PeaceChicken.com

Pop Quiz:
For lunch I had a can of Amy’s brand barley & vegetable soup, two slices of bread, a can of Coke, and Newman’s Own choc. mint cookies. Is this:

• A) vegetarian
• B) vegan
• C) neither
• D) very well-balanced Laura, splendid job

The answer, unfortunately, is A. I was trying to go vegan for just a day, and by lunch I’d already failed many times over. My coffee this morning didn’t pass because I used some Coffee-Mate “non-dairy” creamer. Failure #1: Non-dairy is not totally true because there’s still caseinate in it, which is a milk-derived protein. I had cereal and orange juice for breakfast, which should be safe except I ran out of soy milk and had to use some organic milk to top it off, failure #2.

The soup is totally-guilt-free vegan, this I am sure of. The bread is not (could have milk or eggs). The Coke is safe, by my standards, but I’m sure there’s something hidden in the sugar-refining process or the caramel color (possibly failure #3.) The chocolate-mint cookies are not (failure #4.) And I’m sure the Clif bar I had for a snack had a trace amount of something bad which gives me my fifth failure.

I can’t even eat vegetarian anymore without having guilt issues about the non-vegan things, but I really don’t know how I’d survive otherwise.. There are milk and/or eggs in everything!!! Unless you make all your food from scratch, I don’t see how it’s possible or affordable to be healthy on a vegan diet.

I wish there was a convenient and moderately-priced line of food that you could trust only used milk and eggs from cruelty-free farms, and the animals were never killed or harmed in the process (or when they were no longer productive for food purposes.) Then I’d lose the guilt and eat cheese omelettes again. But not knowing the whole truth always leads me to think the worst, and there’s still no universal standard for calling things organic, let alone cruelty-free. Take personal hygeine products for example, the best ones say “contains no animal-derived ingredients. not tested on animals” but what about the ones that just say “not testing on animals”, does that mean there could be something in it from an animal?

So today I was a vegan failure, but I certainly tip my hat to all the successful vegans out there.