The type of vegan I am
In January Steven and I both had potlucks to go to on the same day. We decided to make one thing that we could both bring – vegan (soy-based) meatballs.*
Steven was taking his meatballs to a potluck for vegans. I was taking mine to a potluck for a book club, where the members had a myriad of diets – gluten-free, soy-free, vegetarian, vegan, and a bunch of others that I can’t recall.
The day before the event, I went to the grocery store searching for BBQ sauce and grape jelly* that didn’t have sugar in it or any “natural flavors.” Steven was really concerned about making sure the meatballs were truly vegan – and most sugar isn’t because it is processed on bone char. Anyway, I found acceptable BBQ sauce and grape jelly, and we were able to share the truly vegan “meatballs.”
So what is the point of that story? Well, I want to share what kind of vegan I am. I am vegan for animals rights issues. Not for health, environment, and so on. Yes, those are nice benefits, but I don’t eat animal products because I have a deep love for animals, that honestly, the intensity of sometimes scares me.
But with all that being said. I am a “do the best I can” vegan. I am not going to sweat it if my sugar is not vegan. I try my hardest to eat vegan at home, and when I go out, but I am just going to assume that sometimes I will consume dairy/eggs by accident. Note: I would NOT be happy to find out someone tricked me in to eating animal flesh. Or for that matter, that someone told me something was vegan when they blatantly knew it wasn’t.
When I was in NYC, I went to a restaurant with a few vegan items on the menu.
The food was so good, I was ordering a lot, and decided to try a vegan dessert the waitress recommended.
When the chef came out to ask how the meal was I told her I was astonished she was able to make that dessert vegan. She told me it wasn’t vegan. The waitress had switched gluten-free with vegan, in her mind (I think).
Dammit.
But! Oh well. What can I do? No point in getting upset about it.
Would that have upset you?
It’s not ideal, but what am I going to do? I take a risk of eating non-vegan things when I go out, and I don’t want to be a hermit, so I am going to eat out.
The thing is, I know vegans have a reputation for being super pushy and for freaking out about things like this. We aren’t all that way (although, I have met many who are, unfortunately).
*I was ASTONISHED to find out meatball sauce has grape jelly in it!!!
Themocracy
If it was a honest mistake, that’s one thing. However, if your job is serving food, you should know the ins and outs of common dietary restrictions. What if you were gluten intolerant and she served you something that was actually vegan, not GF? Or if you had a nut allergy and she got that confused??? Yikes.
For awhile, one of my sisters-in-law was vegetarian. I remember my mom was hosting Christmas or Thanksgiving or something, and making her green bean casserole. And she made it with cream of chicken soup, and still claimed it was vegetarian. How hard would it have been to use cream of celery or mushroom? I mean really? So, if I were a vegetarian, stuff like that would bug me.
That is true – I didn’t even think about that. I know the restaurant was newer, so I was trying to give her the benefit of the doubt, but it would’ve been bad if I had actually food allergies and am not just picky.
Oh yeah, that sh*t makes me crazy. We used to have a family member that tried to put meat in everything I ate, because it made her crazy I didn’t eat it. Pretty sad.
Did everyone love your meat(less) balls?
I didn’t get many compliments, so I think they were so so.
I’m sure there are lots of people who actually think that vegetarian diets include fish and/or chicken, and they just lump vegans into the vegetarian category. Anyway, I hope you both had a ball at your potlucks.
Oh yeah. LOL. I was at a party yesterday and was saying how Steven is a vegetarian and caught myself saying, “So he doesn’t eat meat or fish.” Well, really, fish is meat, but a lot of people still think vegetarians eat it!
Yeah, I wonder why people don’t consider fish to be meat? Strange…
I feel almost exactly the same way. I will ALWAYS make the vegan choice and do whatever I can to avoid dairy, but I would drive myself insane if I obsessed over the trace amounts of animal products in some things. However, yes, I would have been very upset with the wait staff at that restaurant you mentioned. Someone working in the food business should KNOW the difference between vegan and GF! My gosh, what if you had a dairy allergy??? I ran into the same thing a couple of months ago. We went with some friends to a restaurant and there wasn’t one thing on the menu that I would eat, so I asked the waitress what they could do for a vegan. She said they could do a pasta dish for me in “pasta sauce.” When she said “pasta sauce,” I was just thinking like a marinara, but when she brought it out, it was ALFREDO sauce. I was like, “Um, that’s alfredo.” She said, “Yeah, there’s no cheese in that.” I was all, “Sweetheart, that is PURE dairy.” She honestly had no idea that it was dairy. I sent it back and the chef/owner came out to apologize and said it was obvious that he needed to have a back-to-basics with his wait staff. He seemed pretty put out with her. So, yeah, sneak a nonvegan chocolate chip in here or there, or some nonvegan alcoholic beverages, but don’t put a plate of cheese down in front of me and expect me to eat it.
