…one night while I was doing the dishes he and I engaged in a conversation about mucous-forming and mucousless foods, something I knew little about. “What did mucous have to do with food?” I pondered, completely bewildered.

Tye told me how good it was, now that he was following a relatively mucous-free diet, to be able to go through the cold winter months without having to deal with snots pouring out of his nose and into his moustache and beard. As he had never shaved in his life, he had an abundance of both.

Having switched to a vegan diet a little less than a year ago and thinking that my choice of food was at least almost as good as it could be, I was a wee bit defensive. And since my discovery of vitamin C pills, I led a relatively snot-free life anyway, winter or summer. But I quickly chose not to reveal my challenged state and muttered a very weak and no doubt unconvincing, “I see, I see.”

So that was the end of it for then anyway. I continued on doing the dishes, content with my presumably ‘ideal’ diet of pasta, oats, soymilk, spices, fresh fruit and vegetables, seaweed rolls, sprouts and rice, most of which was inorganic, all mixed together, and a fair amount of the time cooked to death. I did however, continue to ponder the idea of giving up soymilk. But simply thinking it was bad for my body, or even Rachel’s remark about the sugar content, didn’t seem to be enough to deter me.

Soon enough though, I found myself in a conversation with Tye about soymilk. He recounted his days of eating incredible amounts of dried fruit, followed by downing two liters of soymilk and then lying on his bed completely incapacitated. He went on to say that somebody had once told him that when you fill your body with mucous-forming foods like soymilk, which Tye referred to as “pasty mucous forming glop”, it prevents you from talking with the Angels. These words spoke loudly and clearly to me and left a solid impression. I had been more and more connected to and in communication with some greater force as of late and I wanted absolutely nothing to disrupt this.

Three days later, after a period of weaning, I’d cut soymilk completely out of my diet…