Thirty years ago this month I went vegan. I haven’t eaten anything that comes from an animal, nor have I used animal products, for three decades.
Okay, that’s a lie. There have been plenty of times I’ve screwed up.
Every so often I’d slip up and eat something I thought would be vegan-friendly, only to discover that it was cooked in butter or chicken broth. This happened more frequently in the late 90s and early 2000s. Nowadays people are far more aware of food allergies and dietary preferences.
Bread would be the one thing that got me the most frequently. I love me some good bread, and whenever it’s offered I’m eager to try it. But every so often there’d be something in there that wasn’t vegan-friendly, and I’d pay the price.
The price, I learned the hard way, was becoming lactose-intolerant. When you give up all dairy products, your system doesn’t know how to process it any more. So whenever I’d do something like eat sautéed vegetables I didn’t realize were cooked in butter, my system would… well, I’ll spare you the gruesome details.
How I learned this lesson was the single biggest screw-up of my thirty years as a vegan, and it was all my fault.
My parents had come to visit me in college and took me out to Boston’s North End for dinner, which is full of fancy Italian restaurants. We all figured the place we chose would have a simple pasta with vegetables dish for me, but this was before every restaurant had a website with their menu. When we looked at the menu, there was nothing for me. Everything was meats and cheeses. I was screwed.
I forget which member of my family said it, but they suggested, “Well, breaking your rules for one night wouldn’t kill you, would it?”
I was in a forgiving and jovial mood that night (likely because we all liked to drink when we got together back then), so I agreed. “Yeah, why not? It’s just one night.”
I went overboard. I ordered pasta with the creamiest cream sauce and a dessert made entirely of milk. It’s just one night, I kept telling myself.
Later that night, in the middle of that night, I was awoken by the most horrid feeling in my guts. That one night was the most miserable experience of my life at the time. It was so bad I can remember the unpleasant details even now, three decades later. Just one night of being a doofus was all I needed to learn what happens when you stop eating dairy for years and then “take a night off” from your principles because you don’t want to be difficult at a restaurant.
I’m often really hard on myself when I make mistakes, but thirty years of commitment to something has granted me a small amount of inner grace. And after that monumental screw up, I try to keep my innards as full of grace as possible.