So, I’m Vegan again.

I managed to be neither vegetarian or vegan for a lot of years. There are a number of reasons for this, but the main reason is laziness garnished with a shiny, shiny layer of complete apathy. I can’t narrow my reasons for committing to veganism again to a single influence, event, or something I read or watched. It just kind of dawned on me that I could and should simply go vegan again. The somewhat painful part is that I understood what I was doing the entire time and just failed to give a shit.

The nice part about going vegan again, when you’re 40 years old much less, is that it’s a fuck of a lot easier than it used to be. Leaving the bay area for other parts of the country provoked what I can only call a panic response in me back then. Where am I going to get food and how will I find out what the fuck is in it when I’m in fill in the blank midwestern state and don’t have access to my pile of outdated books and bad zines? This is obviously no longer the case. The interwebs have made damned sure that every hysterical rumor, quasi-public misstep by a corporate bigwig, and all of the rest is readily and perpetually available for everyone in the world to misread, misinterpret, and pass along haphazardly. Yeah, so that part hasn’t changed a whole lot. In the old days there was a bit

Food (especially the delicious convenience kind that I oh so totally love) of the vegan sort is ridiculously available in chain supermarkets and a lot of normal restaurants offer explicitly vegan options on their menus. Eating on the road and out of your familiar surroundings is no longer a game of read the ingredients and hope they aren’t animal derived. The vegan revolution sort of already happened and I wasn’t paying attention for the better part of a decade. That was a mistake that I’m refusing to make any more. I need to make up for a lot of years of sleeping at the wheel. I’m glad others kept moving.