Opinion – Terra Vegana: Dead animal in the middle of the bread

There is a great tension that surrounds the lives of us vegans and vegans every time we step out of the house. Especially when someone invites us to eat — or when no one invites us to anything and we go out, say, to solve bureaucracy at the registry office, not knowing how long we will be away from our refrigerator.

This ghost of “hunger” that plagues our stomach is an elective tension, and, in a country like Brazil, it can even sound like a “luxury”. Therefore, before continuing with the complaints of a vegan who does not know whether or not she will find something she can eat on the restaurant’s menu, it is important to emphasize that there is an expressive movement of popular and peripheral veganism in the country of non-elective hunger.

This means that, a few dozen kilometers from Pinheiros, Higienópolis or Jardins, there are people who have opted for a veganism without chia or spirulina, but with lots of rice, beans and a huge variety of fruits and vegetables that were not bought at Pão of sugar.

I have never been shy about opening lunchboxes in restaurants and bars, and when I was called to attention, I coldly replied “I don’t eat anything of animal origin and there’s nothing I can eat here, I’m sorry”, without thinking about the merchant’s pocket, or the shame my best friend would go through.

This habit lasted a good three months, during which leaving the house required a lot of planning that culminated in a thermos bag carried over the shoulder for any occasion. I never missed going anywhere “because I didn’t have anything to eat”, and once I opened a beautiful lunch box, with salad in a jar, in the middle of McDonald’s. I bought a passion fruit juice to not get boring.

The manager came out from behind the counter, went to the table, and told me a single sentence: “picnics are not allowed in our establishment”. That was all I needed to hear to start my speech on behalf of animals. “You are serving dead animals in the middle of the bread.”

I wasn’t even aware that, in addition to saving a total of zero animals with my sentences loud and clear, I was reproducing the logic of oppression I was trying to fight against, pointing the finger at a worker who was just working. Whoever says that if he could go back, he would do it all over again. I would do it completely differently.

For a few years now, I have entered the sporadic abyss of “I’ll eat what I have”. And I found that I was wrong. There is always at least one 100% vegetable option. Bread with oil. Olives. Peanut candy. Açaí. Fruit smoothie with orange juice. Fruit salad. Peanut. Fried cassava. Lemon popsicle. Palm pie. Cooked Corn Meal.

Just the other day, I had french fries for lunch with a tin of tea. Not healthy, especially for a pregnant woman. But you need to look at food beyond its nutritional value. Eating is a fundamental act of our sociability, and although I’m still a fan of lunchboxes (I always carry it with me on days when I work away from home), I find it liberating to occasionally have lunch completely outside the house.

The fries, dipped in ketchup, were the best lunch of the week for me, because I finally met the editor of this column, Marcella Franco. The feeling that the date is worth more than the food also nourishes, and an encounter without tensions and judgments regarding what each one eats is fertile ground for conversations that touch and make sense — including about veganism.

When paying, I suggested to the cashier some vegan options that could simply fill the sandwich breads. He laughed, and was about to pass the suggestion along. I will come back to check it out.