Catherine Gill - The Dirty Vegan Cookbook, Revised Edition: Your Favorite Recipes Made Vegan

N umerous people have asked me why I chose the name, The Dirty Vegan. Its been my official and unofficial title for so many years, it seems natural to me. In fact, its a nickname that I was using to refer to myself ever since the day I became vegan. Its origins lie in an offhand remark; someone once observed that, since Im a vegan, that must mean Im a clean eater. I responded by saying that, although vegan food is much healthier than animal products, my love of rich, indulgent foods means I will always be a Dirty Vegan at heart.

But, you may ask, if thats the case, why be vegan?

The truth is that Ive always been this way, even if I didnt know it. But even as a child, I was destined to be an animal rights activist. I can recall myself as young as 4 years old, questioning my parents about animal products, asking about the veins that I would find in chicken or steak, or the blood Id found in an egg yolk. My mom would tell me, Thats just the way it is; its part of the animal, but I couldnt accept that.

In fact, I would protest it!

I would argue with my parents and wonder why we had to eat meat, given that we were a family of animal lovers. My dad would just shrug his shoulders, and give me a sympathetic look of pity. He felt the same way as I did; my dad refused to eat anything with a bone in it and never ate steak. Were it not for my mother being an old-school Italian, raised by immigrants who had never heard of vegetarianism, ours would have been a vegetarian house for sure.

As I grew older and began making my own meals, I dipped my toe into the world of processed vegetarian products. Boy, were they pretty terrible back then! The taste was something else entirely. When the first vegetarian marketed products hit shelves, they were still a work in progress, but I ate them anyway. By the time I was a teenager, I wasnt eating any red meat at all, but I was still battling an Italian family. In my familys culture, everything is based around food; the only thing more important than the food on the table is the people seated around it. Animal products are used in every aspect of Italian cooking, and at the time there were hardly any products available that you could substitute into Italian recipes.

Yet even back then, vegetarians were making their own foodscreating cheeses out of nuts, things like that. In fact, a lot of the amazing vegan products we use today had already been invented; they just werent available in every store yet. Today, any grocery store or superstore with a cold case or a freezer will almost certainly have a ton of vegan products. But back then, vegans were just getting started...and so was I.

When I moved away to college, I quickly grew tired of eating junky dorm food, and would often drive off campus to a grocery store in the city that had a wonderful natural foods section. I had never seen anything like it; certainly a far cry from the small Connecticut town I grew up in! I felt a connection to these natural foods in a way Id never before experienced, and as time went on, I expanded my shopping list to include as many wholesome food products as possible. My roommate would see me come back to our room with my grocery bags and she could only laugh, asking just what it was Id bought that day. My only reply was to tell her not to eat any of it. Hey, back then specialty natural products were even more expensive than they are today!

Of course, everything up to this point had been centered around my diet, and a preference for not eating meat. It wasnt until years later, when I received an email from PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) that this preference was transformed into an ethos and a lifestyle. The e-mail contained a link to a video, cataloging a series of shocking images that an activist had taken inside of a slaughter facility that supplied a popular food chain.

Never had I felt so woke as I did after watching that video. What I was experiencing was the sensation of real, meaningful change. For change and awareness to occur, your comfortable bubble of existence must be burst; you must be shaken awake.