Three weeks ago today my parents, my husband and I began our month-long vegan challenge. Three days ago, my parents gave up. Their chosen instruments of failure were a Jimmy John’s Italian sub and a tuna sandwich - certainly a delicious defeat.
Ian and I had both really wanted all four of us to cross the finish line together, so their downfall disappointed us. But ever since the first week, we realized that our two teams were reacting to this vegan experiment differently. Ian and I took to the diet shift quickly: we like how our plant-based meals make our bodies and our spirits feel. Overall, we’re enjoying the physical, spiritual, and financial (from home-cooking) benefits from our new lifestyle, which I’ll expand upon once our month-long trial comes to end. Stay tuned!
My parents had completely different reactions to the diet shift. A week into the challenge I asked my dad how he was liking his vegan diet, and my usually diplomatic and mild-mannered father quickly and firmly responded, “I hate it.” He had good reason to dislike the diet because, mysteriously, it was not agreeing with his system. I recently wrote about how the higher fiber in my new diet was acting like Draino on my pipes, making me feel light and fresh. Conversely, the high fiber in Dad’s diet acted like a power washer on his system, giving him stomach cramps and all the not-so-fun stuff that comes with those. (He told me once in animated fashion that “apples are just not being digested at all. At all!”)
My mom reacted well at first. She said that eating a plant-based diet made her feel lighter and cleaner inside, and that her junk food cravings were going away. But my mom is the kind of person who will compliment anyone on anything he tries to do. Did you burn the popcorn in the microwave? My mom will eat it. Is the lettuce in your salad crisp-less and soggy? She’ll say you’re Wolfgang Puck. My mom is the queen of compliments, and I love the way she and my dad rush to make people feel proud of their own efforts. So going into our vegan experiment, I expected her to start out with a rosy disposition.
But my mom, who tends towards emotional eating, started to have some rather vocal complaints around Day 10: “All I want is one pancake. Just one!” And my dad joined in with her on my favorite complaint, “I’m tired of all of this chewing. All these vegetables are making my jaw tired.” So, stuck in vegan prison with her husband of thirty-eight years, my mom saw my dad’s give-in as her escape route back into the real world of omnivorism.
Now it’s my turn to complain - not about the diet, though. About my parents’ failure to see it through to the end. You see, before my dad’s firm declaration of “hate” for the new diet and my mom’s desire for “just one” pancake, they both had conspired in secret and determined that Veganism just wasn’t for them. Merely a week or so into the process, they declared “We don’t want to eat like this forever,” and “I want to be able to eat things I like and celebrate on special occasions.” And my parents didn’t even qualify these statements by using the external example of the Thanksgiving turkey - a cultural symbol that can puzzle even the most well-intentioned vegetarians. No, they said that they wanted to eat the ribs at Famous Dave’s they saw advertised during Sunday Night Football. Give that marketing team a raise.
I can’t help but think that this rationale is selfish. From the animal rights perspective, if eating meat is a moral wrong, then the cultural significance around meat consumption shouldn’t matter, right? In Eating Animals, Jonathan Safran Foer quotes a young animal rights activist explaining her reasons for being a vegetarian:
We threw Michael Vick in jail for abusing dogs in a violent tradition that cuts across many cultures; and Catalonia, Spain just banned their emblematic tradition of bullfighting. Yet we continue to source 99% of our meat from factory farms, which are an ethical and environmental catastrophe.
But forget about the animal rights argument for now. My parents failure to finish our vegan challenge makes me sad because I wanted them to like it. And I wanted them to like it because, after reading The China Study, I’m newly convinced that plant-based diets are best for nutrition, health, and longevity. They’re refusing a healthier lifestyle, and from the perspective of a loving child, that refusal seems selfish - that you prefer to eat what you want and die early than to eat brown rice and broccoli and live longer. Certainly, if my father had a heart attack but was still eating bacon cheeseburgers, I could call him selfish for shortening his lifespan. So why do I have to wait until he has a heart attack to call him selfish?
You see, I love my parents; I want them to live a long life; and I’m sad that they’ve refused a lifestyle that likely would have lowered their blood pressure, improved their cholesterol levels, and decreased their risks of colorectal and other cancers. Instead they’re choosing Famous Dave’s. But I guess the real tragedy is our tendency to take our health for granted. Now excuse me while I go bake a lentil patty.
