‘The most intense meal of my life’
By NORA SORENA CASEY Special to the Daily Press
DOWNTOWN Vegan living is not for the faint of heart or the tight of purse.
When I first committed myself to this article about being vegan for a week, I was filled with fear. I saw before me the burger joints I wouldn’t go to, the summer ice cream cones abandoned, the long walks through the health food section at Whole Foods, and endless lists of ingredients. I imagined myself hungry and helpless at work, forced to eat only raw tofu and bananas, and so bitter that no one would speak to me. I felt I was facing a week of vegan life angry and alone.
Then I remembered that I was in Santa Monica.
Returning home from college in Chicago, I found the vegan scene here so much more accessible. In Chicago I had to take three different buses to reach a restaurant alternative enough to offer vegan dishes. Here, there are two raw food and one purely vegan restaurant in the downtown area alone.
I took a deep breath and decided that maybe being vegan wouldn’t be so hard after all. After all, I would only have to cut out all food containing meat, dairy, egg, and honey from my normally uninhibited diet.
The first day began easily with simple soy milk in my coffee and cereal. A nice pasta lunch with tomato sauce and bell peppers lulled me into a false confidence, which was roughly broken when I went to get coffee in the late afternoon. Suddenly, I was confronted by a display of delicious baked muffins, cookies, and croissants drizzled in frosting. In my former life as a non-vegan, I would have happily consumed one of these baked delicacies, as well as a nice latte, some pizza, and a chicken sandwich at various points throughout the day.
Instead, I looked at the cashier in desperation, and asked her if anything was vegan. She directed me to a packaged lemon-poppyseed cookie sitting on the side of the counter. Lemon-poppyseed is not an acceptable type of cookie in my mind, and I cursed under my breath.
I learned a valuable lesson in that shop. Eating in normal restaurants or out with my non-vegan friends, the world suddenly turned into a big “stop” sign, where everything I saw was off-limits.
This circumstance leads to the bitter attitude of the deprived. Luckily for me, Santa Monica makes it almost bizarrely easy to avoid most of that world. Tofu “meatballs” help make a delicious pasta dinner, and eating out at restaurant like Real Food Daily or getting coffee at Mani’s Bakery, I felt my resentment dissipate in the presence of an apple turnover that tasted better than anything I could have gotten at Starbucks.
In true Santa Monica fashion, the first person I talked to at Mani’s Bakery had been vegan for two years. Stephen Ralescu now describes his lifestyle as about 99 percent vegan.
“I don’t believe in doing anything too rigidly anymore,” he said. However, his idea of extreme is slightly different than mine. Ralescu confessed that, “some days I just eat only fruit, just to see what’s up with that.”
I tried raw food for one meal, and it was the most intense I have ever eaten. Yes, intense is the only word for the Coco-phoria sandwich I ate at Euphoria Loves Rawvolution, an organic raw food restaurant on Main Street. While I enjoyed the coconut jerky with lettuce, tomato and onions on a strange flat patchwork called onion bread, it was too much for my taste buds, which are used to the more mellow flavors of cooked dishes.
The people next to me feasted on salads and whole coconuts, and said they eat raw food almost every day and go to Rawvolution three to four times a week, although they were not strict vegans.
“I like the atmosphere,” Patricia Stone said. “This is like the healing place, you know, this block.”
All the vegans I spoke to said they feel better about their health and the fact that their diet does not harm animals. According to the Vegan Society being vegan uses up one-fifth the land needed to sustain an average European omnivore and corn production is fifteen times more efficient than beef production. In Santa Monica, a number of citizens apparently agree that this is a strong incentive to be vegan.
“When I eat this food I walk away with energy,” Kyle Mack, who was eating with Stone, said. “My body’s telling me this is the food to eat.”
Personally, after a week I wasn’t feeling particularly healthier, but I suspect that is a result of my natural cynicism. But as I tried my own whole coconut, I felt a strange awareness of the production and origins of my meal. It was very different from the typical dining experience of package, precut and cooked food, and I knew Karl Marx would be proud.
But eating out as a vegan is a luxury that can be hard to afford. In old normal life, I could get a shrimp burrito for $5 and enjoy it in the park. At Real Food Daily, the all-vegan restaurant on Santa Monica Boulevard, a burrito cost three times as much. However, it is the presence of this vegan sub-culture that makes the lifestyle so much more viable here than almost anywhere else.
“Oh, you can’t be vegan in Ohio,” laughed Ralescu. “I mean, you can but it’s not ….”
After life in the Midwest, I know what the ellipses mean. It encompasses the mushy canned vegetables, wilted lettuce, cheap pizza, and fast food that are so much less prominent in Santa Monica, not to mention the stares and mockery I received trying to explain how milk production harms the environment.
But when I’m sitting in the sun in Santa Monica, with foamed soymilk in my coffee and fresh apples in my turnover, I do feel good about being vegan. But not good enough to continue it beyond a week.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on July 12, 2008. Read the original PDF.