A person who does not eat or use animal products.

That’s not me.

Guilt!

Not yet anyway.  I am aspiring to go vegan and have spent the last four weeks pretending that my favourite food doesn’t exist, as in Be gone with you, wanton thoughts of cheese, O thou creaminess sings to me, nefarious Scylla!  You draw me near with your devilish wiles.  Hag, I demand thee let me be…!

This has not been easy.  At all.  I’d dabbled in veganism at the beginning of my vegetarianism but that lasted about two months for two reasons:  A.  there were few vegan alternatives to meat in those days other than beans and tofu; and B.  I couldn’t cook worth a damn.  Aside from eating fruit and carrot sticks,  I specialized in boiling water and heating things up in a toaster oven.  If the food didn’t fall into one of those categories I didn’t eat it.  Things have changed and now there are so many alternatives out there that even mainstream, mainly chips-and-pop stores are carrying proteins made from veg alternatives.  Still, I am in love with cheese and therein lies my problem.  I have a hard time envisioning what many dinners are going to look like without at least a sprinkling of parm.  I can barely last three days without dairy.  And that’s not even counting milk in my coffee.

I enjoy a large coffee every morning from Second Cup, McDonald’s or Tim Hortons. Large, two sugars, one milk.  If I don’t get my coffee that day for whatever reason, it’s no big deal.  I don’t fall asleep at my desk or suffer a migraine.  While it does give me is that morning ‘lift’, I don’t need it to get through my day.  Thing is, I like coffee and I don’t want to give it up, but I cannot drink it black.  I wasn’t sure if I could give up milk so I turned to the ubiquitous coffee creamer and read the label:

INGREDIENTS: CORN SYRUP SOLIDS, VEGETABLE OIL (PARTIALLY HYDROGENATED COCONUT OR PALM KERNEL, HYDROGENATED SOYBEAN), SODIUM CASEINATE (A MILK DERIVATIVE)**, AND LESS THAN 2% OF DIPOTASSIUM PHOSPHATE (MODERATES COFFEE ACIDITY), MONO- AND DIGLYCERIDES (PREVENTS OIL SEPARATION), SODIUM ALUMINOSILICATE, ARTIFICIAL FLAVOR, ANNATTO COLOR.

OK, so I don’t have to eat that.  It’s not vegan.  It’s hardly even dairy, but it is poison.  No milk or milk substitutes for this girl.  The hydrogenated ingredients, and especially anything that starts with the ubiquitous ‘corn syrup solids’ were enough to close that door. And I’m sure I don’t need ‘dipotassium phosphate to moderate coffee acidity.’  It’s MY coffee acidity and I’ll do with it what I like, thank you very much.  It’s not food, so I won’t eat it.

As the days go by I miss cheese less and less.  Aside from Black Friday (the day I completely fell off the wagon and ordered a cheese-only pizza that was so delicious I should have eaten it alone in a closet), it’s getting better.   Slowly memories of cheese wheels are replaced by cheese halos.  There is still a long way to go and I’m not entirely sure how far I’m going to take this but at this stage for me, vegan is still a  misnomer.  I walk to the pub in leather Blundstones to have a beer that’s filtered with gelatin.  I step off the conrete sidewalk and onto the asphalt derived from animal waste products.  Soon I’ll shed the shoes, find some vegan beer and will glide to the pub, since it’s been said that we holier-than-thou types don’t actually touch the ground when we walk anyway.

The next demon I plan to conquer is sugar.  And it’s everywhere.

Moody squash.