On Becoming Vegan
Like the green sea turtle, I began my life as an omnivore and moved in steps towards an herbivorous diet. The first steps were driven by health, but the last were ethical. Transitioning sex and gender echoed those awakenings.
Minor traumas ate at my conscience over the years. I cried over the dead birds found in the backyard, shot a grasshopper with a BB gun as a preteen and can’t forget the image of the BB lodged in its hip. There were dissections of formaldehyde-preserved worms, fetal pigs, and frogs in middle school and high school that pained me. One summer, I worked at a farm picking eggs from chickens in cramped cages, their feathers flying through the air like snowflakes. At the end of the summer, I had to pull them out of the cages by their feet, screeching, as they were sent to slaughter.
Some biology labs in university required me to pith live frogs and apply drugs to their beating hearts, still in their chests. My undergraduate and graduate research theses were at the expense of neurons dissected from live pond snails. “Now I’m a vivisectionist,” I whispered to myself. For animal welfare purposes, they weren’t considered animals that required protection. One lab had me cut the tails of unanesthetized rats to collect blood as they screamed, and destroy a brain region in mice to see if it changed the way they learned. Many studies required me to pick up the docile rats or mice, give them a fatal overdose, decapitate them, and remove their beating hearts or live brains for study. The final psychic blow occurred when I had to decapitate newborn mice and remove their moving limbs.
None of this was ethical to me, but fine by research standards at the time, and I went against my principles to move ahead in my career.
By the time I was a university professor, I couldn’t continue doing animal experiments and dreamed of changing careers to the pharmaceutical industry. Specifically, clinical research, where people who could consent were the subjects, rather than defenceless animals.
Unfortunately, the first company that hired me wanted me to manage their animal research. I left my employees to do their own thing and focused on medical writing and human studies. The next company had me set up a lab to work on cultured cells derived from a human cancer patient, and I had no ethical issues or traumas. That was until they asked me to set up yet another rat brain experiment and kill more rats. It was time to go.
I went to work for a multinational pharmaceutical company’s medical division in 2004, happily putting animal research behind me, but I was still an omnivore. I maintained that mental wall between animals as pets and animals as food. But deep down, I knew that we were all animals with hopes and dreams.
Then, at a company meeting, they offered free cholesterol testing. Their cholesterol drug was bringing in billions of dollars, and heart health was a big selling point for the company. I walked up to the table, and a nurse pricked my finger and put the drop of blood into her tabletop testing machine. A few minutes later, she handed me a printout that said my bad cholesterol (LDL) and total cholesterol were above normal and that I should talk to my doctor. I didn’t exercise much on the road and ate hotel breakfasts consisting mostly of scrambled eggs and fried potatoes. Dinner was often a steak or something else greasy, served at restaurants in Calgary, Edmonton, or Montreal.
The cholesterol drug was covered at 100% by my extended health insurance since it was a company drug, but I wasn’t excited about starting my first regular prescription at the age of 38. I brought my Framingham heart risk calculations to my doctor, and we decided that I could hold off on taking a drug for about ten years, and if my cholesterol was still high, we’d revisit our decision.
I decided to treat my cholesterol like every other experiment I’d done as a scientist and see what I could do to lower it without drugs. First, I cut out cheese, eggs, and red meat. Some of the doctors I worked with warned me that red meat was essential for iron, and I’d need a supplement to prevent anemia, but it never happened. I also started working out on hotel treadmills, and my cholesterol came down to the upper limit of normal. I avoided taking my own company’s drug.
Over my years with the company, red flags popped up, and I noticed unethical behaviour creeping in. During my first week of training, I discovered that part of our job was to build each doctor’s “allegiance” to the company brand. It wasn’t what I signed up for, and my supervisor assured me that I could ignore what marketing pushed and stick to medical research and science.
Unfortunately, they replaced my supervisor with a marketing-minded colleague, and she said, “He [our boss] wants to know what you’re doing. He doesn’t think you’re doing enough to raise the company profile in Western Canada, and wants to see you setting up big deals with high-profile doctors.” It was within weeks of that 2007 meeting that I had my “Idiocracy Moment,” where, after seeing the movie Idiocracy, a light bulb went off and I saw all the unfair and unethical things around me. I realized I had to leave the industry and go back to teaching.
