Vegan dissonance

I started eating ~90% vegan in early February of this year. I was reading How Not To Die at the time while traveling, and that trip’s menu was pretty much how to die according to Greger’s gospel. But food is sacred, and I’m of multiple hearts and minds about the whole vegan thing.

I say 90% vegan, and that pretty much means preparing only vegan meals for myself and being flexible when I’m with others. It also kind of ends up making me a “weekday vegan” (phrase adapted from this weekday vegetarian talk I watched a few years ago). You could also choose to be 2/3 vegan if you eat vegan breakfast and lunch but not dinner, say.

When I say “vegan,” I not only mean no animal products—the literal definition of veganism—but also doing my best to stick to whole, unprocessed plant-based foods. The “vegan” label is just a lot shorter and easier to say than “whole, unprocessed plant-based.” So no meat, no fish, no dairy. Michael Pollan’s now famous line from In Defense of Food sums it up pretty well: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Food is emotional and controversial. I avoid preaching or persuading. This is all still early and experimental for me. I love food. I love to cook. I think about food all the time. Most nights after dinner I get a little bummed because I won’t get to eat until the next day. I love chicken burritos with sour cream. Sushi is so good. I love pasta and white rice and bagels (not not vegan, yeah, but not exactly nutritious whole, unprocessed plant food). I sometimes eat Oreos (which are vegan!) in excess—not whole nor unprocessed. I also have a romantic admiration for restaurants, and I get the sense many chefs loathe vegetarians and vegans—Anthony Bourdain says in Kitchen Confidential that he detests vegans.

People ask, but how can you get enough protein? They ask on a spectrum from curiosity to accusation. I really haven’t gotten into tracking my protein and other macros, but from what I’ve read I’m not too worried about it. The recommendation from the Food and Nutrition Board of the Institute of Medicine is ~70g for someone my size, or maybe ~100g if I exercise a lot. A more digestible breakdown on protein is available in the Gamechangers What About Protein article. I’m not yet recommending anything because I haven’t due diligenced this—obviously Gamechangers is pushing plant-based, so I don’t know how much of their citations are self-serving versus Truth-seeking. I eat tofu every other day, probably, and the kind I buy has 70g in one pack, which I usually eat half of for one meal. Beyond tofu, I get a heap of protein in my daily diet from soy milk, chia seeds, nuts, nut butters, chickpeas, beans, lentils, etc.

Even if I do go back to how I ate before, this vegan experimentation has definitely broadened my cooking technique and knowledge: pickling more veggies, making even more hummus than I did before, making tons of pestos, using soaked ’n blended nuts as a creamy base for sauces and dressings, etc. I rely heavily on avocado and blended nuts for fattiness and creaminess. I read through Plant-Based Woman Warrior and The Engine 2 Diet by the legendary Esselstyns and have riffed on several recipes therein.

I also read Eat and Run and North by vegan ultramarathoner Scott Jurek. That was my Kool-Aid for the veganism-is-for-athletes-too side of things. Gamechangers and plant-based pro athletes like Tony Gonzalez support that angle, too. I’ve been training for a marathon during this vegan experimentation, and I have noticed anecdotal improvement in performance and recovery. It’s hard to separate causation and correlation, though. It stands to reason that I might just be getting better at running the more I run. I’m more curious how I’ll fare once I’m running less and climbing more. It’s net positive to be lean for running, but I’ll wait and see how effective it is for building muscle (to be fair, it’s also helpful to be lighter for climbing). I find it much easier to motivate myself to eat vegan when viewed as an aid to training.

Most people are not vegan. They eat animal products. So eating vegan is somewhat contrarian or unusual (but not that unusual—lots of people are vegan or veganish). Even less common is having read How Not To Die and/or other books and research about the health-related harm animal products inflict (heart disease, brain disease, cancer, and on and on) and the benefits plants provide. The point I’m slowly getting to is that it’s natural to feel like you have some uncommon knowledge if you have read this stuff. That you are enlightened and others aren’t. And one reason this causes dissonance for me is that I really, really don’t want to be an insufferable tool about this. I don’t want to act or feel better than. I don’t want to lecture, look down upon, or patronize. As I said, I’m really not deep in the research. In fact, I may be on the overconfidence point in the Dunning-Kruger effect curve. There’s just so much I don’t know or might misunderstand. If I were Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn himself I’d have more conviction, although he seems pretty zen about not judging people. But even with more knowledge and conviction, I probably wouldn’t extend unsolicited advice and judgement. I’m glad to share with willing audiences—friends who ask, or readers who chose to come to my website.

If you have vegan or anti-vegan book recommendations, email me. For better or worse, I’ve started down this path, and I can’t erase my vegan dissonance.