Overall, the month went really well.  Obtaining and eating the actual food wasn’t that difficult.  Financing it was a little bit more of a stretch, but only because I’m passionate about great tasting food and eager to experiment with ingredients that are harder to come by and more expensive to obtain.  I do not doubt that a vegan diet can be sustained on a low budget, and probably even on food stamps.  I’d be critical of a financial argument against veganism.  I’d be less critical of an “access” argument, but that’s a whole different can of soy-worms for another post.

The hardest part of the month was dealing with the interpersonal side of things.  I talked about it before, but I really struggled when people were upset about me not eating their cooking/being able to share their food.  My friends, though generally supportive, seemed genuinely disappointed when I didn’t eat their cooking.  Rationally, this is not that big of a deal, but emotionally, it takes a stronger person than I am to deal with it.  Jonathan Safran Foer does a better job at discussing the emotional/cultural links that we have with food in his book Eating Animals.  No matter what your diet is like you should check it out.

Anyway, I’m ending the experiment, sort of.  I’d classify my new diet as “kinda vegan,” but I know that isn’t a thing really.  I still plan on buying exclusively vegan groceries, and making as much of an effort to order vegan restaurant food as possible, but at times I think I will make calculated decisions and occasionally eat dairy in family/cultural contexts.

I thought veganism would be an exercise in resisting unrestrained gratification of my own desires, but staying away from dairy wasn’t really hard.  The hardest part was foisting that choice off on others when it came to restaurants and potlucks and family.  I think that removing food from a sociocultural context is a dangerous exercise, and that real solutions to sustainability and ethics will probably come from learning to balance the two.

I know that none of this is really an excuse.  I still think that a vegan diet is the most ethical diet in our current political/environmental state.  I still care a lot about food politics, but right now I think that the way I will personally engage with this discussion will come more from the production side than the consumption side.  But still a little of each.

I loved writing this.  Lately I’ve been really keen on those sorts of David Foster Wallace-y pieces where you just go to something ordinary and write about it and it becomes extraordinary in the way that it is so ordinary.  I’m nowhere near producing that kind of magic, but writing this felt like a nice exercise in the right direction.  I could have written more than 2,000 words on this…. still might.

Read the piece here. (I also did the photos!)

“For most of my life, when I thought slip, I imagined elephant-kneed panty hose, orthopedic clogs, and a cigarette-rasped voice whispering across a desk, “Have you checked the reference section?” The garment called to mind the smell of weird grandma ointments, and the image of an old lady hauling her groceries home on the bus in a wiry metal cart. As long as I had the means to prevent it, I would never let such an abomination desecrate my own lingerie drawer”

Read more on Rookie –>

I only wrote about 10 long-form pieces in the journal this year, but I feel the best about this one as compared to previous years’.  I overcame the whole Is This Good Enough For The Journal? thing, and as a byproduct I ended up with a pretty nice informal scrapbook of the year.  I didn’t intend to share pictures, but I always wonder about other people’s personal rituals, and I figure others do the same.

New piece about decorating your dorm and not feeling disgusting when you live in an identical cinderblock box etc. etc. up on Rookie.

This month Rookie is running a series of posts I wrote about DIY and budget gift giving.  You can follow all of them here!