Going Vegan In The Deep South: When Changing Your Diet Becomes An Act Of Teenage Rebellion

Sweet home Alabama was my sweet home, indeed. Over the course of 7 long years, it was the place where I transitioned from childhood to adolescence, got my first taste of adult freedom, and re-connected with what it meant to be American, despite the rather conspicuous English accent I was rocking at the time. For anyone  who’s never had the good fortune of experiencing the sheer eclecticism of this particular area of the Deep South that resides along the Bible Belt of The United States, let me provide you with some degree of insight to life in Alabama. 

Alabama is a place where tea is made cold, iced, and with two entire cups of sugar, sometimes more. It’s a place where strangers will talk to you anytime, anywhere - from the rocking chairs on their front porch, to the bathroom sink at the type of restaurant we like to refer to as ‘back-porch.” 

It’s a place known as the land of huntin’, fishin’, and shootin’,’ where - it should come as no surprise - meat and fresh seafood reign as the ultimate supreme.  

We soak our pulled-pork in Jack Daniels, cook our steaks ‘country-fried,’ with gravy, and prefer our fish to start with either the words ‘cat’ or ‘craw.’ We buy straws of honey from neighbors on the side of the road, eat funnel cake (deep-fried cake batter sprinkled with icing sugar) at festivals, snack on dill pickles at baseball games, and occasionally halt our road-trips for the uniquely southern delicacy of some Cajun boiled peanuts, available for purchase only at one’s local gas-station.

In addition, there exists a general consensus among the people that reside here that unless a food has been deep fried at the very minimum of two times, it’s probably not going to taste very good. Our vegetables are mostly canned, pickled, or – you guessed it – fried, and our fruit comes primarily in the form of cobbler or candied apples. As the pioneers of home-baked hospitality, and serve-able Southern comforts, there is no place in Alabama where culture is, that food isn’t. 

And where there is food, there will always be people.

When you meet a person from Alabama, you can be certain that the first question to follow, “How are y’all?’” will be something along the lines of, “So, what church do y’all go to again?” And that’s because if there’s one thing to understand about Alabama, it’s that tradition here equals religion – and you’d be hard-pressed to find anything southern folk take as seriously as they do their religion. 

So, ignoring the peculiarity of the circumstance that led to my British family’s arrival in the beautiful state I now consider my childhood home, about 5 years into living there, I had had enough; It’s safe to say, I was never quite sold on the idea of religion, but much to the dismay of my devout friends and family, I would take my personal commitment to heresy even one step further by defying both religion and tradition in one fell swoop: aka Veganism. 

In order to understand why such a personal lifestyle choice (such as that of going vegan) could be considered nothing less than a forsaking of God and all his holy creation, it’s necessary to first understand the intimate relationship between food and religion in the South. 

There is no eating without prayer, no meal before thanking God, and certainly no religious celebration without a feast-like assortment of food. In Alabama, children are not taught to love animals, they are taught to love God by killing animals.

“God put animals here for us to use and eat,” I had heard.

“The bible teaches us to slaughter the lamb,” I was told. 

“It’s God’s work; we hunt to protect the deer from dying more brutally by natural causes” I was informed. 

I recall feeling angry, my blood boiling as I sat in a sermon at church, one day. The pastor was explaining how, as a way for his people to temporarily atone for their sins, God had demanded the slaughter and bleeding out of a goat. The congregation nodded, utterly unperturbed. I just remember the rage that bubbled up inside me at the notion of a loving God demanding anything from his people, let alone the apparent gruesome murder of an innocent baby animal. 

It wasn’t as though religion was a side argument against Veganism - it was the whole argument. Individuals I spoke to would concede the points I made with regard to the environment, and health, and cost, but the conversation always and inevitably would come back to God.

Going vegan in a place like Alabama has a way of making you feel crazy five different ways from Sunday, and my perhaps youthfully naive faith in humanity took a few too many hits too quickly during those first few months… And I don’t know about you at 16, but myself at 16 wasn’t altogether confident in my ability to fully cook rice, much less sustain myself on a vegan diet in a world of baby back ribs, family barbecues, and buffalo wild wing buffets. 

Eating out at restaurants meant having to define and justify eating plant-based to the waiter, the head chef, and the inappropriately antagonistic restaurant manager. Thanksgiving devolved into a series of family feuds following my Grandmother’s outright refusal to alter any of her perfected recipes in order to accommodate my new dietary restrictions, and school lunchtimes became an attempt to navigate stupid questions, ignorant suggestions, and unsolicited nutritional concerns from the boys who liked to drive trucks with dead deer strapped to the hood. It was entirely exhausting to constantly be made out as this rebellious extremist with wildly unnatural (and un-Godly) views. 

I had to teach myself to cook, first and foremost, and then I had to teach myself to speak about the subject without being reduced to tears of frustration. It’s true - people blame the steep learning curve involved in the difficulty of first going vegan, failing to account for the emotional toll that a sudden changed perspective can have. 

When you come to that personal realization that veganism is the only ethical way to proceed with your life, you just presume that it will happen the same way for everyone else around you. There is an optimistic ignorance accompanied shortly thereafter by a decimation of the hope that anyone will ever understand. 

Thankfully, it only took a year before I had a few fellow vegans on my team. My two best friends took the leap and never looked back, although I’m willing to argue they had an even tougher time than me. 

They nearly broke up their families with their veganism. Their mothers had an un-doing, unable to imagine nor come to terms with the idea of never being able to prepare traditional foods for their children or future grandchildren - it was the best way they knew how to show love, after all. My two friends were kicked out of meal times, vetoed at restaurants, and tormented at every turn. All I could offer were my apologies and the promise that it would, hopefully, get easier. 

Fast forward to half a decade later, and, while the veganism stuck around, my residence in Alabama did not. 

I didn’t move in order to get away from the food culture and tradition, per se, but I certainly did move to get towards a different one. Having first relocated to Montreal, and then on to London, I very quickly became aware of an entire new world of vegan cuisine – and one that meant you didn’t have to trade your sanity for some seitan (or authentic soul food for actual Satan). 

While being on the receiving end of such cultural condemnation and community backlash towards my teenage diet was something deeply perturbing at the time, I can now reflect gratefully on the experience as a whole. It gave me the understanding that culture, especially where food is concerned, is not static; that innovation is not an enemy to tradition, but the translator of it; and that sometimes it takes defying the culture of food in order to make space for the redefining of it. 

Funnily enough, even sweet hometown Alabama seems to have come around to the plant-based lifestyle more than I would ever have anticipated. We vegans now have an entire section of the freezer at all local chain grocery stores, a pizza place that offers vegan cheese at no extra cost, and a slow but steadily growing awareness of the fact that giving up eating animals doesn’t necessarily mean giving up on good food. 

When we return to our parents’ house for the holidays, my two vegan friends and I are, respectively, the best cooks in the house, and our families look forward to eating our food more than they do to complaining about it. 

If that’s not progress, then I don’t know what is. 

Alexandra Walker-Jones

Alexandra is a freelance writer and published author with a passion for nutrition, health, and plant-based living. Check out her website awalkerjones.com for more information about her work.