Vegan MoFo III

In which my listless web browsing one night led me here.

Now here's the deal: I have now been vegetarian for longer than I was an omnivore. (And I was an unenthusiastic meat-eater even then.) For those playing along, that's 21 years, roughly. I stopped eating meat one day when I was cutting up a chicken breast for a stir-fry...and I knew I just couldn't do it again. Ever. I read Diet for a Small Planet, and its basic arguments--that people can be fed more efficiently via a plant-based diet and that a vegetarian diet is nutritionally sound--made TOTAL sense to me. (They still do.) I'm an animal-lover, too, and I think our food choices affect the health of our planet.

But until fairly recently, I didn't make the leap from vegetarianism to veganism. Even though I understood that factory farming of dairy and eggs involved animal cruelty, and the processes of factory farming are an environmental nightmare. I kept inching toward being vegan, especially when I'd get frustrated by my allergies and asthmatic tendencies, which are made worse when I eat dairy. I'd start avoiding dairy, and start feeling better. Huh.

And then a few months ago, I decided IT WAS TIME. As with the chicken breasts, it was pretty much an "okay, we're done here" moment. All of the cookbooks I've bought in the last year have been vegan. I cook from them all the time; it finally hit me that it wouldn't be that hard to only cook from them. We don't eat out much any way, and if we have to eat out less, c'est la vie.

I've wanted to get back to writing again, and Vegan MoFo will give me some structure in that. I love September too much to wish it away, but once October arrives, let the mad vegan blogging begin!