Vegan Life Is Impossible, Announces Carnivore Columnist

Categories: Vegan

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Erin Stubblefield/Concord Monitor
Tim O'Shea eats his last vegan meal
​We confess that until yesterday we had never read the Concord Monitor.

But our omnivorous attention was attracted by the column "My so-called vegan life" by Tim O'Shea, who basically writes what our headline states.

O'Shea's girlfriend suggests he try the vegan lifestyle. We're not sure why, or whether his girlfriend is herself a vegan. But just three paragraphs later, O'Shea reveals that he also has a wife. Dude! We didn't know New Hampshire was the France of the Northeast. You see, meat does raise your energy level.

Anyway, O'Shea is a great candidate for a vegan intervention, because he announces "salads without bacon bits, buffalo chicken strips and ladles of bleu cheese dressing are nothing more than piles of wimpy lettuce." This is a man who needs two weeks without meat. (BTW, what is a buffalo chicken strip? Is it fake buffalo made from chicken? Is it chicken processed in Buffalo?)

We look forward to his suffering and awakening, and the lessons he takes with him when he returns to carnivorism. We're amused by his first impressions of vegan food as "Japanese spaghetti with peanut butter" and "twigs and apricots."

But O'Shea throws us a curve. He only makes it a week before he breaks down at a family party and "crammed piece after piece of chicken and fancy paper-thin Italian pork into my dishonest mouth."

Then he goes to New York, one of the few places in this country with vegan restaurants to rival ours, but finds himself unable to resist those Big Apple meat treats you can't get anywhere else, like steak and a turkey BLT. Not only that, he implies that no vegan can resist these temptations.

At the end, of course he's down on the experience. O'Shea's column isn't a serious attack on veganism; it's an entertaining piece -- the guy's a professional writer. But like most mainstream newspaper columnists (we're looking at you, Mr. Nevius), he believes he speaks for all of us when he says veganism is for the birds.

No wonder, because his "last day as a vegan was a mixture of remorse, anxiety and gastric distress." Gastric distress? Well, the fruit he was eating wasn't sufficient, "so I began secretly wedging chunks of stale bread into a tub of cream cheese, and at the dinner table, I snuck a pad of butter while no one was watching."

Yep, cream cheese and butter: the essential ingredients of the true vegan experience.

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