Oh, and this line… “I have a deep love for animals, that honestly, the intensity of sometimes scares me.” … That is me, too. SO me. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve lost sleep over a news story I read or saw. I’ve had to block some of my vegan friends on FB because of it. They’re always saying, “Don’t bury your head in the sand!” but I don’t think that’s what I’m doing. I KNOW that shit happens, and I do everything in my power to not be a part of it, but seeing it doesn’t keep it from happening. Maybe some people who are ignorant about puppy mills and factory farming need to see the horrific images to see what they’re contributing so that they’ll hopefully change their ways, but I don’t need to. I’m already there.
Oh gosh! Alfredo?! Come on. At least the chef was cool and fixed it! I kind of feel like I should have known when I ate this dessert, because I kind of felt it in my stomach right away! LOL.
Now, nonvegan chocolate chips WOULD bother me! But the alcohol thing I find incredibly hard to keep track of! So I am more lax there too.
Oh gosh. I totally relate to what you are saying about news storys. I am haunted by things I have read by accident, and block stories I see on Facebook too. The things I read sicken me, and you are right that we can’t keep it from happening 🙁
Oh, I’ll BUY nonvegan chocolate chips… but if a milk chocolate chip is the only thing standing between me and an otherwise vegan cookie… look out. LOL
Ha ha ha! Love it!
Hey, I know you are not close to a Whole Foods, but we have found we really LOVE their store brand vegan chocolate chips. I was buying the accidentally vegan Ghiradelli (sp?) semi-sweets before.
That’s the ones I buy now too! I learned not too long ago that they are vegan. The first time I wanted to buy chocolate chips after going plant based, I bought vegan carob nips thinking they were the same thing. LMAO SOOOOOOO not the same thing…
HA HA HA. It’s like, who told these sad little carob chips they could be a replacement for CHOCOLATE? Some sick, twisted mutha…
I’m still trying to make bee-gan happen. Honey eating vegans should really start coining the phrase. I really like that you march to your own drum about what you put into your body. Everyone is responsible for themselves and make sure that their eating falls in line with their values. I have a hard time eating certain foods that I know have additives and chemicals that react in the body, but that’s my choice and I cannot put that on anyone else. That sugar -bone thing is crazy, you are a constant source of vegan knowledge.
Beegan…haha that’s awesome.
What the!?! Grape jelly in meatball sauce?? Kinda sounds good though 🙂
I cant imagine the frustration of going to a restaurant, ordering something vegan, vegetarian, soy gluten whatever free and then finding out it wasn’t exactly what you thought it was.
And your comment about animals also resonates with me. I will stay up at night thinking of the poor dog/cat/goat that I read in a story earlier in the day. I dont eat a lot of meat currently, and was vegetarian for about 6 months when i lived in south carolina because I lived near a chicken processing factory- I always managed to get behind the truck with cages of chickens headed to the factory and pretty much cried every time.
Hmmm, I believe in doing the best you can, but I must admit I’m pretty strict with myself because I am vegan for health reasons first. I don’t have a dairy allergy, but dairy does affect my hormonal balance and turns my “lady cycles” into tornadoes of doom. I’ve never thought about sugar processing! Thanks. Another area that is grey (came up last night) is alcohol. I reeeally like wine and will always purchase vegan/organic wine for home… But when I’m out I will order whatever is on the wine list. And I will never turn down a glass of wine at a party or friend’s home. I’d have been pissed at that waitress!! It is her job after all to know the difference!
Yeah, the alcohol thing is really hard to keep track of! Luckily, I hardly drink, ever. I wonder what other funky things are processed using animal parts!
I’m not vegan, although that’s sort of a long term goal (it’s a long story), but wow, I would have been upset at that waitress. That kind of mistake could make people sick and while I applaud that you are willing to not stew over errors beyond your control, very very much so because sometimes life is beyond your control and life happens, I think that waitress made a pretty major mistake unfortunately. IF she’s going to recommend an item, she better be damn sure she actually knows what’s being recommended – I can think of so many ways that can go SO wrong otherwise!
