Thirty years ago this month I gave up all meat, dairy, and ceased using all animal products. Throughout August the subjects of my blogs will be related to my thirtieth anniversary of going vegan.
The story of my early days of being wholly plant-based can’t be told without recognizing how my mother went all-in on the idea once she realized I was sticking to it, and how she went above and beyond to see I was enjoying my first meat-and-dairy-free meals.
This was all back in 1996. There weren’t a lot of plant-based options readily available on grocery store shelves apart from what was in the produce section. There weren’t cookbook sections of bookstores dedicated to meat-free cooking. The “health food grocery store” wasn’t a thing back then, or at least wasn’t as popular as it is today, so Mom took it upon herself to search high and low for ingredients for my meals.
Now before you think of me as some demanding son, sending his mother to the four corners of Long Island to cater to his new lifestyle, I will repeat that my mother took it upon herself to do all this. She certainly didn’t have to, but she did, and I always recognize that when I tell the story of these early days.
But as she herself will readily tell you, as she’s told me over the years, those early days of finding ingredients were a pain in the ass.
It was also a different approach to being meat-free back then. In the 90s, the vegan/vegetarian focus was on trying to recreate meat and dairy dishes “so you’d never know the difference!” That was a tall order then, given the recipes and ingredients available, but Mom went for it.
If my memory serves me correctly, the very first vegan dish she made from scratch was dairy-free quesadillas. Whether she found dairy-free cheese or a recipe to make it from scratch I cannot remember, but whatever it was she put more than just cheese alternative into a tortilla. I remember other vegetables being involved.
Our house was heavily New York Italian inspired when it came to meals, so cheese was a staple in our house. I myself was an avid cheese lover before giving it up altogether, so this was once again a “do or die” moment for the future of my new diet. Would dairy-free cheese impress a former cheese enthusiast, or would I come to realize I didn’t need it as much as I thought I did?
I remember… not being fooled by the cheese. Honestly, even today with so many alternatives readily available, you wouldn’t fool any ardent cheese lovers. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t good. It had plenty of flavor and gave the quesadillas that familiar texture one expects when biting into one. While I didn’t have a “it’s just like the real thing!” moment, I experienced a much more important one; that I wasn’t going to miss everything I’d given up.
Luckily, Mom didn’t have to go searching all over Long Island for very long. I went vegan my senior year of high school, and then I was off to college to fend for myself. Mom certainly didn’t stop, but she didn’t have to go shopping as regularly for these things once I was out of the house.
But she did always bring up care packages to school, full of homemade goodies, and the many recipes she found (despite their relative rarity back then) yielded vegan-friendly treats that even my meat-eating college friends were impressed by. As one friend put it, “Y’know, this vegan crap ain’t so bad after all.” Another friend exclaimed, as he slurped down homemade pasta she’d made, “Dude, your mom! YOUR MOM!”
There was no stopping a mother of Italian descent from making sure her son had enough to eat, no matter how much of a pain in the ass it was to feed him.