World Vegan Month Tip #4

Framing veganism as a lifestyle of deficiency or denying oneself is not a good long-term success plan and it doesn't acknowledge the amazing abundance and countless positive benefits available to us. The next time you find yourself saying, "I can't eat this," or "I can't go there," think about how you are communicating veganism to yourself and to the world. We are so fortunate to be able to live in a time when we can live according to our values. We get to eat amazing, health-promoting, harmless food, we get to decide how we want to spend our money and time. Isn't that an incredible opportunity? Successful and effective long-term veganism happens when we no longer look at the world through the lens of lack and denial but through a clear-eyed perspective of gratitude, abundance and acknowledgement of this rare opportunity we have.

World Vegan Month Tip #3

Don't leave yourself in the lurch! One of the best ways that you can ensure you can maintain your vegan aspirations is to make it easy for yourself. A simple strategy for this is to keep your kitchen well-stocked with items that can be used any time for making a quick meal, like pasta, soups, and so on.

World Vegan Month Tip #2

Give your taste buds some time to adapt to healthier habits. "The longer we eat healthier foods, the better they taste," says Dr. Michael Greger in this short but informative video and the research backs up this claim. Many people claim to not like vegan food, but have they really given it a try?

World Vegan Month Tip #1

November is World Vegan Month so for the entire month, Vegan Street will be posting a new daily tip to help make veganism easier and more accessible to all. Daily tip #1 (sorry we missed yesterday): Be gentle with yourself while setting concrete goals. If your goal is to reduce consumption of animal products, figure out easy replacements, for example, almond milk in the place of cow's milk in your cereal. Keep finding ways to decrease or eliminate animal products and increase vegan foods. Setting realistic, specific goals rather than aspiring to something vague will get you closer to tangible results.

On Owning Language

Some people really hate labels. I am not one of those people. 

I know that I should shun labels. I am an open-minded, artistic, rebellious type. (Oh wait, those are actually more labels.) But labels are for cans of soup, right? On the surface, yes, but on a level  deeper than that, labels can actually help people to flesh out what was once two-dimensional and inaccessible to them. If you are “out” as someone who identifies with certain so-called labels, it helps those who meet you to understand the richness and complexities of human nature more, not less, and actually see you in a much more expansive way than it would seem that a label would allow.

At a university surrounded by cornfields, I was happy and honored to be able to embrace the label of feminist. Why wouldn’t I be? Feminists were powerful and independent and not taking any nonsense from anyone. It wasn’t long, though, before I learned that it was not so cut-and-dried for the many other young women who made it crystal clear that they did not self-identify as feminists. Even if they were going to college to develop marketable skills and knowledge for professional careers upon graduation, or as a stepping stone to the advanced degrees denied their female forebears, they weren’t feminists, no way, no how. In talking with people, what I learned was largely that they had conflicts with the image and perception of what they thought it meant to be a feminist. To many who disassociated themselves from feminism, it often seemed motivated by a conflict between the image of themselves they were trying to project and feminism.

The same outdated notions prevalent in 1970 were still alarmingly entrenched in 1990. This was what I learned: Feminists don’t shave. Feminists hate men. Feminists don’t wear bras. Feminists are ugly. Sadly, in 2013, all these years later, there is still such a powerful grip the negative associations of feminism has on the word that many women continue to reject the word even as they personally benefit from the advances early feminists fought for years before. In thinking about it, I have to conclude that the universal cultural pressure to be considered attractive might be as powerfully motivating as they come. 

Over the years, I have noticed a growing reticence around the word “vegan” by my fellow herbivores and it also seems to be largely motivated by some similar negative perceptions the dominant culture has attached to us. Vegans are angry. Vegans are busybodies. Vegans are judgmental. Vegans hate people. It’s disappointing to me, as someone who is a proud vegan, to see so many who could be out there creating positive change and challenging perceptions in the world remove their association with the word altogether. I fear that feminism is so full of baggage at this point that I don’t know if we’ll ever rid ourselves of the negative associations attached to it, and I don’t want to see the same thing happen to veganism.

Given the pressing importance of spreading our message of compassionate living, I have to ask this: Whom do we want to control the language and messaging around veganism? Do we want to hand it over to big advertising? Do we want the media to dictate it? Do we want the powers that be, the ones who have everything to lose if veganism takes hold, to control the terms and messaging of it?

