Vegan Awareness Month: Old Habits Died Hard On Thanksgiving
This nine-month old vegan went into the Thanksgiving holiday proud and prepared to abstain from any foodstuffs that were not plant-based. Considering that I became vegan completely by accident this past February and had only ‘slipped’ twice, I was totally confident I would do myself proud.
Indeed I did survive; however, if you’re looking for a holiday that is so ingrained in us and so rife with old habits and ‘traditional’ ways of thinking and eating, this one was it.
On the one hand, there was all the self-talk about “I can do this”; “I eat kindler and gentler with animal welfare and the health of the planet in mind”; “…that was then this is now”; and even a mental channeling of the “Rocky” music (“Gonna Fly Now”).
After all, never in my life had I not touched spicy hot chicken wings (unbreaded), skin from any animal fried to a crisp and loaded with fat, or not fought with in-laws over the artery busting heart-shaped turkey rear over a 9-month period.
I even called in additional reinforcements: I started reading the book “Veganist” by Kathy Freston several days before the holiday, and watched “Forks Over Knives”. Not that I felt I needed it mind you, but by the time the turkey was out of the oven yesterday I was glad I had.
Despite all that, this is where the seductive and subliminal conditioning, the programming, the cultural training came in to make this vegans mouth water a wee bit as his legs wobbled. There were all kinds of sour cream and cheese-based dips for the ‘normal’ people in the family to which I added a healthy vegetable tray as a strategic diversion for myself.
For years twas’ my duty to trim the bird. Sadly, though I ate none, I succumbed to the task, whispering away my guilt to the avian feast, “Don’t worry, I’m not going to eat you”; “I have to do this, you understand, and besides, you’re already dead and I didn’t do it so it’s like hunter-gatherer”.
All the while my internal B.S. meter sounded like an air-raid siren from back in the Cold War.
Intrinsically, I knew it was wrong for me to be anywhere near that turkey; but because of societal and familial expectations based on how things had gone in the past, I caved. Guilty I was indeed, but I kept rationalizing to myself that I had my Tofurky ‘feast’ nearby in the oven, and I had to be a good host to our guests.
Still, it dawned on me that being vegan is a lot more than just taking a pledge to not eat anything that isn’t plant-based, for whatever our reasons.
It is hard work with a tremendous payoff for the animals we save and the environment we preserve. But one of the promises every vegan I’ve ever talked with has shared with me about adopting this lifestyle is that armed with a little knowledge and a lot of truth about how our food gets to us, being vegan allows us to make informed and empowered decisions on what to eat and why.
In many ways, vegan-by-degree (gradually eliminating what you think you can versus going cold ‘turkey’—no pun intended—is still better than the alternative.
In that sense, despite the seductive pull of oozing rich dark turkey meat, the cornbread sausage stuffing and the “Flintstone”-sized golden brown turkey legs, my first major holiday as a vegan was a success.
Oh, there will be ‘Vegan Deacons’ out there who will tell me I’m going to burn in Meat Hell because I sliced the turkey and salivated like a teething baby, but the good news is I made the conscious decisions we vegans are supposed to make when it comes to our food choices; and, it became crystal clear to me from this meal how much harder I need to work to not be a hypovegan.
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