I became vegan at 62 because I finally had time to think about what my choices meant, and now I’m eating less food but living more deliberately

I met Patricia at a farmer’s market in Portland last spring, and I wasn’t looking for a story. She was examining heirloom tomatoes with the kind of deliberate focus I usually see in indie music producers picking vinyl—turning each one over, reading the name tag, considering it like it might change her life. Something about that reverence made me stop.

We got to talking about varieties, and somehow (as these things happen when you’re a writer with a notebook and genuine curiosity) the conversation drifted into her life. Patricia is 62. She’d spent forty years in pharmaceutical sales, eating airport food and conference room sandwiches, never really thinking about where anything came from. She wore the uniform of her job so completely that her life felt borrowed from someone else’s script. Then she retired.

“I had this moment,” she told me, selecting a Sungold tomato, “where I realized I had no idea why I ate what I ate. I just... did it. For decades. I never once thought about it.”

That’s when Patricia became vegan, but not because of a documentary or an ideology that found her. It happened because she finally had something she’d never had before: time. Time to think. Time to walk through a farmer’s market instead of a Whole Foods checkout. Time to ask herself questions that require answers, not just the quick dopamine hit of convenience.

What struck me most wasn’t her diet change—it was what she said about eating less. “I eat maybe 70% of what I used to,” she mentioned, loading her cloth bag with vegetables. “But I feel fuller.” She wasn’t being poetic. She meant it literally and philosophically. Every meal now requires intention. She cooks. She tastes things. She knows the farmers. There’s no autopilot.

This is something I write about a lot: how food choices connect to freedom. But hearing Patricia describe it—how stepping away from the inherited consumption patterns of her career suddenly made space for actual choices—I understood it differently. Research on midlife transitions and dietary change suggests that people who shift their eating patterns later in life often report deeper satisfaction than those who adopt plant-based diets younger, precisely because the choice is conscious rather than default.

“I wasn’t convinced by arguments,” Patricia said, which is exactly what someone like me—someone who reads a lot of vegan theory—needed to hear. “I was just... present, finally. And once you’re present, you start noticing things. Like, I’d never actually looked at a chicken farm. I’d never thought about what I was participating in. I just ate it because that’s what you do.”

What she described was a kind of awakening, but a quiet one. Not revolutionary. Just the simple, radical act of paying attention. Of asking: what do I actually want to consume? What aligns with who I actually am, now that I have time to figure out who that is?

The food world often frames veganism as a young person’s movement—ethical, performative, tied to identity. But watching Patricia move through that farmer’s market, I realized there’s a whole dimension that rarely gets discussed: the version of this choice that comes from having lived long enough to get tired of inherited scripts. She wasn’t rebelling. She was just reclaiming attention.

I asked her if she missed anything. She laughed. “I miss the convenience of not thinking,” she said. “But I don’t actually miss eating it.” That distinction matters. It’s not about deprivation. It’s about the pleasure of deliberate choice replacing the numbness of default.

For more on how dietary patterns shift across different life stages, this research on plant-based diets and life satisfaction offers interesting frameworks. And if you’re curious about how retirement and lifestyle choices intersect, our lifestyle section has pieces on intentional living.

Since that conversation, I’ve thought about Patricia often. She’s become a symbol to me of something I hadn’t fully articulated before: that going vegan at 62 isn’t about becoming a different person. It’s about finally having the time and space to become yourself. It’s about eating less but living more deliberately, and realizing those two things have been connected all along.

When she gave me her email (“in case you want to know how this goes”), I understood she wasn’t just sharing her address. She was sharing the address of someone who’d finally stopped living on autopilot. And that, I think, might be the most important story about food and choice I’ve heard in years.