Vegetarian Ranchwife

I am honored to have my essay, “Confessions of a Vegetarian Ranchwife,” included in After Happy Hour’s food themed issue. In this essay, I talk at great length about the thing I don’t want to talk about: my vegetarianism. I’ve employed many tactics to avoid the topic, including hiding it plain sight, put it in a website name, even. Keep it light, make it the punchline to a joke. People laugh and, mercifully, the conversation moves on.

In fact, I was doing just that in the first, very glib, draft of this essay. That was almost six years ago in a writing class, and almost none of that draft remains. My classmates were trying to be encouraging, but in they mostly expressed confusion about what I was trying to say. Of course they were; I didn’t know what I was trying to say.

I had planned to write about something else entirely, but somehow wound up with lots and lots of words about being a vegetarian on a Wyoming sheep and cattle ranch. The usual jokes weren’t cutting it. They were all about keeping things on the surface, and the whole point of writing essays is to go below the surface. It was no good. I was going to scrap it, but an unsettling question sat in the back of my mind. What was I trying to say?

Draft by draft, I began to pull back the jokes and uncover the thing that I don’t want to talk about, the thing that vegetarianism always makes me talk about, my relationship to the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Even here, I’ve, buried it four paragraphs down in a blog post.

It’s a complicated. The religion defined my family, made me who I am. Many people I love and respect are still involved with the church. I also rejected it because it’s constricting, insular and judgy and it pisses me off. What do you do with all those conflicting emotions? I don’t know how other people do it, but I slog draft after draft through an essay.

It’s only available in print, and if you’re interested, you can get one here. I have interview is posted online, and also a recipe for cashew loaf.