TRACYE’S JOURNEY

I absolutely love my vegan lifestyle. It’s a liberating, joyful, and delicious way of living in the world. I get to eat good food that’s good for me—and that’s also good for other people, animals, and the planet. What could be better?

But the funny thing is I never thought I’d be a vegan. Growing up, I hated vegetables! I was always the last one left at the kitchen table pushing the green stuff around on my plate until my mother came back in the kitchen and put her foot down. Then I’d gulp them down and we’d go through the same thing again the next night.

My mother was pretty health conscious (as she talks about later in this chapter), so for my two sisters and me, that meant that although we ate meat and dairy, there was not a lot of processed food or junk food in the house. We ate relatively healthfully during the week and we got to splurge on the weekends. One of our favorite Saturday night dinners was smoked sausage, along with Kraft macaroni and cheese, Jiffy cornbread, butter pecan ice cream, and ginger ale. (Check out our healthier, vegan versions of these recipes in part 2 for Mac and Cheese, Southern-Style Cornbread, Maple Pecan Ice Cream, and Sparkling Basil Limonade.) We did have cousins and friends who had all the sodas, candy, and chips we could ever want, so we made up for it when we visited them. And at school there was an all-you-can eat cafeteria, so I could eat as many French fries and desserts as I wanted.

So it was my mother who first instilled in me the idea of healthy eating. But despite her best efforts, I liked the unhealthier food more. When I went off to Amherst College at seventeen, I gained twenty-five pounds my first year because I was away from home for the first time and could eat anything unhealthy I wanted, whenever I wanted.

HOW I BECAME A VEGAN

During my sophomore year at college, our Black Student Union brought civil rights movement icon and legendary comedian Dick Gregory to campus to talk about the state of black America. But instead, he decided to talk about the plate of black America, and how unhealthfully most folks eat. This was in 1986 and we didn’t know that Gregory had become a vegetarian activist because of his practice of nonviolence during the Civil Rights Movement, which he extended to humans and animals alike.

During his two-hour talk, Gregory graphically traced the path of a hamburger from a cow on a factory farm, through the slaughterhouse process, to a fast-food restaurant, to a clogged artery, to a heart attack. And it rocked my world.

I was already going through a paradigm shift at the time. I was taking political science and African American studies classes, and I was learning about imperialism, racism, sexism, and more for the first time or in new ways, and it was changing my awareness and sense of self. And it was with this new consciousness that I listened to Dick Gregory’s lecture. I was ready and open to questioning the way society dictated I should eat, as well.

After Gregory’s lecture, I immediately gave up meat—which only lasted about a week. But I couldn’t get what he said off my mind. I called my mother and one of my sisters, Marya, who was a senior at nearby Tufts University, and told them I thought I should become a vegetarian.

When I went home for the summer a few months later, I read every book I could find about vegetarianism in the local libraries, and my mother and sister read them with me. And by the end of the summer, we all decided to go vegetarian.

Well, as it turns out, it wasn’t that easy. When school started again, I studied abroad for the first semester in Nairobi, Kenya, with twenty-nine other college students. It was one of the most incredible experiences of my life. But I was showing up as a new vegetarian and they weren’t prepared to accommodate me so I still had to eat meat. While there, two life-altering incidents happened that made me know I would become a vegetarian again when I returned home.

The first happened when we lived and traveled for two weeks with Samburus, who are semi-nomadic pastoralists living in the northern plains of Kenya. One night, we stayed on a mountain cave and brought two live goats with us that we were going to eat. The day before, while staying with a Samburu family, I saw a goat being born, up close and personal. I was a nineteen-year-old city girl who’d never had a pet, and this was the first time I’d ever seen an animal give birth. It was amazing.

Well, the next day on the mountain cave, I watched the Samburu men slit the throat of one of the goats that we brought with us. They drank the blood that poured from its neck and invited us, as their guests, to do the same. Many of the students did, and I was about to, as well, but I changed my mind at the last minute. The idea of actually drinking blood was too much.