How Being A Beard Made Me Vegan
I was recently interviewed with a couple other vegan comics like Matt Gubser, Myq Kaplan, and Dhaya Lakshminarayanan. You can read the whole thing here!
In high school in Texas, Los Angeles comedian Virginia Jones used to go out on dates as a chaperone with her best friend who was gay. “His mom thought I would somehow keep him from having sex with men.” says Jones. “One night I’m sitting in the front room of a gay guy’s apartment as my friend is having sex with him in the next room and there was a copy of ‘Meat is Murder’ by the Smiths and I listened to it. It’s a terrible song, but until that moment I had never really thought about where meat comes from,” Jones said.
The next day, Jones became a vegetarian—who slowly moseyed into veganism. “As time goes on it became a lot easier to become a vegan as technology and accessibility grew. The only vegan I knew in Dallas, Texas would regularly eat a plate of fried tofu with soy sauce. We ate a lot of cheese pizza and French fries. I ate garbage, which led to a vitamin deficiency in high school. We didn’t have veggie burgers—we would make falafel burgers and fry it up,” Jones recalls.
With abundant low-budget college comfort food like Taco Bell, it’s easy to be a junk-food vegetarian. That changed when Jones went vegan. “It was only when I went vegan that it was pretty easy to see that whole grains, vegetables and a protein source made me feel best. I became more aware of making healthier choices when I went vegan,” Jones points out.