From Omnivores to Vegans and Back Again: How Our Experiences Shape Our Food Destinies

At the risk of being called un-American, I'm going to tell you that I absolutely detest peanut butter. I can't even be in the same room with it because the smell nauseates me. My earliest memory of it was when my big sister tried to sneak a gob of peanut butter between two Ritz crackers and entice me to eat her tricky little sandwich, because she simply could not comprehend that I hated peanut butter--after all, she loved it! (Epic fail on the cracker trick: I can smell peanut butter a mile away.) With food, as with most things in life (music, politics, the color chartreuse), we love what we love and we hate what we hate, and there's very little wiggle room for change.

But sometimes, we rewrite our personal food story based on some experience or trigger. For me, it was a trip to Big Sur, California, about fourteen years ago. There were hundreds upon hundreds of grazing cows, dotting the rolling hills alongside the astoundingly photogenic Pacific Coast Highway. To be honest, I had never really given cows a second thought until that trip, but I looked at my husband from the passenger seat and said quietly, "I don't want to eat cows anymore." And surprisingly, he looked back at me and said, "I don't want to eat them anymore either." Ever since, we've eaten no beef (or any other red meat), except for a slight lapse for me in the first trimester of pregnancy with my son, when my morning sickness (a misnomer--it was round-the-clock) could be staved off only with the greasiest meat possible.

I still eat poultry (kosher or free-range, because both are kinder) and fish. We all have our highly crafted rationales for what we will and won't eat, but even for people who are omnivores, I think we can agree that this photo below is a no-brainer: It's not a kind way for animals to live, whether they're ending up on a plate or not.

My friend Karen has a vegetarian blog called 365 Vegetarian Days: My Record of One Year of Vegetarian Dinners. On it, she writes, "Somewhere around 1976, I read Diet for a Small Planet. The idea that eating lower on the food chain was better for the world made perfect sense to me, and I connected to the underlying ethos of not taking other lives to sustain our own. I began to look for like-minded souls, but there was no Google, no Facebook, no Twitter, so I joined the Natural Food Co-op. In my first apartment after college, I grew bean sprouts on the windowsill and made my own yogurt. I learned to combine proteins, bought The New York Times Natural Foods Cookbook, and stopped eating chicken. The progress down the path to the place I am now has continued ever since. I went from eating fish occasionally to pretty much not at all. I flirted with going vegan, but couldn't give up my beloved aged cheddar cheese."

Says my friend Steven, founder of the first-ever vegan Facebook page, You're So Vegan, "I'm vegan because of the film Forks Over Knives. I've seen hundreds of documentary films over the years, and I usually leave the theater feeling passionate and motivated for change or activism. But that feeling usually dissipates in a few days. I really had no clue that after seeing this film, I would literally decide to go cold-turkey vegan within days...ironic, the use of the word 'turkey.'"

Steven continues, "There seems to be two distinct camps in the vegan universe: the dietary camp and the animal rights camp. I'm in the former. The decision was easy--the film provided multiple studies connecting dietary intake across the globe with various cancers, heart disease, and other diseases. Not only did it give me all this great fact-based data, but I left the theater that day having an 'a-ha!' moment: Maybe I could change my genetic destiny. Maybe I could control my future by changing my eating habits today."

One of my favorite essays about how our diets change based on our personal experiences is called Which Road ? at the blog Radical Farmwives. In it, Cher (no, not that Cher) writes about her journey from being a vegetarian to being an agrarian omnivore, triggered in part by her inability to maintain a pregnancy in her 20's: "I had no idea that soy products contain phyto-estrogens... my hormones were just whacked out. After a few years of struggle, Eric and I stumbled upon the work of Sally Fallon and her amazing book Nourishing Traditions. What an eye-opener for me. The road I was traveling took a sharp turn."

Cher writes with thoughtfulness about her culinary journey, but this was my favorite part of her post: "I am not trying to convince everyone to sharpen their canines and eat a steak. I respect each person’s individual choices and it is my belief that we all have to find our own paths, and live a life true to our own knowledge. I’m just sharing a little from the road that I traveled, and that I am still bumbling along."

Our food choices, like our experiences that shape them, are as unique as our DNA. So, I won't judge you if you love peanut butter. Just don't dare eat it in the same room with me, or we'll both be very, very sorry.

What was the defining moment in your own food destiny? Are there any foods that you've always refused to eat, or have given up? Why? Please share in the Comments section below (now powered by CommentLuv, an easier system--I hope!).

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