You are vegetarian and Dre is a vegan — would love to hear more about your history/path to those choices, and also more about the practical aspects (since Dre is vegan I assume all home-cooked meals are vegan?) Any favorite cookbooks you use?

Ah yes. The joy of being married to someone with a different special needs diet. First, to clarify, I should point out that I eat fish, and therefore am not vegetarian. This makes me an ovo-lacto pescatarian or something. Andreas, meanwhile, has been vegan for 13 years.

Here’s a little window into eating at the Cheateau Fetzllings:

Every morning, one of us gets up and shuffles into the kitchen to put on tea water. As one of us gurgles sleepily in bed, the other brews up a big pot of black tea, pours the tea into oversized mugs, and stirs a spoonful of honey into each. Then, they reach into the fridge and grab two milk containers: one organic non-fat, the other Vanilla Silk soy milk. Each cup gets its own kind of milk, and then the teamaker delivers a cup full of icky milk they don’t like to their sleepy spouse.

Dre’s and my diets are driven by different ideals. He was raised on meat ‘n’ potatoes and was recruited by some vegan Germans who visited his family in 1994 — the Germans are no longer vegan, but Dre still is. He’s vegan primarily for environmental and animal rights reasons, and my understanding is that he eats lower on the trophic system because it lowers his planetary impact, and doesn’t eat animals because he doesn’t like killing things when he doesn’t need to. He’s suggested that if he was in the woods starving he would have absolutely no qualms about ripping off a rabbit’s head and gnawing its meat off its cute little bones — but since he doesn’t NEED to do so most days, he’d prefer to eat kinder.

As for me, I was raised mostly vegetarian — turkey on holidays, fish on special occasions. I’d started eating a little meat in college when dining out, but never really developed a taste for it or understood how to cook it. When Dre and I moved in together, I decided I’d try being a stricter vegetarian, and found it easy to transition back to — Except for fish. I really like fish. So after a couple years of vegetarianism in the late ’90s, I opened my diet back up to fish and am happy about it. So I guess for me, my diet is partially just an issue of taste (don’t like meat), partially an issue of health (it’s not good for me), and partially an issue of animal rights (don’t like where most meats come from).

Now, in terms of what we eat, I definitely eat way more of his food. Which is fine because well-prepared vegan dishes aren’t usually lacking for taste and deliciousness, and realistically cheese ain’t the greatest protein source. When Dre cooks I’m always happy to eat his vegan meals — although I have been known to sprinkle parmesan on my portion of the pasta. I’m trying to get better about cooking more, but I don’t really like following recipes and many of my default meals aren’t vegan … so more often than not I let Dre cook since he’s the one with the special needs. He’s generous and will add cheese to certain meals for me. That seems to be the limit though — he won’t cook me fish or bake me a cheesecake.

Eggs are definitely a major issue. I loooove eggs and Dre can’t stand the way they smell, so he usually asks that I don’t prepare them when he’s home. This has lead to things like, a few years ago, me throwing an egg-centric brunch potluck while Dre was out of town. Sometimes he’ll come home after circus class and find me guiltily waving a stick of incense, windows open and the odor of veggie omelet dinner still wafting through the air.

I know that Dre and I have both had moments of wishing we ate the same diet. Once, very early on in our relationship, we were in the middle of a debate about something and Dre got exasperated and blurted out, “And on top of it all, you’ve never even TRIED being vegan!” I bristled and went cold, he immediately took it back, and we got on with it.

On my side of things, sometimes I’m a wicked temptress. Dre’s been vegan for long enough that he’s not often tempted, but sometimes I wave delicious things in front of his nose and I’ve been bad about buying him leather shoes (Gah: sorry, but they last 10 times longer — all those pleather shoes in landfills isn’t helping things!). Dre’s been known to cheat every once in a great while, too. I will not out his weaknesses, but he’s not impossibly rigid in his diet and recognizes that sometimes it’s more about the experience than the dietary dogma.

Sometimes it is frustrating that we don’t eat the same foods. I would love it if Dre would whip up a delicious salmon fillet some night, and I’m sure he’d be stoked if I came home with a tub of Soy Delicious fake ice cream for us to split. But, like most couples, our different tastes don’t keep us from enjoying food together. I love brunch, and he doesn’t — totally unrelated to dietary issues — and yet we still manage to go out to eat together at 11am on a Sunday. Proof that love between vegans and non-vegans is sustainable!

In terms of cookbooks, that’s more Dre’s domain — so perhaps he will fill us in in the comments?

Commenters, take note: I’m totally uninterested in getting into any sort of dietary debates here, ie why one diet is better than others, why vegans are righteous and suck, why omnivores are murderers, how we’re all hypocrites, etc.