Portia de Rossi is gracing the cover of July/Aug issue of VegNews magazine with a big smile and a healthy glow. Inside the mag, Portia dishes on cooking for her wife (Ellen DeGeneres),
her passion for animals and what restaurants to go to for the best veg food. She also opened up about how much tougher it is to be vegan than it is to be gay.
“Listen, I think it’s more difficult to be vegan than gay,” Portiasays in the interview. “I think people have a harder time accepting it; people feel more uncomfortable with a vegan at their dinner table than they do a lesbian. It’s confronting. It’s kind of suggesting that what someone else is doing is bad or wrong, and it hits them on a more personal level.”
She gives an example why she feels this way, “…If somebody is sitting there eating a steak watching you eat polenta, they’re thinking that you’re trying to preach to them or you’re trying to convert them in some way. Whereas with being gay, I don’t think anyone’s concerned that that’s the agenda.”
de Rossi has often found food to be challenging which is documented in her 2010 autobiography “Unbearable Lightness”. For years the actress struggled with an eating disorder (anorexia nervosa), but when she became a vegan her life changed drastically. She said of the changes in her diet, “While I have never felt more healthy and energized, the most important thing that happened to me when I stopped eating animals was a sense of connectedness. When I was suffering with an eating disorder, my life was solely about me. I was living through my ego and didn’t care about life around me. I was selfish and angry, and because I didn’t care about myself, I also didn’t care about littering in the street or polluting the environment.”
It might be tougher to be a vegan than to be gay in the world today, but if Portia can learn to love herself, beat an eating disorder and marry the woman she loves then she is sure to overcome any vegan discrimination she faces.