Wednesday, November 11, 2015 // The Statement
4B
Wednesday, November 11, 2015// The Statement
5B
O
n the morning of Oct. 21, 2015, Eva Roos, an art and
design senior, slept through five alarms before finally
arising. She yawned and stretched her arms, pulled her
blankets off, hopped into the shower and got dressed.
In her kitchen, she prepared breakfast, like she does any
morning. She poured a half-cup of oats into a bowl, added one
level cup of water, nuked it for thirty seconds, and garnished
with flax seed and a heaping spoon of cinnamon. Before leaving
the house, she grabbed a bottle of kombucha, a fermented tea
beverage which she brews and bottles herself in her basement.
That same morning, I woke up after
three alarms and the sound of a car pass-
ing by my window. I rolled out of bed,
and on my way to the shower, paused to
pick up a bowl from my desk, the dregs of
last night’s chicken soup at the bottom. I
pulled on a pair of wool socks and brown
leather shoes. Before leaving the house, I
checked on two baseball-mitt sized pork
cheeks I have curing in my basement.
For breakfast, I drank a cup of coffee
with a splash of milk in it, and a croissant
— which must have contained a half-stick
of butter. I ate in a hurry, because I was
on my way to see Eva Roos.
We met in the basement of a local cof-
fee shop. Eva is tall and striking, with
fiery hair buzzed into a Skrillex cut. A
button, reading “End Police Violence,”
was pinned to her jacket. I turned on my
recorder, and spoke, quite timidly: “So …
veganism.”
Eva is a vegan; she consumes
no animal products. She became
a vegetarian Thanksgiving of
her freshman year, and then
fully vegan last October while
studying abroad in Copenhagen.
But why would she make such a
drastic change? Why would any-
one?
“I’ve always had huge con-
cern for the environment, and
it just didn’t match up with my
morals anymore to continue eat-
ing meat,” she said. “I also know
my relationship with other ani-
mals and creatures. I know that
if I knew the animal I could
never be the one to kill it. That
would be really hypocritical of
me, and it just didn’t sit right.”
Copenhagen wasn’t exactly
the best place to start as a vegan, and not just because Denmark,
like most Northern European countries, is notoriously meat-
heavy.
“What I ate was pretty undiverse, because I couldn’t read any
of the labels,” she said. “I’m pretty sure I did vegan wrong.”
The idea of doing veganism “wrong” is as old as the term
itself. Vegetarianism has been around for thousands of years
— the Greek philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras sup-
posedly forbid his followers from eating meat, as did many of
the earliest Hindu and Buddhist teachers. But a named vegan-
ism only came about in 1944, when Donald Watson founded The
Vegan Society in Leicester, England. A group of dissidents from
the established Vegetarian Society, they rejected not only meat,
but dairy and eggs.
Fast forward to modern times, and the United States is home
to 1 million vegans.
Veganism, like feminism, has its own internal subdivisions
and sometimes-radical disagreements on self-definition. There
are ethical vegans, environmental vegans, health vegans, even
“flexible” vegans. Some people are only dietary vegans. Others
won’t wear leather or wool. There are continuing arguments
over the ethics of consuming honey and oysters.
Eva is an environmental vegan, noting the impact of ani-
mal industries on carbon levels, water purity and land use. For
food, she splits a farmshare (a stake in a local farm’s vegetable
crop) with her sister, who isn’t a vegan but likes cooking. They
get together on Sundays to convert the mound of vegetables
into bulk vegan meals for the week: lentils, butternut squash
soup, vegetable pizzas, even “frittatas” made with pureed tofu
instead of eggs.
At this point in the conversation, I expect Eva to say “And
this is why everyone should go vegan!” Instead, she remained
almost painfully non-judgmental.
“If you’re a vegan, you can’t be — I think, personally, that I
don’t have the right to be picky, because I’m imposing this on
myself,” she said.
