Why I Eat What I Eat.

The people, who know me personally, already know that I do and do not eat a weird combination of things. For example, right now I am completely vegan- except for the fact that I have eggs. I don’t know how no one ever acknowledges this but what you eat is heavily dependent on the people you live with and the people who cook for you. You cannot eat hummus and carrots while everyone else at that table is having a full-fledged meal. I’ve had a lot of people ask me why I have eggs at all. Were eggs the only item that escaped the vegan cut-down because they were so extraordinarily delicious? Well, not really. I simply cannot leave eggs because my family is going to freak out about Vitamin B12 deficiency if I do. And I cannot really blame them. Vegan diets are not a very commonly occurring phenomenon in middle-class Bengali households. So why did I become vegan at all? Let’s go back to the start.

(Just a side-note before I travel back in time to the 90s, this piece of writing is not meant to be a didactic vegan preach-fest. This is not even really a “How to go vegan?” guide. I just realised that I had finally managed to reach a place in my life where I had a sort of sustainable diet plan so I kind of wanted to document that. I know I will leave a lot of aspects unaddressed, if you want anything answered in particular, do feel free to ask me.)

I was born in the mid-1990s and for the first 5 years of my life neither did I know what chicken or mutton was, nor was I remotely interested in it. My older brother had some weird fish-related allergies so my parents weren’t ready to start the food experimentation on me anytime soon. Then the Great Fever Epidemic of 2001 started. Well, that’s an exaggeration. No one got sick but me but trust me when I say that I got sick enough for a hundred people. I couldn’t last a week without getting a fever, and when I did- it lasted for 2 weeks at the bare minimum. Also, I had terrible leg pain. Growing pains? Maybe. In short, I was pre-serum Steve Rogers.

I don’t really remember what the exact cause of the ailments was, but I remember that the doctor recommended some goat bone marrow soup. What a brilliant introduction to mutton. Predictably enough, I was not stoked. I absolutely despised that particular soup and refused to touch any other mutton dish ever again in my life. I did have a mild liking for chicken but it took me exactly one glance at a slaughter shop to get rid of that liking. I should mention something about my slightly peculiar upbringing here. My parents were always adamant about me knowing the truth about animal suffering. So I was roughly four years old when I was told in graphic detail about how silk worms had to be boiled to extract silk. Do you know how they get those shiny large sea shells that they sell at the beach? Well, you don’t want to know. But I knew; that too at a time when I could barely spell my own humongous name.  

So yes, my highly animal-loving family did eat meat themselves but at the same time, they managed to traumatize me quite enough to start hating meat. I don’t blame them, that was possibly one of the best things that they have ever done. So I was sent to a school where I had to cross no meat shops on the way. Other parents cared about the quality of education that their kids were being provided, my parents had the very low target of not having their child go insane. And I am really not exaggerating here, even at 23 I can barely function for a whole day or two if I see animals suffer like that.

But that’s not something that I am proud of. Suffering exists, and shutting your eyes to it makes you one of the worst kinds of hypocrites. I couldn’t see it, so how could I justify eating a delicacy that came from that pain?

I was in class 6 when I stopped having meat, roughly a year after my brother stopped having it. Now I can talk about the extremely peculiar childhood that we had but that’s a story for another day. We kept on having fish because we were basically children and we could only enforce so much of our own will; at least my parents were a bit more liberal than my friends' parents who were shocked at the mere fact that a child had taken that decision all by herself. But believe me when I say this, we found ways around that non-vegetarian diet. (Throwing fish at people is unacceptable. Throwing fish at a mongoose family is fine. They’re not offended, they just eat it and say "So long, and thanks for all the fish.")

Anyway, so this is how things ran for a while until my brother shifted to Bangalore. He didn’t have the same moral objections that I had to eating meat or fish, he just hated how it tasted. So of course when he started living alone, he no longer had to gulp down that daily dose of “kaata pona” anymore. Here I was in Kolkata brewing my own rebellion. I had a pact with my father, once I turned 18, I would stop having fish. My father tried to sort of blackmail me by saying that he would stop having fish too but that worked out the same way as it had when he had issued a similar threat with the meat situation. So in 2013, three members of my family stopped having fish and meat completely.

I get a lot of questions about how I could have stopped having a complete food group in a day and I can write another article about that. But the short version of that answer is- having an eating disorder helps. (I am not glorifying eating disorders. I’ll explain why I said this later on in the article.) From 2013, started that phase of my life when I was finally eating things that I really wanted to eat. Also I was finally in college. So of course I was eating out a lot (which basically means having a lot of cheese) and I started gaining weight. I’ll fast forward through the years of the initial weight gain because you don’t really realize it until it is too late. So finally when I was doing my Masters, I realized that I was 83 kg. At 5'7, that was really, really overweight. And even though I have never particularly been athletic even in school, I hated feeling like I couldn’t even run for 5 minutes without losing my breath. But that wasn’t what ultimately convinced me to make a change in my diet again. What really convinced me was my PCOD. I know every friend of mine has PCOD now and they don’t really make huge lifestyle changes for that, but I really wanted to not depend on medicines for this since I have a rather severe medicine dependency issue. (Story for another day.)