And neither here nor there but – grape jelly in meatball sauce?? Really? I haven’t eaten red meat in so so long that I’ve never looked at recipes but…wow!
I’d love to hear more of that long story 😉
I have been trying not to get upset over small things, because I really do sometimes and it bugs me! But you are all pointing out to me that she really effed up. LOL! At least the chef knew and I have to assume the chef sorted it out.
Yes! Grape jelly! People are either “duh” when I tell them (since they already knew) or astonished too!
I’ve been sharing the grape jelly thing and getting exactly those reactions, lol!
I’m sure it’s not that interesting but okay! 🙂 I was vegetarian until I finally got pregnant with my daughter – with her pregnancy I was hyperemetic, which means I threw up 10-15 times a day at least. And unfortunately for me, it didn’t go away after the first trimester – it lasted until 34 weeks. That means I pretty much ate what I could get done and prayed it would stay down – I was too sick to care about anything else. If it was meat and it stayed down, fantastic.
Of course, the downside to that was that I got used to it and it took literally years to start caring about my diet habits (a lot of reasons – I struggled with postpartum depressed and a couple other issues as she grew up). That meant that for a while, health and ethics just weren’t on my radar – I did my best to feed my family healthy whole foods (and my husband is vegetarian, which helped), but I was pretty apathetic about my own body.
About a year ago I started transitioning back to vegetarian, I started running, and I started losing weight. I cut out red meat entirely and try to opt for meatless or meat substitutes when possible, and as a whole my daughter and I don’t eat much meat. And then…I got pregnant. To my surprise, I can’t tolerate any kind of meat except seafood right now – unlike the last pregnancy though the morning sickness is relatively light. So, I’m not sure where the journey goes now.
Wow, thank you for sharing that! It’s very interesting! I bet if I was that sick through pregnancy, I would just eat whatever I could too, and have a hard time snapping out of that mindset (heck, I struggle with the “I can eat what I want” mindset now, with no real reason why). Are you feeling better so far, with this pregnancy? Interesting that now you can only eat fish!
I’d never heard of hyperemsis before I was diagnosed with it, so it definitely threw me for a loop and was one of my biggest fears for a second pregnancy because your changes go up significantly if you’ve already had it. I was in and out of my midwife’s office getting fluids often – and worked full time the whole time! It was an interesting pregnancy, haha.
Knock on wood, yes. I have morning sickness, but it’s … more normal, typical? I’ve thrown up a few times, never more than once a day though and while nausea can last forever, it’s not stopping me from keeping food down mostly. Food aversions are VERY strong this pregnancy though, but I’ll take that over morning sickness from hell! I almost feel like I don’t even have it, but I know that’s just because I keep comparing it to last time. I’m very grateful.
It is so weird! I can’t stand the smell or sight of it cooking (I don’t eat red meat, so I really mean chicken/turkey when I say that) and thinking of it even turns my stomach. Baby just won’t let me tolerate it at all which is so odd to me, since meat was one of the few things I occasionally tolerated with my first. I’m not sure why fish is different, it doesn’t make any sense to me!
I just read your title in Yoda’s voice. 🙂
I would have been upset since you specifically asked about it but I can also see your point about going so far such as for the sugar. I struggle with the ethical/moral pony of what I eat a lot buttryto do what Ivan and still mai twin that ever important topic if balance we talked about! 🙂
I also changed my meat-eating for ethical reasons (I’m a vegetarian). Over the years I’ve noticed a lot of vegans/vegetarians downplaying their ethical objections to eating animals — which I sort of understand (it’s a little awkward to explain to someone’s parents at a steakhouse, for example). It’s just easier to say, “oh yeah, I don’t eat meat, why? because, you know, animals, and um, health, and stuff.” I really appreciate this post because ethical reasons are THE reason to become vegan or vegetarian. Everything else is just an argument to eat ~less~ meat, not necessarily ~no~ meat.
Ahh, very good point, re: less meat and NO meat. So happy you said that – I hadn’t thought of it that way.
I have always tried to be upfront about doing it for the animals, because, well, I think you can just tell by looking at me that it is NOT for health reasons, lol! 🙂 GIMME SOME OREOS!!!
