So why did I do it? Why did I decide not to eliminate meat from my diet?  The answer to that is both pretty complicated and pretty easy. First, the easy answer: because I can, and I did.  I’ve always held firm to the belief that a person’s dietary choices are theirs, that labels only serve to complicate things and ultimately when it comes to eating, we’re all hypocrites (at least I am). So I added meat back into my diet because I wanted to. It’s as simple as that.

Yet, it’s not that simple, and the road that lead me here is fairly complicated.  I’d like to think over the last 6 years of being veg that I wasn’t all that dogmatic, but that’s total bullshit. Of course I was dogmatic, I was even dogmatic when I said I wasn’t being dogmatic. When you make the move to eliminate all animals and animal products from your life, it’s a pretty radical move, one which is nearly impossible to do without a litte dogma. I’d always tell my friends, mostly truly, that my choice not to eat meat was my own and that I didn’t care what other people ate – it was my decision about what I ate that mattered. Well, this was as untrue as it was true.  Of course there were times when I cringed at my friends as they scarfed down huge slabs of meat, crunched on bacon or tore into a piece of fried chicken – how could I not? After all, I had put myself in a spot where I equated each piece of meat with the life that it was connected to.

The real reason behind not being dogmatic and be “the coolest veg person I (they) know” was more about bridging the immense chasm that was created between me and the rest of the world and a lot less about how I felt or what I thought. I don’t think at the time I was really able to put my finger on this chasm; it wasn’t for many years that the gap between me and the world became more and more visible and more and more present.

I think Michael Pollan captures this chasm better than I ever could:

What troubles me the most about my vegetarianism is the subtle way it alienates me from other people, and, odd as this might sound, from a whole dimension of human experience. Other people now have to accommodate me, and I find this uncomfortable: My new dietary restrictions throw a big wrench into the basic host-guest relationship. As a guest, if I neglect to tell my host in advance that I don’t eat meat, she feels bad, and if I do tell her, she’ll make something special for me, in which case I feel bad. On this matter I’m inclined to agree with the French, who gaze upon any personal dietary prohibition as bad manners.

One of the great ways to combat this disenfranchisement is to connect or bond with a local community of like-minded people. In Portland the options for this for Vegans and Vegetarians are vast.  I found the Vegan community to be extremely welcoming when we first were starting to go veg. People seemed to go out of their way to give us tips, recipes, suggestions and even invite us out for potluck dinners.  This was a huge bridge over this abyss and for a while it did help.

When I first went Vegan, combined with near daily exercise I lost a ton of weight. I went from 233 down to 185. I looked and felt better. Naturally I credited it to my new diet. Also being veg at first was an adventure. It was a challenge to find ways to locate, invent, create, or recreate my favorite omnivorous foods into vegan creations. People often asked me if I missed meat, missed cheese or ice cream, and I triumphly said “No!”  I think there was some sort of badge of honor which I wore which made me feel good to be veg.

Of course secretly I felt superior to everyone else. How could I not? After all, I had tapped  into a progressive way of eating, I looked good, felt good and I was going to live forever. I was also 35 and deeply mourning the loss of my father who was obese and died from esophageal cancer, so pulling it all together health-wise was a top priority.  I didn’t really let on that I felt superior to everyone, which would make the chasm between us even bigger; instead, I couched it all in health advice. Who is going to scoff at someone who recommends being and eating more healthy?  It was ultimately a good cover for a moral superiority that would  bite me in the ass.

The unfortunate truth was that, aside from losing weight, being veg wasn’t really helping or fixing other health problems I have. It did nothing for my GRD (reflux), my bad back still gave me problems, and I still battled low blood sugar when I didn’t get enough protein in the morning. I ignored anything that possibly pointed to any downside of being veg. When I was shaking and sweating one mid-morning because I didn’t get enough non-carbohydrates into my system, I never thought that it could be a downside of being veg.   I ultimately solved my morning shakes by dropping coffee from my diet (yet another dietary restriction) and drinking fruit shakes with scoops of hemp or soy protein powder in them.

I’ll never forget the day that I went into a sporting goods store and they had a free cholesterol screening. I proudly stepped up for my test knowing full well that OF COURSE I would do fantastic, after all I was veg. This unfortunately wasn’t the case and when I got my borderline troubled results back I quickly stuffed them in a file drawer never to be seen again.