I embrace the label “vegan” partly because I am so very grateful to be living at a time and in a place where I can live by my values. This is an extraordinary privilege and it is unique to our age. In embracing the label, we humanize it and then, paradoxically, it becomes less of a label and more of a simple descriptor. If we can live as complex, individual, dynamic and creative vegans, we take the one-size-fits-all label off of us and we create something altogether new and real out of it. This more fleshed out understanding of who vegans are then flows out when we interact in the world so the public will have a more complete understanding, which will help them to reject the shallow clichés that have been tacked onto us. Further, when we take an active role in broaden the public perception of veganism, the people we interact with can begin to imagine themselves as vegans.

I believe that we need to own the language and, yes, the label, because through that, we will expand perceptions and I believe that this will ultimately ripple out to have a positive net effect for the animals. We can’t give up the messaging around veganism to those who barely understand it or want to see it fail: we need to be out there as individuals, showing the world what it means to us to live as vegans. Our beliefs about equality and justice spring from something much richer and more deep than the lazy cultural identifiers the people who don’t understand veganism assign to it so we need to own the word. Allowing others to define who we are will be our ruin and it will ultimately lead to the continued dismissal of the vegan message.

So here is my challenge to you if you don’t like the public perception of veganism: Practice owning the word. Be an out and proud and unapologetically fabulous vegan. Society being able to see us - as artists, entrepreneurs, students, grandparents, scientists, activists, neighbors and everything in between - as unique representatives of veganism is what is going to be the game changer here.

Are you ready?




My Vegan Haunted House

This year, I’ve decided I wanted to create my own vegan haunted house. It’s not the sort of thing that will scare vegans, though, because just navigating through life, we already deal with plenty of frights. (The annual catered holiday meal with the office; driving through parts of the country without a mention on the Happy Cow app.) Instead, my haunted house will be for omnivores and I won’t even show anyone the scariest parts, the blood and gore of animal agriculture. My haunted house may look like an ordinary home from the outside but it is certain to make an omnivores arms prickle with goose bumps. It is a house of horrors. Consider me your personal tour guide. 


Upon entering this seemingly normal house, intrepid visitors will be brought to the kitchen. What’s so alarming about the kitchen? Look inside the freezer, the cupboards: There are no chicken nuggets, no Chips Ahoy. What kind of insane asylum of deprivation is this?! The worst kind: It’s a vegan one. If that weren’t chilling enough, what on earth is that terrifying bright green liquid in the glass on the counter? Nuclear waste run-off? Primordial sludge? Worse: It’s a green smoothie. And what is this mysterious yellow powder in the container? Ground up witches’ teeth? Flaked off skin from the kneecaps of an ogre with psoriasis? It says “nutritional yeast” on the container. Have two words ever sounded scarier together?

Now, I will take you to the first of our staged rooms. This one is where you will get to time-travel and visit with a cardiologist ten years in the future. Men, you will also get the results of your future prostate exam. Before we exit, you will get to dip your hands in a disgusting substance that mimics the sticky plaque of clogged arteries. Squeeze it between your fingers. Who’s saying, “Mmm...bacon....” now, hmm? 


From here, it is only natural to go to the pharmaceutical rep room, where sample pills for heart disease, high blood pressure, high cholesterol and more are dispensed. Wait: do you need a stent? It’ll just take a minute -- do you want to schedule an appointment to discuss that now?

Scared yet? Now we will go into the subsidies room, where the door will be locked and you'll be forced to learn about the true cost of hamburgers, McMuffins, chicken and Ben & Jerry’s. While you sit there, you will learn the cost to our environment and health care system and YOU CAN’T ESCAPE until it's over.

Next up, we will walk down the hall and the creepy advertising agency executive zombies will wildly grab at you, trying to stuff coupon circulars into your hands, and stare at you with their hungry, cold, dead eyes.  If that weren’t bad enough, fast food executives will be shouting their dollar menu listings into your ears. Want to supersize it?

Ah, now we will enter one of the worst features at my house of horrors: the olfactory room, where you have to experience what it smells like at a factory farm, a slaughterhouse and a fecal lagoon. Could you stand it for even a minute? 

Next, we will visit the food-born illness room: walk through it and try to avoid the creepy-crawly e. coli, the pernicious salmonella, the menacing campylobacter. They will jump on you no matter how much you try evade them. Did you pick up any antibiotics in the pharmaceutical rep room? No? Meh, they probably won’t work anyway due to antibiotic resistance. Oh, well. Hope for the best!

For our next stop, you will be brought to the argument room, where vegans will dismiss any and all arguments used to justify eating animals without even breaking a sweat. “Plants feel pain?” “Look at my ‘canine’ teeth?” Seriously, you don’t want them to laugh right in your face, do you? Our vegans won’t physically harm you but they may really damage your ego.

