What Being Vegan Taught Us
For four years, we were strict vegans. Not for animals. Not for purity. For survival.
When Alexys was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, we stripped everything from our diets that might make her worse. Food turned from comfort to control. Every label was a threat. Every ingredient was a question of what it would do to her body. Veganism wasn’t an ideology then. It was triage. It was the only way to regain control over something that felt uncontrollable. She still takes a monthly infusion. What we eat is not a substitute for medicine, but a way to support it.
We cleaned everything out. Oils, processed foods, sugar, gluten. We learned how to build a meal from scratch, how to read nutrient panels like lab reports, and how to grow things that didn’t need a barcode. It made us disciplined. It made us observant. But it also showed us how far food had drifted from reality.
When you cut everything out, you start to see what’s left. And what’s left, in most kitchens, isn’t much. Packages and powders pretending to be nourishment. Fortified, supplemented, reconstituted, built to imitate the real thing. Even plants had become a product. We thought we were simplifying. Really, we were learning what dependence looked like in another form.
Over time, we stopped thinking about what we weren’t eating and started thinking about what we were actually doing. It wasn’t the label of veganism that helped. It was the act of cleaning up her diet. We stopped eating things that had no place in a body trying to heal. Her symptoms eased because we finally treated food like it mattered. That same control began to spread into every part of our lives. Into our jobs, our money, our health, our home. Every system that touched us became something we wanted to understand and manage ourselves. What started as a way to steady her body turned into a way to reclaim our lives. We stopped outsourcing care and started building it.
This isn’t a story about which diet is better. Ours isn’t even a diet. It isn’t a lifestyle either. It’s a reconciliation, a way of living that faces what it costs to eat and doesn’t look away. Every meal here is built on that. Whether it’s a carrot or a rabbit, it comes from the same soil, the same care, the same refusal to let someone else do the hard part for us.
Veganism taught us discipline. Farming taught us truth. Both started from the same place: trying to heal. But healing isn’t just about what goes into your body. It’s about what you choose to take responsibility for. And for us, that responsibility turned into something fuller, something that brought real strength back into Alexys’s body and real purpose back into our days. The food we raise now doesn’t come from fear or from rules. It comes from understanding. It keeps her strong. It keeps us honest. And it keeps us connected to the land in a way no label ever could.
People look at us strangely when they find out we used to be vegans. They don’t understand that nothing about this came from cruelty or from change of heart. It came from seeing what food really is. There’s a difference between buying protein that arrives in plastic and standing over an animal as its life ends and knowing you’re the reason why. That moment changes how you eat. It changes how you waste. It changes what gratitude means. We don’t pretend it’s clean or easy. We just refuse to pretend it’s anything else.