Tastes like chicken

"Oh, by the way ... I'm vegan now," the boy said with an air of nonchalance as he glided into the house after school, and made his daily afternoon pilgrimage to the fridge. "Well ... for this week, anyway."

Now, as one of his parents, and the person most likely to procure the majority of his provisions, I had to suss just what he meant by "vegan." 

I wasn't sure if he knew that meant he'd have to eat vegetables. 

"You mean, vegetarian, right? You're still going to eat cheese and pancakes and yogurt."

He shook his head. 

"I'm not eating animal products whatsoever. No meat, no dairy, no eggs, no honey. My honey oat granola? It's dead to me."

This new eating plan seemed ... well ... unwise. Especially since the kid standing before the wide-open icebox couldn't find a single thing to satisfy his mid-afternoon cravings.

"Did you know Oreos are vegan?"

It even took me longer than my usual Don't-Just-Stand-There-With-The Door-Open-Refrigerating-The-Kitchen time window to grasp that there was almost nothing in inventory to satisfy such a dare.

Bread? This one has milk!

Pasta? These have eggs!

These crackers? Have cheese! 

And, by the way, the edible is not inevitable: you can't live on Oreos alone.

Yet, despite my deeply held urge to snark at this dietary whim -- not to mention an ill-advised game of "Is it vegan?" round-robin wherein I actually asked a 12-year-old boy to gauge whether coffee made from beans that traversed the entire digestive tract of the endangered palm civet would get the coveted vegan distinction -- the truth was I wanted to support any effort on his part to eat something found in nature.

Maybe something green would finally pass through his digestive tract, and he would like it.

A part of me was overjoyed that this boy had finally accepted vegetables into his heart, if only for a seven-day challenge issued by The New Church of Experiences Based On a Dare ... more commonly referred to as YouTube.

It was contagious.

The overflow of my exuberance collected into a four-way pact that ensnared the whole family into agreeing to eat nothing but leaves, sticks, and highly processed twigs for the next seven days. 

I won't lie. It was exciting for the first three hours.

Together we planned meals and grocery shopping and meal prep. We read labels and searched the internet and shared in our collective shock and disappointment that some bananas are preserved with a spray made from shrimp and crab shells.

We started with bold choices, even using a freshly harvested stalk of "baby cabbage" as the base veg of our inaugural meal.

The reception roasted Brussels sprouts (without bacon or Parmesan) received ranged from lackluster to gag-inducing depending on who you asked.

You can probably guess who was standing over the trash spitting out the green paste.

Indeed, most of the boy's trial phase of this challenge wound up in the compost.

Carrots were still "gross."

Lettuce? Let's not.

Beans? Scmeans!

Four days the kid lived on plain bagels with peanut butter. 

During those same four days, the rest of us ate our bleak kale salads as we lusted after cheese and eggs and meat. Each day asking the boy at meal-timed intervals if we were still vegan?

And on the fifth day, we rested:

"I'm no longer vegan! He announced as he slid into my car on that delightfully snowy afternoon. It was the cafeteria chicken that turned me."