Finally, we will bring you to the animals room. Remember how I promised that you wouldn’t see any gore? I am keeping my promise. In the animals room, you will put on headphones and listen to the sounds of animals in captivity, crying to get out, driven mad, screaming. How long can you take it?

You may walk into my house of horrors and walk out a completely new person. What do you think? Want to give it a try?

Of Transformation and Giving Thanks

I had one of those a ha! experiences a couple of weeks ago when something cut through the ordinariness of the present moment and managed to rise above all the chatter in my mind. I was cooking dinner and my son was talking about Halloween, hyped-up with anticipation for our favorite holiday, and, in that jumping from topic-to-topic way that he has, he started talking about Thanksgiving. What should we make? Shepherd’s pie? Pumpkin cheesecake? He was thinking aloud about possibilities (“...Pumpkin brownies. Or should we make stuffed squashes? We can make both a main dish and a dessert, right?”) when it struck me in one extraordinarily crystalline moment: this child has no apprehension about Thanksgiving. I had to savor that realization as it washed over me.

As someone who went vegetarian in high school, my experience around Thanksgiving was very different. It was a day filled with dread, sadness and isolation. From the sound of the electric carving knife in the kitchen to the awkwardness of having people ask me why I couldn’t eat “just a little turkey once a year,” it was a day that I just suffered through, unhappily pushing the stuffing and cranberry sauce around my plate with my fork, and internally counting down the minutes until I could hide away in my bedroom. Separated from the dining room, the kitchen was a different grisly scene with an actual carcass in it, the flesh carved away and exposing more skeleton and cavity as the meal progressed; I would block my eyes whenever I was asked to bring out more rolls, more butter. I just learned to white-knuckle my way through the experience and find comfort that when this was over, I had 364 blessedly Thanksgiving-free days before the next one.

How very opposite it is for my son, raised as a vegan, and who has nothing but excitement and eager anticipation of the celebration we share with our adored friends. Our Thanksgiving - with plates overflowing with Brussels sprouts and casserole and pumpkin pie and fresh cranberry sauce - is all he has ever known about the holiday because this is how we’ve celebrated it since before he was born. Unlike myself at his age, my son knows and cares deeply about the barbarism around the holiday, but that doesn’t dampen his ability to also be able to revel in the joy of the day, which at its roots is about spending time with the people you love, laughing and catching up, and eating delicious, abundant, decadent dishes.



It occurred to me in that brief moment as we stood together in the kitchen: This is how transformation happens. In one generation - actually, within a single lifetime -Thanksgiving has transformed from a day of dread and isolation to one of pure joy. It seems to me that harnessing that drive to do better, to create a life woven with meaning, care and passion, is how we are going to transform the world, one person after the next, after the next. In that simple, ordinary moment, I saw the future that I dream about. We can change, we can evolve and thank goodness for that.

These children like my son will still be growing up in a world that considers animal products and flesh to be food and they will still be growing up in a world where the human “right” to do whatever we please, whenever we please is a given. With the lens of outsiders, these children can see the deadly consequences of our tyranny everywhere they look with the clarity of those who haven’t had their vision obstructed and this is difficult and painful. They have the added challenge of having to face peers who yell “Ewww!” at their lunches and, as young people, finding a way to live with the absurdity of that. They are not the ones who are eating carcasses, after all. 


That is challenging, no doubt, but this is where it gets really, really exciting: there are engaged parents who are sourcing baseball mitts without leather, who are helping their kids opt out of dissection, who are creating new holiday traditions that are not steeped in the suffering of so many violently silenced beings. Often, we are fumbling and stumbling our way through this as we work to create a new world out of the one we have, but we are still doing it. These little things that circumvent business-as-usual practices may sound silly and trivial but they are not, they’re full of importance: we are actively creating the compassionate world we want our children to live in and every day, we are showing them that it’s possible and it’s joyful.

I started out writing this, thinking I would be writing about my son’s experience with Thanksgiving but it occurs to me that this isn’t just about Thanksgiving. This is about transforming how we think, how we feel, and how we live even within one lifetime. My son reminded me of that the other day in the kitchen: he knows about the violence of the world but he also feels pride and ownership about this life we’ve carved out for family and as a result, we have created transformation. We are not destined to have to blindly maintain the same customs and the same habits we grew up knowing just because that was how we were raised. Given that, this is what floors me sometimes, even when it’s not Thanksgiving: a feeling of immense thankfulness that we live at a time and in a place where we can live according to our deepest convictions and values.

We are building this life. We are changing the world. Whether we are parents or not, we are doing it, one person after the next. Transformation is always at our fingertips.