My Short Lived Life as a Vegan

Eat Meat

This all started when a friend, who I will refer to as “Chris,” because his name is Chris Linn, told me that he had watched a movie called Forks Over Knives, and the movie convinced him to stop eating meat.  So, of course, I couldn’t believe it, and I told him that I couldn’t believe it, and that should have been the end of it.  Only it wasn’t.  Three weeks later, I realized that Forks Over Knives was on Netflix.  (The real mystery is how a void so large in the entertainment universe emerged and swallowed up every other thing which might possibility have distracted me).  Alas, Forks Over Knives miraculously stood alone.

The movie is a documentary about these two skinny doctors who do a bunch of complicated studies using graphs and statistics, and conclude with very serious faces that if you don’t become a vegan, you’re going to die.  Possibly by the end of the movie.  I know this sounds crazy, but they’re very convincing, kind of like that guy at the fair who sells the slicer-dicer.  If the slicer-dicer guy used a bunch of graphs.

So anyway, about two thirds of the way through the movie, I say to myself, “Jack, in the unlikely event you live to see the end of this movie, you’re going to start eating a ‘plant-based diet.’”  See, that’s what they call it, a “plant-based diet.”  But it’s really a vegan diet.  I figure they just changed the name to appeal to more people and not sound like a bunch of crackpots, like when Philip Morris changed its name to Altria.

The long and the short is that I jumped into the deep end of the pool.  If it had parents, or came from something that had parents, it was off the menu.  Even stupid parents, like fish, which I always considered more like vegetables without roots.  Plus anything that was highly processed or contained refined sugar.  Unfortunately, I discovered that if you take all those things literally off the table, what you’ve got left is grass.  Nevertheless, I marched forward.  The whole time thinking, ‘How am I going to get enough protein?’

According to some random website on my iPhone, I needed 56 grams of protein per day.   Was I supposed to eat tofu every day?  (My iPhone said that too much tofu was toxic).  One of the skinny guys on the show ramble on about how everything has protein in it, even potatoes.  Beans supposedly have a lot of protein.  But I did the math, I was going to have to eat like fifty pounds of beans a day.  I’d be creating enough gas to light a small city.  Again, nevertheless, I struggled forward, week after week.  I even spent a few days in Oklahoma visiting my daughter.  Oklahoma!  Oklahoma’s official motto is: “We eat red meat three times a day, and sometimes we even cook it.”  Do you have any idea what it’s like to order a veggie burger in Oklahoma?  I’m one of the few who’s lived to tell the tale.

At week nine, I hit the vegan wall.  I wasn’t hungry, I was exhausted from trying to eat enough protein without swallowing a wheelbarrow of beans every day.  I just didn’t have the ganas (or desire, as Edward James Olmos would say).  I was unable to Stand and Deliver. So I yanked the vegan plug.  I wished the two skinny guys the best, and reverted back to my previous diet, which I know call Knives Over Forks.

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