paulwalkersgirl
July 25th, 2008, 01:00 AM
My step-mother & father discovered this article in 'Sunday Magazine' the other month and kept it for me. They thought I'd find it interesting. :) I just typed it up for ya'll to read. Tell me what you think.
Tofu Warrior (Sunday Magazine)
Less than one per cent of the population follows a vegan diet, yet those who do claim it can make you feel better, live longer and even save the planet. But how much fun can it be? Our erstwhile devotee spills the (soya) beans on a descent into fanaticism.
Story: Stephen Lacey
There I am, on Rue Montorgueil in Paris, staring through the window of Stohrer, one of the city’s most famous patisseries. I’m drooling as I eye off the display of perfectly formed éclairs, criollo and le baba au rhum. But for me, it’s a case of look but don’t touch. I can’t enjoy even one bite. Not one lousy little crumb.
Am I diabetic? On a crash diet? Allergic to pastry? Or just out of Euros? None of the above. I am what is known as a vegan nut job.
While a vegetarian doesn’t eat anything that has a face, a vegan takes this further, refusing to eat anything derived from anything with a face. This rules out dairy products and eggs, plus a whole host of obscure ingredients that are animal sourced.
I’d been a vegetarian for around a decade, when my wife read an article about dairy cows.
“They’re exploited for their milk. I’m turning vegan,” she told me. I agreed to follow suit.
Like most things that eventually become fanatical obsessions – golf or model trains for example – our shift to veganism started out innocently enough; we simply abstained from obvious animal products.
Even at this early stage, it wasn’t easy. Every meal had to be prepared from scratch and we ended up with a huge pile of vegan cookbooks, including a book of desserts entitled Sinfully Vegan. To be honest, the idea of a vegan dessert being sinful is as likely as Fred Nile dressing in leather and growing a handlebar moustache for Mardi Gras. The fact is, tofu is never sinful. Horrible, yes. Bland, no doubt. But sinful, are you kidding?
We almost exhausted the world’s supply of soya beans. Open our fridge and you were confronted with a slimy, white wall of bean curd. Then there was the soy margarine, soy sausages, soy bacon rashers, soy chicken drumsticks, and soy burgers. Plus, of course, soy milk. Litres of the stuff.
We dined in vegan restaurants, visited vegan shops to purchase vegan supplies, and filled our wardrobes with vegan-friendly clothing.
We even read magazines devoted to the vegan lifestyle. These publications were dominated by woefully pale, righteous folk telling stories about how vegans live a longer, healthier life.
A couple of years into our veganism, we started to become acquainted with ‘E numbers’. This is the system that denotes additives in foods. We printed out a list of E numbers, indicating which ‘possibly’ or ‘almost certainly’ derived from animal products.
Armed with out list, supermarket shopping became like cracking the Da Vinci Code and took about as long. We knew E120 was cochineal (a red colouring taken from the bodies of pregnant beetles), E441 was gelatin (a thickening agent by boiling down animal bones and ligaments) and E627 was disodium 5’-Guanylate (a flavour enhancer that ‘may’ come from sardines).
It didn’t take long to discover that virtually everything on the supermarket shelves included the by-product of some unfortunate dead critter.
Surprise, surprise, the dinner party invitations started drying up. Who could blame the hosts? We were just too hard to cater for. We lost count of the number of times we were served a vegetable stack or asparagus risotto (sans parmesan cheese).
Many a time we’d sneak out to the host’s kitchen to check that forbidden ingredients weren’t being used (they usually were, in the form of a dreaded E number). Then we’d have to make our excuses and leave.
We became more fanatical as the years rolled on. It reached the stage where we wouldn’t eat from pots and pans that had been used in the preparation of animal products. A visitor once cooked an omelette at our house and we threw the frying pan away.
Being a vegan is difficult enough, but more so when you work as a travel writer. There isn’t even a word for vegan in many places, so we learnt to say, “I’m a vegetarian” in 10 languages, adding, “And we don’t eat cheese, eggs or milk.” In response, most people just made the universal sign for crazy.