So I started with my first diet plan which was based on my mother’s plan- the keto diet. But the thing is, my mother is a non-vegetarian. When I started keto, I was eating nothing but shitty vegetable soup. That and fruits, absolutely nothing else. And being terrified of carbohydrates meant that I could barely eat anything at any of my friends’ gatherings. I vividly remember one incident where I was returning home after an exam and my friend’s mother offered me a spoonful of absolutely normal noodles. And guess what? Immediately after swallowing ONE SPOON of noodles, I gagged. Believe me, I am saying this from experience, you do NOT want to puke in your friend’s new car.

I realized that I had an eating disorder. And I felt so guilty when I was forced to eat anything carb-heavy at a relative’s or a friend’s place, that I stopped visiting them altogether. Of course I couldn’t stop going to my brother’s house in Bangalore and there I let myself go completely because of the very faulty logic- if I already had a 600 calorie meal, how can I continue this diet? May as well binge.

Needless to say, that didn’t work out. From October to December I had come down to 73 kg from the original 83 and now I was back to 78 by January. But by that time something interesting had happened. I had realized finally that I really loved speed-walking. So I continued that all throughout 2018. But of course that wasn’t enough. I had to decide how to construct a sustainable diet plan.

Here’s where I made the huge decision to stop having milk products. Believe me when I say this, you cannot leave cheese if you don’t have a very solid reason to do so. I did though, thankfully. Milk caused hormonal imbalances according to a lot of reliable sources. And that was that- I finally found my reason to become vegan.

Well, kind of. I won’t lie to you- I did use my PCOD as an excuse to become vegan. I had been planning this move for a very long time but I never had the strength to do it even though I knew all about the injustices carried out in the dairy industry. What do vegans even eat?- was a huge question in my head.

And well,  I might not be the correct person to speak about it since I do have eggs. My family absolutely wouldn’t have agreed with my diet plan if I had refused to have that one remaining source of animal protein as well. I probably will stop having eggs one day but this is a step by step process. You cannot rush it, it will never become a long-term thing otherwise. Every one of my friends who has tried to stop having meat, has once again fallen back upon that habit because they had not considered how their family would react to that news.

Oh and the two other things that I stopped eating in 2018 were sugar and refined flour. I do have atta though. Leaving these two things was far more difficult than I had imagined. You can of course never eliminate these completely but you can decrease your consumption by a huge lot. Do I miss desserts? More than you can imagine. But I also know that I’ll probably puke if I have them now.

So yes, my eating disorder never really went away. I cannot relax and have one cheat day. But since I have not given up on rice or atta, my list of edibles is not highly curtailed. I can eat more things than I could on my keto diet so this is definitely more sustainable. I have spoken to quite a few people and they all seem to think that they cannot pull this off. The point is- you don’t have to.

If you want to become a vegan, there is no reason why you must become a low-cal sugar-free vegan. Learn from SupremeBanana, she eats as much high-calorie fast food as she wants- it’s just vegan. Vegan doesn’t mean tasteless watery salads.

But does sugar-free low-cal vegan diet mean watery salads? Also, no. I have been blessed with a good knowledge of the Bengali cuisine which is not only predominantly vegan but also really flavorful. And if you’re cooking things at home- you cannot really have a huge calorie count if you maintain the portion sizes carefully.

Again, I am not telling anyone to go vegan or to lose weight. I just wrote this down because this worked out for me (at least it is working out, till now). I should have mentioned this earlier but I’m at 63 kg now. With the daily fluctuations and all included, that’s not quite bad. My next USG appointment is in February so let’s see whether any of this worked at all. Either way, I did manage to become a semi-vegan. Three year old me must be very proud.

P.S.- A few last words to clarify a matter that a friend reminded me of. I am not against having meat completely. I do not judge the people who do have meat. I just have a problem with the mass production of meat and the inhumane methods of killing the animals. I once heard a lecture at the university about organic farming where the speaker said that she reared chickens on her own farm, gave them a pretty good and healthy life and then killed them with the least amount of pain and ate them if she wanted to. I really respect that opinion of hers. If everyone could manage that, I would have no problem with meat. I still wouldn’t eat it, of course, but I’d be on-board with that idea. I have no problem with you consuming any animal and long as you can stomach how they are killed. "The man who passes the sentence should swing the sword" remember?