The very first vegan I ran into was my high school English teacher, and back then, I have to admit I just didn’t understand the lifestyle. Nor did I ever go to the trouble of trying. A lot of it, certainly, had to do with my unwavering belief in everything not in the roasted chicken, macaroni cheese, and fruit salad food groups enjoying no basic right to culinary existence. But it is, unfortunately, true that a great deal of my early antagonism stemmed from the personality of the vegan in question.
Hey, kids! How 'bout another Big Mac?
Only a decade later — and I now realize measuring an entire lifestyle choice by a single practitioner is…well, abominably stupid. Better later than never, some would say, and yes, they would be right. But that was high school.
In college, studying health sciences, I learned the intricacies of bad cholesterol and good, of triglycerides derived from different food sources, of atherosclerosis contributing to the skyrocketing rates of heart disease here in the US — and of inherent dangers and surprising benefits of raw, vegan, vegetarian, no-carb — and fully integrated omnivorous diets. There’s latter in every one — just as there is a former (these, mostly from uninformed food choices and bad decisions made by every slice of our foodie spectrum). I suppose the only type of diet I would these days condemn off the bet would be a supersized Big Mac one.
Which brings me to Supersize Me, a single most illustrative (if somewhat preachy and pseudo-scientific) demonstration of what it is to live on clean, self-sustained cuisine vs. the self-indulgent God-knows-what-they-put-in-it dietary school of thought of a rather prominent chunk of American population.
Certainly, it bears to be said the sacrifices Morgan Spurlock went to are obvious to an even unconverted carnivore, but the movie’s relevance to the vegan lifestyle lies actually in what was practically a movie’s afterword. Once Mr. Spurlock’s self-appointed month was through and his vitals ascertained to be all over the place (which is a tad surprising, considering his binging hadn’t lasted that long, though I am not at all disputing the validity of the findings), what did he turn to to detox? And what actually helped?
You guessed it, the tasty and cleansing fare as prepared by his girlfriend, Alexandra Jamieson, the longsuffering vegan chief.
She didn’t nag him (at least, not on camera), didn’t quote him statistics to the tune of 40% decrease in heart-related deaths for those, practicing vegetarianism. That glaring difference being further enhanced by purely vegan choices, not to mention the decreased incidence of colon and lung cancer, kidney and gallstones, diabetes, and even later-life sexual dysfunction, she would have had plenty of ammunition. She didn’t use it.
What she did was prepare him a going-away-to-fight-the-devils-of-consumerism feast — and a purifying post-experiment regimen to gently get him back down from his perpetual sugar high and unclog the arteries unused to the onslaught of saturated fats.
Of course, that a man used to vegan cuisine responded so beautifully to reentering his comfort zone isn’t much of a shocker, but that his is only one example of vegan detox and that it works just as well for those heretofore completely unexposed to this lifestyle, is.
As things currently stand, I am neither a vegetarian nor a red-meat-gobbling carnivore, but will I ever scoff at vegan food choices again? I can safely say, never.
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