A small black bowl rests in front of me. The fork in my hand plunges into the salad it contains. As I gaze into the bowl’s simple contents, I feel nothing. “This is good,” I say out loud, though I’m aware that I’m addressing myself. As my trembling arm inserts the forkful of salad into my mouth, my tastebuds remain passive. My jaws open and close mechanically until sufficient mastication has been achieved, and then I promptly swallow.
As an Orthodox Christian, a large part of my religion is asceticism—fasting from life’s pleasures to achieve greater spiritual health. Because food is one of life’s simplest pleasures, Orthodox Christians traditionally take up simple, plant-based diets for much of the year. The idea is simple: cut things out and you’ll appreciate them more. So, for the past few weeks, I’ve gone vegan.
Immediately after I started my diet, I began to miss the things I had given up. I had never been a huge fan of plain salads, and my mouth would water as I passed by restaurants on the street. I even began to envy the simple lunches of the Garfield cafeteria. But interestingly, another thing came with going vegan: I started to appreciate my meals more. For most of my life, I hadn’t ever given any thought to what I ate. But now that my meals required careful consideration—both to ensure I was following my diet and that I was getting the necessary nutrients to be a student athlete—I realized that even the most modest of meals were the culmination of a great deal of thought, love, and care.
I quickly discovered that my relationship to food wasn’t the only thing that had changed. Because my meals were simpler, eating became less central to lunch time. I finally had the chance to spend time with my friends, walking and talking around Garfield. We started to just stop and look at things. The old theater arch in the commons, for example, features so many beautiful, hand-carved details. I can’t believe I walked by it every day for years and never stopped to appreciate it. On the day it was snowing, as I rode the bus to school, I put down my phone and just looked out the window. Such beautiful scenery, yet I so often ignored it.
Looking back, it definitely took going vegan to discover just how much I valued meat and dairy. But changing my diet did more than just let me appreciate my meals. It showed me everything I had been overlooking: the places around me, the scenery outside the bus window, and the friends I walked with during lunch.
So as I take a final bite of the salad in front of me, I am not staring at the bowl anymore. Instead, I’m looking up.
