How It All Cheegan

My diet growing up was suburban meat & potatoes with a twist of healthy (i.e., we weren't allowed sugar cereals or junk food, and were made to eat whole-wheat bread and wheat germ, therefore I considered myself practically an abused child compared to the kids who got to eat Twinkies and crap like that). I was also exactly like that kid Randy in A Christmas Story who wouldn't eat his dinner, so every night at the dinner table was a major struggle as I was coaxed and urged to swallow whatever it was that I didn't like this time that I was pack-ratting in my cheeks.

I became vegetarian in college once I started meeting other vegetarians and had access to the veggie line at the dining hall. The change was pretty intuitive and didn't require much deliberation. I'd always been pretty grossed out by a lot of meats anyway and had had a bunch of proto-vegetarian moments during a childhood trip to Ireland. I still wasn't too hep on veggies, though, and was basically a cheeseatarian who lived on quesadillas, mac & cheese, pizza, and omelettes.

Later, during the dot-com boom, my dot-com job afforded me lots of Internet time, so I poked around the vegetarian websites. After reading/seeing the pamphlet Why Vegan? I didn't want be a party to the atrocities I'd just learned about. It was time to say goodbye to my old friend cheese.

Going vegan was much more of a lifestyle change than going vegetarian and was akin to a religious conversion--I bought a bunch of books to learn all about it, I gave away lot of my old wool clothes and leather shoes. I was really into it; it was my hobby. I cooked something new every night. (There were fewer soy cheeses on the market back then, but I had The Uncheese Cookbook to ease my transition, which yielded results of varying degrees of success.) My pantry was full of exotic new ingredients. I dragged friends to health food stores to help me find mystery ingredients like agar and nutritional yeast. I felt like I was doing something good. And it did good by me, too; the occasional interloping zit went away for good, I lost some weight, my cholesterol level disappeared, I just felt better overall.

For three years, I didn't look back. I was a model vegan. I was informed, I read every ingredient, didn't consider cheating, cooked often. Well, OK, once in awhile I thought about my old pal cheese and wondered what it would be like if we got together. I encountered a lot of people who used to be vegan. At first I'd felt a bit disappointed when they told me that. Like, why give up on it?

So then I went to Scotland, in the springtime, and all the cute baby lambs and calves and goats and creatures I saw there were living better lives than I led back in Brooklyn. On the idyllic isle of Mull, we stopped in a wee shop, and they were selling cheese made from those happy animals on that very island.

That cheese was a glorious, unparalleled flavor explosion in my delighted mouth. Soon after returning from that trip, I was quite unexpectedly dumped, and decided that I was therefore allowed to have cheese. I went on a bit of a cheese bender with help from a fellow wayward vegan, shoving cube after cube of cheddar in our mouths at a party and talking about what jerks stupid jerk guys were.

But the thing was...never mind that my stomach was none too happy about this dietary invader. It just wasn't the same. Gooey, heavy cheese no longer felt as much like essential food as it used to, in my mouth and throat it felt (to quote another veegs-ish friend of mine) mucousy. Now that I'm not used to it anymore, I've never wanted real cheese as a large part of a meal since--mac cheese and quesadillas would be way too much. Cubes of sharp cheddar at a party, though? All bets are off. Down the hatch!!!

So now that the seal has been broken, I've never gone back to hardline veganism. There are probably a number of reasons, one being that my beliefs about food have just relaxed over time. I still think it's healthy and good for the planet and all that...ah, we can get into this angle later. But I eat loads more real veggies than when I was cheeseatarian--in fact, if you showed young me (even teenage me) what my diet would eventually become, I would've been horrified--and now I even really like kale.

So I'm mostly vegan. Except for occasional cheese. Or other little cheats here and there (often in the name of trying something new). That's why I'm a cheegan.

By the way, I invented this word.
P.S. After Googling it: no I didn't. But I shall popularize it!