The Atlantic City Vegan Food Festival 🎡
& My VegAnniversary

I’m really excited to be volunteering for The Atlantic City Vegan Food Festival! Yes, I get comped admission and a food voucher to the event, but most exciting, I get to enter to the event, including the Food Truck Festival, an hour before the general public. This is great because I don’t tend to go to food festivals. My tolerance for crowds has diminished dramatically since my days of moshing and crowd surfing at concerts.

But perhaps I am missing out on an opportunity to honor what I love so dearly… missing the chance of witnessing its reach, its innovation, and connecting with those who strengthen it. With this opportunity cost forefront I am pledging to dedicate myself to one vegan festival annually from this point onward, a proper VegAnniversary. And this year my veganism is 22 years old!

When I was a idealistic teenager I wrote a letter to The Rainforest Cafe when, upon visiting their ridiculous rainforest-themed eatery, I realized they had a lack of vegetarian options. I found this appalling as meat production was and remains the number one reason the rainforests are being depleted. You know, rainforests, Rainforest Cafe? They responded with a gift card for a second visit. 🤦‍♀️

As it turns out, this idealistic adult still upholds the same values of truth, awareness, responsibility, and action. And the hypocrisy of this ridiculous themed restaurant is a microcosm for the many horrendous profit systems (Big Food, Big Pharma, the meat and dairy industries, etc) that continue to delude the populus. The sick, dying, obese populus. Because a sick, dying, obese populus generates a lot of money; money that is more important than your personal health, our collective health, the health of our planet and billions of innocent sentient beings apparently.

Every time I have been ostracized for my choice in diet, in an epoch spanning 2 decades thus far, it has served to illuminate just how mis or uninformed most are about health and the production of food. Every light-hearted joke about the deliciousness of animal products has illuminated how successful these profit systems have been. Living in a world where the privilege of ignorance enables such pain and destruction… this is the hardest part of being a vegan. Not giving up cheese.

People sometimes ask me if being vegan is “difficult.” They don’t understand how it couldn’t be. But I eat exactly what I want. And if I can’t find what I want, I just make it. After so many years, I don’t even think of animal products as food. Because it isn’t to me at this point. And now that vegan food has begun to take over the mainstream, it’s as easiest as it’s ever been. Sometimes it shocks me how quickly vegan markets are growing. Being an OG Vegan, I can truly appreciate how far things have come. So to this growth and its continuation, Happy Vegan Birthday to me! I’ll see you in Atlantic City!