The Gypsy Re-emerges

After having been in Montreal for 8 weeks, I’d decided my inner-gypsy needed to re-emerge so I decided to take off to New Jersey and New York for a reprieve from my very un-gypsy lifestyle.  I got off work that night at 10:00 pm and the bus departed at 11:45 pm, giving me just enough time to boogie on up and stand in line – and what a line it was, no less than 75 people long, plus their accompanists.  I was kind of worried I might not actually get on the bus since seats aren’t reserved and it’s first-come, first-serve.

I managed to make it into a seat and settled in for what is quite possibly the worst commute on the face of the planet.  There’s only one thing worse than a ride on the Greyhound for eight and a half hours, and that’s a ride on the Greyhound for eight and a half hours, where you need to get out of the bus twice, in the dead of winter, before you actually arrive in your destination.  You were probably envisioning a nice, peaceful ride through the Adirondacks, my pleasant slumber accompanied by dreams of New York City food establishments and of course of my international love interest, but you couldn’t be more wrong. 

Not only do you have to get off the bus to go through Customs at 12:30 am where you wait, always anxiously, in line while people ahead and behind you are questioned, have their retina’s scanned, and are sometimes pulled aside for additional questioning; but you also have to get out in what I will endearingly refer to as the “butthole of America,” Albany, New York.  We arrived there around 3:30 am.  It was about 15 degrees below zero.  I was not a happy gypsy.  We sat in the station while they serviced the bus for another half hour, and then reloaded and as I approached my seat I came to realize that someone sniped it!  I thought everyone knew the rules of travel, when you sit somewhere, that’s where you stay – especially on lengthy trips.  I was delegated to the back of the bus, right next to the bathroom and some dude who snored loudly for the remainder of the trip.

The only saving grace of the whole drive happened when we arrived just outside New York City.  There was a cold, misty fog hanging above the skyscrapers, causing them to disappear into it, as if they could go on forever.  The sun began rising just as we approached the city and the vibrant yellows and reds behind the beautiful New York City skyline blew me away.  I was then grateful for being ousted from my seat, and for being kept awake by my snoring seatmate, because otherwise I wouldn’t have caught the magnificent view.

I’ve briefly referred to the five days I spent in New Jersey/New York City in my blog post on becoming vegan.  My trip took place just after I finished my four-week vegan cleanse and I was rewarding myself for my dedication by allowing myself to eat whatever I wanted, after all, I was on vacation.  My body had other plans for letting me know what was going to go down (specifically down my oesophagus).  Throughout the week I had a heaping pile of waffles with whipped cream and fruit, pork, chicken and beef taco sliders, burritos, Peruvian food, coconut cake, eggplant parmesan (it’s not a visit to Jersey without it), and chicken fajitas, not to mention snacks and other treats along the way. My body reacted by developing a chronic stomach ache and blessing me with nightmares every single night.  It was then I decided I was going to be permanently vegan.

Surprisingly, it was the last day and my travel back to Montreal that left even more of an impact.  Coincidentally, my best friends’ parents were in New York City for a conference, so before catching my midnight bus back to Montreal, Matt and I met up with them for a 20 minute, super fast, catch-up cram session and I was on my way, fearing that I was going to miss my bus.

During the drive to the US, I kept to myself with my headphones on, but on the way back I happened to sit next to a fellow, or rather he sat next to me.  He immediately offered me a piece of chocolate and so the conversation began.  He just got back from travelling for six months in Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Belize and Florida.  He told me about how he began as a deck hand for a rich Floridian man who was sailing down the coast to Costa Rica, but after a few days at sea he realized their personalities clashed too much to salvage even a working relationship, so when they docked in Costa Rica he decided to stay there.

He took 48 hour long bus rides, hitchhiked, taxied and walked throughout all of the countries he visited, and all just at his own whim.  The travel wasn’t planned, it wasn’t sought out, it just happened.  He took the circumstances he had and made the best of them.  He received his certification as a scuba diver and was only coming back to Montreal now for a brief hiatus from the seas before he was heading West to Vancouver to meet up with a documentary film maker who was going to be at sea for three to six weeks filming whale migrations.

