Hello for #VeganMoFo 2019!

Hey, everyone! How excited are you for #VeganMofo?

In keeping with my theme this month of "Vegan on the Go," I'm taking a break from the usual lunch post to follow today's prompt for #VeganMoFo 2019 (The Month of Vegan Food), "Introduce yourself," by telling you why this packed food blog exists in the first place. My theme is honestly more or less my blog's usual theme anyway, with some special additions for this month--it's typically a lot of packed lunches and snacks with scattered restaurant reviews, the occasional recipe, and some breakfasts here and there. During #VeganMoFo, I will be answering the official prompts about once per week, especially the ones that fit my own theme! Like last time, I've challenged myself to post every single day.

I introduced myself last year, which was my first year participating in #VeganMoFo, by explaining how and why I went vegan and why I kept my original blog in spite of it. This time, I thought I would tell you about how and why I started a lunch packing blog to begin with. I used to blog as "The Student." I finished my Ph.D. in 2014 and hence the blogging name "Student-turned-Doctor"--but it's in the humanities; I am not here to give you medical advice other than to see your own doctor if you have questions. I am qualified to interpret American history for you if you need that, though.

When I started graduate school, I was living in a dorm. I had made it through my undergraduate years without dorm life, so that was a huge adjustment. I really missed having a kitchen. And in graduate school there was so much reading that reading for fun, for the most part, was unthinkable. So I started looking at cooking blogs when I wanted to relax. They were mostly pictures, anyway.

This was slightly before American culture at large discovered you could pack something other than a sandwich for lunch, but it was possible to find a whole bento-packing culture online. I was utterly captivated by how beautiful the food was. Most of this content was being put out by Japanese or Korean bloggers. I talked with my Asian friends about their memories of packed lunches and they told stories of their mothers staying up late at night to pack the best lunches in some sort of competition with all the other mothers. I kind of wished I could do it, but I was on a meal plan, and also had no real access to a kitchen.

When I moved into an apartment again, I started packing my lunch, but I didn't photograph it or anything. But people kept remarking on it, out in the world, especially because I was using a bento box and that was, at the time, uncommon in the United States. I had a kind of longing to participate in the community of bento bloggers, even though my food wasn't all that much like theirs--I wasn't using special cutters to make cucumber stars or carrot hearts, peeling apples to look like rabbits, or constructing anime characters out of rice. Still, something was meditative and soothing about packing pretty lunches and taking care of myself in that way. I wanted to share it. So I ventured forth, and Food for Dissertating was born.

I wasn't vegan then, but I was exploring all sorts of cuisine, because I quickly learned that I could not eat baby carrots every day and have anyone else be interested--I was boring myself, too! I shared my very first vegan lunch on July 27, 2012:

It consisted of Galia melon, marinated tofu (I've since given you the recipe for the tofu), Moroheiya noodle salad, and carrot-beet salad. Back then, I wrote: "I am also somewhat impressed that I managed to make a vegan meal not only satisfactory, but appealing. I know others out there are blogging vegan lunches, and I'm always amazed at what they manage to come up with--it takes creativity, that's for sure!"

Now that seems a bit ironic. I was always creative with my food and vegan meals were just unfamiliar, which is what made them challenging--now I can easily pull basic vegan food together without thinking very hard about it. I didn't go vegan for about another four years, but I did experiment with vegan food. Most of it was pretty good! I would still happily eat this lunch if I had the chance today (unfortunately, I have no local source for the Moroheiya noodles this was based on anymore--though I have occasionally contemplated attempting something similar with ramen).

I've been vegan for nearly three years now. The food is "satisfactory" and "appealing" to me most of the time. I wish younger me had known more vegans; it might have helped. But I am grateful to all those vegan bloggers for inspiring me to try it out sometimes, way back then. My whole lunch packing community seems to be gone now, vegan or not, but I'm glad to have built a new one around passion for vegan food.

One more thing you should know if you're following my content this month: I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disorder last year, oddly enough in the middle of #VeganMoFo 2018. So sometimes I blog about myasthenia gravis, too. I hope that if you're ever experiencing extraordinary challenges, my thoughts on that might make us both feel less alone. Maybe I should have made the theme "Vegan on the Go with a Chronic Illness" but that seemed too long, and I may or may not say a whole lot about it. It really depends on how I'm feeling.

I'm excitedly looking forward to what all of the other #VeganMoFo bloggers have in store this month! Let's do this!