“I’m a vegan.” Though you are seeing those words on the internet, I am fairly certain you have a mental image of the girl you ascribe them to. She probably has long hair, perhaps in dreadlocks, and there’s not a doubt that she drives her Prius to Omega for summer vacation, right?

Wrong.

I have never fit that description but for 6 months I somehow adhered to veganism, an experience that proved to be much different than I ever thought it would be. So how did I transition from a lifestyle wrought with skim milk and Hamburger Helper to one without any foods from animal sources? Well, by now we all know that college has some very strange effects on the mind . . .

Just before I started college, I cleaned up my eating habits quite a bit. Once there, I stood in line with my plastic tray in hand, standing on tiptoes to see what was waiting behind the sneeze protectors. It dawned on me that I didn’t want to touch any of the meat in the dining hall. Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing tastier than a well-stuffed pork chop, but where in the world was this meat coming from? Were the animals coming from a place that would gross me out if I had seen it in person? I couldn’t be sure, and so I decided to bypass traveling tacos and mystery meat until further notice.

Around the same time, I was (unfairly) blaming the dining hall food for the terrible cramps and bloating I had begun experiencing. I talked to a good friend and health food guru about it. “I don’t think it’s the food that’s bothering you,” she insisted. “It’s dairy. You know that stuff’s no good for you. Don’t have any for 2 weeks and see how you feel.” Read More »

When my boyfriend first told me he was a vegan, a whole mess of things ran through my head. Does that mean we’ll never get to go out to dinner together? Is he going to flip when I show up to his house on a Sunday afternoon smelling like bagels and lox? Are we going to go to PETA protests on dates, and is he going to sneak gory slaughterhouse pamphlets into my purse after I talk about jonesin’ for bacon?

Like a lot of college girls, I had been a vegetarian about 15 times by the time I’d met my boyfriend. I gave up meat in high school to freak out my parents, and I gave it up in college to lose weight, then later to impress the chain-smoking anti-war coalition kids that I wanted to hang out with.

Despite my good intentions, however, it never really stuck. The cafeteria had zero veggie options, and I was lazy — not to mention a sucker for carne asada. To boot, I had a pretty superficial understanding of what veganism is; like a lot of people, I thought all vegans were misanthropic skinny kids with social problems. Then I met John. Read More »