gladcow

What better first post for my new website blog thing than to tell my vegan story? Get your hot beverage of choice and settle in. When you’re done, feel free to leave a comment about your own vegan journey.

There are so many points in my life that I see as connected to my final decision to become a vegan. Maybe I could have made the choice sooner, but I think I had to meander around a bit to really understand why I was doing what I was doing.

I come from an omnivorous family where homemade food was the default and eating out was rare and special. I understood where my food came from, for the most part. We had a garden. My grandparents raised sheep. My family fished and hunted. I spent many hours on the counters of my relatives as they lovingly crafted all kinds of food, from pot roast to apple pie.

I tried to become vegetarian in my teens, after a successful hunting trip turned our garage into a mortuary. In a busy household, though, there was not a lot of interest or time to give to my new passion, so I got little practical support from my family. I was expected to make my own meals if I wanted to eat differently, which seemed fair enough. But, I didn’t have much experience making savory foods. My specialty was generally cake from a boxed mix. My mother gave me a really confusing speech about combining proteins, so I ate a lot of refried beans, being careful to always eat them with a grain of some sort. I gave up after a few weeks. My whole family rejoiced, and I felt like a failure.

I met my future husband in high school. He was raised vegetarian, but had become omnivorous in his teens. After we had our son we were both strongly convinced that he did not need meat, at least not while he was so young. We continued to eat meat outside the home, but neither one of us liked to cook it.

After my son turned one we added dairy to his diet, just like the books say to do. Up until that point he had been exclusively breastfed. At first, he liked cow’s milk a lot, and sometimes it was all he was interested in eating. Then he started throwing up. Every hour. For a whole day. My husband and I examined what he had eaten the previous day and it was yogurt, cottage cheese, milk, cheese pretty much exclusively. I had a sensitivity to cow’s milk when I was younger, so we decided to cut out the milk and see how he felt. Well, he never felt better!

We didn’t eat meat at home. We didn’t feed our son meat. But, our babysitter snuck him meat once, thinking he couldn’t possibly be healthy without it. We never took him back to her again, but we did feed him meat for awhile after that incident. Our hearts felt sure that a meatless diet was good for him; our brains needed some more evidence. In the meantime, we fed our child a few chicken nuggets. Honestly, I still regret that.

We continued on with our weird brand of food exclusion for a couple of years. While trying to find recipes for my son, I discovered the UnCheese Cookbook by Joanne Stepaniak. I thought it was wonderful! I started reading about veganism a little, and though I was shocked by what I was finding about how animals were treated, I didn’t make any drastic changes.

Around this time, my father-in-law went on a super drastic total vegetarian diet that also excluded oil, sugar, cinnamon, pepper, chiles, chocolate, and other foods. The diet was a diabetes maintenance program. My husband and I experimented with it at home for health reasons, but still ate just about anything when we weren’t at home.

Then I got pregnant with my daughter. I was re-reading some of the vegan material I had from before andmade a decision then to just do it already. My whole family has been vegan ever since and never looked back. That was in 2001. Shortly after my daughter was born, I started the original gladcow website. Later, I started a home-based wholesale vegan baking business in my town and ran it for two years, providing whole-grain, trans-fat-free, vegan pastries to a few local coffee shops. When it became clear that running a baking business and caring for my children was a little more than I wanted to handle, I shut down the business. My husband suggested I write a cookbook, so after a slight panic attack at the thought, I got to work.

In August of 2003, I self-published The Glad Cow Cookbook, now in its second printing. I’m currently working on a second book to be released late this year. I wanted to post more often, so my devoted webmaster created this new site for me. I look forward to writing more rambling posts like this for you all to enjoy.