BE YOUR VEGAN

I started eating meat again a few months ago (which after a year of veganism and seven of vegetarianism was a pretty big deal). Still not ready to fully identify with the meat eaters of the world I've taken to calling myself 'post-vegan', if not only to avoid the failure implied by being an ex-vegan. I'm not going to lie, my flatmate's mexican chicken lasagna had a large part to play in the whole matter, but in all honesty the move was a well thought out and philosophically justified decision. Unfortunately, the explanations and justifications that I know make sense in my head have been tough to convey to others, and my attempt at a blog entry has until now been just as incoherent, if not more so, than my verbal ramblings.

Thankfully, life has been kind enough to provide me with friends who have the special ability to gather up my ramblings, string them together, and give them back to me in a form that makes sense of things that even I didn't previously understand. Most recently, one of these friends wrote about my post-veganism in a vegan punk cookbook/anarchist zine... thing created by another friend of ours. Knowing that he really did get what I was getting at means a lot to me, and I doubt that I'll ever come up with a better elucidation, so here's what he said:

"Yo peeps, now here's the thing. I've got a friend who oppressed herself through her own vegan-ness. She took herself there and maintained a diet through a morality of punishment:I must not eat that, or I'm a bad person. She had whips in the mind, man - which as we all know makes people do stuff but kills their will to do it. Veganism Is Joy, my sistren - it's a diet of love, and if it hurts us then there's no point not hurting our fellow cyborg planetary residents (ANIMULZ).

So she's POST-VEGAN now. That means she holds onto the reasons for bein a vegan with none of the guilt. Sometimes she eats a cheesy pizza. We both know some poor old cow got the zippededoodah sucked out of her to make that cheese, and that's a bad thing, but if my friend can't not eat the pizza without sucking the zippededoodah out of herself then she has to not not eat the pizza. Which doesn't mean she has to, but she does anyway, coz it's tasty. What she's working to do is reconfigure her vegan self so that she can eat vegan without using guilt as a motivator. And because that vegan label is so corrupted by mad diet fascists, body-deniers and intestinal terrorists, she's a POST-VEGAN. I suggested Neo-Vegan, but post- is always cooler than neo- (post-liberal/neo-liberal, see?), whatever the Matrix says."