The practical side of eating this way is mostly solved in a fortnight.
The social side takes considerably longer, and almost nobody warns you about it in advance.
When we started, our friends and our family thought we were crazy.
They were not unkind about it. They simply could not see how a person lives without cheese and meat, and they were quite sure we would be back within the month!
We had felt exactly the same about it not long before, so it was difficult to hold against them.
Why other people find it uncomfortable
Food is not only fuel and it never has been.
We gather around a table in good times and in bad ones, and what is on that table carries a great deal that has nothing to do with nutrition.
So when you change what you eat, other people at the table hear something that you did not say.
They hear a comment on what they are eating.
That is usually the whole of the friction, and it explains why the questions arrive with more heat than the subject deserves.
Nobody interrogates you about your opinion of jazz over dinner. They do interrogate you about beans!
What we found actually works
Explaining less works better than explaining more.
We spent our first months with a great deal to say about it, and we do not think a single person was persuaded by any of it.
What changed their minds was the food.
Venny cooked, and after a while the same people who had been sure we were mad started asking what was in it, and then asking for it again.
A good meal makes an argument that no amount of talking does.
The one conversation worth having
There is one exception, and it is with the people you live with.
Somebody who shares a kitchen with you needs to know what is changing, because it affects their evenings too.
That conversation goes better when it is about what you are adding rather than about what everybody is giving up.
The rest of the world does not need a position paper.
When somebody asks, we tend to say that we feel better eating this way, which is true, brief, and hard to argue with.
About the label
We do not call ourselves vegan and we never really have.
Technically we very nearly are, though we do eat some honey.
The reason is that the word arrives before you do, and people begin the conversation with whatever they already think about it rather than with you.
We would rather talk about food than about a category.
There is a second reason, and it matters more.
Trying to be perfectly consistent in a world that is not built for it can be exhausting, and we have watched people decide the whole thing is impossible because they could not manage the last five per cent.
Eating mostly plants with the occasional exception is enormously better than deciding it is too hard and eating none.
What happened in the end
Venny’s mother was hesitant for a long time, and then she was not.
Some months after she changed how she ate, her blood pressure came back into the normal range and she stopped needing the medication for it. Her arthritis improved as well.
That was not the result of an argument. It was the result of her watching, for a good while, and then deciding on her own.
Most people come round that way or they do not come round at all.
The harder version of this is not the family table, where you have some influence. It is a restaurant, where you have none, and that is next.
