Why I Went Vegan: Seeing an Old Girlfriend, Reading Jurek's "Eat & Run," Watching Aronofsky's "Noah"

By the end of spring the year before last I had given up eating red meat. The motivators were a nasty case of food poisoning caused by eating at a cheap Chinese restaurant in the city of my father's residence and then reading Ted Conover's cover story in Harper's, "The Way of All Flesh: Undercover in an Industrial Slaughterhouse." I stuck to chicken and fish, and even scaled back on that.

I had been a vegetarian off and on, and not an entirely consistent one, for a few years as a teenager -- I think my junior year in high school and my freshman year in college. The motivation was not health but morality. If I couldn't imagine myself killing something in order to eat, I shouldn't eat it. Then, for whatever reason, societal norms took over and I returned to the fold of the carnivore, running with the pack for another thirty years.

Aging is guided by what is in your gene pool. If your father's vision began to fail him when he reached fifty, expect to get thee to an optometrist at around the same age. If high blood pressure runs in your mother's family, be prepared to deal with it when you reach the age it became an issue for your mother.

My voyage to veganism began in earnest last winter. Several things happened to hasten me on my way. For one, I became very sensitive to salt. I had been indulging in frequent trips to the olive bar at my local supermarket. I guess I overdid it. I began experiencing nasty arrhythmia. Arrhythmia is unsettling, unpleasant, worrisome. Knowing that high blood pressure runs in my mother's family, I decided to take corrective action by radically reducing my sodium intake. I also limited meat consumption to once a week (with a sushi option on an additional day if I felt like it) and strictly kept coffee consumption to two-to-three cups per day. It worked. The chronic arrhythmia disappeared. Diet regulation was a huge success.

Then, next up, in the spring an old friend/girlfriend came to town on a business trip and she looked me up. When I first saw her in the lobby of her hotel I didn't recognize her. Why? She appeared to be in her thirties. I hadn't seen in her 25 years. This made no sense to me. She should have looked like me, gray and almost 50. It turns out she is a vegetarian and has been for years. The fact that she looked so good, so young, made an impression on me. (And she still drinks!) Diet has to be a key factor.

Soon after my meeting with Maura, I read ultramarathon legend Scott Jurek's Eat & Run. Jurek is a vegan who became a vegan primarily for competitive advantage, not for hippy-dippy Gaea holism. He makes a compelling case that peak performance requires a plant-based diet. It is a terrific book. If you liked Born to Run, Eat & Run is a must-read.

But what pushed me to become a vegetarian again for the first time since I was a teenager, and then on to the virgin territory of veganism, was seeing Darren Aronofsky's Noah this past autumn. Aronofsky connects meat-eating with the Biblical fall from grace and the despoliation of the planet and the great flood. The Serpent corrupts Adam and Eve, and part of that corruption is the belief that man has to eat meat to be strong. He doesn't.

So for the last couple of months I have eaten a plant-based diet. (My one failing is that I have yet to excise the splash of half & half I put in my morning Starbucks before I get on the train. At home I use soy creamer. Starbucks does not offer soy on its condiments counter. I am going to ask for it. I've just been lazy. This morning I'll do it.)

All in all it is much easier than you think. Beans and tofu and nuts provide me all the protein I need. The only difference I feel is that I feel better. My default state is much cleaner.

In the autumn I had a moment of sadness where I looked around my studio and realized that before I die I wouldn't be able to finish reading all the books I have accumulated.

Jerry Brown was in Fresno the other day for a ceremony marking the start of construction on a segment of the high-speed LA-to-SF train. Adam Nagourney had the story, "To Gov. Jerry Brown, a Legacy Project; to Critics, a Runaway Train":

“It’s going to take long,” he said. “It’s kind of touch and go, like am I going to make it to the end here.” 

The year “2030, you may think that’s around the corner,” he said. “I’ll be 92 in 2030. I’m working and pumping iron and eating vegetables. I want to be around.”

The overarching rationale for going vegan, besides the obvious moral imperative, is simple and Brown captures it: There is a lot to be done, and I want to stick around to do it.