He didn’t know what he would do after that, but that didn’t matter to him anyway.  What mattered was that he was following his passion, the sea, and his heart.  I find the idea of static living to be so suffocating that a conversation with this late-twenties West Islander invigorating to the point that I couldn’t sleep until roughly 4:00 am.  It’s always so inspiring when I find people who don’t blend in or conform to societies’ rules of what they should do and when.  His life was full of uncertainty, not unlike mine, but also full of pleasure and pure joy, also not unlike mine.

As we parted ways at the Berri-UQAM station in Montreal, I wondered if I should have asked for his contact information, to be kept informed on all of his adventures and travels, but as I slowly descended the escalator I knew our brief encounter was just what I needed to remind me of my own need for adventure, drive for discovery and absolute necessity of listening to my heart.  The moment before a new, exciting chapter in life is what I refer to the “inhale,” and with that in mind I could feel myself breathe in.

This is why I'm vegan. Now stop harassing me about my protein intake.

So, it was suggested to me that I should write a blog about why I became vegan.  I've found that since becoming vegan, I've been explaining myself - a lot.  Either defending my protein intake, excusing myself from eating certain things, ensuring that I'm being "healthy", defending my choice, and just about every other wild and crazy debate and discussion you can think of.

Here's how it went:

Firstly, I "became" vegan unintentionally.  After a visit from Matt over two months ago where I had eaten entirely too much meat and dairy (on his last night in Montreal we ate for two hours at an all-you-can-eat Brazilian restaurant that served 12 varieties of rotisserie meats), I decided to do a cleanse.  I'd be vegan for a month to detox my system, give it a well-needed rest, and reduce the bloating I was having from all the dairy and salty foods I'd been eating.

My first week of being vegan was a little challenging, but bringing food to work with me helped and I started researching and trying new recipes instead of just eating salad and quinoa.  What I started realizing was that I actually enjoyed the hunt - I liked looking for new recipes, making alterations based on my taste and trying new things.  I really liked cooking - a lot.

During the next 4 weeks my energy levels increased, I lost a couple of pounds (probably mostly in water weight), I stopped craving salt like I used to, I felt happier, was sleeping better, and felt like I was getting into a natural rhythm.  The only thing that became difficult was continually defending my decision, but usually when people found out I was only doing it for a month, they relaxed and stopped bothering me.

On my 28 day mark, I was to arrive in New Jersey for a visit with Matt and the end of my vegan cleanse (since all we do is eat new food while we're together).  For the next five days I gorged on waffles with whipped cream, pulled pork taco sliders, ice cream, and just about anything else I could get my little Canadian hands on.  And in return I had severe stomach pains every day and nightmares every night.  I felt lethargic, had no motivation to go to the gym or work out, and was sleeping 9+ hours a night.

It became clear to me exactly what was going on.  My body was happy with the way it was under my new vegan regimen, and was rejecting the old chemical-, hormone-, preservative-filled foods I was pumping into it again.

When I got back to Montreal I started reading Alicia Silverstone's book The Kind Diet.  This book touches upon a wide variety of reasons for becoming vegan, and just one of these reasons is the inhumane treatment of animals in industrial food production facilities.  I say this because for the vast majority of non-vegans that I've crossed since making my choice, most of them raise their eyebrows and make some snide remark about me wanting the save the cute little cows or chickens or whatever.  While I disagree with the way animals are treated in mass production, unethical facilities, I've gotta admit that my reasons for deciding to stay vegan were a lot more selfish than that.

In Alicia's book, she touches on the way animals are slaughtered and how it actually effects the meat itself - this is what got me.  When an animal is in a slaughterhouse, it's aware of what's going on around it, and when it's time to go under the knife, the animal knows it's about to die.  All animals possess a fight-or-flight impulse that will help any creature to survive a threatening situation.  When an animal goes to slaughter, it's fight-or-flight impulses and stress hormones kick in, causing the chemicals adrenaline and cortisol to spike in production.  

