Starting Out

I've been eating nearly vegan since 2011, after almost 20 years of a whole-foods vegetarian (and sometimes pescatarian) existence. For many years, I've been eating different. Back in medical school, I brought Tupperware full of bean soups with me for lunch, so I didn't have to consume the pizza and cookies served every day for lunch. I ate big salads and toast with Chickpea Cheese (from Joanne Stepaniak's Ultimate Uncheese Cookbook) for dinner. When I moved back to Pittsburgh for fellowship I read Peter Singer's book The Ethics of Eating and decided that, although I wasn't ready to become completely vegan, we now had the income to buy non-dairy milk (twice the cost of cows' milk). And for the past year and half I've been intermittently calling myself vegan, usually just in time to inconvenience my family for Thanksgiving dinner ("No, I won't eat the lentil loaf if it's made with eggs, or the mushroom gravy that contains butter, or the pumpkin pie"). Then I spend a few days in Rome, or attend a conference in Indiana, and the ubiquity of cheese and butter, as well as the twin fears of starvation and of causing other people trouble make me go back to eating dairy and even eggs hidden in baked goods. Oh, and there's also the fear of missing out on desserts .....


Now, shored up by a few Pittsburgh Vegan Meetups, particularly the monthly book group, and a number of vegan podcasts (Victoria Moran, Colleen Patrick-Goudreau, among others), I'm ready for an experiment. Can I confront those fears and travel through the world eating only plants? I decided to make this trip to Utah a test. I packed oatmeal packets, peanut butter, and Clif Bars in our suitcase. We stopped at the Whole Foods in Salt Lake City to pick up trail mix, little containers of dried black bean and minestrone soup that we can just pour boiling water (from our portable hot water heater) into for dinner in a pinch, as well as mini cartons of soy milk that don't need refrigeration. I'm ready!