It looks normal...

It looks normal doesn't it? Vegetable, Starch, main portion. This meal is vegan. It was eaten pre-challenge. I've found in my year-plus living with my wife that the main challenge or issue I have with vegetarian/vegan cooking is the foreign-ness of the elements of the meals and how they're put together. The picture above looks more like regular meals. Somehow that, the normal American meal set-up, makes eating vegetarian/vegan easier for me.

I hope that the challenge isn't too taxing. It's almost scary to think about changing my diet. Food is such a big part of socializing and culture and it's daunting to think about changing that. Growing up I think I had no willpower whatsoever. I'm not sure how much willpower I have now. Will I be able to give up all meat? How will that affect things like Thanksgiving and Christmas? Will I be able to go without? Will I be able to cope with being even more blacksheep among my family? I think I'll hold on to something the Vegan Burnout said to me. "Of course it's easy to go get a cheeseburger from McDonald's I want to do that from time to time. My principles keep me going."

I am so embarrassed. (PLASTIC FAIL)

Well, as you see from Jim's post below, we collected all our plastic "trash" for one week. And OH MY GOD I must use more plastic than anyone on the planet, I swear. Here I am patting myself on the (tattooed) back for bein' all green and sassy, and we must have accumulated 60 pounds of plastic. Okay, not that much, but a lot. We were going to catalogue it, but yeah, that was overwhelming. Here's what I can decipher from the photo:

2 (maybe more) plastic trays from Trader Joe's vegetables
plastic wrap from same
empty mustard bottle
half-dozen or so NyQuil blister packs
2 or 3 Band-Aids (I did not add those to the pile because it's gross to save Band-Aids)
10 ramen noodle packages (in my defense, I was sick last weekend and that's all I wanted)
huge Costco toilet paper wrapper (I think I could wrap my car with it)
bubble-wrap envelope (I couldn't very well tell my Etsy seller not to ship my stuff in plastic)
empty bottle of dog treats
2 clamshell containers (one from Jim's lunch and one that held cherry tomatoes)

And a bunch of other crap that I am embarrassed to have bought. Jim's right that most of it is recyclable, but the plastic recycling process ain't exactly all that energy-efficient. At any rate, my ramen noodle craving disappeared with my cold. I think our biggest culprit is food, and it would be easy to reduce our plastic there. Frequently we go to Trader Joe's first because we know what they have, and then we go to My Organic Market (the amazing MOM's) for everything else. I think we'll start relying on the MOM's more—sometimes their produce is a little pricier, but it's all organic, mostly local, and it sure as hell isn't pre-packaged.