There was no place or time in the contemporary United States worse for a vegan than New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina.

As one of many people who felt compelled to go to New Orleans and help in any way they could, I was working long hours, and it felt good to be on what seemed like the front lines of this disaster.  I was surrounded with people whose homes and lives had been blown, storm-surged, and flooded into oblivion, so any thoughts I had of my own petty dietary discomforts were quickly buried beneath equal parts shame and perspective... until my girlfriend came out to visit me about a month after I arrived.

I had been subsisting mostly on vegan protein bars I had smuggled in from California and whatever vegetables I could get my hands on.  My girlfriend took one look at me when I picked her up from the airport and said “you need to start eating eggs and cheese.”  My knee-jerk “nuh-uh” response was countered expertly, when she pulled up my shirt, revealing protruding ribs and a skin-tone usually described in vampire novels.  Forced upon a scale, I realized I had lost 15 pounds on an already slender frame.  

Yet, to start eating dairy and eggs again?  Looking at myself in the mirror with a critical eye, the health reasons for expanding my diet were readily apparent.  But all the environmental and ethical reasons that convinced me to give up animal products in the first place were screaming in the front of my brain.  Sensing my ambiguity as I gazed at my scrawny reflection, I heard my girlfriend’s siren voice, “you said yourself when you started this that the marginal effectiveness of vegan versus vegetarian is slight...”  Seeing this was not enough, she continued “look, if you won’t do it for yourself, and you won’t do it for me, how much good will you be to the people your trying to help if you aren’t eating?”  Finally, she went in for the kill, “and if dairy makes you sick or whatever, we can try to figure something else out- just try something because you look like a zombie and I don’t even want to think about you naked right now.”  Check and mate.  

We walked down to a mexican place I had found that had vegetarian beans and tortillas, and I stared at a menu that was now dramatically expanded.  I felt anew the scourge of 21st century America: paralyzation in the face of too many choices, appreciating the peace that came with a narrow menu only too late.  My eyes danced back and forth between bean and cheese burrito (a favorite of mine when I was newly vegetarian) and huevos rancheros (a classic of my youth), or maybe I should just get the beans and rice burrito I always get at this place?  Than I saw it: a cheese quesadilla.  Oh jeebus.  

I watched as the Honduran guy grilled it up, at once repulsed by the oil dripping out of the tortilla and entranced by the once familiar smell of sizzling cheese.  He scraped the glaring totem of my weakness up with a spatula and threw it on a plate, the cheese that had oozed out of the tortilla sticking to the grill and trailing those glorious tendrils that vegan faux-cheese just never ever got right.  

I wish I could tell you I stared long and hard at that plate, contemplating everything that this meal might mean morally, and even how it might effect my identity as I moved from vegan back to just vegetarian.  But as it was, I’m surprised I even made it back to my table. 

I tore into that quesadilla like I caught it keying my car. 

My girlfriend was right, I never really did look back.  I felt better almost immediately, and was back up to a reasonable weight within a couple weeks.  As a bonus, going out with co-workers was no longer an exercise in shared misery, as they desperately tried to accommodate my vegan diet, and I tried hard not to preach, judge, or guilt-trip.  

And that really was the final lesson of my year as a vegan: the marginally increased economic pressure you bring as a vegan as compared to a vegetarian is simply not worth the emotional and dietary ransom you put your friends and family through every time you go out to eat.     

Besides, I could stimulate the local economy directly with my increased potential for spending on food, and help drum up some long-term tourism with tales of the New Orleans culinary delights that broke me of the ascetic food principles my carnivore friends and family always hated anyway.  See, everybody wins!  

Except, I guess, the dairy cows.