Putting tahini on everything.

Cooking.

Eating lots of vegetables.

Putting nori seaweed on everything.

Eating fruit mixed with almond butter for breakfast (or dessert).

Not drinking while I eat. This was specifically a macrobiotic habit, but I’m as strict about it as I ever was, even though I’ve read it makes no difference. And in fact, drinking while you eat might actually be good because it helps you get full faster.

Eating lots of nuts.

Waiting at least half an hour after eating my main meal to eat fruit. Another macrobiotic thing that I haven’t let go.

Putting nutritional yeast on everything (though this one has tapered off along with flax seeds, miso, umeboshi paste and spirulina).

Drinking white tea.

I lost my taste for kombucha for a while, but eventually it came back. I don’t drink it by the gallon the way I used to, though.

Eating raw vegan desserts. This one is more theoretical because I don’t have access to them lately, but aside from fruit, raw vegan desserts are the only desserts I’ll eat.

Using apple cider vinegar on salads and sometimes doing shots of it.

Eating lots of young coconuts.

Using Bragg Liquid Aminos instead of soy sauce.

Not showering every day.

But using Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soap when I do shower.

Before food was divided into six quadrants of a pyramid, there were Four Food Groups:

ONE. “Meats, poultry, fish, dry beans, peas, eggs and nuts.” If your beans weren’t dry, you’d better have been eating meats, poultry, fish, peas, eggs and nuts to compensate. TWO. Dairy. THREE. Grains. FOUR. Fruits and vegetables.

Ideally, you would have four meals a day, one for each of the groups.

In the early 1990s, we realized that eating only four things sounded kind of limiting. So fruits and vegetables were accorded their own categories, and the now five groups were molded into a pyramid, capped with a pointy hat of sweets and vegetable oils, acknowledged for the first time in nutritional history. (In retrospect, maybe those should have stayed a secret.) Even more radically, the pyramid picked favorites. Sweets and oils were to be used sparingly, while grains were the foundation, to be gorged upon. The only thing it didn’t change is that the beans are still dry. So crunch away.

Then I went to the World Veg Fest in San Francisco and saw that it changed yet again!

Now we’re back to the four food groups, revised for the vegan epoch. The dairy group is gone completely. There’s not even a hemp milk/almond milk/oat milk, cultured coconut yogurt and Daiya vegan cheese group to replace it.

Only two foods have been salvaged from the “meats, poultry, fish, dry beans, peas, eggs and nuts” group, which has become the “chickpeas, baked and refried beans, soymilk, tempeh and texturized vegetable protein” group. In other words, the “look at all the things we can turn beans into” group.

After the musical fruit group, we have the beach bum fruit group; just be sure to wash your fruit’s sunscreen off before you eat. Sweets and oils are gone again, but two pyramid innovations remain — rollerskating vegetables get their own group, and surfer dude grains are the foundation of a healthy diet.

Note that there are no nuts in this quartered vegan future. Nuts are relegated to the lard bin of nutritional history, as mankind’s destiny will be a lipidless one.

Let’s hope everyone reads the fine print about supplementing with B12, or we could be leaving the fate of this world in the hands of an anemic, gastrointestionally-compromised nervous-system-disorder-plagued (yet hyper-compassionate) humanity.

Anyway, good to know what we’re supposed to be eating. Let’s watch the vegans at The World Veg Fest, San Francisco put nutritional theory into action.

Soy yogurt: a dirt-biking legume.

These bottles of green powder represent the pinnacle of health for vegans. You know all the “normal” foods you eat? Cowering weaklings, all of them, compared to superfoods like spirulna! This algae product is perhaps the best source for B12-blocking B12 analogues in the world, which doesn’t sound like something that vegans would go out of their way for, but it turns out that for most vegans, it isn’t enough to bury B12 — no, they have to put on cleats and stomp on its grave.

This was the first time I ever saw anyone say “Open up and say ahhh!” before feeding herself.

I have to believe that the “Joyful Eating!” sign is for something else.

