Before college, I had only heard of a handful of health trends and allergy-friendly diets. My mom had the South Beach diet cookbook, a girl I knew in high school tested out the Daniel fast, my best friend was a vegetarian and that’s about it. Coming to college opened up a whole new world of health-conscious eating, one of the most prominent being veganism.
For those of you who don’t know, here’s a summarized background on veganism: The Vegan Society was founded in 1944 by a man named Donald Watson. Watson and his group had initially gone by “non-dairy vegetarians” and actually created the word “vegan” to effectively set them apart.
According to the website The Vegan Society, “[Watson and his friends] settled on ‘vegan’, a word that Watson later described as containing the first three and last two letters of ‘vegetarian.’ In the words of Donald Watson, it marked ‘the beginning and end of vegetarian.’”
The Vegan Society was founded about 75 years ago, but there are insinuations that animal product avoidance diets have been around for over 2,000 years.
The society has a wordy, disproportionately long definition for vegan but what it’s essentially saying is: “We aren’t going to eat or utilize any product or food that originated from an animal.”
Modern-day veganism takes it a step further and comments on the ecological friendliness of the diet as well. Hannah Fryling, a junior Spanish/TESOL major who was a vegan for almost a year, said what motivated her was the idea of “a healthier lifestyle that had a lower environmental impact.”
This alternative diet has been around for a while but is just now gaining real traction. An article found on a website entitled LiveKindly discusses the impact that the vegan movement has made on colleges around the United States and says that the amount of vegan college students have doubled in the past ten years.
We could talk statistics all day long, but those are just numbers. I spoke with three Union students who had been vegan at some point in their lives and have now renounced or altered the lifestyle for one reason or another. While talking with them, four clear stages of the vegan romance, if you will, became clear to me. I’ll walk through each one to give you a taste of what real-life vegan eating may look like.
1. The Honeymoon Stage
At the beginning of anything and everything there is a honeymoon stage: relationships, college life, jobs, doing your own laundry, and of course, changes in eating habits. Depending on various factors, this stage can last anywhere from mere moments to years.
For example, doing your own laundry can seem neat at first. Learning new things, being an adult, buying laundry detergent, but then you have to separate whites from darks and you get confused. Is denim light enough to be considered a white? Maybe these darker jeans should go in with the darks. Shouldn’t all denim go together?
BOOM.
Honeymoon stage has been entered into and trekked through in less than a minute. Based on the research done for this article, it appears that the average honeymoon stage for a vegan eating college student is about six months to one year.
Liz Caldwell, junior creative writing major, said she was vegan for a month and a half at the beginning of the 2018 fall school semester after investigating for herself what the pros and cons were of the diet.
“I had done a lot of research on dairy and just [about] the stuff that’s actually in cow’s milk and how we’re actually really not supposed to be drinking cow’s milk,” said Caldwell. “We’re the only species that drinks another animals’ milk, especially past infanthood.”
She also listened to the advice of others.
“My cousin is a pharmacist and [said] ‘You do know that eating deli meat or any meat that you buy at the store is actually increasing your risk of cancer by 30%,’” said Caldwell. “You hear that every day, that deodorant causes cancer or something, but this one was legit – it’s [well known] in the medical world how much meat is actually hurting you more than helping you. So, I just quit and had meat supplements.”
[I am now thinking about the deli ham sitting in my fridge drawer and am making a mental note to throw it in the trash when I get home.]
Abigail Wolfzorn, junior studio art major, was vegan for her first two years of college.
“I decided to go vegan after I began having digestion issues,” said Wolfzorn. “I had heard good things about it, so without much additional information, tried it for a week. I felt great and so I did more and more research, and believed it was the most ethical choice at the time, as welI as the healthiest.”
2. The Reality Slap
Veganism has some really great sounding benefits: standing up for a cause and having a healthier eating style. However, especially in college environments, it can be harder than you think to stick to this type of eating style. Anyone with food allergies or a restrictive diet knows how challenging it can be to find things everywhere that they can eat. Restaurants are sometimes the biggest culprits. And college dining halls? Don’t even think about it.
