Articles Reflecting a Vegan Lifestyle used with permission from All-Creatures.org

This Lent, Christina Gdisis reflects on family, the convergence of veganism and tradition, things that change across the years, and things that always stay the same. She also shares a delicious recipe for fasolada, Greek white bean soup!

I Fast All Year. The Table Changes Back.
From Christina Gdisis, Main Street Vegan Academy, MainStreetVegan.com
March 2026

Photo from Christina Gdisis

Originally printed on Christina Gdisis' Substack and in the Main Street Vegan blog, MainStreetVegan.com.

On the Greek Table, the Lenten Fast, and What It Means to Be Fed Separately by the People Who Love You

My aunt figured it out on her own. The message came through Facebook Messenger, the way it always does with her, and I read it and laughed. She’d been watching me for years, trying to place what I was doing with my food, and then one day something clicked. You’re fasting, she wrote. You’re fasting all year long.

She said it like she’d solved something. And in her terms, she had. But what stayed with me was the translation itself. That she needed one. That the word vegan passed through her without landing, and fasting she already knew.

Vegan spanakorizo. Photo from Christina Gdisis

In Greece I use her language now. When someone asks why I won’t eat what’s on the table, I tell them I fast all year. It works better than the alternative, which requires a small lecture and ends, always, on fish. Even so, they look at me the way you look at someone who has chosen a difficulty that seems, to them, unnecessary. How is that possible, they ask. All year?

What no one says is that the table they’re defending is not the old one. My grandparents came from a mountain village in Central Greece where meat arrived on Sundays, if at all. The week was legumes, greens, olive oil, whatever the land gave. My parents’ generation ate differently, more meat, more often, the markers of arrival. By the time I was making my own choices the table had already shifted. I was moving back toward something they had moved away from. The Greeks who find my eating strange are eating in a way that would have seemed strange to their own grandparents.

I’ve understood this longer in my body than in my head. I went vegetarian thirteen years ago and vegan a year after that. A few years into it I started sitting with Vedic philosophy, eventually at a temple in New York, and found the same root I recognized from the Orthodox Church I grew up in, the understanding that what we consume is not separate from how we live, that the practice of restraint is also a practice of attention, a clearing. I don’t hold the two traditions apart. They are asking, at the bottom, the same thing of me.

What Lent gives back is the table.

In the first two weeks of August, Greece fasts for the Dormition of the Virgin. The fourno has xortopita. The taverna has fasolada. I sit down with my whole family and we are eating the same thing. There is no separate plate, no quiet accommodation, no one rearranging what they’ve made. For those two weeks I am simply inside the meal. The fast that marks an exception for everyone else is, for me, just a Tuesday. But at that table it makes no difference. We are all there together.

I kept Holy Week strictly as a teenager, seven days, with my best friend who was also Greek. We didn’t know how to cook. We leaned on pasta. We counted down to midnight on Holy Saturday the way you count down to the end of something hard, with relief and a little pride. We didn’t talk about what it meant. It was just what you did, the way certain things are simply what you do when you come from where you come from.

Fava salad. Photo from Christina Gdisis

I don’t count down anymore. But I still feel the calendar turn. Lent arrives and I notice it the way you notice a season, not because everything changes but because you’re paying attention and you can finally name what’s been true all along. The Church asks for this table forty-eight days a year (including Holy Week), and more, if you count the Wednesdays and Thursdays, the feast days, the two weeks in August for the Dormition. Fakes. Fasolada. Briam. Xorta, which my Yiayia cooked down in olive oil until the greens gave up all their water and the whole kitchen smelled like the earth they came from. I eat this way every day. For those who follow the calendar strictly, the distance between us is smaller than anyone says.

Then Easter comes and the table changes back.

The arni. The pastitsio. The tzatziki. I can make versions of most of it, and I do, and they are good. But I eat them from a separate pot. Everyone else is inside something together and I am next to it. This is the part that doesn’t resolve with time or with better recipes. The food is almost the same. The table is not.

My Yiayia understood something about this without ever naming it. Her kitchen on Easter was loud, cousins stealing loukaniko, my uncles hovering, and she would shoo them all out so she could finish her work. What I didn’t know until it arrived at the table was that her work included me. Not a scoop set aside. A whole pot, a mini pot of orzo veganized and placed above my plate like it was simply part of the meal, because to her it was.