Mock kangaroo pouch. I love it when fake meats get creative.

I had to give this man the Heimlich later. He choked on a miniature walkman in his carrot juice.

She asked for the burrito, but clearly had her eye on the green liquid. When veganism becomes too easy, it’s a good idea to give yourself these little willpower tests every once in a while.

Another green powder for vegans to swear by.

Vegans are so used to being paranoid about what is in their food that even at vegetarian events they can’t drop their guard. “This tastes a little creamy,” she said. “Did they put fish sauce in this?” Cute how vegans forget which animal products are which.

A giant bag of gojis, yet another superfood, this time in dried, chewy berry form. Better keep your eye on that bag of red gold, buddy — there are vegan body builders in these parts.

I don’t know what is in those boxes, but I’d recognize those white baggies anywhere — that’s the vegan mac & cheese from NYC’s Veggie Conquest.

Howard Lyman was here too, but this was the real Mad Cowboy.

This food looked actually looked good, so I made sure not to get it in the frame.

A lot of vegans start off being against caffeine. An unnaturally quickened heart rate has nothing to do with animal products, but avoiding it meshes well with a purity-minded lifestyle. As your veganism wears on, though… and the spring in your step turns to a shuffle… and the brain fog swirls ever more densely, even the most anti-caffeine vegans eventually turn to green tea and then sometimes even to coffee, just to be able to keep moving. Soy and caffeine — long-term veganism would be impossible without them.

Suck the soy marrow out of life.

In September, I attended “Veggie Conquest,” a monthly Iron Chef-style vegan cooking competition in New York City.

Unfortunately, compared to any Veggie Fair, Fest or Expo that I’ve been to, it was mostly a bust as far as sickly vegans. Sure, there were a few. I mean, there just had to be. But even to my highly biased eye, I couldn’t honestly say that overall, this group of individuals looked any more sickly than average.

Perhaps the sort of vegan who goes to a cooking contest is a more active, less secluded variety of seitan worshipper than the expo-attending sort?

Depression and a general disdain for existence, two qualities in abundance at vegan festivals, can’t do much for one’s complexion, especially when in combination with willful malnutrition. But the excitement of attending a cooking competition seems to add a much-needed splash of color to a pallor that had all but given up on itself.

At least that’s how I rationalize it. What am I going to do, say that maybe vegans aren’t so sickly looking after all?

I did what I could. I waited for otherwise healthy-looking vegans to step into a bad patch of light, or to blink, look sad, or talk with their mouths full.

It only rarely worked, which makes me think that most of them must have gone vegan the day before. I’ll check in on Veggie Conquest in a few years. Then you’ll see!

It wasn’t a total waste, though. Veggie Conquest was a good case study in how veganism drastically decreases one’s culinary standards and taste. There were four dishes up for awards. Three were inedible and the other was raw zucchini slices covered in watermelon salsa. The event was a food-lover’s nightmare. But these weren’t food lovers — these were vegans!

When the emcee asked who in the room was vegan, just about everyone raised their hands. The fact that they were able to hold their hands in the air at all showed that I was dealing with a different class of vegans than I was used to.

Well, there was one guy who couldn’t get his hand up all the way.

Or maybe he just wanted someone to put that little pumpkin in his palm.

This was the emcee, whom I managed to catch mid-blink. That aside, he looked pefectly normal, so I at first assumed he was a recent vegan convert. Then he talked about having microwaved veggie hot dogs when he was in college, so there went that theory.

My belief now is that his tattoo ink contains animal products that gradually release nutrients and sustenance over time. Pretty soon his desperately hungry arms will devour all of that nourishing ink and he will either be forced to get new tattoos, or to quit veganism forever.

These were the three judges.

The judge in the middle runs a vegan bakery somewhere in the Midwest, I think. All I remember for sure about her is that she was in New York on her way to Ghana to help certify a women’s co-op as organic for shea butter. In my opinion, if she really wanted to help them, she should have mailed them a letter saying, “Forget about the certification. Just slap ‘organic — trust us’ on it, like we do here.”

