Oh hey there.
So. You know that I’m big on New Year's Resolutions, right? I think new beginnings are great, and studies do show that you’re more likely to stick to goals if you start on a “new” day. Even a Monday will work, but hey, new year has gotta be great, for stick-to-it-iveness. Or so my thinking goes. Mine, and everyone else's.
Usually, I have a pretty good idea of my goal for the year. Last year, I declared 2015 to be the year of the books. Instead of, you know, podcasts, New Yorker articles, TV shows, Pinterest wormholes and blogs. I did read a few books this year – and am currently reading Americanah, courtesy of my sis-in-law, which is so far really great – but not a ton. Not as many as you might have thought I’d go through, when one Sunday back in early February I read two books. That was a great day, but the rate wasn’t super sustainable. My top reads (okay, it's pretty much all of them) for 2015 are above. Even though my end tally isn’t so high, I think this type of goal was pretty good. It didn’t bring the feeling of immediate and inevitable failure (you know, doom) that so many goals do. So I’ll call it a win.
Fresh off the heels of success, you might think that this year, I’d be raring to go on new resolution. But I have been dragging my feet, and I’ll tell you why. I feel like I know what I should resolve to do. I just don’t want to do it. I know you know I know what I think I should do.
Tempeh, or fermented soy beans. Via.
Yeah. I should go vegan.
That sigh you hear was Bret. Not that I blame him: I’ve been threatening this roughly every three weeks for the last nine years.
Nobody likes a vegan. They’re impossible to eat out with. Or in, for that matter: Even if they are totally fine that your carefully prepared dinner menu leaves them munching on raw, dip-less carrots while everyone else exclaims over the fondue, you don’t believe they’re totally cool with it, and think you can spy the faint glimmer of the halo, the faint sniff of the upper lip, hoist haughtily into the air, secure in superiority.
I’m a vegetarian who eats yogurt from a glass jar etched with the names of the local, grass-fed cows from which it came, so it’s not like a ton of people like me to begin with.
I’m not sure which way that cuts.
I’m totally joking, of course. Some of my best friends are vegans! But eating vegan does mark a lifestyle shift in a way that is harder to navigate than just asking someone to hold the pepperoni.
In any event, my reluctance isn’t about upending my social life. It’s about the cold hard truth that I really, really, really like milk. I rely on it to make my coffee delicious - and coffee is what gets me out of bed in the morning. I also have very strong feelings about cheese and chocolate. I think, at this point, having learned to bake with flax, and even satisfyingly subbing in tofu for morning scrambles, I could do without the eggs.
It’s the damn milk I’m having a hard time with.
Since you asked, I’ll tell you, much of this decision is health-based. I do believe that eating a plant-based diet is the best choice for our planet – namely, keeping the planet cool – but I also think the science pretty consistently shows that plant-based diets make for healthy people. Diets covered in melted cheese do not.
This not at all dramatic title via.
The thing is, I’m not even sure where to start with being a vegan, but I stumbled across a blog post in which the vegan author chronicled a typical day’s menu for her. (It was wildly unrealistic, involving cooking and whole foods and cloth napkins and presumably sitting to eat at every meal, but still, it painted a nice picture for me). Turns out there are tons of these types of things out there, on YouTube, on blogs, even, dare I say, in books. So it stands to reason I can get some good ideas about how to transition, and how to eat vegan on my lifestyle.
If you’re wondering why I'm so fixated if I’m so reluctant, I don’t really know. It’s sort of like those silly cloth diapers. For better or worse, I just can’t quit them. So rather than mope about it, or worry if it will be hard, or I’ll fail spectacularly and end up skinny dipping in a vat of brownie batter, muttering about Paula Deen having at least been right about the need for heavy cream, I’m just going to lay out a couple ways I can get closer to my goal.
To set myself up for a possible eventual actual transition to veganism, and to at least build better habits in the meantime, I’m going to:
- Learn to like some milk that is not dairy…or even, coffee without milk? That seems like a tall order, but I shouldn’t sell myself short, right?
- Learn to make some vegan staples that make us happy; and
- Research how to raise healthy vegan kids.
To these ends,
- Every month, I’m going to try a new vegan substitute (not necessarily packaged – maybe homemade or creative in some way) to soothe a recalcitrant octo-lacto craving I’m afraid I won’t be able to survive. (In furtherance of this goal I stopped for a soy latte after dropping Lou at school this morning. I know - oh the sacrifices. It was delicious. I may already be a convert).
- Every week, I’m going to challenge myself to make one new vegan dish. I prefer to eat plant-based meals that use recognizeable vegetables and such, not just all veggie burgers all the time, but I need to figure out how to sub in for some of our decidedly not-vegan go-tos, like quiche, lasagna and the like.
- Every month I will also make it a point to search out vegan options on restaurant menus.
- I’ll check out a book or two on vegan kids. And possibly one on converting a pork-loving spouse.
Sooooo, I guess that's it. My resolution. I’m glad we had this talk. It really helped me work through things.
Your turn. What are your goals for this year?