Interview With an Ex-Vegan: Billy Thogersen

In 2000, when I moved into one of the two vegetarian co-op houses in Austin, Billy Thogersen lived in the other vegetarian house. We saw each other at parties, and I imagine we bonded to some extent over our mutual veganism, but at first we weren’t as close as actual housemates might be.

Then in 2001, I co-wrote and co-directed a musical with my friend Joe. Since Joe and I were more familiar with the Austin co-op scene than the theater scene (and since there was more talent in the co-op scene anyway), we scoured the cooperative houses for stars. We cast Billy in a double role as a gun-toting Student for the Constitution and an anti-Ecstasy activist done in by the child safety lock on his gun.

Though the musical didn’t have anything to do with veganism, a few of the lines did hint at the dietary persuasion of its authors, and Billy got perhaps the most vegan line of the show: “Eat brown rice. It’s the perfect balance of yin and yang.” We didn’t single Billy out to deliver that line because he was a vegan, though – almost all of our cast members were vegan. Billy was invaluable as an actor, techie and friend for that production, as he was for our following show, a live musical sitcom.

Once I left Texas, Billy and I didn’t really stay in touch. That changed this week when he submitted a photo of himself as a sickly vegan to this blog, and told me that he was no longer vegan.

So you were vegan, and now you’re not. Let’s start from the beginning, shall we?

I need to go back to 1990 when I was living at the decidedly non-vegetarian New Guild student housing co-op. I knew what a vegetarian was in theory, but for me the concept had no basis in reality. A really cute girl named Jacqueline, who turned out to be vegan, lived there at the time and a crush ensued. My fascination with her piqued my interest in the diet. A short time later, I experimented with not eating meat for six months and was quite surprised that I was still alive at the end of the experience. I resumed my previous crap-based diet.

I moved into the House of Commons vegetarian student housing cooperative in 1996. It didn’t take long before I’d fully accepted the superiority of veganism. Just for kicks I’d occasionally eat some meat, just so I could say I wasn’t really a vegetarian. That’s the kind of person I am. But by 2000 or so, I completely stopped eating meat, except for a few memorable occasions.

Now it’s 2009, almost 2010, and a few days ago you email me to say that you have started to eat meat again. What happened?

When I came home from work about three weeks ago I walked up to the screen door and took in a pleasant aroma. Confused about what to eat and hungry, Christa [Billy’s wife, an ex-vegan turned vegetarian] had broken down and bought a chicken that was now roasting in the oven. We have been eating a meat-and-fresh-vegetable-based diet since then.

Did she have to talk you into eating the chicken, or were you in the same place as her psychologically? Were you secretly ready to eat meat even before she was?

I’d say that Christa was in a very different place from me psychologically, but with the same result: namely, it was time to try something else because the veg thing was not working, despite trying just about every permutation of a vegetarian or vegan diet. I didn’t need any prodding to dig into the chicken. Now that you mention it, perhaps I was secretly ready to let go.

How did you feel after eating it?

I felt fantastic after eating the chicken on the first night. The first thing to go away was the constant soreness of my bloated gut. I chock this up to not trying to eat like a cow, stuffing myself with huge amounts of grains and other low calorie foods in order to be able to make it more than two hours before I was famished again.

I’ve also noticed that my allergies have disappeared almost overnight (after 10 years of debilitating problems) and my eyesight is improving. I’ve lost all cravings for sweet foods. If you knew me before, you’d be amazed. All I could ever think about was eating brownies or cinnamon rolls. Giving into the never-ending sugar cravings wrecked havoc on my system, but I was a slave to impulses.

If that isn’t enough, I can now stay awake all day. Just a few weeks ago I’d find it hard to keep from sleeping 3-4 hours during the day on the weekends, and for an hour or more after work each day. I can see what I’m writing and I barely believe it myself, but it gets even better: All of a sudden I can ride my bike up the hill to get to work. And most importantly, my brain seems to be working again. I can concentrate, have a sense of serenity, and am happy with myself and the world. And for so long I thought I was just a smug, irritable, depressed person. Well, I guess I’m still smug.

That sounds like my experience as well. I’d had problems with constant sleepiness since first going vegetarian, but eventually I realized that my brain was in a fog almost every single day. For a while I simply convinced myself that I wasn’t a very sharp thinker anymore and there was nothing I could do about it. Why are vegans so afraid to blame their diets that they would sooner blame themselves?

Food is one of the most deeply rooted attachments humans have. Water, sex, and for some, inebriation, are the only more intense drives. It’s no wonder that vegans wouldn’t want to place blame on their diet. It would be an indictment of who and what they are, literally.

The “fog” you talk about is exactly what I experienced. I used the word out loud on many, many days when describing to people how I felt. And I too had resigned myself to being less intelligent than I had been. I said to myself, “I’m getting old. My brain just doesn’t work as well anymore,” over and over again. The thought of this now almost brings a tear to my eye.