I searched Rome, eventually finding a carton of soy milk in, of all places, a pharmacy. My ‘medicine’ cost the equivalent of a day’s pay and tasted like grass, but I gulped it down and bought another.
Back home, I started to question my choice to become vegan. I was losing touch with all sense of reason, as the fanaticism began to feed off itself. The cause – animal liberation – was becoming less important than its obsessive instrumentation.
It reached the point where I was checking my wife’s shopping to see if she was sneaking any forbidden items into the mix. It came to a head when I discovered she’d purchased a Milko Chew and eaten it on the way home.
“How can you do this?” I screamed at her, enraged and brandishing the telltale wrapper.
“Listen to yourself,” she reasoned. “You’re bloody crazy. We’re both bloody crazy.”
Then I was berated by a vegan friend for eating honey on my toast. “You’re so selfish. Bees are imprisoned so you can have that honey,” he snarled.
The final straw came when one of the vegan magazines informed me I’d have to give up beer and wine because they’re filtered with isinglass (derived from fish) or bone char.
By this stage I was losing weight, having dizzy spells and dreaming actual dreams about eating a big, fat juicy steak.
We didn’t crack right away. We sort of slid. My wife bought some natural yoghurt and we started with that. For us, it was a big step.
Then, one Saturday afternoon, my parents took us out for fish and chips. We smothered it in salt and vinegar and enjoyed it while watching the little trawlers out on the bay and the kids chasing seagulls. We felt as if we’d rejoined the human race.
A month later, I went to my local butcher and asked for two pieces of his best scotch fillet. I took the steak home, cooked it slowly over a flame grill and we ate it with black pepper and a slice of lemon.
Oh God, it was tasty – tasty in a way tofu could never hope to be. There was no going back.
So how do I feel about eating animals now? About exploiting them, just so I can enjoy a good meal? Not too bad, actually.
Being top of the food chain has its privileges, and one of those is being able to eat anything you damn well please. I just keep reminding myself that if cows had a big enough brain, grew opposable thumbs and turned carnivorous, they’d do the same to us. SM.
Tofu Warrior (Sunday Magazine)
Less than one per cent of the population follows a vegan diet, yet those who do claim it can make you feel better, live longer and even save the planet. But how much fun can it be? Our erstwhile devotee spills the (soya) beans on a descent into fanaticism.
Story: Stephen Lacey
There I am, on Rue Montorgueil in Paris, staring through the window of Stohrer, one of the city’s most famous patisseries. I’m drooling as I eye off the display of perfectly formed éclairs, criollo and le baba au rhum. But for me, it’s a case of look but don’t touch. I can’t enjoy even one bite. Not one lousy little crumb.
Am I diabetic? On a crash diet? Allergic to pastry? Or just out of Euros? None of the above. I am what is known as a vegan nut job.
While a vegetarian doesn’t eat anything that has a face, a vegan takes this further, refusing to eat anything derived from anything with a face. This rules out dairy products and eggs, plus a whole host of obscure ingredients that are animal sourced.
I’d been a vegetarian for around a decade, when my wife read an article about dairy cows.
“They’re exploited for their milk. I’m turning vegan,” she told me. I agreed to follow suit.
Like most things that eventually become fanatical obsessions – golf or model trains for example – our shift to veganism started out innocently enough; we simply abstained from obvious animal products.
Even at this early stage, it wasn’t easy. Every meal had to be prepared from scratch and we ended up with a huge pile of vegan cookbooks, including a book of desserts entitled Sinfully Vegan. To be honest, the idea of a vegan dessert being sinful is as likely as Fred Nile dressing in leather and growing a handlebar moustache for Mardi Gras. The fact is, tofu is never sinful. Horrible, yes. Bland, no doubt. But sinful, are you kidding?
We almost exhausted the world’s supply of soya beans. Open our fridge and you were confronted with a slimy, white wall of bean curd. Then there was the soy margarine, soy sausages, soy bacon rashers, soy chicken drumsticks, and soy burgers. Plus, of course, soy milk. Litres of the stuff.