My cousins teased me about it, gently, the way family teases when something is also a little tender. She’s spoiling you, they said. I didn’t argue. I was being spoiled. There is something about being cared for by your grandmother that you don’t understand is finite until it’s gone.

My mother makes the lamb and orzo now. It’s her contribution to the Easter table, which belongs to everyone to build together, and she makes my orzo separately without being asked. The gesture passes from one woman to the other, and I receive it the way I always have, with gratitude and with the knowledge that it is still a separate pot.

A Recipe for the Lenten Table

When I was seventeen and keeping Holy Week with my best friend, we didn’t know what to make. We ate a lot of pasta. If you’re navigating a Lenten table and want to cook something that actually feels like the food I grew up with, I’m leaving a recipe below.

And if you want more—a full Lenten kitchen, the dishes my Yiayia made without thinking about it—my on-demand cooking class recordings are available [here].

The kind of food that doesn’t need a fast to justify it.

Greek Fasolada (White Bean Soup)

A humble village soup built from simple ingredients—white beans, olive oil, and a handful of vegetables—slowly simmered until the broth becomes rich and comforting. The key is tasting as you go, allowing the beans, olive oil, and lemon to find their balance.

Prep time: 15 min

Cook time: 1 hour 30 min

Total time: 1 hour 45 min

Serves: 4-6

Equipment: Large soup pot or Dutch oven, Wooden spoon, Chef’s knife, Cutting board, Citrus juicer (optional but helpful), Ladle

Ingredients

• 1 cup dried Great Northern beans
• ½ cup extra-virgin olive oil (preferably Greek)
• 1½ cups onion, diced
• 1½ cups celery, diced
• 1½ cups carrots, diced
• 1½–2 teaspoons sea salt, plus more to taste
• ½ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper, plus more to taste
• 6–8 cups water
• Juice of 1–2 lemons

Preparation

Step 1

Soak the beans: Place the beans in a bowl and cover with plenty of water. Let them soak overnight. (If short on time, bring the beans to a boil for 5 minutes, turn off the heat, cover, and let sit for 1 hour.) Drain and rinse. Before cooking, take a moment to look at them—plump, pale, and ready to soften into the broth.

Step 2

Build the aromatic base: In a large soup pot, warm the olive oil over medium heat. Add the onions, celery, and carrots with a small pinch of salt. Cook gently for about 5–7 minutes, stirring occasionally. Notice how the vegetables begin to soften and release their sweetness. The onions will become translucent, and the kitchen will start to smell warm and comforting. This is the foundation of the soup.

Step 3

Add the beans and water: Stir in the drained beans and add 6–8 cups of water, enough to cover everything by a couple of inches. Bring the pot to a gentle boil, then reduce to a low simmer. Let the soup cook 1–1½ hours, stirring occasionally, until the beans are tender. As it cooks, watch the broth change. The beans will release starch and the soup will slowly become more golden and full-bodied.

Step 4

Taste and adjust: About halfway through cooking, taste the broth. Add salt gradually, tasting after each addition. The goal is a broth that tastes full and alive—not flat. If it feels too thick, add a little more water. This step is where the soup becomes your own.

Step 5

Finish with lemon: Once the beans are tender, turn off the heat and stir in the juice of one lemon. Taste. If the soup feels like it needs brightness, add more lemon juice little by little. The lemon should lift the soup without overpowering the beans and olive oil.

Step 6

Serve. Ladle the soup into bowls and finish with: A drizzle of good olive oil. Freshly ground black pepper. Serve with simple bread for dipping. Fasolada is often even better the next day, when the flavors settle and deepen.

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Christina Gdisis is a first-generation Greek American, founder of Conscious Vegan Kitchen, and a writer and guide exploring what it means to live in harmony with food, season, and the cultural rhythms that hold a life together. Drawing on her Greek roots, Vedic philosophy, and fourteen years of conscious eating, she currently writes personal essays, offers plant-based cooking classes, leads a virtual dinner book club, and hosts intimate retreats in Greece. Her work brings people back to the table – to the food, the season, the culture, and the daily rhythm that makes a life feel whole. She lives and writes in Beacon, New York, at christinagdisis.substack.com. (Please visit her Substack and consider subscribing. This wonderful essay first appeared there.)

Christina in her element. Photo from Christina Gdisis

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Posted on All-Creatures: March 27, 2026
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