Ella dice que sí, pero él no sabe...

This is it! The inaugural post. We've been talking about it for some time. Today's the day.

I am the wife, and I have recently gone vegan.

I think the last time I ate meat was in May... shrimp, to be exact. Shrimp twice, actually. So that might be what's hardest for me to give up. But shrimp have faces. (So many people have exceptions for seafood; I think it's because it's the "meat" that feels furthest from human. But fish, shrimp, and the like are obtained in just as unsustainable a manner as other meats; they can be detrimental to your health because of crazy human activities that have polluted their environment; and they suffer, too. But I'm getting ahead of myself.)

A little background:

Back in the spring of 2010, we screened Food, Inc. at our apartment and even hosted a potluck. (I won a cool gift basket from PBS, too, when I shared photos from our event!) It's an important film, and you should see it. It changed the way I thought about the food I ate, and I couldn't eat chicken for a long time, thinking about the footage I had seen. One thing I've learned along the way, though, is that you have to continue to educate yourself and keep your reasons for making changes fresh in your mind, or you slip back into what you were doing. That's how I figure I slowly got back into eating meat and buying processed foods that had icky ingredients in them (although high fructose corn syrup is like a curse word in this house--it's just not allowed).

In December of last year, I stumbled upon Alicia Silverstone's The Kind Life website when I was looking for a gluten-free, dairy-free dessert to make for a holiday party. I have to eat gluten-free, and I was nursing a baby that seemed to be sensitive to my consumption of dairy products. The chocolate peanut butter cups I wound up making were amazing! I noticed that they were vegan and thought that was kind of funny. After all, a vegan diet is just too extreme, right?

Fast forward to January? Februrary? when I decided to read Alicia's book, The Kind Diet. Whoa! I will have to write a whole 'nother post about that on another day. But it changed everything for me and helped me see that not only should I stop eating meat, but I needed to eat a whole lot more veggies, especially leafy greens, and also whole grains.

And that's pretty much how I became vegan. Other books have been helpful along the way, such as Food Revolution and Vegan for Life (written by two vegan dietitians), and movies such as Vegucated. I heartily recommend each one of those.

Stay tuned for his side of the story! We're going to blog our way through our experiments with food.

-L.