This judge is from the site Ecorazzi, an environmental vegan blog that I link to on this site to create the appearance of fairness. Before I really started to read that blog, I assumed from the name that it kind of made fun of environmentalism. It doesn’t. The only time it mocks anything is when celebrities like Hilary Swank stop being vegan.

I’m not sure what this judge’s role is at Ecorazzi, but considering the effusive praise he heaped upon the bland, dry insults to our taste buds coming out of the kitchen that evening, I have to question that site’s journalistic objectivity and integrity.

This judge is the owner of Counter, a vegan restaurant in New York that I have been to a few times. It is the sort of restaurant that you don’t like when you go, but over time the unhappy memories fade a little bit, and you think, “Hey, it’s time to give Counter another chance.” And then you regret it when you do.

Still, while both of the other judges were wildly forgiving and had nothing but praise for every mediocre dish, I noticed that this judge only rarely had anything to say at all. I gather she didn’t discover her next star chef here.

The stakes were high. This is what the cooks were fighting for — a tofu press. You put a block of tofu in, press, and the excess tofu water is squeezed out. This is the sort of device that vegans don’t talk about too much with outsiders.

Bonus prizes included this bag of vegan macaroni and cheese (“Is this really a prize?” he asked)…

…and vegan white chocolate chips from Israel. Vegans find all dietary restrictions that aren’t veganism to be annoying and arbitrary, but they sure love that the Kashrut “don’t boil a calf in its mother’s milk” rule leads to some interesting Jewish vegan products.

So this was the set-up: four chefs all had to make a dish based around a “secret ingredient,” which was announced a few days before the competition. The ingredient was squash. I don’t particularly love squash, but I was relieved that the secret ingredient wasn’t Daiya.

Once the cooks finished, a Veggie Conquest server brought out the dishes, one at a time. I know, she was not sickly looking at all, but I managed to catch her with her mouth slightly askew. Also, check out the woman whose face ends at her eyes. This is what veganism does to you, folks — almost strange expressions and half faces.

This was the first contender, an unnaturally sweet butternut squash dip with bread “chips” that were dusted with cinnamon and sugar.

Half a bite was more than enough for me.

In general, the reaction to this dish was ambivalent.

It got a few points simply for being vegan food, but sometimes even that isn’t good enough.

The cook was invited up to explain herself. Looking guilty for her squash dip’s affront to our senses, she meekly described how she puréed butternut squash with tofu and cashew to create her pulpy, sugary atrocity. The reason for the tofu is obvious — this is a vegan cooking competition, so you may as well use tofu somehow — but why the cashew? Because it’s a nut, so she thought it would go well with butternut.

She then told us her favorite restaurant was the vegan fast food joint in Brooklyn called Food Swings, which is perhaps the most disgusting restaurant in the entire tri-state area.

She got last place.

Next up was the only dish I was able to stand, the raw “squash chips.”

The creator of this dish told us he used fresh cucumbers for the chips, and that the salsa was made with watermelon and jalapenos. Not very ambitious, especially since he didn’t dehydrate anything (raw food isn’t truly considered raw unless it’s dehydrated), but that was probably why it hadn’t utterly failed.

He told us he’d been a partial raw foodist for three years, mainly because of a misunderstanding. He was buying supplements at a natural food store and the woman at the register falsely assumed he was a raw foodist. He didn’t even know what raw foodism was at that point, but he researched more about it and decided to become one.

I felt a bond with him over this, because I became vegetarian in a similar way. I was at Golden Corral with a friend and I happened to get only vegetarian dishes from the buffet. My friend asked if I was vegetarian, and for some reason, this made me think that I might as well be, so I said that I was. Not only did this influence the rest of my life so far, it also probably had a big impact on what I got for seconds at Golden Corral that night (it would have looked weird to get pepperoni pizza).