Not all vegans are as nuanced. Yuval Noah Harari, Israeli
historian and ethical vegan activist, recently took to the pages
of The Guardian to claim that “animals are the main victims
of history, and the treatment of domesticated animals in indus-
trial farms is perhaps the worst crime in history.”
So I decided to hunt down some ethical vegans.
Laura “Lita” Brillman is an LSA junior studying in Wash-
ington, D.C this semester. Lita became a vegetarian when she
was 12, and then a full vegan her senior year of high school.
She comes at it from a broader animal rights perspective — she
avoids cosmetics tested on animals, won’t visit a zoo or aquari-
um, and wouldn’t go horseback riding if the opportunity arose.
“I didn’t know being a vegetarian you still harm so many ani-
mals,” she said. “I didn’t realize dairy and eggs kill. You can’t
feel great about being a vegetarian if you want to save as many
animals as possible.”
It’s true. Even if you aren’t opposed to the idea of breeding
and holding animals for human purposes, the dairy and egg
industries still deal out an unsettling amount of death. The
dairy industry obviously only requires adult females — many
male calves are sold as veal. Millions of useless male chicks are
born a year, and many are killed in huge meat grinders soon
after birth. Cows and chickens too old to produce anymore are
usually slaughtered for meat.
It was this reality that made LSA sophomore Sarah Gallagher
go vegan four years ago. She heard a story about a cow that gave
birth for the fifth time, and the calf was taken shortly after so
that the mother could be milked. But she was dry. The farmer
investigated, and found that the mother had actually birthed
twins, and in a bovine version of “Sophie’s Choice,” was hid-
ing one of the calves in the woods, and allowed the other to be
taken away.
“I didn’t really care about the health benefits — I’ve always
considered myself a pretty healthy person,” she said. “It was
the ethics that really got to me.”
Our campus is full of vocal activists, students who identify
inequalities and injustices, and are ready to remind others, pub-
licly and privately. After talking with several vegans, I was left
wondering how a vegan could even associate with meat eaters
anymore? Or, more realistically, how do they resist the urge to
chastise them?
Sarah lives in a sorority house with its own dining hall, where
she finds enough cereal, salad, and hummus to make meals. But
many of her friends eat meat and dairy.
“I don’t like to push my views onto them, because that makes
people really uncomfortable most of the time,” she said. “I don’t
talk about it much with people who I know wouldn’t be recep-
tive.”
This is a common pattern amongst the vegans I spoke with.
Because eating is such a common, yet intimate experience,
many people become anxious and/or defensive in the pres-
ence of vegans, and feel like they’re under attack. In a struggle
between personal morals and social decorum, the latter often
wins.
“There’s this perception is that vegans talk about veganism
all the time from a morally superior point of view,” Lita told me.
“I’m not going to express discomfort unless it comes up.”
She was quick to add that she didn’t even judge non-vegans as
harshly as one would think.
“A lot of the time people feel guilty, but don’t have willpower
or drive to do it,” she explained. “We all have things like that. I
should drive less, but I don’t.”
The primary difficulty of adopting a vegan diet isn’t giving
up animal products — in fact, most vegans I talked to reported
having few to no cravings for meat, cheese, eggs, or milk any-
more. Instead, it’s ensuring that what they eat doesn’t have
any animal products in it. Jell-O and many gummy candies are
made with gelatin derived from animal bones. Most barbeque
chips have traces of milk in them. Guinness recently pledged to
go vegan — for 257 years, they’ve used a fish-bladder compound,
isinglass, to filter their beer. What’s a vegan to do?
In Ann Arbor, you could go to The Lunch Room, one of only
two vegan eateries in town. It began as a food truck in 2010 by
vegan friends Phillis Engelbert and Joel Panozzo. In August
2013, it opened as a permanent space, followed by a sister bak-
ery a year later. I spoke with Panozzo at the restaurant over
cups of vegan coffee. As he explained the restaurant’s philoso-
phy, a fly buzzed near my head, and I suppressed the instinct to
immediately crush it.