“I do not think it is healthy or sustainable for everyone in every context,” said Fryling. “I don’t feel like it is sustainable for me right now while I’m at school.”
More specifically, it seems like there just aren’t enough vegan friendly possibilities to choose from.
“There are options, but when I was vegan, I could only eat veggie wraps, fries, burrito bowls, rice and salads in Cobo or the Lex,” said Fryling. “So it was impossible for me to get enough calories and stay full without supplementing [some of] my own food.”
Not only is it difficult to find food you can have, but there’s a certain stigma attached to veganism as well. Wolfzorn experienced criticism from those around her when it came to her decision to be vegan, not only because of how she ate but her beliefs attached to it as well.
“That you only eat salad, you can’t have cookies or brownies and people freaked out when I said I could make vegan cookies. They think that you don’t care enough about people, sometimes, too,” Wolfzorn said. “Like, ‘Oh you’re vegan? Are there not enough problems with people starving?’ I remember telling someone, ‘Oh yeah I forgot that rule where you can only care about one thing at a time.’”
Fryling also stressed that what is expected of vegans is usually not reality.
“I think that many people expect vegans to be like these hippie, animal-loving, judgmental people,” Fryling said. “I think that there are vegans who are super aggressive about their veganism and look down on others who eat animal products.”
3. The ‘I Like You As A Friend’ Stage
It is common knowledge that one day you may reach a point in a relationship with your significant other when you decide that you’d rather have them as a friend than a boyfriend/girlfriend. But did you know that this can also be applied to food?
This can occur when the idea of something may be better than the reality of something and a breakup is nigh. Breaking up is where the vegan dating metaphor ends, but logistically a ‘Food Break Up’ can be brought on by a myriad of reasons.
“This is a long story, but I stopped [eating vegan] because I stopped feeling like I was at my peak,” Wolfzorn said. “At the beginning/transition I felt fantastic! But it was difficult to get all of what I needed, unless you are in control of what you eat, and I’m not, being a college student. I also read lots of books and views from omnivore perspectives and began to wonder if eating animals or animal products is not inherently bad, but the amount at which they are consumed really should embarrass us.”
Caldwell emphasizes that listening to your body is key in any relationship with food, vegan or otherwise. Sometimes, the vegan way is not the healthiest way for your body and that’s okay.
“There are assumptions that people think veganism is the healthy choice, and for some people it’s not,” Caldwell said. “You really have to listen to your body ultimately. No matter what you’re doing: exercising, eating, even mental stuff, you absolutely have to pay attention to your body so I would really caution people. Yeah, I tried it and now I have to eat red meat on occasion, and I feel better.”
Caldwell has altered her former vegan lifestyle to fit what her body specifically needs. She doesn’t eat dairy or meat most of the time, but says that on occasion she will “down some Halo Top ice cream.”
4. The Skinny on Vegan Eating
Veganism has its good and bad moments – any sort of altered diet will. I received vastly distinct responses from each of the people I interviewed because each of their bodies reacted differently to the vegan lifestyle. All of them seem to agree on one large idea though, that moderation is key in determining the best eating style for your body.
“There should be no shame in how someone chooses to fuel their body,” said Wolfzorn. “If you are convicted, go vegan, without condemning others for not. We are all at our own places and journeys and trying to figure it all out. On the flip side, those who aren’t vegans could really let back on the jokes. We’ve heard them all, and they don’t get much funnier over time. I would love if we could all support one another in these endeavors!”
At the end of the day, how you choose to nourish your body is completely up to you and no matter what your food journey currently looks like, I wish you a hearty good luck in your search for life, liberty and the pursuit of healthiness. In the meantime, please enjoy this picture of a very elderly and kind-looking Donald Watson.
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“Your mental health is so much more important than any diet or trend. You only have one life, and it is way too precious to spend it counting calories and obsessing over how healthy certain foods are. Love your body well because it does so much for you.” – the wise Hannah Fryling
Photo by Tamara Friesen