Hungry for Meat

My daughter, Clara, recently decided to try a vegan diet – not to lose weight (because she has not one extra ounce on her) but to see how it made her feel, if her body would respond with more energy, if her conscience would be clearer because she was not eating animals or participating in the large-scale corporate agriculture that is the conventional delivery system for American meat and other animal products, and to see if she could do it.

I signed on for the project partly because 1) I am interested, for the same reasons, 2) I love a food challenge, and immediately started flipping through my mental file of vegan recipes, and 3) I’m the one who makes her dinner.

So how do I feel after a week of vegan diet?

Hungry. All the time.

A vegan diet is a wonderful thing for many reasons: there is, of course, saving animals from slaughter, which is graphically depicted in PETA and COK literature (yuck). My regular diet includes occasional meat, but I still avoid big-agriculture raised animals (with the corresponding unnatural and inhumane treatment of the animals, over-dependency on pesticides for grain feed, use of antibiotics to keep corralled animals from infecting one another, etc.). Instead I go for local, grass-fed, free range fare (way less yuck). I justify the price of this indulgence because I don’t eat meat often, and I believe the meat is vastly more healthy for my body. Plus, it tastes so much better. (For more on Good Meat, see Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma, one of my all-time favorite tomes).

A vegan diet is also good for your health, as long as you are careful about getting enough protein and fat in your diet. Eating all those veggies packs your body with vitamins and amino acids and fiber and, in general, good health. Cutting out dairy products eliminates the mucus-y gunk that can accumulate along your digestive tract, and, for many people, a non-dairy diet clears up decades of all sorts of maladies, from indigestion to depression. I’d even read it would help clear up eczema, which I have (it didn’t).

Theoretically, all those healthy veggies, fruits, nuts, seeds and grains don’t leave much room in the belly for dairy products, meat, and junk food, anyway. But theory doesn’t always prove true. There’s plenty of room in my hungry belly, and there don’t seem to be enough tamari-roasted almonds and dried apricots in the world to fill it.

I did stay vegan for a week. Maybe my body is just taking a long time to shift. I do feel lighter. My energy’s been fine, for the most part. It was fun finding (and revisiting) recipes that I liked, and I discovered that coconut milk and hemp milk are rich and satisfying on granola. The hemp even has omega 6 and omega 3 fatty acids in it (for the uninitiated, and those busy with things other than the minutiae of food nutrients, that’s good. And, the hemp won’t get you high – same plant, different process). Oh, and I created a new favorite snack: lightly toasted bread with olive oil and salt, then squares of chocolate melted on top and spread around with a butter knife, topped with fig spread left over from two years ago New Year’s Eve. Yum.

So I learned a few things. But I’ve added meat back into the diet. I had burgers two nights in a row, and fish today – think I’ll go back to salad for dinner.