I'm a vegan. You know, those smug, preachy, in-your-face people who ambush you whenever you sit down to eat, even in the privacy of your own home--how the hell do they keep getting in, anyway?--and are all, "What is wrong with you??? Do you not have any conscience??? Besides, all the cool Hollywood people are vegan nowadays." Because I'll let you in on the truth about us vegans, gentle reader: it's not really about the animals. Screw the animals. We just want to be as cool and pretty as Lea Michele.
Anyway, I'm a vegan. Now, my son eats anything he will agree to eat, because he is three and picky, and getting him to consent to ingest calories in any form is hard enough as it is. Still, because I do all the cooking, he mostly chows on members of the plant kingdom. And my husband has settled on being a vegetarian, particularly after what I like to call the Hot Dog Incident. (OK, so, after several months of eating nothing non-vegan aside from the occasional scoop of gelato, let's say your son rejects a $4 beef hot dog on the grounds that it tastes weird compared to his personal benchmark, namely the tofu dogs he usually scarfs down at home. What you should not do is get all concerned about wasting food and money and decide to eat it yourself. Especially not on a long road trip, when you--and all sounds or smells you might forthwith produce--are in close confines with your helpless, innocent wife. But let us say no more about that painful scene.)
We don't own a car ourselves, nor do we live near a store, and did I mention the three-year-old, who insists on being carried everywhere? So we get a lot of our groceries delivered by a company named Peapod. So many, in fact, that they made us "VIPeas." No regular peas, us. One of the perks of being a VIPea is that once a month we get to select from a list of free products. We've scored a lot of free berries that way, and sometimes some free chocolate. I never met a berry I didn't like and subsequently devour, so I was all excited to see what was on offer for August. And this is the list:
I'm not sure if you can read that, but it offers us our free choice of one of the following: cheese tortellini, fat-free cow milk, sliced ham, a cobb salad, ice cream, and beef patties. If you are not vegan, the best way to understand how this list looks to one is to imagine that someone offered you--free!--your choice of squished cockroaches, a sack of sawdust, a brick sandwich (two pieces of bread with a brick in the middle), or braised zombie brains. Yum yum. Your selection, sir/ma'am?
Now it is of course obvious, due to my untreated paranoia, that these offers are personally aimed at me and my lettuce-munching lifestyle. Equally obviously, they are intended to make me throw Lea Michele under the bus and chow down on some flesh. But here's the question my paranoia requires be answered: what is the exact nuance of this message? Because, you see, there are a lot of reasons for deprogramming vegans. I have been informed that about ten of them are bacon, and at least another six are our constant home-invasions to yell abuse at non-vegans. But here's the thing: Peapod doesn't have a home because it isn't people. ("Peaple" maybe, but not people.) And none of the items on offer are bacon. So there must be some other message they are trying to give me, some other particular reason why they want me to leave the vegan fold. And upon reflection, this is the list of possibilities I have come up with:
1. Peapod wants to fatten my scrawny vegan ass up. With this possibility, I am conjecturing that Peapod knows, probably from ever reading the internet, that all vegans are pale and bony. Ergo, my cheeks need some filling out...I guess I also must need some more skin pigment, but good luck there, Peapod, because I only come in two shades: fish-belly white and the-daystar-burns-us-precious red. (Wouldn't those make great names for paint chips?)
The problem with this theory is that I'm not all that emaciated. I'm sort of a normal weight, except that when I put on underpants, they give me a mini-muffin top. Mostly the rest of my clothes conceal this, except when I try to wear something tight enough to reveal my curves, and then, well, those underpants-induced curves show up, too, like an hourglass with a weird extra bend in it, the sort of thing that might result from someone sneaking up behind the glassblower and yelling "BOO!" at a crucial moment. (The solution, of course, is to stop wearing underpants. Um, the solution to my pantie-muffin top, that is, not to pranked glassblowers. Frankly, I think the glassblowers can solve their own problems, given that they have ready access to molten glass. In fact, I bet they don't get pranked all that much.) I suppose it is possible that Peapod doesn't know, from reading the internet, that I am the lone exception in the scrawny vegan population. I guess this blog post'll sure set 'em straight, though!
2. Peapod knows I am secretly longing to quit being a vegan and just need some free sliced ham to push me that final step. "After all, how can she resist free ham?" the Peapod execs ask one another at their board meetings. "Finally, she'll be able to face her suppressed desires and embrace her true self again." They're all about the psychological health of their customers, over there at Peapod.
Well, the strange thing is, after you stop eating meat for a while, it also stops looking like food. At first, it just looks like a hassle. What is that in there--sinews? Tendons or something? That I would have to cut out or pound flat or whatever? Or maybe chew and chew and chew and chew until I have to give up and spit it surreptitiously into my napkin? Fuck it, I'm making lentils. Later on, though, you reach this point where you forget that anyone eats meat. The idea of putting something in your fridge that might leak blood all over your bagels becomes entirely foreign. About this time, you happen to have the use of a car for an afternoon, and you go out to a grocery store, and there you are, happily shopping, when all of a sudden there's this weird, bad smell, and you reach the end of the aisle, wondering if maybe a can of moldy soup exploded that morning before they opened and they cleaned as best they could but missed a few spots, and--HOLY JESUS FUCK! THERE ARE DEAD ANIMALS IN THE GROCERY STORE! EW EW EW THAT IS WRONG AND GROSS ON SO MANY LEVELS, WHY THE HELL WOULD--oh, yeah. That's right. Some people eat those. Ummm, yeah.
So, anyway, no, Peapod execs. Your sliced ham does not really tempt me, and I do not secretly wish to consume it. Thanks, though.
3. Peapod is sick and tired of losing money on my cheapo orders of brown rice and broccoli. Buy meat, already! Buy ice cream! Fill your cart with meat and ice cream! Make us money, please!
But I gotta be honest with you, Peapod and/or gentle readers. I don't buy cheap because I'm vegan. (Not that nutritional yeast is all that cheap, mind you.) I buy cheap because I'm a grad student, and I can't afford to eat Gardein and organic veggies at every meal. Now, if you want me to spend more money, you'll have to give me the money to spend, and when you do the math up, that doesn't make any sense, so never mind.
4. Peapod is a secret government organization that runs secret tests on people, and they want to know just what eating animal products does to vegans, anyway. Dear Peapod, gimme a call. Ask about the Hot Dog Incident. That'll be plenty enough data for anyone. Trust me.
