Repetition is death.

Stop and think about it. How much time a day do you spend eating? How much of your day is spent cooking, or finding the ingredients that will make up your next meal?

How can we continue to mindlessly eat the same things, day after day? Eating is such a huge and essential part of our lives. We need to begin examining our eating choices. Are we expanding ourselves and exploring the culinary world around us? Or is every meal a repeat of one of 5 easy to prepare ‘favored meals’ that you already know you enjoy?

This post is about veganism.

The last thing anyone needs is to read another stale blog post about reasons you should be vegan . Frankly, we’ve heard it already.

Throughout all of the dialogue about health, environmental impact , and animal activism, there is a crucial component missing from the conversation.

Why am I vegan? I am vegan because it is fun.

Let me give you a little background. I can clearly remember the day in the 7th grade when I decided that I would no longer eat meat. Sitting in the middle school cafeteria, amidst the chatter and the buzz of prepubescent feeding, I cradled a school hamburger between my hands that looked at felt like some combination of cardboard and charred putty. It felt disgusting.

My stomach churned and I felt an intense longing to eat something…. fresh.

Since then, I have spent my life eating either vegetarian or vegan (with a brief phase with pescetarianism, but that didn’t last long) diets. I have noticed plenty of benefits, including extra energy, weight loss, and a certain tongue-in-cheek moral self righteousness (“You sure you need an extra helping of those cheese curds, bro?”).

However, the greatest benefit brought on by this comparatively restrictive diet is entirely mental. I’m talking about how much fun it is to always be trying new things.

By forcing yourself to restrict your choices, it allows you to experiment with what things you already have. It adds a creative dimension to your cooking that extends and enriches your life.

Whether it is soy hot dogs chopped up and placed in impromptu bean and corn burritos, or disastrous attempts to boil quinua in a pan of dark beer, I have to improvise with food combinations to find new flavors, or be forever damned to a hell of bland salads and peanut butter foldovers.

Change your diet, even just for a little while. You will immediately notice how it changes other, seemingly unrelated aspects of your life. By getting creative in one area and opening yourself to new things and ideas, you will find other areas in your life open up and be enriched by the same voracity for new experiences.

Practice learning. Live without dead time.