Did you have to talk yourself back into the idea that eating animals could be okay morally?

I’m still wrestling with the idea of eating the animals, but I’ve been working on a number of good rationalizations to make it easier. If I take the human point of view, as in Diet for a New America, it’s pretty easy to come to a vegan conclusion. By "human view,” I simply mean examining the world in a rather one-dimensional way, using simple observations of animal behavior and a lot anthropomorphizing. My experience with the world leads me to believe that I’m not so high and mighty that I can remove myself from mess of reality.

After reading David Holmgren’s Permaculture, Joel Salatin’s You Can Farm, and of course the even more fringy Nourishing Traditions and The Vegetarian Myth, I’m certain enough that it is not immoral to consume meat that I’m willing to do it.

So now all that’s left is what happened between these vegan and ex-vegan bookends. You mentioned in your email that you were vegan while in Hawai’i.

I was there for about 8 months in 1998, house-sitting for my brother and his wife while they were on Navy deployment. I had just read (and fully accepted) The McDougall Plan and put it into practice, all while living by myself in a strange and bizarrely hostile US state. (The Hawai'i Walmart devotes an entire aisle to potted meat…)

What got you interested in McDougall’s low fat vegan scheme?

I was interested in making my vegan diet even more extreme, both for its own sake, and for all the purported great health reasons espoused by the book. Although I pretty much took in the arguments hook, line and sinker, I’d like to state for the record that the incredibly clunky graphs and thin data never sat well with me.

How did the Hawaiian low fat vegan experiment begin?

First, I cleaned out (ate) all the frozen meat that was left in the house. I made an interesting video of the process, including what appears to be me going slightly insane.

I had this idea that I would get a 50 lb. bag of oats and sort of work from there. I developed a menu according to the McDougall guidelines and stuck to it for months. I also came up with an exercise routine, but it wasn’t very successful since I could barely run 200 yards before practically collapsing from lack of energy. After about 4 months I began to get mad cravings for fat, and finally began to give in to them once a week by getting a couple slices of cheese pizza.

Do you wish you’d experienced Hawai’i as a practicing omnivore?

It wasn’t too bad being a vegan in terms of missed opportunities for enjoyment. Even when it would’ve been convenient to eat meat, I got to chew on the satisfaction of being right. My workmates in Hawai'i never could let it go. They’d always say stuff like, "Why don’t you get you one pig, bra?”

One day I took in one of my McDougall "cookies” for one of them to try. Keep in mind that I didn’t add any fat (I mean, oats contain 15% fat and are already quite suspect because of it) and just a touch of sugar. One woman kind of rubbed it against her front tooth and then spit into the garbage can.

Why are vegans often content with mediocre food, like that inedible cookie?

Righteousness makes an excellent sauce for mediocre food. Since it’s often a struggle for a vegan to eat at all when out in the real world, you get used to taking what you can get. Over time, your bar gets lower and lower.

It’s true, you can almost taste the morality in vegan food. Speaking of that, it seems like people who aren’t religious are more likely to fall into veganism. Also, I’ve noticed that a lot of vegans grew up on fast food junk, or at least lacked an inspiring cuisine at home, before realizing that they were clogging their arteries and torturing innocent animals. Did this fit with your upbringing at all? Do you think there are certain traits that make one “susceptible” to the vegan argument?

Interesting points. That certainly fits in with my experience. Perhaps you could add to the list: exposure to other vegetarians, willingness to be “different,” being "eco,” control freaks, smug people, bulimics, children provided with excess cute stuffed animals…

Did you experience any alienation as a vegan?

I never really felt ostracized. These days most people accept vegetarians as legitimate, even saintly. As long as I spent most of my time in the safe veggie circles, which I basically did, there was no problem. Because of my fear of people, I rarely ventured into potentially meaty situations.

On the few occasions when I would be offered meat and had to awkwardly turn it down, I doubt I was feeling any more uncomfortable than if I had to say anything about anything at all. In other words, my social handicap was beyond anything related to being a vegetarian.

Did you try other vegan offshoots like macrobiotics and raw foods, or did you stick with low fat for the most part?

The low-fat approach simply did not work for me. I gradually gave up after doing a yeoman’s job. I was very interested in other vegetarian ideas, like macrobiotics and raw foods, but never adopted them.

I was disillusioned by the McDougall diet failure and was thoroughly in a vegan rut for years. After years of careful study and constant fighting, I simply assumed that veganism was right for every reason. My actual eating criteria became "anything vegan goes,” which in some ways is a very strange diet.

Beginning a few years ago, in response to feeling like crap all the time, Christa and I began a more systematic approach to eating. The culmination is a renunciation of vegetarianism.

How so?