Thanks for sharing this with us. It’s always interesting to hear why people eat the way they do (or at least it is to me :P). It’s incredibly hard to know what goes into your food when you’re eating at restaurants. I’m basically gluten-free, soy-free, dairy-free, and egg-free and if I were to tell a knowledgeable server that, I’m not sure I’d be able to eat more than 1-2 things off of any given menu. I do my best but occasionally, I just try to avoid certain ingredients and hope that sauces or whatever don’t have any wheat or soy ingredients. It’s just easier that way on both servers, the people I’m eating out with, and myself and I’m fortunate enough that if I feel sick it’s only kind of awful ;).
That being said, I agree with Maggie’s comment. It’s kinda sad that more waitstaff don’t understand the ins and outs of different diets–although there are a lot of new ones appearing. Maybe, we just need to do better and talk people through what comprises various diets?
I would love to hear more from you about what you do, since you do have allergies and still manage to eat out! I find it interesting too 🙂
I do think we need to explain better to people what compromises various diets. However… lol… what I think makes it really hard is that there are so many vegetarians who are only vegetarian when they want to be, or eat fish. Okay, so the food industry people should get the “real” definition, but I have known “vegetarians” who eat meat when someone else provides it, etc., and I always wondered, what does that tell the people around them about what a vegetarian is? You know? Well, my friend Fred is a vegetarian and HE eats meat! LOL.
That is really interesting. I think you handled it really well. There are certain things that I refuse to eat and whenever I found out I ate something on that list I freak for about 10 seconds and then realize…well I already ate it so there’s nothing I can do about it now. it’s hard to always follow something to a T and be perfect so if something happens…well it happens!
I love your attitude towards veganism and your acceptance of others for having different styles. (Harrison and I comment on this ALL the time, like “So many vegans are so mean, except for Kim and Steven! They’re awesome!”) One thing that I really liked in this post was how you tied in your approach to veganism to the reason that you’re doing it in the first place. Health vs. environment vs. love of animals are all such different motivations, so it seems silly to judge everyone based on the assumption that people are approaching their diets for the same reason.
Aww, thank you! 🙂 We try really hard to be accepting, and also, to show that vegan food is yummy too 🙂 But hopefully not in an obnox way.
It’s really interesting, since we have become more involved with the Chicago vegan groups, we are finding most people are vegan for health reasons, and it’s taken us for a spin!
I read this yesterday and just kept thinking about it. Having met you and talked about this, I know these are your views and they’re just SO REFRESHING. I love that you can have your own (totally reasonable) views and understand/support different views. If only everyone else would think this way about every topic 😉
Aww, thank you! That is the nicest comment ever! And thanks for backing me up and saying that I am legit! Hee hee.
My Aunt always made meatballs with grape jelly and chili sauce and when I asked for the recipe she was afraid to tell me for fear I’d not want to eat it knowing it was grape jelly! Ha!
I don’t have a specific diet that I follow but I don’t think I’d get upset if something like your NY experience happened to me. I’m a pretty laid back person and often if I ask for something at a restaurant and they forget (or don’t hear/understand me?), I usually just let it slide and eat it anyway (or pick off whatever I didn’t ask for). I imagine I’d feel at least a little more strongly if I was asking for ethical reasons. But, I know people make mistakes and I am pretty forgiving.
My best friend used to be vegan and she had the same idea as you -she tried her best but she knew that sometimes she wouldn’t be able to be completely vegan when she ate out or at a friends house. She then went to vegetarian because vegan got to be too tough and I think she was low on energy so she needed to eat more or something like that. Now that she is pregnant (And when we were marathon training) she ate meat about 2x a week to make sure she got/gets enough protein (especially with growing a baby now). I like how she has amended her diet to make sure she is healthy and its not just about not eating meat because of cruelty to animals. I know she still eats organic meat now and does the best she can with that (eating out she eats whatever), so i just like her approach on this.
So was your best friend following a vegan then vegetarian then flexitarian diet for health reasons, since you said you like that she is not just about not eating meat because of cruetly to animals?
I have a friend who started eating meat when she got pregnant too. And continued to after. Our bodies all tell us to do different things!
So, I have mixed feelings on your restaurant experience. In your case, it was no big deal (thank goodness!). But, what about people with severe allergies or extreme health issues who follow a vegan lifestyle because it’s their only way to stay alive? One false move could jeopardize their life. And for that, I say shame on that waitperson for forgetting what’s gluten-free versus what’s vegan.
Yeah, I hadn’t even thought about that until a few other commenters brought that up! I hope that waitress doesn’t do that again!