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

