spiritual well-being had to be right up there as a top priority in our lives.

We live in a stressful society that seems engineered to make people unhappy. Stressed-out, unhappy people turn to familiar comfort foods — which, in our culture, means things like hamburgers, hot dogs, and pizza. So, as people who grew up around those things, it’s critical for us to circumvent situations that might lead us to want them, at least until new habits and new comfort foods take hold. When people say that they couldn’t possibly give up eating meat, I think most of the time what they’re really saying is, “Don’t take away my security blanket.”

A year before we became vegan, Hannahbee and I went on a raw food diet. (I hate using the word “diet,” because it wasn’t a weight loss plan, but just a diet in the sense of a way of eating.) It was, in practice, a vegan diet, but we didn’t frame it or think about it that way. We weren’t specifically trying not to consume animals — that was just a side benefit of our plan.

It was a positive period in our lives. We both felt pretty good, mentally and physically, and yes, we lost weight. But we couldn’t sustain it. Eventually we went back to eating cooked food, including animal products. And there was never a point where I didn’t crave all those comfort foods.

Now, living as vegans, I might feel the occasional impulse, but it never develops into a full-on craving. The temptations that spring up are pretty easily dismissed. One reason, of course, is that a typical vegetarian diet is nowhere near as restrictive as a raw diet. If you’re cooking your food, you have access to all kinds of familiar dishes.

But I’m convinced that the main reason I don’t get seriously tempted anymore is that, this time around, our intention of not eating animals is not simply a dietary self-improvement plan, but an ethical, moral, and spiritual change in our lives. If I were doing this strictly for health reasons, I wouldn’t stick with it. For one thing, I don’t have a high enough self-esteem — at least, not yet — to sustain a “my body is my temple” attitude. And for another, good physical health, while a laudable goal, is hard to maintain as a motivating force in my life, because, while the idea of it is certainly pleasurable, it’s not actually a pleasurable sensation.

(I’m not talking about physical fitness, which is pleasurable — it feels good when your muscles are strong and you can move easily — but rather nutritional health, which, if it’s in order, is pretty much invisible, and defined mostly by what’s not happening in your body, namely cancer and heart attacks, or even just noticeable discomfort, like stomach problems.)

What does feel noticeably good, though, is my spiritual well-being. One thing that happened when I went all in with veganism and committed myself to living a life of compassion and nonviolence, is an enormous sense of liberation. I felt freed from my guilt over contributing to the suffering of animals and humans by participating in the factory farm system. Food honestly tastes better when you can appreciate it with your whole heart, without having to block out any unpleasant knowledge of the implications of what you’re eating.

So now, when I receive those familiar cues to eat whatever animal products are being marketed to me, there’s a lot happening on my side to fight against that pressure. I have the positive reinforcement of living a life that produces vitality and joy and a defense against stress. I have the awareness that I’m living a life that reflects my ethical and moral values, and there’s no food pleasure that is worth going back to a life of denial and moral blindness. And if nothing else, I have the knowledge of the unpleasantness of our food production system, and of everything that gets imparted to our food that would make us nauseated if we could clearly perceive it.

I would feel tempted to return to my old life if there was anything about that life that was remotely appealing, aside from the temporary pleasure of eating something that I’ve already eaten thousands of in my lifetime, and which never even made me all that happy to begin with. If you think about it that way, where’s the temptation at all?