I don’t miss meat. The last meat item I ate was a chicken parmesan sandwich I ordered while drunk and crying at a Lower East Side deli. Even more pathetically, it was eaten, still drunk and crying (maybe even verging on sobbing), with only the street lights flickering through my apartment. I woke up the next day to 1/3 of a chicken parmesan sandwich on my couch throw pillow, crusty from the overnight exposure. And that’s the last time I ate meat.

I think it was December 2015 when I was at Kripalu, a retreat in the Berkshires in Massachusetts. I had taken my sister there for her birthday, and we rotated from class to class, from downward dog to mapping out our intentions for the year ahead. I was so stressed out that over the course of those 2 days, I had 5 massages in addition to the regularly scheduled programming.

There was an astrologer on site, and I booked an appointment hoping she would have some answers to help guide me out of my predicament. Predicaments, I suppose. It should have been plural.

She talked about planetary alignments after I provided my birthdate and time. My sun, moon, and stars were all analyzed without much surprise. I’m hardworking, a leader, want to work in health and service to others, demonstrative, loyal, big heart, risk-taking, trail-blazing. Then she told me I had strict parents and that in a past life I had had them as kids – WHAT????!!! I sort of glazed over that fact. Since 23, I had been delving into many things and had been on the dark side for 10 years. For the next 3 years, I would be working on myself. She emphasized that I would be changing my diet and the foods I eat fundamentally. That didn’t really seem as radical a change as other things I could be doing, and it didn’t resonate with me at all at the time, but it stuck with me because it just seemed so prosaic and bizarre. OK lady, I’m thinking about blowing up every facet of my life, and you’re talking about how I’m going to change how I eat as if it’s that extraordinary?

I take it all with a grain of salt though, as 2016 was supposed to be a big marriage and partnership year for me, which it was not. She told me not to quit my job until July or August, but by April, I just had to go. Reading the stars may or may not be art, science, or black magic.

If I were to pinpoint a prescient moment in recent memory, I guess I would start with that odd prediction that I could not reconcile in my mind until not.

I am not quite vegan yet. I am verging on vegan. I’ve had mozzarella sticks at a pub when there was nothing else to order. I’ve had some pizza too. I’m a happy vegetarian who doesn’t have to think too hard about that and a persnicketty vegan who’s always reading labels.

In all practical terms, my travels around Asia helped me make the leap and realize it was all quite doable. In Korea, the land of carnivores, I met Canadian vegan James. We chatted a lot about veganism, and he cooked a lot of delicious meals for me. In Thailand, I read Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Eating Animals,” which had been sitting on my Kindle for eons and eons. That book distressed me so much that I got off the plane in Kuala Lumpur after finishing the book on the plane and immediately ordered a cheeseburger from Wendy’s. I am far from perfect, and it also shows how food is so much more than a receptacle of nutrients. We look to it for comfort and familiarity, lineage. It’s hard to erase that or diverge too significantly from it, especially all at once.

I am sort of lightly browsing The China Study now (a book recounting the findings from a 20-year study on nutrition). But honestly, I don’t know how it’s possible to use that many words to not even really get to a point, so I might give up on that soon. Cliffnotes, please.

Why am I not eating animals? I’m not one of those people who remembers statistics or facts very well, so it’s hard for me to marshal them into an argument on command. I’ll try to explain it crudely.

Factory farming practices are absolutely abhorrent and inhumane, and knowing now what I know and sort of always knew, it’s hard for me to justify eating meat in this country. I do not judge others – it’s just a personal choice. It’s not about my love for animals. I honestly don’t even love animals that much. I just don’t like cruelty.

I don’t consider myself an activist, and I’m not naive enough to think my secret personal choice that I’m hiding from people is going to change the world. Of course, there is something to be said by people power and the micro-actions of the masses adding up to something significant, especially a shift in norms and behavior over time. That can help push the bigger normative policy shifts against the weighty tides of big business and small wallets. For example, smoking and cigarettes. I think my dad used to literally blow smoke in my face daily when I was a child, and that was considered a-ok. In this case, I don’t think veganism has yet reached the mainstream and a big cause. It probably won’t for a while yet.

I don’t necessarily think it is cruel to eat animals or to have them in captivity, but stepping on them, breaking them, gutting them alive, abusing them, raping them, squishing them all together bloodied, killing them as soon as their egg production reduces slightly, creating an environment of lifelong suffering – that, I have a problem with. The general waste level, I also have a problem with. The amount of bycatch (excess sealife retained / destroyed) associated with catching one good fish for commercial production is wasteful. I don’t like that.

Yes, and of course, factory farming contributes much more to global warming and emissions than cars. So why aren’t we focused on that?

It seems to me from the limited amount of literature I have read that even the “good guys” and good farms find it extremely hard to escape these practices at least in part. So I’d just rather not guess.

Being vegetarian / vegan has not been very difficult. It’s actually been pretty delicious. I don’t miss meat at all, except sushi to a small extent. It’s made me appreciate food a lot more, oddly enough. I take it less for granted in a way. I examine the menu and think more about the ingredients.

LA offers a lot for vegans. Tofu scrambles and coconut yogurts for breakfast. Many amazing restaurants like Crossroads, Gracias Madre, Flore, Cafe Gratitude, all the Ethiopian restaurants, and Samosa House on my corner. All these restaurants are so inventive, and I’m excited to try more of them. Even those that do not cater exclusively to vegans are pretty much all vegan-friendly.

But am I getting enough protein? What about other nutrients? Am I eating too many carbs? Protein isn’t an issue. I need to deal with the whole B12 thing and for now, I’m taking supplements. Yes, I’m eating way too many carbs, and I need to be conscious of it. But…I haven’t really had pasta, bagels, or scones in years, so I’m secretly happy about it too.

I do believe there will come a point in the future when a sizeable portion of the world will be vegan.