Instead of stepping back, I decided to go deeper into the rabbit hole. Slightly disenfranchised with the vegan community and in a search to do even better for my health, I decided to explore raw foods. Again I entered the honeymoon period, new friends, new community and new results. I felt GREAT at first. This of course was the elixir of life, right? Maybe not. Preparing raw foods takes hours and hours and hours (some things even take days).  I wasn’t completely raw, although to raw foodists in my life I said I was “high-raw”, a fancy way of saying “while I am not completely raw, I’m pretty damn good”, and to fellow vegans I was ‘playing with some raw foods’.  Again I didn’t want to create any bigger chasm than I already had.

This came to a head when I attended the Raw and Living Spirit retreat.  It was an all-day raw foods love fest complete with a catered meal. I took a ton of notes, met a lot of great people and then came home and got sicker than I ever had in my life. An extremely high fever had me laid out for days. It didn’t compute – how could eating so healthy leave me open to getting so sick? I filed this in my little mental file cabinet and moved on.

It went on like this for years. There was rarely any doubt about what I was doing and why, and then we moved.  Moving from our little bubble in the suburbs to the city, we were thrust into the ‘real world’. As we walked the streets of our neighborhood, past local restaurants, and made new friends, we started to feel that gap more and more.  One of our neighbors brought by an amazing plate of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies – a wonderful gesture – and yet we agonized about eating them because they weren’t vegan.  It was my wife who said that she felt it was time to look at adding some dairy and eggs back into our diet. It was one huge step at bridging the gap and would open a whole new world of options for us. She did this, the kids did this, but I did not.  I’m not completely sure why I didn’t make the step at that point; perhaps it took so much of me to stick to my dietary direction that the thought of changing that was almost unimaginable.

So we went on like that for a number of months. I was vegan, my family vegetarian and everything at home was prepared vegan. Then I went to India.  Prior to going to India I was told in no uncertain terms that it was going to be extremely difficult to not have food with dairy in it. India prizes dairy and almost everything they cook is cooked in ghee (clarified butter). I was also told that Indians are so accommodating that if you ask for no dairy in something they will assure you that it’s ok and that they will take care of you even when they can’t. It’s hard to put into words the impact of my trip to India. They say that going to India is a life altering experience; all I can say is, not all life altering is a good thing. My biggest take away from my trip to India (aside from the fact that I love whole milk chai) is that ultimately what we do here in the US with our lives is of almost no consequence in the scope of the entire world.

We do things like not eating meat or recycling because it makes us feel good, or it’s something we believe in. Ultimately it doesn’t even register on a global scale, not even a nano bit.  It was a tough realization, but an important one. One of the big reasons I had stopped eating meat was because I wanted to make a difference. I thought that I was making some sort of political statement with each bite; unfortunately, it was complete and total sanctimonious bullshit. At almost no time in the near 6 years I was veg did I ever open myself to any opposing ideas. I took it on faith that being veg was something good and something that made a difference.

I don’t want to completely disparage being veg. For some people it’s something meaningful to them – it has a real positive impact on their lives and their identity. It’s their choice and I respect them for it. But as a whole, vegans aren’t very open to dissenting views.  This became amazingly clear when two vegan activists threw cayenne-pepper-laced cream pies into the face of Lierre Keith, author of “The Vegetarian Myth”. I’m not defending Lierre or her book, because I haven’t read it, but I think the reaction is indicative of the community.

But this isn’t about the veg community or the impact of being veg on the world. Ultimately it came down to my family.  As I sat in front of a plate of red curry with tofu at one of my favorite local thai restaurants, I realized something: I really couldn’t eat any more tofu. My system had been sending messages about the over-abundance of soy in my diet and here, faced with one of my favorite dishes, I just couldn’t do it. As I picked out the pieces of tofu, I had a feeling the end of being veg was near. But that wasn’t what ultimately did it.

One evening I was sitting in the audience of my son’s third grade play, filled with pride and excitement. I love my son and seeing him up on stage with his class having fun filled me with joy. But that joy was seriously tempered by something – the unavoidable fact that he just didn’t look that great.  Pale and horribly thin, my son wasn’t the face of anything happy or thriving. He looked drained and he looked tired and he looked fucking thin.

