Vegans

My revolutionary son who shall not be blogged about has become a vegan. This is necessitating a lifestyle change for everyone in this house, up to and including the dog, because part of veganism requires reading the labels on everything (Cinnamon Toast Crunch is not, alas, vegan, but Sponge Bob Square Pants Cereal is, if you aren't that picky and give your sister the marshmallows) and reading the label on a can of chunky Alpo beef n' gravy is enough to convince even me that it's high time the dog was living on organic chicken and brown rice. I'm kind of excited about becoming a vegan, myself, because, well, have you ever seen a fat vegan? No, me either. Not even the dissolute vegans I know, the ones who live, apparently, on PBR and tater tots, are fat. So I think that this vegan thing will make me lose weight, yay, and I'll be able, maybe, to get a boyfriend even though the peony I brought into the bedroom to magically summon one promptly turned brown and shriveled up in a clear case of sympathetic magic going backwards: a simple flower is no match for the evil aura surrounding my nonexistent love life.

So I went to the Ingles and to Earth Fare and I spent huge, huge sums of money and in the Ingles parking lot I had a fight with my daughter A, who is just not behind this veganism thing at all and who had arrived with her boyfriend at Ingles planning to buy bacon and take it home and cook it, trusting the aroma to convert her brother back to a heedless consumerist junk food eating existence. I pitched a fit about this (I have a cold and am not smoking; my temper is kind of short, perhaps more so when I have just dropped more than $100 on healthy goddamn food) and she gave up and I went home to make buckwheat groats with tamari and nutritional yeast, meatfree soy sausage and sprouted whole grain toast with unsweetened organic raspberry preserves. Which she refused to eat, making smartass comments about how long this was going to last, and so on.

See, A remembers the last time I went all vegetarian on her ass - M was too young, but in my own golden youth I was also a convert to health food and vegetables. I even worked in a health food store juice bar cafe, where I was disappointed to find that, far from actually using the organic carrots and $7 EdenSoy Nayonnaise we sold in our sandwiches, we actually made food with the cheapest most horrible factory farmed carrots and huge vats of foodservice mayo. Also, after my first week there, the lady who told me she'd had nothing to eat but steamed broccoli for eight years got to me (you could tell, by looking at her, that all she had eaten was steamed broccoli: she was tall, and limp, and green) and I went out that night for ribs. Two devoted years of vegetarianism down the drain. But that was a long time ago and now I'm all fired up again. I felt so at home spending every penny I have on tahini and soy cheese and chocolate almond milk and Japanese buckwheat udon noodles. I felt virtuous and good and also, possibly, a little delirious from the cold and the lemon ginger echinacea fermented honey beverage I was swilling by the gallon. Still, here we go - into the wild vegan yonder.