Husband (to be known from now on as Hubs) is a vegan. He consumes no animals or animal products. He does not buy or wear leather shoes or silk ties. He does not eat anything that ever had a face.In the early years of our marriage, this was the same guy who came home from work and made himself a couple of hamburgers to tide him over until the steak was ready. If the cow stopped moving, the steak was overdone.
Like his father, he loved to cook, especially Italian ham encrusted in pepper and basted continuously with vinegar. And meatballs. He made the best damn meatballs. Even I, who never liked meat to start with, ate these meatballs.
About 15 years ago, he thought he might lose weight if he cut back on fats. Bye bye to butter, milk and ice cream. Then everything else went, one at a time, because he only has two settings: on and off. If he�s doing something, he�s doing it all the way, or he�s not doing it all. He has a short mental menu.
Within the year he had eliminated dairy, eggs, all meats, fish, and even alcohol. (That came back after a year or so. He was never even able to approach eliminating coffee and cigarettes. They were all that held him together.)
I�m not sure when it stopped being a health issue and switched over to �we don�t have the right to take animals� lives� thing. It did. (And I don�t disagree, actually. I just can�t do it myself.) He does not kill spiders. He returns wool sweaters he gets for Christmas. (Okay, that�s a lie. I return them.)
He cooks for himself. The �bacon� or �chicken� is really tofu or vegetable protein, and when he fries it up, it smells like someone is burning all the furniture.
Going out to dinner is a challenge, unless you go Chinese or Japanese, and enough is enough of that already. At least when we went out for my birthday he didn�t make a scene when they brought him pasta with cheese on it. He didn�t complain, but after awhile the waitress saw him sitting there not eating his food and asked what was wrong and brought him a new bowl. It does tend to put a damper on dinner out with friends when he doesn�t order anything and sits there quietly while everyone else is eating. He has this passive-aggressive thing fine-tuned to perfection.
He doesn�t try to change anyone else, and when the girls were small he would still cook meat for them. It�s a personal thing, a matter of ethics and conscience. You�ve got to admire someone who sticks to his convictions like that.
If only it didn�t make living with him so weird and strange all the time. He won�t insist on special treatment, but we still have to take this into account when we make plans to do anything or go anywhere. Husbands are hard enough to explain without having some kind of really major quirk that no one else has ever heard of.
