Day 16: Mmmmm waffle

I must apologise for uselessness on a number of levels. Firstly, lack of posting (went on holiday, hooray), and secondly, for breaking vegan-ness and knowingly and deliberately eating a very lovely chocolately waffle whilst on said holiday. I suppose at least it wasn't a kebab.

Vegan-ness has so far been ok mainly, and I think that has mostly been because I haven't minded it too much. However, spending 5 days in Amsterdam felt like this challenge lark was more of a sacrifice than it has been to date (especially with cereal bars, falafal and chips as the staple diet items). There were two main issues here:
1) We were eating out a lot in restaurants with very limited and fairly unappealing vegan options
2) I (slightly) resented the fact that I was taking time off and spending money to have a holiday, and that eating vegan food was making my holiday a bit more difficult.

Extending this thought to making changes in general - its easy to make a change when the difficulties aren't too challenging. When things become a little harder you can really see if you care enough to make the effort (...and I do suspect think that many vegetarians and vegans don't really have a particular desire to eat animals or animal products. There will be some, but how many vegetarians do you know who would really really want a nice rare bit of steak?).

So I think its important to consider changes in context for specific people. I went to conflict management training a couple of weeks back and they really hammered home how you really just can't understand how things feel to different people (for example, how saying "I know how you feel" in a conflict has the potential to very much irritate the person on the receiving end). So maybe more credit should be given to those (like Milos), who are finding this really difficult, but making an awesome effort.

Went to a lovely Japanese vegan restaurant near King's Cross station in London last night - one of the nicest meals I've had in months and you would even notice there's no meat - and it wasn't only me who thought this - with admission from the slightly suprised avowed meat-eater: "I'm glad you are a temporary vegan otherwise I would never ever have gone to that restaurant and it was really nice".

And I have to quote from their menu (we should get them to do the food for our final course dinner - the department would love this - 2 "sustainables" in as many sentences...):

"...the Itadaki-zen restaurant was born from the need to provide a source of food which integrates into a cycle of sustainability. The goal is to reach a state in which the restaurant can self-produce methods which are themselves sustainable for the wider ecosystem..."

If anyone has a spare hour at King's Cross I highly recommend hunting them down (see http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/669017)

Next post will be less rambly and more scientific.