The best advice I can give to someone trying to go Vegan:

The first few weeks are tough, because not only are your taste buds experiencing major changes but the rest of your body is too. It takes time to get accustomed. And that’s why many people think it is so hard, but after a week or so you start getting used to it, and ENJOYING your new foods. It is no longer work, it is just simple. I promise you that. Just stick to it for 2 weeks – a month and you’ll see how easy it is to be a vegan, and how happy (and healthy!) you feel.

Now that I am vegan, I feel rather the opposite, while shopping. The smell of cooked flesh disturbs me. So I suppose it’s a matter of self-sugestion. In the past I starved for flesh on Lent, because I felt it like a bereavement of flesh, even if willingly.

After we decided we should become vegan, something happened. At my work, I saw a cooked chicken in a dish, and I know it was destinated to be thrown on the morrow. My first thought was this: «if they throw the chicken, it will polluate; if I eat it, il will poluate less», so I decided to eat it by “mercy”. But when I looked at it, I couldn’t. I was too disgusted to act. I felt it to unnatural. So I threw it by myself, then washed my hands.

And like Bea said, it’s not the taste of “meat” people enjoy necessarily, but all the stuff that it gets dressed up with. So, if you like a particular sauce or garnish, why not try in top of a portabella mushroom or some tempeh instead? I grew up in Western NY, home of the hot wings. I love hot sauce. I make tempeh “wings” that everyone goes nuts for, proving that it’s not the “meat” itself people like, it’s the hot sauce!!!

~ Recent blog post: Food, Inc. ~

I’d love my boyfriend read what you’d written, because it’s one of his common responses when we talk about veganism .

With “it’s natural” and “it’s too hard to give up meat” who often lead to “I admire you for what you do and how you manage to cope with the whole veganism thing”, him and other people seem to have so stereotypic responses that it becomes a little boring.

Bea, you’re right, almost nobody love the taste of unseasoned meat. And raw meat neither !
Meat is bland.
But when I was still omnivorous, the meat (I wasn’t really a meat-eater except for ham or too processed to recognize flesh) I could happily eat sausage meat on steack tartare, but both well seasoned. That was very weird for my mother !
Now, it is weird for me too to think about it.

Thankfully, taste changes, I’m a proof of that.
I began to cook a lot uncommon (for me at least) vegetables since I’ve become a vegan in training.
I love almost all of them, especially those of the cabbage family that french see as “poor man vegetables”.

I’m convinced you can win people hearts and minds with cooking good vegan food and that’s why I cook even more since I live with my bf ! Unfortunatly, there are really few veggies and fruits he likes and it’s so sad (for me, for his diet etc).
Hope his tastebubs will enjoy veggie-based vegan food more often.

” Taste is a trivial thing … we can prioritize …”
I’m ok, but it’s very difficult to really think about what we are doing to animals. And setting (omnivore) food aside and make a change isn’t the number one priority for most people I know.

Thank for your contribution to my reflections.

a little almost vegan frenchie (and sorry for the grammatical or spelling mistakes)

That usually gets people to think a bit… about what foods really do taste like…

~ Recent blog post: About Kids Who Kill & A Culture That Supports It ~