Vegan Tuna

This last July my entire family went to Washington, D.C. to honor my grandpa Dave's life with a ceremony at the Arlington Memorial. It was a huge experience for us, since we have NEVER all gotten on an airplane together, nor have we traveled much as a family in general. I'm not going to talk right now about the heartwarming moments shared or the memories we made together in the furnace that envelopes the east coast in the summer. No, right now I'm going to reference something that happened on the airplane on our way to commemorate our wonderful David Rudolph Hessler.

We were flying peacefully on our way, above Colorado or one of those other states that you fly over on your way to Virginia. I was consoling my fear of flying (every five minutes I re-remembered that there was NOTHING. HOLDING. THE PLANE. UP. I feel sick even TALKING about it right now) by spending my non-existent money on anything and everything available on the in-flight service screen in front of me. Bloody Mary? Check. Entourage episode? Check. Club soda, cookie, pretzels? Check, hell-mutha-fuckin-yes check, aaaaand check! I perused the food-cube options: something chicken-y (even though this was in my pre-vegan days I wasn't a big fan), a hummus and vegetable dealio, or a tuna spread (in my pre-vegan days I WAS a big fan. I ate a tuna melt at LEAST once a week for about two years). Hm. Tuna? On an airplane? Well... there weren't many options... and there was a plane FULL of people, so odds are that a fair amount of passengers around me had been happily smearing tuna on crackers and our nostrils had remained blissfully unaware. What the hell, tuna it is! I received both my food-cube and a weary grunt from the flight attendant who'd been running back and forth down the aisle to my seat every five minutes with my overzealous free beverage requests. I unpacked my tuna can, crackers, some nuts, probably more cookies, and I don't remember what else from the lil cardboard box and proudly got to work putting tuna on everything I just listed. I generously waved my creations in front of my sister's and mother's faces to my left, offering up my precious tuna yum-yums and securing my status in sainthood, unaware that their faces turned green once the aroma settled into their breathing space. Suddenly an abrupt movement startled me from the seat behind and to my left, as my sister Hannah ripped her seat-belt from her lap and jumped to her feet.

"DON'T YOU EVER EVER EVER EVER ORDER TUNA ON AN AIRPLANE AGAIN!!!!"

The pilot dropped his controls and scrambled out of his seat; the man holding up the bathroom line shoved out of the tiny stall with his pants still around his ankles; the paralyzed woman at the back of the plane broke into a trot straight out of her wheel chair; and the nursing baby let go of his mother's teat and latched on with his infant biceps to the crowd's coattails as every single person on the plane rushed to point a finger at me in unanimous disgust.

And that, my friends, is how I earned the super attractive nickname (Big) Tuna.

Yaaaay.


Vegan talk:
Seafood was always one of the foods that I had a hard time letting go. It always made me uncomfortable that the ONE animal I enjoyed eating was also my spirit animal. (Still not sure what that says about me....) When I went vegan I was worried that it'd be too painful breaking up with tuna melts, rainbow rolls, and bagels with lox. The truth is, I haven't missed them a bit. Oh okay, I won't lie and say that I don't vividly remember how delicious seared ahi salads are, but it's just not enough to make me tempted anymore. I struggled for months with giving up my diet of finned-friends and cheese, but ultimately after I sought out the hard-to-hear facts about the meat/poultry/seafood/dairy industries... well... something finally clicked into place in my brain and it became impossible for me to further make-believe that the salmon in my pasta never had a face or that the cream in my Starbucks coffee didn't come from the udders of a miserable, childless cow. I'm continuously learning kinder ways to exist on this planet, and I'm constantly freaked out by the endless list of everyday items that contain animal products. I downloaded this great "app" for my phone that's simply called "Animal-free" and just lists alphabetically a bajillion animal ingredients and a bajillion vegan ingredients, so when you're looking at what a product contains you can reference it really quickly. It's a great app because when you click on a word it pulls up a whole description of it and where it is commonly found and such, so it's helped me to navigate shampoo ingredients and other stuff that would otherwise just look like jibble-jabble to me. Yay Android app for helping to make vegan-product hunting more user-friendly!!