i'm sure my story's not that interesting, but that's never stopped me before!

i had a friend go vegan in high school, probably 2002 or 2003; i thought she was nuts. we lived in Iowa which is hardcore meat and potatoes territory. but this was my first real-life exposure to that ideology. Alice, if you're out there, i hope you're still vegan and know that while i was not cool about it then, it affected me!

anyway, fast forward many, many years of loving animals but never thinking about where food came from. i ate the standard American diet, drank too much, lived a sedentary life; by the time i sort of "came to" i was over 400lbs (180+kg), a pack-a-day smoker, a heavy drinker, etc. shortly after i realized what i was doing to myself i got diagnosed with diabetes and moved to Colorado. the more active lifestyle out here combined with some other choices helped me get a bit healthier, stop smoking, and some other things. i think this was the first time i tried going vegan myself, maybe 2011 or 2012. it was really difficult and my complicated relationship with food made it not work.

around this same time i began practicing Zen Buddhism, which i continue doing to this day. i tried going vegan several times over the years and never lasted longer than about six months - the Buddhism strongly encouraged the vegetarian/vegan lifestyle, but it still didn't click.

in 2022 my wife and i bought a house and got two cats. they are an absolute joy in my life, and it was that which made me realize ever buffalo wing or hamburger i ate came from a creature with as rich an internal life and as much feeling and personality as my boys, and i couldn't do it any more. in 2023 i became a vegetarian, and in 2024 (April-ish) i became a vegan and have stuck it out since then. the kitties, the zen, and the internet have all helped.

additionally, going vegan made tremendous positive impacts on my health. for the first time in my life my diabetes is under control, my depression is moderated, my gout isn't flaring up, and i'm almost 100lbs lighter than i was when i started all this stuff.

so... yeah! tofu is amazing.

one way that being vegan has improved my life is that it's reduced the stress of cognitive dissonance, by which i mean i feel like my dietary choices are in line with my values and beliefs. i'm a practicing Buddhist and not killing is the first precept in Buddhism - and there's millennia of history of at least vegetarian if not entirely vegan cuisine coming from countries and societies where other people took that precept seriously.

for me personally, another moment that impacted me was when my wife and i adopted two cats that had been discovered in an empty house. they were such playful, intelligent, and obviously feeling creatures; what in my life made me feel like cows, pigs, or chickens were any different?

anyway, that's sort of what's improved. it's definitely created more complications too as so many others have pointed out. my wife's not vegan, which bothers me occasionally. my mom totally doesn't understand what being vegan is; she seems to think it's basically keto somehow? i travel a lot for work and in some of the really rural places i visit, finding vegan options can be tough. i don't mind that, but when i travel with co-workers they love to give me shit about being vegan. i keep showing them delicious food options (for example, Frisco, CO, has an amazing Vietnamese restaurant with some of the best vegan food i've ever had), but they still like to mock. oh well. i hope that by living according to my values, i will have an impact on them even if they don't admit it.

just got back from a week-long sesshin (zen meditation retreat), so no reading during that time, lol. a bunch of my holds came in at the library though! "Prophet Against Slavery" about the early American emancipationist vegan Quaker Benjamin Lay, "Vegan Africa" by Marie Kacouchia, and also "Borne" by Jeff Vandermeer. gonna be on the road a lot this week so i am hoping to make some progress on these!

As for me, I'm working on "Birnam Wood" by Eleanor Catton. i'm having a slow time getting into it, but i've heard it's good. likely won't get it finished in the next week as tomorrow i'm off to a zen retreat for a week, but it'll be waiting for me when I get back.

i've got a couple things specifically relating to veganism on order from my local library: "Veganism: Politics, Practice, and Theory" by Eva Haifa Giraud, and "The Vegan Studies Project: Food, Animals, and Gender in the Age of Terror" by Laura Wright.

i'm no academic but i am a nerd, and am hoping that these so-called foundational texts in vegan studies will help me have a better theoretical and actionable framework within which to work. speaking of which, i also have on order "Striking at the Roots: A Practical Guide to Animal Activism" by Mark Hawthorne. this one i have purchased so that i can have it as a reference for actual praxis.

have any of you read any of these and have any thoughts, or recommendations?

thanks to this post i just learned about rajma! i am excited to try making it in the near future.

i did create a post about what we're reading, but i realize now that might be stepping on toes so if so, i apologize. let me know and i can take it down in favor of whatever we collectively decide we'd like to see.

As for me, I just finished "The Future" by Naomi Alderman. i enjoyed it enough to stay up late last night finishing it. i don't necessarily agree with some of the premises, but i found it enjoyable to read. there are a few scenes that stuck with me in unpleasant ways, but i found myself very intrigued as to what, exactly, the fuck was going on.

four out of five stars from me.

it was great. i ended up going with the NuWave wok shown in this video, despite in the end him recommending the other one (heads-up, his channel is not vegan; there are some vegan recipes but viewer beware). at my price point and lack of a functional separate wok, the NuWave checked the boxes and worked just like i was hoping for.

lol, that's fair - i always run my cell phone photos through Google Photos to dial up the saturation and what they call the "pop". it makes for more interesting photos but if you have a good monitor i bet it's almost unpleasant, ha! sorry for that.

in Google Photos there's an option to dial up the saturation and dial up what it calls "pop" and I usually dial up both a fair bit, otherwise my photos tend to look dull and unappealing.

hella delicious!