Miami Vegan Blog

I don't get this! If a person becomes vegan for the right reasons, and not just to hop on the bandwagon, they would never return to eating meat.

_______________________

Roasted bone marrow, anyone?

So, I enjoy my meat. But it was not always so. In my 20s, I was a vegan. For 10 long years I eschewed the pleasures of the (animal) flesh. After growing up on a traditional diet of meat-and-two-veg, I'd become a vegetarian at 18.

On holiday with some art student friends, I discovered it was possible to eat what seemed then to be interesting food without eating animals. For me it was a short journey from vegetarian to vegan, which seemed ethically more consistent and had added radical kudos. This was the 80s, when meat was usually poor quality factory-farmed and as leftie students kicking against Thatcher's Britain, the personal was always political.

Returning to university, I taught myself a repertoire of sludgy vegan meals, usually involving tins of tomatoes or kidney beans. Since anyone cooking anything was a novelty, nights chez JD proved popular, and pretty soon most of my friends had also taken up the vegan cudgels.

Leaving university to pursue a career in music, the rest of my band were vegan, as were our road crew. We even had our footwear supplied by the non-leather shop Vegetarian Shoes. Two of the band attempted (and failed) to set up a vegan co-op along the lines of the one Jay Rayner describes in Vauxhall.

But when my band split up (musical and non-musical differences, but none that were dietary) and I got a "proper" job in journalism, I began to find it much harder to avoid eating dairy produce. A few years followed as a vegetarian, feeling guilty about softening my position and increasingly longing for meat and fish.

I had several moments of clarity. One came at a wedding meal in Sitges in Catalonia. My fellow guests, dozens of them, tucked in to the most beautiful seafood I had ever seen, while I picked listlessly at a particularly depressing salad. Similar experiences followed on subsequent holidays, and I realised that my veggie days were numbered.

[Source]

----------------------------------------

One commenter on this blog said,

"It's a peculiar thing how so many people's morals seem to decay as they age. Or perhaps it's simply that the relevance of one's morals seem to diminish in proportion to one's spending power."
Posted by SeanD on June 12, 2007 1:58 PM.

Sad. Real sad. :-(

Labels: backsliding vegan, vegan, veganism, vegetarian