Becoming Un-vegan

For fourteen years our family ate a mostly-vegan diet. We were house-vegans. We only ate vegan at home but when we visited other people's homes or celebrated family holidays we would eat what people served.

I threw my full-time homemaker efforts into this way of eating. I gestated and birthed two babies on this diet, raised three children from infancy to pre-teen/teen years. Damien and I taught plant-based diet courses in our living to friends. I wrote about it on my blog and published freelance essays and articles for other sources.

And then some stuff happened in our life and I stopped eating this way. But not without a lot of processing the change in my decision along the way. (I don't do much without a lot of processing!)

This series is all about that processing. In this series I dive into:

• why we started eating vegan, why I stopped being mostly-vegan, and why I would go vegan again (if I do).
• how food and cooking has been closely tied to my identity as wife and mother, and how I needed release from that.
• redefining health more holistically.
• how complicated food, eating, and cooking is and my own experience with the familial, cultural, cognitive, and spiritual reasons for that.
• what our family eats these days and how we share the cooking responsibility.
• the importance of food culture and hospitality in building relationships and community, how hard this can be with everything I've already mentioned, but how our spirits need to do it anyway.

Food matters, a lot. It matters globally, locally, and individually. It matters in our bodies and in our families. This is my food story, thus far, I invite you around the table to share it.

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