OK, this has nothing to do with copywriting. Let’s call it vegan PR. Here it is, my quick-and-dirty guide to eating with vegans this Thanksgiving. Vegans catch a lot of shit for choosing to avoid animal products, just like you catch a lot of shit for choosing not to eat horse. Oh, wait…
Ah, Anthony Bourdain. Charming fellow. But let’s get onto the real troublemakers, vegans at Thanksgiving!
1. First off, there is a difference between being vegan, and being an asshole. If you make your best effort to wine and dine your vegan companions, they should be gracious despite certain inevitable lapses. This graciousness does not include eating what you’re eating. In dining at someone else’s table, you may think it simple common courtesy to take a heaping pile of whatever is placed before you and put it on your plate. However, bear in mind the particular battle that vegans have picked. No animal products means just that, not just avoiding food items with visible musculature, as with vegetarians. Now, the expectation to please and be flexible is always there for a vegan. They know it’s inconvenient for you to Soy Butter your stuffing and keep the gelatin out of the cranberries, and it would be smoother sailing to just grin and swallow. But many vegans face a slippery slope; if they take some of Aunt June’s delicious rolls, who’s to say they should stop at Aunt Mo’s perfectly adequate gravy? And then, why not some of Cousin Jed’s free-range roadkill venison? Think about it. The only thing worse than someone who refuses to eat animal products is someone who makes a fuss and then eats them anyway. This is the line they’ve drawn, so vegans may look at your sumptuous pile of buttery potatoes and politely decline, or beam at you and pass them on. That’s the polite thing to do. Now, if that pass has snorts, eye-rolls, or pointed sighs, know that the person at your table is an asshole first and vegan second. (NOTE: When dealing with a vegan college student, expect to feel more confusion on this point—they’re likely to be abrasive in their adherence, as with anyone new to a belief system.)
With the line drawn between assholes and vegans comes the realization that you don’t have to change your whole Thanksgiving to suit them. Naturally, you won’t expect your vegan friend to bend over and lick the turkey in a show of solidarity. Likewise, the gracious vegan doesn’t expect you to take your drumstick into the storage area under the stairs to eat it. Most vegans acknowledge that Thanksgiving is a ritual grounded in eating meat and know this is not the time to broach the subject of change. Would they rather you ate roasted beets, corn, and an 8-bean salad? Well, yeah. Is that up to them? Nope. And adults are able to distinguish this boundary, be they vegan or omnivore. Any resistance towards this matter should be chalked up to a dearth of maturity in that individual, not veganism in general.
2. Don’t be surprised with the number of (polite!) declines you get. It’s not personal: there is just a shitload of stuff that has random animal products in it! On this list are a lot of wines, beers, and Good ‘n Plenty candies. It may seem arbitrary, but many wines and beers have isinglass (extracted from the air bladder of sturgeon), while many red foods like candy and grapefruit juice contain carmine dye (made from crushed cochineal beetles). Even certain soy cheeses contain casein (a protein derived from milk). Dig a little deeper from a vegan perspective, and you’ll see that many of the foods we eat not only aren’t vegan, but aren’t even vegetarian. Thus, one can understand the common vegan lament: why, oh why, would wine, beer, soy cheese, and candy contain animal products? I mean, did you know you were tasting the lining of a sturgeon’s internal organs when you sipped wine? Perhaps you can both agree that such practices are weird, at best. (Or maybe you love sturgeon in all its forms! But isn’t it lovely to dwell comfortably in a diversity of opinion?)
3. There is a shitload of stuff that doesn’t have animal products in it. On this list is wine (usually Germans are a great way to go, although 2 Buck Chuck is perfectly adequate), certain beers, and Oreos. (Yes indeed, there is so much weird polysyllabic stuff in Oreos that much of it qualifies as manmade.) Huzzah! Another vegan staple is soy butter. Vegans love butter! Earth Balance is the best way to go, usually found in a little 16 oz. tub. It’s tasty—nice and, well, buttery. You can get it at TJ’s, Whole Foods, or even WinCo.