I can’t speak for Christa, since I believe her experience has been quite different from my own. As for me, the systematic approach began with learning more about farming and agriculture, especially firsthand through gardening. Both curiosity about alternative ways of eating and slowly deteriorating health led to actually trying eating differently.

The first thing to change was to eliminate soy. This made a big difference by itself. I then began eating much more fat, especially coconut oil, and phased out canola oil. Again, I perceived improvement in my health. Around the same time, there was a concerted effort to avoid processed foods.

When I first read some of the stuff in Nourishing Traditions, I laughed about Fallon’s suggestions for tricking children into eating sweetmeats. Only after many discussions and reflection over a year did the option of eating meat enter into my realm of possibility. I’d say that The Vegetarian Myth was the breaking point.

Did you try vegetarianism before eating meat again?

I changed over to a vegetarian diet about a year ago in response to a nagging feeling that something was missing from my diet. And I did indeed feel better, pretty much right away.

I remember a guy that I hadn’t seen for years came up to me after I began eating eggs and dairy, and the first thing he said was, "wow, you’re looking good.” When I asked what he meant he said that I "looked really thin and sick before.” At the time I brushed off the comment as silly and uninformed, especially coming from someone who looked as unhealthy as he did to me.

Then you saw that there was an entire blog devoted to just that very subject. In retrospect, did you notice sickliness in other vegans while you were vegan? If so, how did you rationalize it away?

My mental image of a healthy person changed as a result of my total buy-in to veganism. I embraced the results of a vegan diet: Sickliness = Perfect Health. What I ended up perceiving was vegan people in top physical condition and the rest of the population in various states of disrepair. I paid special attention to the pudgy marshmallow-looking people to make myself feel better about being a vegan.

The extremely fit meat eaters posed more of a problem, but I figured their arteries were probably about to pinch shut, making my diet superior once again.

Vegan sickliness does at least seem to be a different sort of unhealthiness than what a bad omnivorous diet can do. Though some vegans may be tired and weak all the time, do you think they are safer from chronic diseases like heart attacks and cancer?

It’s entirely possible that vegans are safer from heart disease and cancer relative to people eating diets that are even worse. I’d say that I was suffering from fatigue and an irritable bowel condition after only a few years of being a vegan. I believe that being in a poor state of mental and physical health over a long period will likely cause chronic illness.

At the time you were vegan, you must have felt that you were benefiting the world and animals in some way. Now that you’re no longer vegan, do you still think that you accomplished something tangible in that time?

Thinking back, I indeed felt like I was benefiting the world through veganism, but even then I understood that my diet probably didn’t keep a single animal from being slaughtered. As for a tangible result, I was partly responsible for multiplying tenfold the available number of vegan products, especially "frozen deserts.”

How is it that people who once believed so strongly in veganism and/or animal rights can eventually forget all that and go back to eating meat? Does part of you still believe it, except that you don’t feel up for the challenge anymore?

I haven’t given up. I take humane animal treatment, sustainability, health and social justice seriously. When I told my brother I was eating meat, his first response was, "so you’ve come over to the dark side.” And my response was that I sincerely now believe that it is not the dark side, to which he muttered, "hm.”

I’m also humbled by the experience of so fully believing in something and then letting it go. It’s true though that I’m not up for the challenge anymore; the challenge of always feeling like an irritable stuffed sack, crapping six times a day and constantly wishing I were eating a donut.

How is your life, post veganism?

So far so good. My concern is that it might actually be even harder to eat than before.

What makes it harder?

Right now I’m finding my non-vegetarian diet more difficult in part because I’m still in the process of working out all new meals. After 12 years of vegan and vegetarian cooking, I became quite adept at putting together meals quickly without having to think about it.

I was initially worried about getting meat that I’d be comfortable eating, but now that I’ve been looking around I see that there are small farmers all over the place selling fresh grass-fed animal products. I think the biggest adjustment has to do with eating smaller amounts of grains, and being careful with grain preparation to avoid ingesting the toxic compounds.

I had a little freak-out at first when I thought about the large vegan and vegetarian cookbook collection amassed over the years becoming obsolete overnight. But it turns out that it’s pretty easy to adapt the recipes. For example, instead of egg replacer, you just use eggs. Instead of "screeze,” just use some cheese. Meat makes an excellent substitute for tofu, etc. etc.

Omnivorizing vegan recipes? Genius. Is there anything you miss about being vegan?

Veganism was only a bad experience in light of the inadvertent impact on my health. The most fun years of my life were spent as a vegetarian, hanging out in tight community of 25-30 people. But my renunciation of vegetarianism is complete and without reservation. I thought I’d "miss it,” but I really don’t.

The one exception would be having to now carry the weight of killing an animal to sustain myself. As a vegan, I felt I wasn’t directly responsible for the death of animals, or at the very least, that I was doing the least harm. I miss that enlightened feeling.