When Carrie Forrest's steak with Gorgonzola sauce was set down on the white tablecloth late in the spring of 2014, she began looking around the restaurant nervously. She wasn't famous, or at least not exactly: she had a vegan blog with an app successful enough that she'd just flown from her home in California to present at a food blogging conference in Miami, before then flying up to New York.
Carrie – who has a master's degree in nutrition – ate plenty of beans and soy for protein, yet she was exhausted. In fact, she'd been low in energy for months, maybe ever since she'd switched to being vegan in 2010, inspired by Alicia Silverstone and a love of animals. Giving up meat was easy; it was yoghurt that had been hard, but lately she'd started looking longingly at eggs in farmers’ markets. In New York, something clicked. “I was just like: this isn't working,” Carrie, now 47, says of being vegan. “I felt ashamed. But I also felt like: this is
