Half-Girl, Half-Jerk, All-Plant!

In Powells' on Hawthorne I go to the Diet and Nutrition section to find a book to help me along my pre-quest. I immediately search the shelf that's at my sight-line. This is because the vast majority of vegans I've encountered have been pocket-sized men and women who resemble unshowered Keebler elves and also 'cause, hey, anything above my head doesn't really matter.

Within a few minutes I'm craning my neck so far back I could be trying out for a Fire in the Sky sequel. There are no books on becoming a vegan. I see more frightening alternatives such as The Detox Diet (if this is a whole tome pertaining to that time I ate nothing but Ritz crackers for a week and refused to leave my Brooklyn apartment due to "the fucking shaking" I will buy it simply out of principle) and the Great Food, Great Sex: The Three Food Factors for Sexual Fitness (insert protein shake joke here) but not a single book on the wonders of veganism. I at least expected a ratty chapbook printed with beet juice ink on recycled toilet paper.

To be fair, I was looking for the very 'Merican just-gimme-an-answer series known as "for Dummies" and found only Dieting for Dummies, Carb Consciousness for Dummies, and the ever tempting Atkins Diet for Dummies but nothing on planning your meals in accordance with photosynthesis and crop rotation. Either there is a whole section I overlooked in the stacks or this shit is so difficult that books just fly off of the shelves. I suddenly imagine that those who subscribe to a plant-based diet actually rival the intellect of aerospace engineers. This, of course, is a shocking consideration, namely because it would mean that I would be wrong.

Finally I found one, lone paperback. VEGAN - The New Ethics of Eating by Erik Marcus (1998 - McBooks Press). A yellow icon labeled "URGENT" is on the cover. It reads "What we eat has devastating effects. Heal our planet and your body" Okay. The planet coming first on that list sort of irks me but whatevs, Marcus has given me at least part of what I'm looking for by providing a handy definition inside of the front cover: "Vegan (most commonly pronounced "VEE-gun") A person who does not eat animal products, including meat, fish, seafood, eggs and dairy products; All-plant."

All-plant.

To be fair - I didn't actually read the book, though it has pictures, which is always a plus. And I didn't buy the book. It was $11.50. That's far more expensive than the latest copy of Bust magazine and a biscuit. But I did sit and leaf through it in the hope of figuring some stuff out.

In V-NEE the author names the animals that were en route to becoming breakfast links or burgers and he tells their horror stories, much like I do with the bugs crawling on my ceiling that are just too terrifying to kill. Chester the pig and Agnes the calf are no longer sleeping on concrete floors, in cells smaller than Emmanuel Lewis' left Reebok. They have passed on and passed through and now are resting peacefully in a sewer system somewhere. It's cloying, it's manipulative, and for a reader with a heart, unlike me, it works to make them identify with their food on a level that perhaps they weren't prepared to before. It's hard to chow down on your chicken parm when you're thinking about Daisy the hen and how she was "always intuitively affectionate towards humans."

There are chapters titled "The Killing Business" and "The Perfect Food Isn't." Obviously Erik hasn't gone out for ribs recently. Perfection exists, friend. Like many things worth devouring it requires patience and many, many napkins.

Now as much as I try to maintain my arrogant air of cynicism and incorrigibility I can't deny that the animal tales and statistics, such as the fact that the Federal Government killed 124,292 prairie dogs in 1988 and that cheddar cheese gets 73 percent of its calories from fat, are upsetting and make me give pause. However, I am not a big fan of cheese nor do I eat prairie dog. In short, I wanted Marcus or somebody, preferably the cartoon gentleman on the cover of the "for Dummies" series or the enlightened authors of the Idiot's Guides, to break it down for me. What do I have to do, where do I have to go, and will I die are some of my most (incense) burning questions.

Yesterday I ate two (2) sandwiches consisting of roast turkey flavored soy "meat" I found in the food substitute aisle and they produced the sort of searing pain that made me believe that this years running of the bulls was taking place down my large intestine or that Jerry Garcia was posthumously sparking up using my duodenum as a lighter.

This morning I ate Gorilla Munch (also found in the food substitute aisle at Fred Meyer) with vanilla soymilk. Soymilk - at least the vanilla flavored variety - is like that girl in high-school who was slightly overweight and may have had acne or an overbite or a body odor issue but she was, by far, the girl with the best sense of humor and a jewel of a personality. I finished my 'Munch and was left with a half a cup of grey, watery liquid that I would have thought was dirty dishwater if I hadn't poured it out of its environmentally friendly spout. It looked like some tween puked up a White Russian but it tasted like a little bit of heaven. Go figure. Some of this pregame is far easier than I imagined, the rest requires Alka-Seltzer and an immutable will.