It's amazing to think that excluding a few foods from your diet can make you such an aberration. At work this week we were having food catered to our group, and since Marilynn (my supervisor) had emphasized hot wings and rib tips as the main entrees, I thought it might be prudent to bring up the fact that I don't eat meat or dairy. Oh, the look on her face . She immediately consulted Peggy to try and figure out how to accomodate this, I let them know that while the effort was profoundly appreciated, it wasn't necessary. So it's decided I can skip the big catered thing on Wednesday (i'm not paying fifteen dollars for salad) and just contribute for the smaller one on Thursday when we each order individual meals.
Normally I don't get a lunch at work so this was the first time the "V" word has come up, other than with Martha. So naturally there are the questions --- "You don't even eat chicken? Or fish? What do you eat?" "Aren't you afraid you won't get enough protein?" --- and the remarks --- "No wonder you're so skinny" (no comment) and "Wow, I could never do it." If I had a dollar for every time those same predictable responses came! (Like on Tuesday when Melissa asked if my back problem might be due to "a deficiency in your diet.")
At the same time it goes back to a previous musing on labels. There's the old cliche of "you are what you eat," and as Leon Rappoport surmises, "If we are indeed what we eat, then what we refuse to eat, we are not!" But isn't diet just one small part of what makes up a person? Labels do help to communicate with the world (such as making sure you don't get served veal parmesan), and as long as it's not exclusive, congregating with people of like minds can be validating and helpful. But does the "ism" itself have to be so tied into identity? People who eat a gluten-free diet don't call themselves "nonglutenists." (I also cringe at identifynig a self with a disease, e.g. alcoholic or anorexic used as nouns.) Just as two Christians or two Buddhists or two Jains or whatnot can have drastically different views, so too can two "vegetarians" or "vegans" have completely different eating habits. Bernie Siegel laments this as well, saying that all the "isms" make it sound so serious, "It's about what you have for dinner... I just call it healthy eating." [Or compassionate eating, or environmentally sound eating, depending on your reasons.] This is precisely why i don't call myself a "vegan." That and because I can't quite dive into full-fledged veganism anyway.
I truly admire someone who can be that vigilant, but personally I cannot spend hours scrutinizing food labels and carrying around a list of animal ingredients. I try to make my meals from scratch using ingredients I know meet my "standards," and avoid the obvious (cheese, milk, whey, albumin), but... well, in the grand scheme of things, if one tenth of a percent of a product contains something derived from egg, i'm not going to flip out about it. I've accepted that with eating out and traveling for skating i'm going to have to make the occassional concession, although there are absolute lines drawn on certain grounds (like absolutely no flesh whatsoever). I know that vegan does not equal eating disorder by any means. At the same time, I've done the eating disorder "thing" before, and I don't want to bring that same sort of rigidity to the dinner table anymore. Life's too short to be dogmatic. About anything.
