Today I’m thinking about… gorging on yummy animals. Om nom nom…

When I was 20, I was with a guy who’d take me out to pubs for lunch and dinner all the (freakin’) time. Now, I do enjoy a decent, cheap chicken parmy, or a $10 steak when the mood strikes, the cash is strapped or the restaurant is an uncomfortable distance away and I’m in heels. But once, twice or three times a week can take its toll. After all, there are only so many meat, chip and salad combinations one can handle until it all starts tasting like heart attack.

I like to call this time in my life my steak period (like Picasso’s blue period, but with pepper sauce). Before this, I rarely if ever ordered a steak at a restaurant thanks to a father who thought shoe soles were the pièce de résistance of cow meat. Of course to impress the guy, I was all up in this steak business. ‘Oh I loooove steak’ I’d exclaim to him, withholding tooth ache memories of spitting chewy gobs of meat into napkins at the dinner table. After my fifth or sixth pub steak I began to, however, develop a refined taste for the meat, proclaiming that one may only have it medium rare to enjoy the full rich iron-y flavour, and refusing to put sauce on it for fear of sullying the taste and insulting the all important chef.

Recently I became a vegan. It is vegan month and I told those around me that I wanted to do it just to see. Curiosity was my calling, I am after all a writer at heart; what is writing without experience? Of course this was all bullshit. To be perfectly frank, I did it to lose weight. I’d been looking for an excuse, a quick fix, a something to trigger some shift in my body without just starving myself. With the intensive restrictions of veganism I thought no one, not even myself, could persuade me to take a bite of that chocolate cake temptation. Extraordinarily, I was right.

I’ve lost about 4kgs already, and quite unexpectedly, I feel amazing. The surprise wasn’t the weight loss. I knew if I stuck to it, I surely must lose something as keeping up the caloric intake needed to gain weight while being a vegan requires far too much effort (and far too many chips). The surprise came in stead with the total absence of desire.

Desire is a fickle thing. In my life I have succumbed to two great temptations over and over; boys and food. My appetite for food was only ever suppressed by my appetite for boys, and vise versa. They both pulled my focus in the great tug of war game, and generally my focus ended up sinking in the mud.

Since going down the vegan route, not only have I miraculously sprouted dreadlocks atop my head, I have also found that my desire for food has flourished into a need. The concept of need is not one that’s very familiar to my non-pleb upbringing, where cupboards are filled to overflowing with milo, soy sauce, corn chips and exotic teas. Where my fridge contains 20 different varieties of bread spreads, and my mother bulk buys a trunk of meat each fortnight from the butcher down the road. When I made the conscious decision to relinquish the things that are a product of confining, torturing, poisoning and/or slaughtering animals from my diet, I found that in my home there was very little left for me to eat.

For the first time in a while I felt hunger, not for the sake of dinner time or cravings, and not just to fill my tummy for comfort, but hunger for energy, nutrients, thirst – all those things I seem to have taken for granted. I could only survive on bread and cucumbers for a couple of days before I snapped and explored my options outside my own home. What I found amongst far too many attempts to copy non-vegan foods with mouth numbing results, were enhanced flavours, interesting combinations and bizarre cooking techniques.

I’m not trying to get on my high horse, or even my little pony, when I say this. I still don’t see anything wrong with eating animals or animal products. I have no expertise in the subject, but I do know it is very difficult to get a full and rich diet out of veganism in contemporary western society. But it has made me consider why we eat so damn much meat. Why we drink milk like it’s the sweet nectar of life. Why we eat eggs and honey as though we were built to sup the excretions of winged animals. Why the vast majority of packaged products in the supermarket today rely so heavily on animals being farmed, caged and killed. The sheer scale of it baffles me. I think back to how many cows I consumed in my 20th year because of some carnivorous glutton, and it fills me with a rapid and relentless nausea that I have no hope of going away anytime soon. And maybe that sickly feeling will push me into veganism for less shallow reasons than the one I began with. I don’t particularly miss meat, milk, eggs or much of the other things I would gorge myself on with remarkable ease. But it isn’t really about what I miss. It is much more that I have begun to appreciate in all sincerity the real and inescapable implications of my every day food choices.

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