An open kiss on the mouth goes to the first person who was able to identify what my last non-vegan food item was.
The answer?
Yup. At 12:15 this morning (sorry, I was late, busy savoring other pleasures of the flesh, heh heh) I opened up a pack of marshmallow Peeps. Blue bunny Peeps, to be exact, costing a whopping twelve cents from Fred Meyer. That list of ingredients may resemble the ingestion potential of an unlit candle but it also contains gelatin, decidedly not vegan.
I looked up why after suddenly being struck with the blind hope that I could survive for a month on pharmacy Easter candy clearance specials. Turns out that gelatin is made from taking the connective skin, cartilage, and bone of animals and bringing it all up to a robust simmer. Delicious for stews and also, obviously, candy. Think of that the next time you pop a Peep in your piehole. You are actually eating parts of a chicken. Or cow. Or pig.
Circle of Life. Or, I guess, rectangular cardboard packaging shrink wrapped in plastic of life.
"Going vegan in Portland is kind of like cheating," a wise man once said. How true. For day one of this odyssey I decided to forgo any actual cooking in my stove-free kitchen (don't ask, we have a hot plate, it's cool) and enjoy a late breakfast, aka brunch, at a local vegan diner, while for dinner I went to my favorite NoPo vegan eatery for a bowl of tofu, spicy collard greens, and brown rice. The first twenty-four of this adventure has been a plantastic breeze.
Do I feel any different? No. Was I any more hungry than usual? Decidedly no. In fact, breakfast left me feeling like I was lugging around some extra junk in my trunk, and by junk I mean hemp, tapestries, hand-thrown pottery, and patchouli incense, not an actual deer chucked in the flatbed of my proverbial 4X4 Chevy. It turns out that vegan bread does what non-vegan bread does: make me feel fat and sleepy. A new mystery came out of my early meal, however, and that is the question of what the fuck is in vegan sausage? It is damn tasty. Not in a way that would make me mistake it for actual sausage, but delicious nonetheless.
The irony here is that I loathe actual links. So go figure, being vegan actually broadened my culinary horizon. Take that, “restrictive” “diet.”
Dinner, as always, was like an orgasm for my tongue. Highest props I can give go to the Bye and Bye. In truth it's one of the original reasons why I moved to this town, and likely it will be one of the things that keeps me here, regardless of whether or not I can make it through this month without slipping and digesting something that blinked.
(The Bye and Bye: 1011 NE Alberta Street, corner of 10th)
The only difference I can say that I notice is that being a vegan is a lot like learning a new language, it requires asking seemingly stupid questions, irritating your unlearned friends, and quickly developing a noticeable chip on your shoulder. I felt pretty elite as I scanned the ingredients list to my cranberry flavored Emergen-C. Now I just need to Google whether or not tapioca maltodextrin and cysteine hydrochloride are vegan. Considering they sound like something I would put in my car in order to winterize it my guess would be no.
Potential for being a Peep professional? http://jerkethic.tumblr.com/
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