To all my vegan readers, I say: What the hell? I’ve been on a vegan diet for the past three weeks. Now I have to go to co-ops for my food, and they won’t even let me in there unless I’m sporting Birkenstock sandals and a Karl Marx t-shirt. So now I have to change my entire wardrobe? All for what? Just because I want to buy that overpriced barley almond salad? Come on! Speaking of expensive: I’ve been reduced to those rich white people at Whole Foods who insouciantly plop organic mangos and a carton of soy milk into their cart, a privilege not afforded the poor and minorities in our country, let alone the poor saps in developing countries who are lucky if they can fish a muskrat out of the swamp for din-din. Yeah, like those shoppers I return home smug with my expensively healthy crackers and bananas, put on the news, and sit on the couch indignant about the government’s “hawkish” and “right-wing” policies abroad, that is, the U.S. imperium that allows us to live so high on the hog at the expense of the guy with the muskrat. Fortunately my veganism is temporary. Just remember, tofu eaters, you’re part of the problem, not the solution!Okay, so that’s the absurd lifestyle I’ve had to adopt these days, and I didn’t mention the lip service I have to pay to the New Age when I’m around the extreme ones, as if I’m perennially stuck in 1978. Now back to the food. Being a vegan is being condemned to an eternal salad without the real meal to follow, and you’re forced to live a life of longing and dissatisfaction, as if you're an inmate in a penal colony looking over the fence at an adjacent dairy farm. Am I right or am I right? It’s all about using spices, you say? Spice THIS! Okay? Spice THIS! If God wanted us to just eat grass and smoke pot, He in his loving Providence wouldn’t have given his children such delights as the Swiss cheese omelet and the Western Bacon cheeseburger. Look, I’m just saying that I don’t want to be Donald Sutherland in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, okay? I spit out things like “harmonic convergence” and “Marx actually had it right” so they won’t identify me as a human being with independent thoughts. Let’s call a spade a spade, huh? A plant-based diet sucks, and rather than affirm vegan food as being absolutely delicious, like a believer who extolls his faith so much you get the feeling he’s simply fighting off doubt, let’s be honest.