So after a long talk with my wife we decided the time had come: we were going to return to meat. I posted a tweet on twitter asking for places in town that would be good for a first non-veg meal and of course I was met with a symphony of veg tweeters who said ‘don’t do it’. We ended up deciding on a local BBQ place we had read good things about and decided to take the plunge. It was horrid. Not only was the food mediocre but I found it very difficult to dispel almost 6 years of aversion to meat. To make matters worse, my system got completely trashed. Had I made a wrong decision?

The next time out wasn’t nearly as bad. I had an amazing pork dish from the chef at the Teardrop Lounge that put all my concerns to rest. After a week I noticed a clear difference in my son. He looked less pale, had more color in his cheeks and had more energy. Also gone were my mid-morning low blood sugar shakes.  I began the road back with my first steak at Laurelhurst Market, my first burger at Foster Burger, and so on.

An entire universe opened up to me. I went from being able to eat at less than a handful of restaurants to being able to eat anywhere and everywhere. I noticed how immediately the gap between me and the rest of the world closed in and how people who hadn’t invited us over for dinner suddenly offered.

For the most part I don’t regret being veg for the period of time that I was. For a lot of the time, for one reason or another, it was the right answer for me, but now I’ve decided to move on. I consider myself a conscious omnivore. I still care about what I put in my mouth and what impact it has in the grand scheme of things. I won’t abandon my feelings but in the same respect I’m not going to feel bad eating meat.

“I’ve got some not great news…. Meg has Lukemia”. My brother’s shaky voice breaks my heart, it shatters right there even though we are 1500 miles a part.  Cancer is the big white elephant in the room, it’s something that almost everyone will be touched by, even if its effects aren’t direct… it’s something that someone you know or someone you love will ultimately face and unfortunately I’ve had to face it several times before.

This whole situation is even more complex, you see the woman in question who now has to grapple with this horrid disease is the same one whose barred me and my family from seeing my niece and nephew.  My first thought on hearing the news (aside from deep empathy for my brother) was that somehow the grappling with this disease had some impact on the way in which she dealt with the world and therefore with us.  How long had cancer lurked under the surface before it reared its ugly head? It doesn’t matter anymore, Cancer ends family feuds, it’s the ultimate trump card in any argument and it’s the kind of thing that you simply drop all your shit for and do everything you can to help.

The whole thing was a sobering reminder to me not to delay the enjoyment of my life. On a walk home from a haircut I got that day, I was walking hand and hand with my son Aaron and I said to him “you know I love you, no matter what…. Whatever you do, I will always love you.”  That’s the kind of stuff we SHOULD be saying to our kids, and hearing the news that my brother and his wife are now hand in hand in a fight for her life was just the kind of kick in the pants to remind me to make sure I say the kinds of things to my kids that a father SHOULD say…These kinds of things DON’T Go without saying,

The moments in the day since that I am alone with my thoughts I run the what if scenarios through my head. How could my brother survive the loss of his wife, be a lawyer and raise two kids?  The answer is, I hope he never has to find out. But if this story doesn’t have a happy ending, I belive in the amazing capacity of people, to survive and transcend tragedies. My deep hope is that this is something that Jeremy and Meg can beat, if not for good, at least for a good long time.

Fucking Cancer.

Walking The Talk all started with the entire family walking out the door and down the street for Sunday Brunch. It continued the day school started and instead of piling the kids on a school bus, we walked them to school but to me the real walking the talk happened the other night when my wife Heather and I went on a date.

With three kids, date nights only happen about once a month (or when we can get a sitter). It’s always a rush of freedom as we used to hop in the car and drive downtown for dinner, a movie or a show and some drinks. The thrill was even grater this date night as we walked down the driveway towards the car and then took a sharp right walking down the sidewalk and off to our date.

Walking on our date gave us an opportunity to really talk. The dynamic is much different when you’re in a car talking then when you are walking. The world slowly creeping by gives a different setting for a real talk, it changes the tempo, it alters the way you communicate.

The first stop on our date was Sivalaya Thai, a local neighborhood restaurant where the family who runs it always makes you feel at home. Sivalaya is one of the few Thai restaurants where complimentary appetizers, Thai iced tea and mango with sticky rice can accompany a meal. We sat and had a nice long and leisurely dinner, after all without a car, there was absolutely nowhere to rush to,

We had intended to make a stop a my favorite local beer shop/pub Belmont Station after eating dinner, but we were so stuffed from dinner we decided we needed to ‘walk it off’ before we did any drinks or dessert. So we walked, and walked and walked. Soon we had meandered our way from 48Th and Stark to 7Th and Morrison! With the heart of the city in our sights we felt an elation equaled to scoring a goal or hitting a home run. After buzzing by many of the bars around LoBu we finally decided to head back up Burnside to The East Burn (a lot less ‘sceney’ than the bars around LoBu).

