Elise Kendall was born into a vegetarian family. She was lacto-ovo vegetarian for most of her life, vegan for two years, then vegetarian again, and now an omnivore for the past year and a half. You can read her blog entry about it here.

Not to be confused with here, which is where you’re about to read her ex-vegan interview.

Some vegans think that being raised vegetarian or vegan is the best thing that can happen to a person. Having tested that theory out, do you agree?

I have never grown up eating more typical food, so I am not sure “what it was like growing up” that way. If I ever do, then I will report back and compare!

I lived in a very hippy/new-age sort of town and I went to a Waldorf School there. Honestly I don’t think I often thought (when I was growing up) about not hurting animals. It was just the food that my family ate. As I grew older I felt proud that I was vegetarian and that I always had been, although I never felt like it made me better than people who weren’t.

Did you ever resent the restrictions or feel alienated?

I didn’t feel like I was forced into it, because I wasn’t. My parents had split up by this point and they’d both left the Transcendental Meditation movement that they’d been involved in when we lived in Sydney.

I’m not sure exactly when my mum started eating meat again but for pretty much my whole life she would have ham or chicken if we went out for dinner, although she didn’t cook it at home. I did try chicken a couple of times when we came down to visit my Grandma. They gave me chicken breast and it was really gross. I may have tried other meats at other times and it was always really disgusting. I just started off vegetarian and was convinced that I hated meat.

I didn’t feel alienated at all because, going to the school I did in the town I did, being vegetarian was pretty normal. It wasn’t like my diet was the most restrictive — there was one girl who was not allowed any refined sugar at all. She used to steal my sandwiches out of my schoolbag because she was so hungry and jealous of my delicious jam or Vegemite sandwiches. I’d actually class my diet as being one of the less restrictive! There were a lot of kids who were sugar-free or wheat-free on top of being vegetarian or vegan.

A Vegemite sandwich? Only bread and Vegemite?

Just Vegemite and bread. Delicious! Vegemite sandwiches are very common and not at all restricted to vegetarians. In fact, the more hippie kids would not eat Vegemite and my sandwich-stealing friend was not allowed Vegemite or wheat bread. She had miso on rye bread instead, which is not nearly as delicious.

Did you ever know of any vegetarian or vegan kids to trade for meat from the meat eating kids?

I think it was probably fairly common. We used to have soup days where the class would all get together and make soup. There was ordinarily one vegetarian soup and one chicken soup - then we just ate whichever soup we wanted to! I am pretty sure that our dietary restrictions were much more important to the parents than to the kids.

Every vegan parent’s worst nightmare. Did being raised vegetarian instill those veggie values into you more strongly, or were you less committed because you were born into the beliefs and didn’t choose them yourself?

Looking back and looking at myself now, I think that I am not a very committed person. I don’t have that… fervency. I am someone who seeks comfort in familiarity and routine, but I am not a believer in anything and I don’t think I’m the sort of person who becomes one.

Some people seem to go from fanatical Christianity (for example) to fanatical anti-religion atheism… I’m not sure that it’s possible for me to get that worked up about something, or that committed to a cause. I have always been able to understand multiple sides of a problem and all through my life when people are fighting around me, I really don’t get why they don’t see what the other person is trying to say.

I could never be an activist because I would sympathise too much with ‘the enemy,’ I think.

Have there been any reactions to your veg*an betrayal?

I was talking to someone recently and I mentioned something about how I used to be vegetarian, and he asked what made me decide to “go back to” meat. I said it wasn’t “going back to” so much as “going to” and he remarked that becoming an omnivore after being vegetarian from birth was very unusual. I have no idea how unusual it actually is but people’s attitudes seem to be that they can grok why someone who used to eat meat would want to go back to it… but someone who had always been vegetarian wouldn’t have a reason to start eating meat.

The few early encounters you had with meat weren’t very promising. What was your reason to start eating meat?

Well I’d been thinking for a long time that introducing a bit of meat into my diet might be a good idea for health reasons. I wished I could eat meat, but felt like I couldn’t because I always just found the thought of eating meat to be really really gross. It’s the flesh of a dead thing. That was why I became vegan - not because I thought that it made any real difference to the world, but because when I thought about where milk and eggs came from… EWWW! But veganism proper was pretty unsustainable for me. I just couldn’t get enough protein for my needs and had to go back to eggs and dairy. So I just kind of suppressed that disgust, I guess.

I began to suspect that beans and lentils were triggering my abdominal pain. I had absolutely no desire to eat tofu (which didn’t seem to trigger me as badly for some reason) three times a day, and I don’t really like dairy products very much. I enjoy cheese a lot, but I really didn’t want it to become my major protein source!

My boyfriend refused to eat tofu at all, which made things slightly inconvenient. There was some talk of having tofu for dinner one night, and I teased him about avoiding tofu for no good reason. “I’ll eat steak if you eat tofu,” I challenged him, and I was totally thrown when he agreed immediately and happily put away a large bowl of tofu hours later. He even enjoyed it and now has no problem eating tofu! I think until that point I didn’t realise how inconvenient he found the fact that I refused to eat meat. So we went out to a steakhouse and I got the vegetarian meal (and tried some of his steak!).