We dined in vegan restaurants, visited vegan shops to purchase vegan supplies, and filled our wardrobes with vegan-friendly clothing.
We even read magazines devoted to the vegan lifestyle. These publications were dominated by woefully pale, righteous folk telling stories about how vegans live a longer, healthier life.
A couple of years into our veganism, we started to become acquainted with ‘E numbers’. This is the system that denotes additives in foods. We printed out a list of E numbers, indicating which ‘possibly’ or ‘almost certainly’ derived from animal products.
Armed with out list, supermarket shopping became like cracking the Da Vinci Code and took about as long. We knew E120 was cochineal (a red colouring taken from the bodies of pregnant beetles), E441 was gelatin (a thickening agent by boiling down animal bones and ligaments) and E627 was disodium 5’-Guanylate (a flavour enhancer that ‘may’ come from sardines).
It didn’t take long to discover that virtually everything on the supermarket shelves included the by-product of some unfortunate dead critter.
Surprise, surprise, the dinner party invitations started drying up. Who could blame the hosts? We were just too hard to cater for. We lost count of the number of times we were served a vegetable stack or asparagus risotto (sans parmesan cheese).
Many a time we’d sneak out to the host’s kitchen to check that forbidden ingredients weren’t being used (they usually were, in the form of a dreaded E number). Then we’d have to make our excuses and leave.
We became more fanatical as the years rolled on. It reached the stage where we wouldn’t eat from pots and pans that had been used in the preparation of animal products. A visitor once cooked an omelette at our house and we threw the frying pan away.
Being a vegan is difficult enough, but more so when you work as a travel writer. There isn’t even a word for vegan in many places, so we learnt to say, “I’m a vegetarian” in 10 languages, adding, “And we don’t eat cheese, eggs or milk.” In response, most people just made the universal sign for crazy.
I searched Rome, eventually finding a carton of soy milk in, of all places, a pharmacy. My ‘medicine’ cost the equivalent of a day’s pay and tasted like grass, but I gulped it down and bought another.
Back home, I started to question my choice to become vegan. I was losing touch with all sense of reason, as the fanaticism began to feed off itself. The cause – animal liberation – was becoming less important than its obsessive instrumentation.
It reached the point where I was checking my wife’s shopping to see if she was sneaking any forbidden items into the mix. It came to a head when I discovered she’d purchased a Milko Chew and eaten it on the way home.
“How can you do this?” I screamed at her, enraged and brandishing the telltale wrapper.
“Listen to yourself,” she reasoned. “You’re bloody crazy. We’re both bloody crazy.”
Then I was berated by a vegan friend for eating honey on my toast. “You’re so selfish. Bees are imprisoned so you can have that honey,” he snarled.
The final straw came when one of the vegan magazines informed me I’d have to give up beer and wine because they’re filtered with isinglass (derived from fish) or bone char.
By this stage I was losing weight, having dizzy spells and dreaming actual dreams about eating a big, fat juicy steak.
We didn’t crack right away. We sort of slid. My wife bought some natural yoghurt and we started with that. For us, it was a big step.
Then, one Saturday afternoon, my parents took us out for fish and chips. We smothered it in salt and vinegar and enjoyed it while watching the little trawlers out on the bay and the kids chasing seagulls. We felt as if we’d rejoined the human race.
A month later, I went to my local butcher and asked for two pieces of his best scotch fillet. I took the steak home, cooked it slowly over a flame grill and we ate it with black pepper and a slice of lemon.
Oh God, it was tasty – tasty in a way tofu could never hope to be. There was no going back.
So how do I feel about eating animals now? About exploiting them, just so I can enjoy a good meal? Not too bad, actually.
Being top of the food chain has its privileges, and one of those is being able to eat anything you damn well please. I just keep reminding myself that if cows had a big enough brain, grew opposable thumbs and turned carnivorous, they’d do the same to us. SM.