The Confessions of a Non-Vegan Vegan

I am a tormented soul, and the battlefield is my plate. I never feel I’m in the right place, and by “place” I mean my eating domain—the psychic terrain between brisket and beans. I was raised on barbecued beef sandwiches, smoky hamburgers, salami hoagies, and charcuterie boards that looked like Renaissance still lifes of cured flesh. And then, over time, my conscience kicked in like a late-arriving bouncer. I began to hear the muffled cries of suffering animals—and the louder groans of my own arteries. I hated that my pleasure depended on the misery of sentient creatures. I wanted clean eating, a clean heart, moral clarity, and the faint sanctimonious glow of vegan virtue hovering above my head like a halo.

Then I actually paid attention. Veganism, it turns out, isn’t a moral spa retreat; it’s a maze of tradeoffs. Monocrops. Soy fields bulldozing ecosystems. Mice and birds ground into casualties of industrial “compassion.” I realized that evangelizing vegan purity often slides into cultural arrogance—an Instagram-fed smugness that flattens traditions built over centuries of living close to land and climate. Who was I to wag a lentil at an Inuit and say, Have you tried chickpeas? Moral certainty curdled into embarrassment. The world, annoyingly, refused to sort itself into clean categories.

And then there was love. My family bonds through food, and their love language is meat. Bring home burgers and barbecued chicken and I’m greeted like a returning war hero. Serve curried lentils and I’m exiled to the doghouse with a Tupperware lid for a pillow. So I live as a Non-Vegan Vegan: my heart leans plant-based, but pragmatism, domestic peace, and the gravitational pull of convenience drag me back to the carnivorous center. This is my life—philosophically compromised, nutritionally conflicted, emotionally negotiated. It’s tormented, yes, though still less tormented than the animals sacrificed for the charcuterie board my family will demolish on New Year’s Eve. That thought doesn’t save me. It just makes me chew slower.