How was it?

I pretty much just had one bite. I don’t think that the experience of actually eating meat was mind-blowingly good or anything, but I was optimistic about it getting better once I did it a few more times.

From that point on I made a conscious effort to try to learn to like meat. I ate small amounts at a time. It didn’t taste bad, like I’d remembered from childhood, but it just didn’t seem like something you should be eating. I would be sitting there chewing and it was like eating some kind of deliciously flavoured and textured cardboard or paper or something.

But after a few months of practice, meat started to taste like food and I was able to cut down on the beans. My stomach is still causing problems, but I really notice it if I eat beans and lentils (which is a shame, because they are delicious!). I’ve also recently been placed on a fructose-free diet which seems to be helping. I’d really hate to be wheat-, onion- and fruit-free if I was also trying to be vegetarian or vegan! And if I was trying to do that while minimising my legume intake? Yeah.

Then meat exceeded the low expectations you had for it?

I’m not really sure what I expected, but I didn’t expect that other things I’d always hated would suddenly become palatable. I used to really hate chicken breast - even when I ate chicken I would only ever like the thigh and leg or the wing or something. After I started to like red meat, I also started to like chicken breast.

I never expected that I would be the sort of person who would really love eating a huge chunk of meat. I know a lot of people who do eat meat but they like it to be smooshed up and well cooked and disguised by other things. I’m not as disturbed as I thought I would be by just eating a big steak or something. I really love steak!

Have you had any memorable encounters with vegans as an ex-vegan?

Well my housemate’s friend’s girlfriend’s vegan social group were at a vegetarian pizza place, which is just around the corner from my house. So we went down there to say hello and while I was waiting for my pizza there was a guy there who, ah, made it clear that he would like to get to know me a little better. When he discovered that I was no longer vegetarian it became obvious to me that he divided the world up neatly into three groups of people:

1. Vegans.
2. People who don’t care (ie, Bad People).
3. People who don’t know any better.

Unfortunately for him I didn’t fit into any of these categories so he did his best to re-convert me to veganism, lest his psyche shatter. He kept trying to “find a solution” for me which did not involve me eating meat. “Have you tried…” he kept trying to ask me. I found it really difficult to express to him the fact that eating meat was just one of many MANY things that I have tried and that it seemed to be working pretty well.

I also went to a vegan pancake event recently and had a similar conversation. I tend to easily get into conversations with vegans talking about veganism … just talking about what fake cheeses taste the least awful and what vegan restaurants are any good. Then I feel like I have to come clean when they ask “so how long have you been vegan?”

These people were less rude about it but it was obvious that they had never considered that someone may not be able to be vegan for health reasons. The vegan = healthy connection is just so strong that they had difficulty comprehending it and were pretty dumbfounded.

Do you think something could be physically bad for us — veganism, say — yet still be the right thing to do?

I have difficulty believing in absolutely right and wrong things for everyone. For me, my health and physical comfort (ie, not being in pain or having an upset stomach all of the time) is a very high priority. Maybe other people find that ethical discomfort is more painful to them than physical discomfort.

Like a lot of veg*ans do, you blamed yourself for issues like not having the stamina to exercise or being sleepy all the time. Why is it that vegans prefer to blame something inevitable about themselves rather than something they can change, like their diet?

I think that part of it is a reaction to the attitude that a lot of people have, which is to blame all of a veg*an person’s problems on their diet. Whenever I went to see a doctor and mentioned that I was veg*an, they’d immediately pounce and look at my eyes and my fingernails and then, almost disappointed, would remark “oh you’re not anemic”. Like that would be an easy answer for whatever ailment I happened to be expressing.

And I don’t want to be like those doctors and put every problem I ever had before the age of 25 down to the lack of meat in my diet. I am pretty sure things are not that simple! My grandmother has never been vegetarian and she has chronic digestion problems the same as I do, for example. Meat hasn’t been a cure-all for me at all.

Even though every doctor I ever saw wanted to blame all of my problems on my diet, after the blood tests came back, they overwhelmingly told me that my diet was NOT the problem and that I ought to be perfectly healthy. Even when I told them that I was open to the possibility of introducing meat into my diet, I was always told that it was not necessary.

But for the first time in my life, now that I eat red meat about 3 times a week, I have low iron. Like really low. I have had to take iron supplements which I’d never had to take before. So I am pretty sure that our bodies are super complicated and we really don’t know everything.

Is there anything you miss about veg*anism?

One thing that I did miss, which is very silly, was that when I was veg*an I rarely had to make a decision about what to eat when I went out to a strange restaurant. Because there would be so little to choose from! “Luckily” I’m now on a different set of diet restrictions (low fructose) so I’m back to having that problem!

I never really got into any veg*an social groups or anything that I’m now excluded from. It turns out that everyone I live with was vegetarian at some point and none of us are now. So we enjoy eating vegetarian food pretty regularly. We generally eat meat 2-3 times per week at home.

So really it’s all been gains! I’m hoping that my stomach will get better enough that I can relax my fructose-free a bit when I go out. It really is fantastic to be able to leave the “special dietary requirements” field blank on wedding invitations!