Ian and I had both really wanted all four of us to cross the finish line together, so their downfall disappointed us. But ever since the first week, we realized that our two teams were reacting to this vegan experiment differently. Ian and I took to the diet shift quickly: we like how our plant-based meals make our bodies and our spirits feel. Overall, we’re enjoying the physical, spiritual, and financial (from home-cooking) benefits from our new lifestyle, which I’ll expand upon once our month-long trial comes to end. Stay tuned!
My parents had completely different reactions to the diet shift. A week into the challenge I asked my dad how he was liking his vegan diet, and my usually diplomatic and mild-mannered father quickly and firmly responded, “I hate it.” He had good reason to dislike the diet because, mysteriously, it was not agreeing with his system. I recently wrote about how the higher fiber in my new diet was acting like Draino on my pipes, making me feel light and fresh. Conversely, the high fiber in Dad’s diet acted like a power washer on his system, giving him stomach cramps and all the not-so-fun stuff that comes with those. (He told me once in animated fashion that “apples are just not being digested at all. At all!”)
My mom reacted well at first. She said that eating a plant-based diet made her feel lighter and cleaner inside, and that her junk food cravings were going away. But my mom is the kind of person who will compliment anyone on anything he tries to do. Did you burn the popcorn in the microwave? My mom will eat it. Is the lettuce in your salad crisp-less and soggy? She’ll say you’re Wolfgang Puck. My mom is the queen of compliments, and I love the way she and my dad rush to make people feel proud of their own efforts. So going into our vegan experiment, I expected her to start out with a rosy disposition.
But my mom, who tends towards emotional eating, started to have some rather vocal complaints around Day 10: “All I want is one pancake. Just one!” And my dad joined in with her on my favorite complaint, “I’m tired of all of this chewing. All these vegetables are making my jaw tired.” So, stuck in vegan prison with her husband of thirty-eight years, my mom saw my dad’s give-in as her escape route back into the real world of omnivorism.
Now it’s my turn to complain - not about the diet, though. About my parents’ failure to see it through to the end. You see, before my dad’s firm declaration of “hate” for the new diet and my mom’s desire for “just one” pancake, they both had conspired in secret and determined that Veganism just wasn’t for them. Merely a week or so into the process, they declared “We don’t want to eat like this forever,” and “I want to be able to eat things I like and celebrate on special occasions.” And my parents didn’t even qualify these statements by using the external example of the Thanksgiving turkey - a cultural symbol that can puzzle even the most well-intentioned vegetarians. No, they said that they wanted to eat the ribs at Famous Dave’s they saw advertised during Sunday Night Football. Give that marketing team a raise.
I can’t help but think that this rationale is selfish. From the animal rights perspective, if eating meat is a moral wrong, then the cultural significance around meat consumption shouldn’t matter, right? In Eating Animals, Jonathan Safran Foer quotes a young animal rights activist explaining her reasons for being a vegetarian:
I love calamari, I love roasted chicken, I love a good steak. But I don’t love them without limit. [Factory farming] isn’t animal experimentation, where you can imagine some proportionate good at the other end of the suffering. This is what we feel like eating. Yet taste, the crudest of our senses, has been exempted from the ethical rules that govern our other senses.
We threw Michael Vick in jail for abusing dogs in a violent tradition that cuts across many cultures; and Catalonia, Spain just banned their emblematic tradition of bullfighting. Yet we continue to source 99% of our meat from factory farms, which are an ethical and environmental catastrophe.
But forget about the animal rights argument for now. My parents failure to finish our vegan challenge makes me sad because I wanted them to like it. And I wanted them to like it because, after reading The China Study, I’m newly convinced that plant-based diets are best for nutrition, health, and longevity. They’re refusing a healthier lifestyle, and from the perspective of a loving child, that refusal seems selfish - that you prefer to eat what you want and die early than to eat brown rice and broccoli and live longer. Certainly, if my father had a heart attack but was still eating bacon cheeseburgers, I could call him selfish for shortening his lifespan. So why do I have to wait until he has a heart attack to call him selfish?
You see, I love my parents; I want them to live a long life; and I’m sad that they’ve refused a lifestyle that likely would have lowered their blood pressure, improved their cholesterol levels, and decreased their risks of colorectal and other cancers. Instead they’re choosing Famous Dave’s. But I guess the real tragedy is our tendency to take our health for granted. Now excuse me while I go bake a lentil patty.
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