Raising a Vegan Daughter: Reflections from After the Fact by Victoria Moran

My baby made me vegan. Oh, I’d tried to take the plunge before. I was vegetarian and largely “vegan at home,” but it was hard back in the benighted 80s. Besides, how could we know about nutrition? Look at what we did with our hair!

I wanted to be vegan for ethical reasons, but I also knew there were health benefits, protection against high cholesterol and heart disease, “old-person problems” I didn’t relate to. My biggest dietary concern was weight: I’d been either fat or dieting (sometimes fat and dieting) as long as I could remember. I figured that if I still had the problem with the nonfat yogurt, water-packed tuna, and hard-boiled eggs nearly everybody said I should eat, I’d be a veritable blimp without them.

But then I had this baby.

She was perfect. Innocent, but wise too. She seemed far to noble a soul to be given a moral copout: “At home, we don’t eat eggs or drink milk because we care about the chickens and cows, but when we go out, it’s just too much of a hassle.” Her sweet face seemed to answer: “It’s only a hassle because you want tuna when you’re dieting and muffins when you’re not.”

So, little Rachael Adair changed my diet before she even started eating. And raising a vegan child has been one of the glorious adventures of my life. People ask if she wanted to try other foods. She never did. I remember once when she visited a friend’s Sunday school class and telling me: “There were crackers, but I didn’t have any because the teacher wouldn’t let me read the ingredients.”

There were a few rough patches, mostly caused by me. Example: I was concerned about my daughter’s being accepted in her peer group and decided that she could go to McDonald’s and eat French fries, just to fit in. What I didn’t realize was that those fries were addictive. Once she’d tried them, she didn’t want  anything else. I also didn’t know that, at that time, McDonald’s fries weren’t even vegetarian: they were doused with “beef powder,” a fact discovered by a Hindu group that led to a multi-million-dollar settlement benefitting several pro-vegetarian non-profits.

I was committed to raising a healthy child, but we weren’t as enlightened in those days. We saw healthy as brown: whole-wheat bread, brown rice, granola, tempeh, lentil loaf. It was better food than we’d grown up on, but we didn’t know yet that green, not brown, was the king of colors, and that all the bright ones – red, orange, yellow, purple, even white when it was cauliflower and mushrooms – were vital.

Still, we did okay. During one picky period, I took a list of the foods my little girl ate to a nutritionist. It was a curious compilation, comprised primarily of avocado, tofu, potatoes, oranges, and seaweed (like I said, curious). The nutritionist did a computer analysis and told me that, if I’d give her the kind of tofu cultured with calcium sulfate, her diet, although limited, would be surprisingly complete. She also told me to worry less, which basically solved the problem.

In fact, my vegan daughter (and her vegetarian friends) had far more sophisticated tastes than their omnivorous playmates. Rachael (she’s used her middle name, Adair, since she was fourteen) loved Ethiopian food. Forks are considered weapons in Ethiopia and the food is eaten with a delicious, stretchy, sourdough bread made from a unique, gluten-free, flour, teff. In other words: you eat with your hands. What kid wouldn’t like that?

She also favored Japanese food (avocado sushi, seaweed salad, miso soup), Indian food (she’d order chana saag [spinach and chickpeas] or aloo gobi mater [potatoes, cauliflower, and green peas in a tomato-curry sauce], and Middle Eastern fare (falafel, hummus, and especially dolmas, the stuffed grape leaves she was making for herself by the time she was twelve). There was always something to eat. If the kids were having pizza, she had a cheeseless pizza (this was before the advent of Daiya, a nondairy cheese that melts). For birthdays, I’d make my mom’s Wacky Cake, a traditional it’s-only-once-a-year, white-flour-and-sugar-containing chocolate layer cake that women developed during World War II when eggs and butter were rationed. (The recipe is in chapter 1 of Main Street Vegan.)

This was our normal. Some kids went to violin lessons or Hebrew school or sleep-away camp. Some kids – my kid – went to Vegetarian Summerfest and farm animal sanctuaries. We homeschooled—not because we were vegan, but because the world at large was such an amazing school. Homeschooling parents were a fascinating microcosm of America: evangelical Christians, back-to-the-landers, artists of various sorts, and corporate types who’d become disgruntled with the public schools. Some of them were vegetarian. Almost all believed in feeding children “real” food, and because they were ruthlessly individualistic themselves, they went out of their way to accommodate our family’s chosen diet.

Later on, my daughter’s interest turned to theater, and there, as well, being vegan was just another way to be oneself. By then, in her tweens and early teens, other kids were catching on and some of them adopted the diet because, once they’d met a vegan, being one made sense.

It was Adair’s acting, and my writing books, that eventually brought us from Kansas City to New York. She was seventeen. Two weeks after we arrived, she was cast in a national tour. That’s how she met Nick. Five years later, they were married. They now live in East Harlem, about a half hour’s walk from my husband and me. They’re both actors with a dazzling array of day jobs, one of which for Adair is stunt person (every mother’s nightmare, right?).

Adair is still vegan (she helped me write my latest book, Main Street Vegan), and Nick is vegetarian, as are their two dogs. They have a yard –  a near-miracle in Manhattan – and Adair blogs about their outdoor adventures at www.blogspot.com/HarlemFarm. They travel – like last summer’s trip to South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Zambia where they photographed animals few people ever see up close. And Adair is a New York State licensed wildlife rehabilitator, working with two colleagues to develop Urban Utopia Wildlife Rehabilitation, to care for sick and injured wild mammals in New York City.

When I think of my daughter today, I’m so proud it’s embarrassing. She’s followed her dreams and she’s living her values. She didn’t take everything I gave her – I tend toward the mystical, and she’s quite the pragmatist – but the vegan piece took residence in her heart and isn’t going anywhere. And that makes perfect sense: after all, she made me vegan.