Two things happened when I turned 18: A mentor told me how bacon was made and I watched the documentary Super Size Me. I went vegetarian that summer, and it was hard. Even though I lived in the Bay Area during the time, I didn’t always have easy access to fresh, organic produce (there was no Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s where I lived). When I wanted to go out with friends, no one really cared about accommodating my new diet. The homies wanted to eat where the homies wanted to eat, and that was usually the spots we’d always eaten. It was the burger joint in downtown or the hoagie spot in East Oakland or the taco truck. I found myself eating french fries… a lot.
When I was 19, I started spending more time with a friend who was also vegetarian.
She took me around to farmers markets and taught me about farmers to support directly instead of huge grocery chains, often purported as my only option. The less affluent parts of a rapidly gentrifying Oakland are plagued with food deserts, but farmers markets are often the workaround to not having constant and convenient access to fresh food.
She also introduced me to the bevy of vegetarian restaurants in the Bay Area and encouraged me to invite my friends out to at least try it. If they didn’t like it, there was always a pizza spot usually around the corner, and they could grab a slice on the way to whatever we were doing next. She also taught me how to cook for myself again. I could make a mean meatloaf and potatoes or smothered pork chops, but I didn’t know anything about tofu (and my mom had always told me it was nasty). That friend was my safe space when most of the people around me (family included) were constantly groaning about my dietary choices.
I stayed strictly vegetarian for two years, and then I was diagnosed with diabetes.
It hit me like a ton of bricks. Yes, I had a strong family history with the disease, but I’d gone vegetarian! Just when I was getting my healthy lifestyle on, life and my doctor were gonna come at me with this?! In my youth, fear and frustration, I dropped the diet almost immediately. Although my doctor was telling me to reduce my sugar intake, I was making every flavor of Kool-Aid they sold at the store (except orange… I mean, come on). While they were telling me how eating clean would help eventually alleviate the disease or at least its symptoms, I was riding dirty: turkey burgers, fries, burritos with extra sour cream, and everything else I’d loved pre-vegetarian.
The only thing I continued to abstain from was eating pork and beef. There was enough alternative junk food in the world for me, anyway. I was only intermittently compliant with my medication because vegetarianism hadn’t prevented diabetes. It felt like a death sentence. But my return to my former diet soon had me feeling like I was actually staring down my mortality, and I cleaned my diet up a bit.
Then I met a cute guy who was vegan.
On our first outing, he took me to a Ryan Leslie concert (I was obsessed with R. Les at the time), after which he bought me a tempeh BLT, some rosemary fries, and well… I went vegan for six months. It just so happened that I had also started working with a personal trainer during that same time, and the combination of rigorous exercise and veganism all at once didn’t work well with my body. My energy spiked, crashed, and I wasn’t getting enough sustenance to avoid the side affects of my diabetic medicine (with which I was now compliant).
So, I worked with a homie from around the way who was a nutritionist, and over the next month or two, we got my vegan diet calibrated right. He introduced me to quinoa, which I replaced rice with, and taught me how to make a slamming raw kale salad. Although my relationship with veganism lasted longer than ‘ol boy who introduced me to it, I missed meat. Still, it wasn’t health implications that had me in fear of stopping by a local spot for a turkey burger, it was the health conscious people around me. My atheist homies were still down to kick it even though they knew I believed in the man or woman upstairs, but would my vegetarian and vegan homies still love me if I showed up with a plate of chicken and waffles? I was spooked.
And then it hit me: no matter what side I stood on with my diet, someone was always judging my plate.
It didn’t matter that I was struggling to find a dietary balance that would both satisfy my love for delicious food and help resolve the imminent health problems I was facing. Everyone wanted me to eat how they were eating. If I didn’t, what the heck was wrong with me? There is a lot of judgement in our community about how people choose to engage food and the consequences of those choices, often without recognition of the systems in place that have historically created our poor diets and limited palettes. It’s important for us to have conversations about how to turn around negative health trends among our people, absent of judgement and open to new ways of eating. So, if you see me with something unfamiliar on my plate, instead of turning up your nose, ask about it.
What are some of your dietary challenges? Let me know in the comments below.