It all went well until a series of traumatic run-ins with students and department heads in 2012 and 2013 that set me on a return trip to anxiety and depression. I worked through a cognitive behavioural therapy program called BounceBack and began to rediscover my own ethical leanings.
I told Sarah that I needed to eat vegan at the end of our December 2013 vacation in Hawaii because I couldn’t bear to hurt animals anymore. It was a few days after we celebrated Sarah’s birthday at a posh seafood restaurant and posed with our meals. What was once a magnificent tuna was reduced to a small piece of muscle, lightly seared. There’s a picture of me making a tired half smile as I look down at what was left of the animal on a bed of asparagus. It was the last creature I ate.
The wall I’d erected between the animals I ate and myself as a species had broken down irreparably. To borrow from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, I realized that animals are not mine. The animals I ate and who produced the milk and eggs were all capable of feeling pleasure and joy, and when I used them for food, I deprived them of that pleasure and joy, or worse, consigned them to a short life of captivity and torture.
If I couldn’t farm or eat another human, or eat a pet like a cat or dog, how could I do that to any other living being when there were alternatives? It’s another story, but I realized I couldn’t keep pets either.
Sarah loved to cook and pored over the recipes in Bon Appétit magazine, clipping the ones she’d make and filing them in three-ring binders. I knew I was orchestrating yet another heartbreak because of my “fragile” mental health. First depression, now veganism. What was next?
2014 was a year of adjustments as I searched out and tried substitutes for milk, butter, cheese, and eggs, learning that we didn’t have to change our diet much. Many of our regular recipes were vegetarian already, thanks to our most well-worn cookbook, Fast Vegetarian Feasts by Margaret Rose Schulman. My first attempt at pancakes didn’t go well, but they improved with the right substitutes and technique.
I also donated leather and wool clothes, including two once-beloved leather jackets I wore when I rode motorcycles, prized belts and shoes, and sweaters Sarah gave me as gifts (I think she wears the sweaters now, so they’re not completely gone from our lives). Even shampoo, bar soap, dish soap, laundry detergent, and lotion were replaced with vegan alternatives. One of the biggest surprises was that Rogers brand sugar was whitened using bone char at the time (they’ve since gone vegan).
Portia De Rossi jokes that it was harder to come out as a vegan than as a lesbian. I know what she means. I can avoid talking about sexual orientation and gender identity in social gatherings, but there’s nearly always food, and if I want something to eat, I have to make certain that a restaurant has vegan options. If it’s a potluck, I need to bring something I can eat and be content if that’s all I can eat. Sarah is forever explaining what I can’t eat when arranging dinners with friends.
Once at a restaurant, I feel like I’m making a scene when I ask about ingredients, and at friends’ homes, the inquisition is even more personal. But like transitioning, it was something I needed to do, and it wasn’t a choice once the realization struck. Fortunately, there are plant-based restaurants and more choices at the grocery store than I imagined possible in 2013. News stories about animal abuse on farms, food poisonings, avian flu, and the effects of farming animals on the climate have all reinforced my ethical resolve.
Apparently, I wasn’t alone in my journey from health to ethics to veganism. Famed Michelin-starred chef Alexis Gauthier was diagnosed with fatty liver in 2010, faced protests outside his restaurant over his use of foie gras, became vegan in 2015, and made his restaurants fully vegan in 2021. He writes about a similar arc where he realized that his accomplishments and awards in the culinary arts, like mine in science, were at the expense of animals. He wrote in May this year, “If you are a chef, a cook, a creator—if you feel the flicker of discomfort when you prep a foie gras torchon or break down a crate of lobsters—know this: that flicker is a flame. Don’t smother it. There is no more time to wait. The animals cannot wait. The planet cannot wait. And your own soul—however buried beneath the rituals of service and tradition—cannot wait.”
The magnitude of my changing gender in 2016 can’t be compared to becoming vegan in 2014, but the steps along the way felt similar. I was compelled by personal realizations in both cases. The social resistance to both caused me fear and to hesitate in making both changes. Both involved learning how such things were possible, and there’s an ongoing decision to “come out” when meeting new people.
Becoming vegan prepared me for fighting internal and external resistance to changing sex and gender. It also relieved that niggling anxiety I faced every time I consumed something made from or by an animal and allowed me to confront my deeper anxieties about sex and gender.
Like imagining a world at peace, without war, poverty, or hunger, I imagine a world where we live as herbivores and let animals live their own natural lives.
What did you think? How are you doing? I’d love to chat…