'Changing my diet didn't make Ben fall for me, but we became real friends once I stopped eating like him.'
If you’re judging compatibility solely by diet, Ben and I shouldn’t have made it past our first meal. I am allergic to nuts and sesame; Ben is vegan. My fridge almost always contained four different cheeses; his cabinets were stocked with trail mix and tahini. The overlap in the Venn diagram of our diets was razor-thin—and yet, we began a friendship by cooking together.
He pulled up a manifesto on his laptop–three pages he’d written outlining occasions when it was acceptable to break from veganism. From the beginning, Ben’s attention felt like a gift. He lived in a cool loft downtown, and I lived in a dingy apartment in the suburbs. He spent his weekends visiting friends in New Orleans and Philadelphia, while I spent mine sitting alone at breweries, reading to pass the time. More than anything tangible, I envied Ben’s self-confidence—he knew exactly who he was and did not think to apologize for it.
Before I met Ben, I’d never genuinely considered cutting out meat or dairy. I love burgers and Parmesan and baking with full-fat butter. But somehow there I was, making “ricotta” out of tofu and coating my popcorn in nutritional yeast just so I could tell someone about it. Meanwhile, Ben constantly forgot about my food allergies, nearly feeding me nuts or sesame on multiple occasions.
Then, a few months into the pandemic, I lost my magazine job. Out of options, I applied to be a baker at Birmingham’s local creamery. I loved baking for a living, but I faced one piece of dissonance: It was officially part of my job to eat dairy. I spent my days watching hundreds of quarts of liquid silk churn out of the ice cream machine: goat cheese ice cream swirled with magenta-hued strawberry-hibiscus jam, or sweet cream loaded with chunks of cookie dough and ribbons of malted fudge.
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