During the summer, I was talking to my editor on Facebook, looking for stories I could work on before school started.

“Well, I’ve got this article where you could be vegan for a week,” she told me.

“Do you realize,” I responded, “that I once rolled up bacon in ham and ate it like a burrito?”

I thought for a second.

“That makes me perfect for this, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, it does.”

Please allow me to introduce myself: I’m a man of simple tastes. I want my milk in the morning and my bacon cheeseburgers any time of day. When I go to the 8 below McMahon, I skip past the salad bar and get two slices of double pepperoni from Pagliacci.

An attentive person would say I’m ill-suited for the vegan lifestyle, and people who didn’t know me at all would say — and have said — it’s hard for everyone. Truly, it is. Probably one of the greatest challenges of my life was turning down most of my favorite foods for what amounted to no good reason — but I’ll come back to that.

I started Sept. 30, the first day of school. The night before, I had a glorious send-off: a triple burger from A Burger Place on the Ave, with a double serving of bacon on it, topped gloriously with American cheese. I’m a skinny guy, just below 6-feet tall and 160 pounds, and I finished the whole thing. My body was ready, if a little less than willing.

“God,” my roommate told me, “this is just going to suck for you.”

He was probably right.

I began my first morning with an apple and chai tea — made with soy milk, of course. I felt good — it felt right — and I knew I could do this, even if it would feel a little odd at first. My first lunch I spent a good 20 minutes wandering McMahon’s dining hall looking for something appetizing. I even checked if Pagliacci was advertising some kind of vegan cheese pizza that day before settling on the least appetizing-sounding thing there, which coincidentally was the only thing I could eat without getting a salad: vegan spinach masala.

I’m a 20-year-old guy, and I have never once admitted to enjoying anything with spinach in it, but there’s a first time for everything. The Indian dish was decent: Maybe not as filling as I’d like, and perhaps a little pricey, but I could always pick up a snack if needed.

I could only find cereal for dinner my first night. It was another 24 hours before I was starving, even with three meals a day.

Here’s a little tidbit about the 8: Housing and Food Service’s Executive Chef Gabe Kinney was right; there is a healthy vegan option everywhere at all times of the day, somewhere. At the 8, this is whatever vegan fill-in-the-blank masala happens to be served up for lunch that day: sometimes spinach, sometimes spinach and, if the dining staff is feeling frisky, chickpea. Masala is good; it’ll do, but it looks like a sick baby had its way with some rice, and I can only stomach it about once a week.

In the interest of full disclosure, I did find, before I started this little experiment, some vegan carrot cake and vegan chocolate at Joe Haus, the espresso bar at the 8, but after I had started, I couldn’t find it again. It just disappeared off the menu.

On Thursday night, I went to A Burger Place again with one of my friends to try out their veggie burger — of course, with no cheese and some lettuce. I was sure that wasn’t going to be enough, so I ordered some curly fries, too. The burger was great, and I waited until I was done with it to pick up the fries. I had a few before my friend tried any.

“These were cooked in grease,” she told me.

“[Expletive deleted],” I said.

I was still hungry and had to give my stash of fries away to one of my friend’s girlfriends. A good deed, to be sure, but I was hungry, and a Clif Bar wasn’t going to do it.

On Friday, I went home to help my dad with some work around the house. Although, truth be told, I needed him to fix me a real vegan dinner just so I would believe they were possible. He made an elaborate tofu stir-fry with veggies, firm tofu, peppers and almonds. It tasted great and filled me up for about a half-hour.

I wanted to know why I was always hungry, and it wasn’t until I talked to a nutrition professor that I got my answer: more meals.

“A lot of people really adhere to that kind of eating style, where they eat smaller meal, snack, smaller meal, snack,” professor Elizabeth Kirk said. “They may eat six times a day. It keeps you energized throughout the day.”

When I was interviewing vegans for the previous article, I got the same story. They would keep a supply of snacks on them — peanuts, some fruit or a sandwich — just in case they needed it at some point while they were out.

Living in the dorms with a meal plan, it’s almost impossible to do without a huge amount of money to pull from. I’m on the silver dining level ($870 per quarter), and my week being vegan demolished my account balance. So, while it’s totally possible to eat and live on campus as a vegan, it’s also expensive. Routine trips to QFC — which I did not take — and the ability to store and cook your own food is a necessity, and a lot of dorms simply don’t have that.

It also turns out that when you’re not used to the absence of meat or dairy in your diet, all-veggie meals don’t really fill you up.

“Protein has a satiating effect itself,” Kirk told me after I had quit veganism. “So, if you’re not consuming protein with your meals in the forms you’re normally used to, then you lose that satiating effect. Higher fibers, lower calories — hunger.”

I went back the next day and finally had a straight-up salad for dinner. I think that might be a record — three days vegan without a single salad. Appetite, be not proud.

I quit a day early, on Tuesday just after midnight. Not because I had a particular craving, but because I was painfully hungry and tired of waiting. I ended it with a burger too, a double cheeseburger from the Burger Hut with three friends.

It was delicious and utterly satisfying, one of the best burgers I’d ever had.

The next morning, I had an apple and some chai with soy milk to start my first day back.

To paraphrase Langston Hughes:

Rest at pale evening …

A tall slim tree …

Night coming tenderly

Green, like me.

Reach reporter Morgan Gard at lifestyles@dailyuw.com.