An Amazingly Easy, Tasty Alternative To Grated Cheese

Emily,
It’s been a long process for me. I have always had a huge soft spot for animals (I will go to great lengths to take spiders and other bugs outside, rather than kill them, for example). I grew up on a farm where we had some animals (dairy cows, pigs, chickens, goats, and rabbits), but they were all roaming around wherever they liked, eating grass/scraps/bugs, etc. and having a pretty good life. When I was 12, we moved to the midwest, and I saw feedlots for the first time in my life. I was stunned, and could not believe that animals were kept in those sorts of conditions. Those images have stuck with me ever since.
In college, I gave up meat (but was happily still eating dairy and eggs), and stuck with it for a couple years after college while I was in the Peace Corps. That wasn’t hard to do, since meat was very scarce in my village anyway.
I started eating meat again when my husband and I moved in together, and kept doing so for about the next seven years. But I was never really comfortable with it, mainly from an ethical standpoint.
Then a few years ago, I started learning more about the environmental impact of eating meat; how a meat based diet uses so many more resources than a plant-based diet. A vegan diet for one person can be grown on 1/6 of an acre. For a meat eater, that number increases to 3.25 acres. There simply aren’t enough acres of land on earth to support the sort of meat-based diet that most Americans eat, if everyone on earth were to start eating that way. We are overpopulating our planet, and running out of land on which to grow food. Raising meat is greatly exacerbating that problem, and I want to be part of the solution.
In addition, I’m thoroughly convinced that a vegan diet is better for my health.
One exception I might make would be if we were ever in a situation to have a few backyard chickens (I think they are currently not allowed in our HOA), I wouldn’t mind letting them wander around the yard, eating bugs and laying eggs. I would never eat the chickens themselves though.
I have posted before about my feeling regarding eating at other peoples’ houses… if someone else is cooking for me, I’ll eat whatever they prepare. But that is a relatively rare situation for us – the vast majority of our meals are cooked at home, by me. So although we might never be 100% vegan, we’re pretty close, and that’s ok with me.

Emily,
No problem. I’ve put that book on my list to request it from the library, and I’m interested to read it. I am always trying to learn more about nutrition and the environmental impact of all the things we do, and that won’t happen if one only reads sources that agree with the viewpoints we already hold dear. To be sure, my views have changed on all sorts of issues over the years… if they didn’t, I’d figure that my brain was turning to mush.

Our family is actively working to remove ourselves from the commercial food cycle as much as possible, and we’re spending every spare minute lately out in the yard – digging, mulching, spreading compost, watering trees… it’s very exciting

One thing to note about vegetarianism/veganism: neither are an automatically nutritious diet. Just giving up animal products does not make a person healthy. I go to great lengths to incorporate things like spirulina, hemp seeds, several kinds of seaweed, flax seeds/oils, several kinds of sprouts, sesame seeds, dark green leafy things, and loads of veggies/fruits into our diet. We eat very few grains (other than our morning oats) and we don’t eat refined sugar at all. Our family is in exceptional health, based both on how we feel and the results of physicals. But it’s quite possible to be a very unhealthy, overweight vegan if a person is eating a lot of processed meat substitutes and grains, and not a lot of vegetables. The word “vegan” encompasses a lot of different diets, and they are definitely not all equally good.