Now, in humans, adrenaline is produced naturally, which can give us a rush and make us feel good, or in too-high doses it can cause aggression and anger (this is the "fight" part of the fight-or-flight impulse).  Cortisol is naturally produced by humans, too; when we get stressed out, our cortisol levels increase and this has been linked to weight gain and a variety of other stress-related ailments (this biological reaction dates back to the caveman days when "stress" meant "food shortage" so our bodies released cortisol to store fat for famine, even though this is no longer the case).  So, consider this:  animal secretes adrenaline and cortisol moments before being slaughtered, therefore, those chemicals are released into the blood, which pumps through the muscles, which then get packaged and sent to grocery stores and bought by people who cook it up and eat it, so those chemicals get passed into us!  If these chemicals are already proven to negatively affect us when we produce them ourselves, then what do you think is going to happen when we consume more when we eat foods that are laden with it?  Cortisol and adrenaline overload = angry, fat people!  That's not good for anyone!

And not only that, but because the FDA doesn't enforce slaughterhouse rules as tightly as they should, we have cases of food contamination.  Do you want to know why that happens?  You probably don't, because it's going to ruin eating meat for most of you, but I'm going to tell you anyway.  When they string up an animal for slaughter, slaughterers go at it with knives, usually while it's alive, slashing away all willy nilly!  In the process, sometimes internal organs are pierced, like colons, which are full of shit - literally.  What does this mean?  Escherichia coli, or E. coli, which is responsible for 20-30 deaths, countless food recalls and over 70,000 illnesses every year.  Fluids from the liver, pancreas and gallbladder can all make their way into our meats, too, filling us with all kinds of nasty toxins.  Milk isn't safe either.  Cows are often over-milked, causing inflammation and infection in their teats, which translates into puss in your milk, cheese, butter and yogurt.  YUMMY!

To top it all off, these poor animals are fed nutrient deficient food and pumped full of hormones and antibiotics, which all (you guessed it!) gets passed onto us in their meat.  And we wonder why we're living in an increasingly aggressive, anti-biotic resistant, messed up, cancer-ridden world.

Also, the anti-establishmentarian in me loathes the incestuousness of the industry and government.  These industries pay government parties and officials millions of dollars every year to promote legislation that will keep them on top, and they spend even more promoting their "staples" as absolutely necessary to human survival.  Let's get one thing straight:  until refrigerators were invented, meat, dairy, eggs and  cheese were rarely eaten at every meal.  It's was impossible.  They couldn't be stored for long periods of time like they are now.  Yet, somehow, people still survived.  How could this be?!  Well, I know it's hard to believe, since the dairy, egg and meat industries have brainwashed us into believing that their foods are the only complete forms of proteins, calcium and other nutrients available, but you can get all of those things from other sources - and they're even better sources than meats, eggs, and dairy!

Our bodies use a huge amount of energy to digest these nutrient-deficient, hormone-filled, antibiotic-laden foods.  So, a plant-based diet - one that includes other sources of protein, like beans, lentils, dark greens, and sea vegetables if you're so inclined - is going to provide you with all the vitamins, nutrients, and amino acids (these make up proteins) that you'll need to life a healthy life.  And you'll likely find that you're naturally staying away from preserved foods, which are often extremely high in sodium, and junk foods that have dairy products in them and are often high in fat and refined sugars.  Just what the doctor ordered!  

Whodathunkit?!  A natural diet makes us feel most human - not so shocking when you really think about it.  And vegan diets have been proven to reverse a plethora of medical conditions - even cancer!

Now, I'm not writing this to tell people to become vegan or vegetarian, though it would be nice if a few did.  I'm writing this because most people just don't know about this stuff - I know I didn't!  But in order to make a change in your life, you need to find a reason that will work for you.  If that's thinking about the cute furry animals and not wanting to be responsible for hurting them anymore--cool.  If it's the reasons I listed above--cool.  If it's jut wanting to make a healthy change for yourself and the environment (don't get me started on the waste that's produced and the water that's used for raising livestock!)--COOL!  Whatever your reason is, you've gotta believe in it.

If you still want more information, hit up the interweb.  There's so much information online.  Go to www.sprword.com for some mad chill documentaries on food production and other cool stuff.  Read Alicia's book The Kind Diet, or find another book that you are more drawn to.  And even if you don't go vegan, at least educate yourself and stop making yourself look like an ignorant asshole when you talk to me about how "unhealthy" I am for being vegan.  What's in your food that makes it healthier than mine? Don't know?  Then go find out.