Okay, the background...

Several years ago, just as I was cutting down my sugar consumption and learning more about the evils of things like hydrogenation, shipping vegetables around the globe, food additives, and factory farming, I had a new coworker who was superhardcore in her commitment to veganism and whole foods (as in unprocessed things, not the union-busting grocery chain). We started talking endlessly about the politics and ethics of food choices (and the connections between those politics and seemingly unrelated social justice movements), the health benefits of unrefined food, what looked best at the farmers market, and tasty cooking ideas.

Then another friend made a deal with me: We would do the vegan whole-foods-only thing for a month, cooking and eating together and keeping each other on track, and he would never eat fast food again, ever. So for one month I ate no white flour, no refined sugar, almost nothing processed at all. Lots of brown rice, beans, roasted vegetables, tofu stir fries, etc.

And I felt so much happier and more energetic that I realized I could never go back.

Back to the processed stuff, that is. Just not getting that midafternoon need-to-put-my-head-down-on-my-desk-and-nap feeling was enough to keep me on board with the brown rice, whole barley, whole grain bread, and everything else. And I've always loved vegetables, tofu, and all that. Sure, the sweet tooth was a real issue, but I discovered that the less sugar I ate, the less I wanted it. And things that I used to love started to taste waaaaay too sweet for me. Especially at first, I was so motivated that passing up candy and mass-produced baked good was frickin' easy. (Homemade things, well...harder. More on that later.)

The animal products were a different story. Not actual meat; I'd already been a once-a-month-or-less meat eater, and I'd gone through many vegetarian periods. My problems are cheese, yogurt, and eggs. More accurately, cheese, yogurt, eggs, and rigidity. See, I need some flexibility in my rules, since in my world food restrictions can start with "no animal products" and end up at "you are allowed one piece of toast with a milligram of peanut butter spread on top, and a cup of tea" pretty durn quick. And so I avoid anything that smacks too much of virtuous self-denial, a hallmark of my high-school eating disorder. Or maybe it's just too hard for me to make sacrifices. Urgk. Balancing all these ethical questions is haaaaaard.

I started calling myself an aspiring vegan, but sometimes that's not too accurate, because how hard am I trying if I buy cheese twice a month?

So. What are my rules, then, anyway?

1. Local (and organic) whenever possible. This is when I feel especially lucky to live in the Bay Area: I shop for produce mostly at farmers markets and choose what to cook based on what's there. (If I need something specific for a recipe, I spend a lot of time reading supermarket signs trying to figure out where things came from.) If I'm choosing between conventionally grown and local and non-local but organic, I go with local.
   
2. No factory-farmed animal products. From a practical perspective, this means Straus organic yogurt, Niman Ranch meat (oh so rare), cheese from the folks who make the incredible Humboldt Fog, and any eggs or cheese I can get at the farmers market. And, um, this is the rule that I prolly break with the most frequency.
   
3. Unrefined grains only, unless nothing else is available. Brown rice, whole grain breads, lots o' oatmeal, quinoa, millet. I discovered that I hate amaranth, though. I'm not superfanatical about this rule—there aren't that many tacquerias that have brown rice (and don't kid yourself, even those "whole wheat" tortillas are mostly white flour), and though I prefer Chinese and Thai places that serve brown rice, sometimes they just don't. And I'm not passin' up the garlic noodles at Sunflower, which are totally refined.
   
4. Minimally sweetened things only. Um, most of the time. When people bring delicious homemade brownies to a potluck, I'm not gonna grill them about what they used. I'm not that much of a tool. I don't think. When I bake, I use brown rice syrup, agave, maple syrup, and sucanat. Okay, I know that last one is still basically sugar, but...shut up.
   
5. Absolutely no hydrogenated anything. This one's not that complicated, since anything with hydrogenated anything is going to have so many other anythings that I don't want to put in my body. This one goes along with—
6. Read labels carefully and know which weird ingredients are really fucked-up, and which ones aren't (xanthan gum is okay, disodium inosinate, not so much).
7. When you're a guest in someone's house, eat what's put in front of you. I'm not comfortable making people accommodate my weird and complicated rules.
   
8. And the one that makes it all possible (and possibly meaningless, and definitely complicated): If you really, really want to eat it—go ahead and eat it.