What happens when you are the first of your vegan friends to betray the cause? Will your friends accept and love you despite your return to selfish eating? Or might there be a little judgment of your ethical failure?

I was lucky in a sense. I was one of the last holdouts in my group of vegan friends, so by the time I finally put myself before the animals, my friends were more likely to be happy than to hate me.

That was not the case for Jessica Pelkey. 

What was your diet like before you became vegan?

I was raised on standard American fare. My mother made staples like ground beef tater-tot casserole, chicken enchiladas with the spice packet, tacos, open-face hot turkey sandwiches, and peaches from a can. I started drinking coffee when I was 11 and drank soda on a daily basis. In high school, I became very aware of what I ate and tried dearly to be anorexic or bulimic. I didn’t accomplish either and instead felt guilty about everything I ate. Shortly after graduating high school I stopped drinking coffee and soda altogether.

What got you into veganism?

I became vegan literally overnight when I was 18 years old. I was having dinner with a couple of folks and one of them was vegan and gave me a brochure called “Why Vegan?”

She brought “Why Vegan?” pamphlets to dinner? Animals must love her. Were you taken aback at first?

At the time I didn’t know much about veganism and when I asked her for details, she jumped right on me. She was volunteering with Vegan Outreach so she had all those activism materials on her. It wasn’t too awkward because, even though she was zealous, she only got on her soapbox after I prompted her.

I took it home, read it, cried about how awful factory farms were, and was totally vegan from that day forth (as far as I understood it; it took me about a month to get caught up on all the byproducts). I quickly adjusted to not being able to eat food at parties and always having to order fries when out with non-vegan friends. I wrote down a bunch of pro-vegan quotes and put them in my wallet to remind myself why I was vegan.

What were the quotes?

Some examples: “Animals are my friends… and I don’t eat my friends.” - George Bernard Shaw. “Until he extends the circle of compassion to all living things, man himself will not find peace.” - Albert Schweitzer. “Take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.” - Elie Wiesel

“The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in times of great moral crises maintain their neutrality” would have been a good one to add to Wiesel’s quote. Except that most vegans don’t believe in hell because they weren’t raised religious, or have stopped believing in their family’s religion. Was that the case with you?

You read me perfectly. I went to a Lutheran grade school and Catholic high school. When I graduated high school, I was on the war path: god didn’t exist and Christianity was the most blasphemous BS religion of all the religions. I dropped it like it was hot shortly after became vegan.

Do you see any similarities between veganism and religion?

I commonly used to say that veganism was my religion. I do see lots of similarities. It’s hyper-moralized and the members try to outdo each other. It can extend beyond just diet, clothing and product use into fighting the man however possible: don’t wear Nike, don’t support Silk Soy, don’t feed your dog Iams, don’t shop at Safeway, don’t don’t buy any clothes produced overseas, don’t do anything at all ever again.

I thought that meat eaters were living in their own personal hell by ingesting the flesh/milk of animals who died cruelly; as though somehow, the way the animal died would transfer into the consumer. I thought that people who ate meat deserved to be fat and have clogged up arteries. They would die before me and that would be their punishment.

I have always been a self-righteous person, no matter what I have going on in my life. So feeling like I had been lied to my whole life about what to eat and where my food came from turned me into a turbo bitch. Being vegan gave me an easy way to feel like I was more ethical, more kind, more alive than other people. Overall I thought everyone who wasn’t vegan wasn’t worth being close friends with.

Do omnivores underestimate the extent of vegan judgment?

Absolutely. I judged everyone who wasn’t vegan. The only way someone could be okay by me was if they were vegan. Thus, the main/only connection I had with lots of my friends was our veganism.

When I would be hanging out with all vegans, we would trash the fuck out of anyone we knew that had stopped being vegan. If someone was once vegan and went back to eating meat/eggs/dairy, we all agreed that they had never really cared to begin with. I told a vegan friend about people I met at school who called themselves vegan but would eat stuff like M&Ms or eggs from someone’s backyard chickens. We agreed that they were totally phony and shouldn’t get to call themselves vegan.

I also judged vegans. I lived with a vegan friend and looked through her cosmetics and found stuff that had trace animal products in them. I thought she was phony from then on and told friends of ours about her offending shampoo.

But I got judged by vegans too. I ate honey for a good three out of my five and a half years of veganism. In the vegan community I was in, this was a gross violation. One girl called me out at a vegan potluck in front of 20 other vegans, saying I wasn’t really vegan if I ate honey.

Did you judge lacto-ovo vegetarians?

Oh god. I thought lacto-ovo vegetarians were so lame. Why didn’t they just close the deal and become vegan? I don’t know how many times I heard someone say, “I would be vegan but I could never give up cheese!” I thought they were weak-willed.

What got you out of veganism?

I felt good and healthy for a solid five years and never thought twice about my choice to be vegan. I thought that I was going to be vegan until I died, since obviously the vegan diet is nutritionally and morally superior. Things changed for me last summer.

During the last six months I was vegan, I ramped up my fitness regime. I was doing a three-day-a-week boot camp of running and trapeze. I ate peanut butter every single day, along with gangs of beans and greens, and experimented with supplements. But I could not feel satisfied no matter what I ate. I became mildly obsessed with eating eggs.