The emcee told the raw guy that he had “the raw glow.”Most vegans supposedly have a “vegan glow,” an aura of healthfulness and goodness that emenates from within them because of their pure, ethical diet (a secular version of the “Mormon glow”). I used to be told I had a vegan glow, but eventually this became “you look like you’re dying of tuberculosis.” Raw foodists are said to have an even more intense sparkle, though, because their diets are the most pure and extreme. Raw foods maintain their enzymes, making them “live,” and supposedly they transfer this life energy to those who eat live foods exclusively.

For most of the night, I sat next to this raw guy, and though he exhibited no signs of vegan sickliness (aside from being a little too thin, which he said he was even when he ate meat), he did seem melancholy about the alienation and social problems that veganism had wrought on his life. He said that though being vegan didn’t make it impossible for him to hang out with non-vegans, it made it just difficult enough that it would often discourage him from doing so.

But at least here, this night, he was among vegan friends.

This was the third dish, a bland stuffed mushroom. It looked like something that Baltimore schools should be serving on Meatless Monday, and didn’t taste any better.

Here is the cook of that one, wearing something far more colorful than her food.

This may look like something you would leave on someone’s grave, and you very well could do that, but it is also vegan food.

I don’t know what the hell it was, and neither did anybody else. Still, it was deep-fried in some sort of pumpkin seed milk batter, which impressed people. It didn’t taste like much, but the mystery and complexity of it all pushed it over the top. It won both the audience award and judge’s award for best dish of the night. The raw guy was robbed!

Go on, accept your tofu press, enzyme killer.

This is the winner, a public school teacher. When he said “I am a huge advocate of really unhealthy vegan foods,” everyone cheered. In a room full of unsickly vegans, I was surprised to find that this was the crowd-pleasing statement of the night. Could it be that healthy vegan food is actually the least healthy of all?

Let’s hope so, because once the competition was over, the Veggie Conquest organizers provided some unhealthy vegan food of their own.

Not a huge fan of unhealthy vegan food myself, this is what I managed to extract from all that:

Now I remember how vegans feel most of the time!

Actually, though, as much as I didn’t like the food, I have to admit that Veggie Conquest isn’t a bad way to spend a night, especially if you eschew all animal products and want to meet other people who do the same. It was only $15, which included food and the chance to win prizes. Like this woman, who won a sack of vegan macaroni and cheese just for showing up.

It was also fun to be reminded about how easily impressed vegans are with vegan food. I was the same way. It’s what happens when you resign yourself to only eating what you feel is moral, and forget what actual food tastes like.

I’m tempted to register as a chef next time, sneak in some duck fat in an Earth Balance container and totally clean up. Then again, I’m not sure how badly I need a tofu press.

Sign up for the next Veggie Conquest, on Nov. 14, here.

Baltimore public schools have instituted “Meatless Mondays,” apparently to cut costs and “give children more options.” This would seem to be a victory of sorts for the veggie movement, but based on the stomach-churning food shots in this CNN report, the long-term effect of this policy will likely be to transform these poor kids into carnivores for life.

On the Monday that CNN stormed Baltimore’s most hallowed halls, the compulsory school attending waifs were attempting to subsist on plates of corn with sides of bread. Or plates of green beans with bowls of “veggie chili” (white rice with some black beans sprinkled on top). As if schools weren’t already enough like prisons!

I suspect that most of these kids will come to dread Mondays, and will grow up even more inoculated to the vegan message than the rest of us brainwashed fast food eating tools of the meat industry. Good luck trying to educate these kids about all the wonderful variety that a vegan lifestyle has to offer.

If the Meatless Monday concept spreads as a thinly-disguised attempt for schools to cut costs by taking the meat out and replacing it with nothing (under the guise of health and sustainability), it will simply reinforce the stereotype that vegetarian food is tantamount to deprivation. Vegans should be condemning Baltimore for making them look bad. Instead, vegans are honoring them.

Even I am hurting the vegan movement less than Baltimore is. Why isn’t PETA honoring me?