Guest post: Steven's Vegan Month

It seems like 'going vegan' is spreading around the world - last week saw an entire episode of Oprah dedicated to veganism, Kathy Freston (who was a guest on Oprah) saw her book Veganist climb to the top of the Amazon.com charts, Kris Carr continued her media tour with her hugely successful vegan book The Crazy Sexy Diet, and the net was abuzz with articles on how you can 'go vegan' successfully.

Here in Ireland, one man who is heading down the vegan path for a month (with a view to possibly even longer) is journalist Steven O'Rourke, who is behind the music blog 4FortyFour and who wrote this great article about going vegetarian last year.

Steve and his wife are vegetarians and recently Steve decided to try and cut all animal products out for a month and see how he goes. And being a writer he has kindly agreed to fill us in here at Adventures in Veg as to how he gets on.

Whether Steve stays vegan or not, I'm delighted to see him try veganism for a month and can't wait to hear how he gets on. I firmly believe that even if you don't stay vegan, once you try veganism and tasty vegan meals, they'll stay part of your cooking repertoire. The proof for me of that is my own boyfriend is a chicken-wing loving omni - who cooks really delicious vegan meals for me at home (when I let him into the kitchen, ha!).

Kathy Freston says we should aim for "progress, not perfection" and personally I really love that.  Every little step counts. And if that step includes homemade vegan haggis and cranberry sauce like in the pic above...then you can't argue with that.

Anyway, without further ado, here's Steve's post - thanks a million Steve and best of luck! Hope you enjoy some delicious animal-free food.

This is what it’s come to. The teen with a pathological fear of greens is turning vegan. Over three years after deciding to embark down the vegetarian route, it seems like the logical next step.

But let’s not start at the end, that wouldn’t make any sense at all. This story begins way back when; at time when the country was broke, had an inept Fianna Fáil government clinging desperately to power and could do little to stop its young people emigrating by the thousand.

In this strange, distant land; a blonde-haired, blue-eyed little boy was growing up in Kildare. He didn’t live on a farm – or a bog – but his grandfather, who lived next door, grew his own fresh veg. Well, he did for as long as he was able. Time and hip replacements wait for no man.

Forced – small town Ireland in the 80s didn’t offer a great deal of choice – to eat processed vegetables, this boy decided enough was enough and that if he couldn’t get home-grown veg, he wasn’t going to eat any at all.

Cabbage cried, mushrooms mourned and tomatoes – fooling nobody by pretending they were fruit – tearfully accepted that their time had passed.

This story has a middle, but it involves lots of awkward teenage mood swings whose shadows stretched far too long into adulthood to be healthy, so we’ll leave it trapped between the clowns and the jokers.

Three years ago, the boy, now a man – his ownership of a stick just for stirring paint was proof of this – decided it was time for a radical change. One simple question, ‘could you bring yourself kill an animal’; set in chain a train of thought that pulled up in ‘WoahWhyDidn’tYouThinkOfThisBeforeVille’.

Okay, that’s not a real place, but he didn’t care, his decision was made. If he couldn’t kill an animal, he wasn’t eating one.

However, more and more, it made less sense that he wouldn’t eat an animal but would still eat animal derivatives produced in equally horrific conditions.

Eggs, milk, cheese. He won’t lie, these are all things he’ll miss but they are products he really wants cut out because they just don’t sit comfortably on his conscience.

By the by, you needn’t worry omnivorous folk, he’s not a vegan nazi. You won’t be wiping blood out of your eyes only to find him at the other end of the bucket anytime some.

Life is about choice. This is his choice. Thanks to Aoife – and her mountains of recipes – this, already, looks like the right one.