Reluctant Vegan Son

Reluctant Vegan Son started with a clear before and after. Before quarantine, Adam was on spring break in Myrtle Beach, drinking, smoking and eating a lot of fast food. After it, he was home with a vegan family, and he became, in his words, the reluctant vegan son. The podcast he made from that is described in its own opening as talking with friends and family about food, veganism and whatever else comes up. Nikki is a recurring voice across from him, and together they settle into winding exchanges where one question leads to three more. The vegan material is hands-on. Part two of a vacation special covers what they actually ate on the trip, and argues that a fully vegan holiday works even when nothing is catered to you, as long as you are creative and flexible. Another episode names monosodium glutamate as its tip for making cooking great, and it also talks about dieting and how the media can present things that are not good for you. That same episode has Adam with his mom as she gets ready to take a doctor's job in Alaska. They talk about staying vegan in a fishing village whose culture has long centered on eating fish. Health also comes up on a personal level, through cholesterol, medication and open-heart surgery in the family. Still, the food is often just a way into other subjects. Adam talks about being close to graduating college after getting there by a less typical route. With Nikki, he talks about the many paths a life can take, which wanders into how different a one-year-old is from a two-year-old and when a child can be trusted to do the grocery shopping. In one conversation, vaccines seeming easier to get lead into what hope means to them. The same conversation covers which merchandise with a person's face on it they would buy, and whether they would play an evil character they disagree with entirely. Another episode carries Adam's announcement of a new business as an emotional coach for young men. Next to it is a playful theory about learning a language by dating someone who speaks it, backed by a story about a couple whose only shared language was Mandarin. That kind of drift is what the show is really like: topics come in sideways and are left open rather than wrapped up. The run is finished. The final episode calls it a quarantine podcast that lasted almost as long as quarantine did. It says plainly that the show's subject was no longer what it started with, so rather than rename it, Adam ended it and pointed to a new show, DMDY, short for Discovering me, Discovering you. For the vegan food, 'How to Eat on Your Vegan Vacation Bonanza' and 'How to Make Delicious Food 101 - MSG' are the natural places to start. For the turn toward emotional coaching, start with 'We Just Want to be With You'. 'Final Episode of RVS' is where Adam looks back on what the whole project meant to him.