At The East Burn we sat sipping cocktails and ordered their famous Trinity Fries – A Blend of Russet and Sweet Potato Fries and topped with Fried Leek. Because we hadn’t driven around town, scoured for parking spots, gotten pissed at the ludicrous cover charges at some of the LoBu bars our time at The East Burn was completely relaxed a fun. A nice romantic moonlight walk home with a crisp night air was the finale of our walking date. As we were walking we tried to estimate just how far we had walked that night.

The next day I popped on Map My Fitness and plotted our route. 5.6 miles! My jaw dropped. I couldn’t believe how much ground we covered on our date. This experience would not have been even remotely similar if we had gone by car, not just from an environmentally point of view, but from an experiential one. Life is different when you experience it by foot and the more I walk the talk, the more I can’t imagine living any other way.w

But you can’t go to Ikea and not look, especially when the woman in the returns department tells you that they’re having a sale. I can’t say I totally regret her advice but I can say:

- Shopping at Ikea on a holiday is hell. Think river + Salmon.
- It’s impossible to tell what’s on Sale and what’s just low Ikea prices.
- PB&J Sandwiches are a cheap way to elevate low blood sugar and cranky kids.
- Even though things are cheap I always spend too much money there!

My final take from my trip to Ikea today. Two wastebaskets (one of ours got mangled on the move and we now have 1 more bathroom in the new house), Florescent light bulbs (Ikea’s really do rock, good quality of light) and… Lucky Bamboo (at $1.99 my son said he’d spend his own money on this item of greenery for his new room).

The next time I go to IKEA (and there WILL be a next time), I’m going to go during the week while the rest of humanity is locked in their offices.

One of the many reasons I moved from the South West suburbs of Portland into ‘town’ was I that I do not like to drive. It’s not that I’m a bad driver or that I haven’t driven a lot in my life. In the late eighties and early nineties I used to drive from Northern California to Upstate New York at the start and end of the college school year. I’ve spent a month on the road in the US and have probably logged at least a hundred of thousand of miles in driving in my life. Road trips have their appeal, but the day to day grind of hopping in my car and driving eighteen or so minutes from home to the city was simply getting old.

I’d like to say that I moved because of high oil prices, sure paying $60 a gallon does give you pause, but in moving I traded my fairly cush Washington County property taxes and traded them for the heftier Multnomah County Taxes. Like everyone now a days, I do care about the environment, not in the green washing was so many people have paraded their ecofriendliness of late. My views of environmentalism were shaped back in college after reading books like Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia (which ironically is set in the Pacific Northwest). My senior seminars for the Political Science part of my education: Environmental Politics and Chinese Politics (yeah a pretty good selection in 1991).

But not driving goes beyond the desire to ‘save the environment’, it’s about a quality of life, and experience of the world you don’t get whizzing by at 40 miles an hour. So the first full Sunday we’ve been in the new home we laced up our shoes and walked. From home to Sweet Pea Bakery is just under two miles and the walk through the tree lined streets is a literal breath of fresh air. The walk took the five of us just over thirty minutes (with Ivy in her Bob stroller). Sitting down to our Vegan Sunday brunch there was an added sense of accomplishment. Getting there by foot made the experience all that sweeter.

The family dynamics change when you ‘hoof it’. Rather than being squeezed together in a car, the kids have room to roam. Sibling squabbles happen a lot less when you’re paying attention to them rather than the road ahead of you and the drivers around you. Kids are also a lot more likely to talk to you when you walk with them. Walking hand in hand with my son he expresses his feelings about the move in a way that just wouldn’t happen from the back seat of a car. My daughter skips down the street and then my son follows suit hopping off the steps of houses as we pass. I hold my wife’s hand as she pushes my youngest. There’s a reason why walking is the oldest and trustiest form of transportation.

We did get caught in a late summer shower the last quarter mile of our walk. The rain was part of the whole experience as we dashed between trees to avoid getting soaked. I’ve been talking a long time about improving the quality of my life by getting out of my car and living in an area where life can been done on foot, and this weekend I began to walk the talk.