Know what other vegan food you should know about? This delicious stuff discovered by the Aztecs called chocolate! Yes, chocolate is vegan, in its most natural (and some would say, delicious) form: dark chocolate. Now, some dark chocolates aren’t truly truly vegan, so a quick flip to the ingredients list is in order. Watch out for milk solids. Before you protest that this “reading” thing is a lot of work, just ask yourself, what are milk solids doing in a perfectly good bar of dark chocolate?
Many of the staples of Thanksgiving can be made vegan with minimal effort. Forget the can and use some actual frozen cranberries and OJ to make cranberry sauce. Take a squash, slice it in half, and simply bake it to let the natural nuttiness come out. Make
popcorn the way it was actually made 400 years ago. Make green beans with olive oil and a splash of lemon. Mash potatoes with soy butter and lots of garlic. In fact, take a bulb of garlic and put that sucker in the oven at 375° for a buttery spread that’s vegan and a H1N1 Hammer of Thor. Sounds delicious, right? Well, it is, but you don’t have to take my word for it. Check out a vegan cookbook!
4. Nobody wants a Tofurkey for Thanksgiving. How can I emphasize this enough? The holiday Tofurkey industry is entirely driven by well-intended relatives of vegans and vegetarians. But I get the Tofurkey dinner thing, truly I do. It’s a mound of brown protein, an acceptable visual analogue to the other mound of brown protein you’ve stuffed with carbohydrates thanks to its enlarged sphincter.
But a hunk of Tofurkey just doesn’t taste very good. Tofu is cool and all, but when was the last time you wanted to eat a big slice of it? I know, I know, vegans have more in common with Klaatu than with most Americans, but trust me, they don’t want your Tofurkey.
- Keanu Reeves as the all-seeing, all-judging Klaatu. That Keanu is probably weird enough to be vegan!
If you’re looking for a similar meaty hunk, try Field Roast, made by Seattle Chef David Lee and available in most health food stores. It actually tastes good.
5. A word to these well-intended friends and relatives: sadly, no one has really achieved vegan pumpkin pie. I mean, that tastes good. Make yourself a pumpkin pie, eggs and all, then have a delicious apple crisp to pinch-hit (easily veganized and delicious to boot). Trust me, you’ll want a slice of both. Other possibilities include pumpkin-cranberry cookies and even pumpkin pudding. Try making a vegan pumpkin pie and it will taste, well, vegan, in the worst way possible. Vegan pumpkin pie is just terrible PR, quite frankly.
6. This is perhaps the most important: do not choose Thanksgiving dinner as the appointed time to debate veganism pro v. con. If you invited someone who followed kashrut to a BBQ, would you grill them on why they weren’t having a cheeseburger? Argue with them about it? Call them a hypocrite? Of course not. Yet this conversation is one that vegans are used to having again and again: Why? With their reputation for militancy, one would think that vegans would be the one to start such conversations, but I assure you it is not so. What starts out as polite questioning often turns into bluster. People are often threatened by vegans, feeling judged, but it’s rare that the vegan doing the “judging” is doing much other than sitting there and trying to have a perfectly decent conversation about the UN Advisory Council, or certain Google apps. Contrary to popular belief, most vegans don’t carry relevant proselytizing material in their back pocket, and many aren’t even fans of PETA. They aren’t looking to “save” you when they sit down to share a culinary experience. Likewise, I am certain that any vegan with which you share salad tongs is not burning to know why, in fact, you yourself are not vegan—could it be that you (gasp!) just couldn’t give up cheese? If you feel judged by vegans, fair enough. But what you’re eating in the presence of a vegan is probably a much bigger deal to you than it is to them. They don’t care. They just want to celebrate the successful colonization of this great land by the the superior pathogens of the Europeans, just like you!
All this said, I’ve been on both sides of the fence, and back again. In fact, every unpleasantry listed above is one that I myself have perpetrated on this journey. In college, I became vegan for awhile, mostly thanks to a vegan who didn’t bother to shove PETA brochures down my throat. It’s not that hard, and it’s not that much of a lifestyle change. (Lots of vegetables. Lots of cooking at home. It was nice not having dairy-inflicted gastrointestinal distress.) Now I don’t count myself among the vegans, but having spent several years in their midst as one of them, I have zero regrets. And no, I’m not interested in debating veganism’s merits with you, either.
