Alpha Broccoli

Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

Alpha Broccoli — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 14:37:13 +0000

Life has been pretty rough in past few weeks. Ever since I got back to the Sauerkraut Kingdom a week ago, I was confronted with meat on a daily basis.

I realized it might not be the best time for going strictly vegetarian (and transitioning into veganism afterwards) because:

I possibly cannot get a vegetarian meal anywhere close to my college, unless it’s fried cheese with fries. No, thanks, I have had enough cholesterol and free radicals already.
I shouldn’t jeopardize my effort with alcohol because I didn’t even know how & I ended up feasting on meat.
I’ve been experiencing a severe back pain, to the extend I cannot sleep because of it. Usually I am glad to find a comfortable position but walking and sitting still hurt, and I cannot imagine dragging full grocery bags all around the city.
If something is marked as vegetarian, it means it contains shitloads of cheese. I like cheese, but having blue cheese, ementaler, camembert and God knows what else in one sandwich makes me feel sick to my stomach.

I’m not giving up though! I just thought it would be a lot easier.

The Vegan Quest: Thoughts, Views & Ideals

Alpha Broccoli — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 23:01:40 +0000

It’s a lovely March and I’ve been stuck with bronchitis in Baconland for a good week now. Normally, I would be furious for sleeping all days long with an Illness (which is not fun at all) but if it was not for bronchitis, I wouldn’t stumble upon broccoli-loads of vegan info last night.

As I noted in my last post, my desire to go vegan has not been driven solely by ethical aspects (even though it’s definitely one of the most crucial ones to me).

Innie, minnie, miney, mooo.

As all the vegans, I am deeply convinced that vegan diet will be beneficial to my overall health. Meat and dairy products have made me feel physically sick recently (just to clarify, we are talking about chicken meat here) and triggered my eczema. Once I stopped nomnoming on dairy, eczema was gone in 2 days! One cannot possibly understand how awesome it is to wake up without bloody scratches all over one’s legs. And that’s only one of the health benefits a vegan diet can offer.

Then, there’s the aforementioned animal cruelty issue. Animals are social creatures and they have feelings. Reading Skinny Bitch, the modern wannabe-vegan bible, was totally eye-opening. I know a whole lot about animal abuse and the situation at slaughterhouses but I was turning my head away, pretending that having the traditional Baconland cheese is just okay. Cottage cheese, milk, eggs, poultry, fish, ham, and yes, even occasional bacon & cheeseburgers (There. I admitted it. Le sigh.) – I acted as if animals did not have to die or suffer for this. (I expect some speciesism-soaked comments on this part, though you should know they’re not going to make me change my mind. If you can enjoy your steak, I’m happy for you; however, I simply cannot.)

Moreover, change is the spice of life. Now that I am not going to eat at random restaurants or grab a cheeseburger at a random fastfood, I am absolutely excited about cooking, grocery shopping and experimenting in the kitchen. Needless to say, I am not the I-would-give-a-kidney-for-a-good-meal kind of person but hey, it will be awesome to actually enjoy food for once! No more old food combos, fullstop.

Ideally, the Vegan Quest will make me feel a lot healthier and oh boy, cannot I wait for it to happen. For now, I am going to stick to vegan diet with some vegetarian meals & snacks thrown in; I need some time to figure out where to get all the veg groceries anyway.

Love & vitamins,
Alpha Broccoli

PS: If you don’t have a copy of Skinny Bitch yet, go and get one tomorrow. It’s a must-read!

Of the Vegan Quest and Vitamin Rainbows

Alpha Broccoli — Wed, 02 Mar 2011 10:26:30 +0000

Alright, a confession has to be made. When I was a baby, I wasn’t a Baby Broccoli. I was a Caterpillar obsessively shoving anything I was served down my throat. However, as I started elementary school, my concerns about meat started to grow. Truth to be said, I never really liked the taste of meat and was noticeably disturbed by the animal fat even at the age of 8. In 7th grade, I stopped eating lunches at the school cafeteria because, let’s face it, I couldn’t choose a veggie option. What I could choose from was pork with potato mash and pork with rice and if the Heavens heard me out and sent a vegetarian/vegan option my way, it usually was something disgusting like pasta with potatoes and paprika, pasta with cocoa or plain 2-inch spaghetti with a spoonful of cheese. Don’t even ask. I will never ever phantom who kept putting such an awful menu together for so many years because by the time I left for high school, nothing had changed.

At the age of 16, I got my first part-time job – at McDonald’s. The very first day, I was lucky to land directly at the monstrous grill and deep-frozen patties. That experience temporarily shook my oh-whatever-I-still-can-eat-chicken-and-cheeseburgers attitude because the patties were white or if lucky, light pink (yuck!); I had to make them edible in approximately 2 minutes which is totally healthy, right?; I had to scrape the fat and other remains off the grill every now and then (double yuck!); and finally, the evil grill gave me a 2nd degree burn on my knuckles. It took me 17 days to quit.

University has surely been the best thing to happen to me so far. Moving away from Baconland (or more precisely, the Cheese-Milk-Meat-Bacon Kingdom), my home country, was a ticket to eating whatever I wanted to. However, you can imagine that being given so much freedom goes wrong sometimes and I wasn’t an exception. It was a rollercoaster ride, eating vegetarian/vegan on and off until I realized that meat is not good for my body. (This statement has more to do with my food preferences than with ethical issues and whatnot even though ethics has played an important role, too. I will cover this in the next post.)

So, I have been on the Vegan Quest. When I was younger, I could not appreciate the taste of fruits and veggies because I was brought up in the Cheese-Milk-Meat-Bacon Kingdom and neither could I have the last say when it came to family lunches (I successfully boycotted read meat, though!). There are so many myths about vegetarianism and veganism it gives me adrenaline rush. So, if I were the queen of the world, I would, among gazillion other things, make a public statement that vegetarians and vegans are not crazy hippies in oversized Greenpeace T-shirts who are slowly trying to kill themselves because plant-based diet is not fatal (and neither meat-based diet is. Your choice). Oh, and I would require all the supermarkets to sort their fruits and veggies according to colour so you would see a rainbow every time you have walked in. Yum.

Love & vitamins,
Alpha Broccoli