“We put a lot of effort into assuring that every point of con-
tact in the restaurant is entirely vegan, and has absolutely no
animal products in it,” Panozzo said. “I’ve made sure even the
sugar and the liquor are vegan.”
Unsurprisingly, The Lunch Room has become a safe haven
for campus vegans, unable to trust most restaurants. What’s
surprising is that, according
to Panozzo, almost 90 percent
of their customer base isn’t
vegan. Most people come in
because they want an afford-
able, healthy, meat-free meal.
“We assume that most
vegans out there will find
us,” Panozzo said. “We’re
really interested in reaching
everyone else, and hopefully
influencing their choices, and
breaking the stereotype of
vegan food as bland, expen-
sive and unfulfilling.”
Obviously,
most
vegans
can’t make it to The Lunch
Room for every meal. Many
cook for themselves, or head
to University Dining Halls, all
of which serve vegetarian and
vegan entrees at every meal.
The two newest dining halls,
South Quad and East Quad,
even have purpose-built veg-
etarian stations. But when
eating becomes a matter of
personal morals, many vegans
still feel the need to inquire
about their meal, even if it is
advertised as vegan.
“Being a vegan, you have to
be okay with being a nuisance
sometimes.” Dylan Nelson, an
LSA junior and South Quad
Residential Advisor said. “You
have to be an asshole some-
times, in order to make the
choices you want to make.”
Dylan became a vegan a
year ago, after eight months
of vegetarianism. Improbably,
his parents, sister and high
school girlfriend were all veg-
etarians.
“I’d always say ‘Nah, I
couldn’t that,’ ” he said. “In fact, I ate more meat than most
people.”
When he got to college, he gradually became a vegetarian, as
he cut down on eating meat for both ethical and environmen-
tal reasons. Last Thanksgiving break, ironically, he watched a
vegan documentary, “From Farm to Fridge.” He hasn’t looked
back since.
“I just couldn’t participate in that anymore,” he said “And
after that, I found many more reasons to go vegan.”
He cut out animal foods from his diet, and stopped buy-
ing clothes made with animal products. Last month, he even
swapped out his old leather wallet for a pleather one. He feels
more at peace with himself, but doesn’t want that to come off to
others as smugness.
“People assume that vegans are self-righteous, and certainly
some of them are,” he said. “I hope I don’t come off as self-righ-
teous. The reason that I say anything to anyone is to open up a
conversation. I want them to ask me why I’m a vegan, and why
it’s important to me, so that either they can something about
the meat industry that they didn’t know, or at least get my per-
spective, and understand that I recognize that for some people,
veganism or vegetarianism is completely unrealistic.”
Before our conversation ended, Dylan suggested I watch
another documentary, “Earthlings,” to get a better idea of why
some people choose to become vegans. After a scene of a bull
getting dehorned with bolt cutters, I slammed my laptop shut.
Ann Arbor, given its progressive climate and number of veg-
an-friendly restaurants and shops, is certainly not a half-bad
place to go vegan. And given the relative wealth of the student
body, many can afford to buy more expensive products like
organic vegetables and faux-meat products. Veganism, it should
be said, is not a feasible lifestyle for everyone here.
But for those who do choose to be vegan, I still wonder what
the point is. Our world runs on animal usage and death. Vac-
cines are incubated in chicken eggs. Most condoms contain a
milk extract. Growing vegetables’ food uses animals — ground
bones as fertilizer, captive bees to pollinate, countless mice
crushed during plowing.
I asked Eva Roos why, as an individual, she would go vegan,
in the face of such large, entrenched systems.
“It just, morally, sits better with me, because I don’t feel like I
have a lot of control in the system I’m existing in,” she said. “As
far as making an environmental impact, I do what I can. But
food is the one thing I have control over, so I really don’t allow
myself to make exceptions.”
Eating Purposefully:
A look at campus vegan culture
by Giancarlo Buonomo, Daily Food Columnist
PHOTO ILLUSTRATIONS BY LUNA ANNA ARCHEY