Oh, but I couldn't live without….
12 March 2005

There always seems to be that “one thing” that prevents vegetarians from going vegan. That thing that they couldn’t live without. I have to admit that when we were vegetarian, I always thought of vegans as a bit extreme or out there. I just didn’t get it.

So for me, it was cheese and surprisingly, half and half. I thought I just couldn’t live without either. Eggs were always slightly gross to me, and I didn’t like the taste of milk on cereal. But my coffee had to be just right … and at the time soy milk tasted funny in coffee.

But at one point in our lives, something clicked. How can we say that we are concerned over animal welfare when we still eat eggs, cheese, and milk? The half and half in the coffee suddenly started to seem insignificant.

So, we ate the last egg in the refrigerator, stopped buying cheese, and started trying soymilk in our coffee. Now, it all seems so normal. How could we every enjoy eggs? They are so gross! And milk? Yuck! The thought of them now makes my stomach turn. (Btw, Silk’s enhanced soymilk is wonderful in coffee – better than their version of half and half.)

It’s amazing how your perceptions can change so quickly. Now, I find myself having little patience for vegetarians who protest “but I couldn’t live without x!”) even though I try to think back to when I was in the same position. We have a professor friend who is lacto-vegetarian and who is always telling us about how she just could not live without her daily yogurt and her mom’s sweets, even after just having watched Peaceable Kingdom, a movie about factory farming and the Farm Sanctuary. I understand the part about the sweets more than I do the yogurt; for her, the milky sweets are part of her heritage and have strong family connections, so they are harder to give up. But, I might just have to bring her a container of silk yogurt one day to try. I don’t want to be annoying and push too hard, but I guess I would like to see someone else have that moment of epiphany – that it just isn’t worth the suffering of animals to have that daily yogurt.

And on that note, I need to also put in a word of thanks to the vegan friend of ours who showed us, with gentle reminders and through example, that life as a vegan is possible and happy. I guess for us it took meeting “a real live vegan” to understand and to start to change our perception.

  Posted by Jenna Torres    Permalink    Filed under: Hell Is Other People
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