My Vegetarian Decade

Protein, oysters, and how it all began

March 2023 marks my tenth year of being a vegetarian. It still feels weird that 2013 was a decade ago as it feels immediate in some ways. Today, for the first time, I’m going to explain why I made the decision to go vegetarian, how it’s going, whether it’s affected my career, and answer some of your questions.

I’ve written about vegetarianism here and here, talking about my favorite vegetarian cookbooks, but I don’t brand this newsletter as a vegetarian food newsletter—vegetarian food is just food and I want anyone to be able to come here and get some ideas for things to eat. I believe we’d all better off is people ate less meat but I’m not here to dictate anyone’s diet—food is so personal. I’m sharing my experience here and would love to hear about your food journeys as well in the comments.

Now, back to 2013. Here’s the situation: I was a sophomore in college, leading an alternate spring break trip to New Orleans with my friend Leslie. The trip was focused on urban farming and food justice—we spent our days visiting different projects, learning about the city, and volunteering (looking back, we were definitely not that helpful and voluntourism is more for the people who go on it than the local communities that host it). Our group stayed at a hostel and cooked almost all of our own meals. The trip was supposed to be vegetarian to appeal to the farming/food justice angle, and we cooked our meals at a local synagogue that opened space up to us. For some reason, we had to the use the meat kitchen, which because of kosher laws, meant we couldn’t use dairy at all. The vegetarian trip became basically a vegan trip, which was not how I was used to eating. Growing up, we didn’t eat pork in our house but I certainly ate a lot of shrimp, chicken, and sometimes steak. We also ate vegetarian meals regularly like stuffed shells, falafel, and sweet potato and black bean burritos and my favorite childhood foods were things like pizza and grilled cheese (I also loved chicken cutlets and lamb chops).

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the week of meatless eating and also very amped on food systems and the environment after a week of discussing urban gardening, food apartheid (then referred to as food deserts), and more.