I felt I had to choose between being vegan and being athletic. I love fitness too much to scale back in that area. Veganism had to go. I started with eggs, then went to dairy, then ate fish, and finally polished it all off with filet mignon a few weeks ago in DC at the Daily Grill. YUM! I now eat eggs almost every day and I feel 10x more energetic. I also don’t crave sugar like a fiend. (Vegans tend to be sugar addicts and I was no exception.)

Even though there are plenty of scientific studies that give credence to what I experienced — short-term effects of veganism are positive, but long-term effects are negative — I know most balls-to-the-walls vegans would disagree vehemently with me and mention Brenden Brazier and Carl Lewis. I don’t have opinions about Brenden Brazier’s veganism. I only know about my own.

A lot of vegans say that veganism isn’t a sacrifice. Did you feel that way as a vegan? Do you feel differently after the filet mignon?

I did not feel like being vegan was a sacrifice at all. I always used to say it was “the least I could do.” As a vegan, I didn’t realize how much I was missing out on by not being able to share meals with my family and do small things like eat cookies my friend’s three-year-old daughter bakes for me. I feel much more connected to other people without the roadblock of my eating habits/holier-than-thou judgments in the way.

How did you convince yourself that it might be morally tolerable to eat animal products?

I went on a camping trip with a bunch of my vegetarian friends. I sat by the fire and told them I was craving eggs like a crazy woman. I was having a mild identity crisis and actually said to them, “Who am I if I am not vegan?”

They all said that I should “listen to my body.” When I told them that my vegan friends were going to disown me, they said the obvious, “then they’re not really your friends.” Looking back, I don’t think I needed too much coaching, just reassurance that I wasn’t a terrible, evil person if I decided to eat eggs.

How did the vegans in your life react to the bad news?

After a few months of veganism I had dated a 31-year-old vegan tattooer. He helped usher me into the lifestyle, as he had been vegan for 10 years at that point. It was through him that I found the community that now snubs me.

I had kept in touch with him even though we’ve been broken up for a few years. But I told him that I was eating eggs and dairy and he flipped shit — he was genuinely angry with me. Later I sent him an email about some art he’d made, and he never wrote back. Eventually he flat-out told me that he was distancing himself from me since I wasn’t vegan anymore. This is impressive because after we broke up I slept with his best friend and he didn’t distance himself from me then. Apparently not being vegan is a worse offense.

I called two vegan friends before I ever ate an egg to ask what they thought. One of them told me I should do what felt right to me. The other one said I should try to figure out what my egg craving meant and satisfy it another way.

I knew that news would travel fast, and it did. I walked into a vegan restaurant that I used to eat at frequently and the guy ringing me up was wearing a shirt that said, “Never trust an ex-vegan.”

That same day I walked up to a table of vegans I knew and one dude wouldn’t even talk to me. It was sad because he looked like he had to try so hard to not be friendly. He felt he was doing the right thing by shunning me. One vegan friend told me that she believed my mind wanted eggs and not my body. Another friend has posted things on her facebook wall that leave me wondering if they’re aimed at me. Things like, “go and stay vegan” as a status update.

My vegetarian friends seem to think it’s kinda funny and haven’t reacted poorly at all.

How did the non-vegans in your life react to the good news?

A lot of my non-vegan friends are surprised because I was staunch for such a long stretch. I can’t count how many times people have said “welcome back” to me. Where I’m being welcomed back to, I’m not sure. They laugh when they see me eat meat now. Really, though, they don’t care. Only the vegans care.

There’s a good chance your vegan ex-friends will eventually want to switch the placement of that ex-. Could you see being friends with them again as future repentant ex-vegans?

I could be friends with most of them again. The vegan social culture is different from American culture en masse and I expected them to react poorly to my decisions. It will be interesting as time goes on to see who else leaves the vegan club. I wish them no ill will and I’m just happy to be out from under the crushing dogma myself.

When you became vegan, you felt like you’d been lied to your whole life. Now that you’re an ex-vegan, do you feel like veganism lied to you?

Yes. When I was vegan I thought I had found the perfect way to eat. I believed it was the only moral lifestyle and also the healthiest diet for my body. Now I don’t subscribe to any diet with a name and I’m wary of ever doing so again. I weightlift and lots of people at my gym are into the paleo diet. I just can’t jump on the bandwagon because I lost faith in the idea that someone can write a book and design a diet that will meet everyone’s needs. Even if I ate a paleo-type diet, I don’t think I would rep the name.

Furthermore, I am not here to say that veganism is the wrong diet for anyone. It just didn’t work for me long term.

Are you self-righteous in your ex-veganism?

I don’t think so. Mostly I’m just bummed about how my vegan friends have treated me. It’s hard for me to continue to be supportive of their way of life when they’re so hostile about mine.

How do you avoid guilt now that you eat meat again?

I don’t avoid it. I live in Seattle and you can’t go anywhere without encountering vegetarian/vegan advocacy. When I think about the animals who are living in awful conditions, I still feel upset about their shitty lives. What has changed is that I don’t feel like I am going to fix their situation with my diet.