Veganist_ Lose Weight, Get Healthy, Change the World - Kathy Freston [15]
This struck me as odd. As far as I was concerned, we weren’t doing anything wrong. I’d heard that PETA was boycotting KFC at the time, and I would have understood the need for secrecy if we’d been eating there, but this was McDonald’s—what could be so wrong about that? Still, the last thing I wanted to do was offend him, so I gladly agreed to keep our lunch between us.
Later we went back to Ryan’s house and hung out. He seemed like a cool guy, and we had a lot in common. Nothing about Ryan suggested that his beliefs were fundamentally different from mine. Ryan offered Katie and me something to drink after a while: he had OJ, Coke, bottled water, and rice milk. I’d never heard of rice milk, so I asked if I could give it a try. It wasn’t the best thing I’d ever tasted, but it wasn’t bad either.
Why, I wondered, would this guy my own age deprive himself of a glass of milk, a Big Mac, or a plate of cheese fries? Given how much I enjoyed those things, his decision to abstain based on a set of beliefs actually struck me as rather commendable. He had to feel pretty strongly about it to refuse something so delicious. So I asked him why he chose to be vegan. His answer—that he wasn’t willing to cause suffering to other living creatures, and then his recitation of lots of intense and awful details about that suffering—changed my life.
Effective that day, I was vegan, and have been ever since. It just made sense. Why should I eat something that caused an animal to suffer when I could choose to buy something else? Rice milk wasn’t as good as milk, I thought, but it wasn’t bad enough to justify buying cow’s milk, which, as Ryan explained, came from an animal that was continually impregnated to maximize her dairy production, and her male calves were likely slaughtered for veal.
My decision to adopt a vegan diet was a very personal one. While I became increasingly concerned—and, later, outspoken—about the plight of animals raised on factory farms, I chose to adopt a vegan diet that day because I knew it was something I had the power to do, and I knew the choice was right for me. I loved Meat Fest as much as any of my friends, but I liked a lot of other foods, too. The way I saw it, when I sat down to eat, I could make a choice: I could eat the thing that I thought would taste best, or I could eat something perhaps slightly less delicious but that caused far less suffering. When I chose the latter, I felt good about myself—like in some small way I was making a difference.
I don’t think I substantially changed what I ate on a daily basis; I replaced the animal products I’d been eating with plant-based alternatives. Rice or soy milk on cereal, PB&J instead of ham and cheese, Earth Balance instead of butter, tofu and seitan instead of meat. Except for the occasional temptation—a tiny slice of brie, my grandmother’s matzo ball soup and coffee cake—I found that nearly everything I liked to eat could be replaced by a plant-based version of the same thing. Even when I tried a vegan product that tasted terrible, there was usually another brand that I found to be a little tastier. And, over time, vegan sour cream stopped tasting like, well, fake sour cream. Today, vegan sour cream tastes rich and creamy—a great topping for, or ingredient in, some of my favorite foods.
After a while, I stopped comparing the food I was eating as a vegan to the food I ate growing up. My tastes started to change. I had fewer cravings for rich and fatty foods, and I realized for the first time how sweet and satisfying whole foods can be. I started eating more fruits and nuts, used pure maple syrup as a sweetener instead of sugar, and added fresh spinach or kale to many of my favorite dishes. And, having never found a tofu scramble I really enjoyed, I invented my own.
My family was, by and large, supportive. My aunt Annie took me to a local bookstore to shop for vegan cookbooks and to read up on vegan nutrition. If my parents were cooking pasta with chicken for