This is sort of last week’s news, but I’m chronically behind in my blog-reading, and this was too good not to share.
Oprah recently finished a 21-day stint as a vegan. Apparently she’s taken some flack in the past for questioning whether beef is safe to eat (and the beef industry let her know that a little mad cow never hurt anyone), but now she has undertaken a temporary meat-free, dairy-and-egg-free, caffeine-free, gluten-free, alcohol-free lifestyle, calling it a “cleanse.” She blogged about it, which is particularly interesting. She has some nice insights:
Eating more consciously now feels like a way of being. I actually think about how my food got to my plate. That was the whole point, right?
Doesn’t mean I’m committed to veganism…but I am thinking about what I eat and why. And from that I can never turn back.
She is also impressively cheerful about the whole experience, and says that she misses wine most of all – I can’t think of too many people who would miss wine most in a gluten-free vegan diet. But she praises almost every dish she describes, and I bet that goes a long way toward dispelling some of the illusions many people have about vegan food.
Of course, there are some advantages to being Oprah, and she makes full use of them. For the first half of her diet, she had a gourmet chef preparing all her meals for her. I don’t know about you, but I could put up with almost any dietary restrictions if I had a personal gourmet chef on call. (The meals do sound delicious, though!) So that’s sort of cheating, but I can understand.
What did disappoint me is her frequent mentions of Morningstar, frozen waffles, and the Whole Foods prepared meals department. She seems to like them, and it’s nice that there is now such a wide array of vegan convenience food available. But how is it healthy or cleansing to eat waffles from a box? Cooking for yourself with natural ingredients isn’t necessarily a part of vegan living, but it often is. If you’re eating convenience foods, you’re not really connecting with your food. It’s one thing to pick up a box that says “all-natural” on it, and quite another to know the source of each ingredient and assemble the meal yourself. It would have made me happy to see her cook more on her own, as she does on the final day with a whole meal coming from her own garden:
All ingredients except the olive oil came from my garden. Yes, I’m growing potatoes this year, as well as beets and corn. I got a real kick out of that. I was raised by a grandmother who grew and harvested everything. Going to the garden was something I took for granted…now it thrills me to see the baskets of lettuce, fava beans, and herbs, fresh picked.
So in the end I say: Bravo to Oprah! Even if I disagree with some of her methods, she’s brought veganism into the public consciousness and made it a healthy, even spiritual choice. Will any of her viewers branch out and bring more vegan food into their diets? Will they pay more attention to where their food comes from? I hope so.