Others

The Folks Around Us

Relationships can be complicated. Our relationships with others when we reach a point where we decide to go vegan get even more complicated. At first, new vegans often worry about finding products, identifying ingredients, the disappointment of limited options in so many restaurant menus, as well as about how they'll be perceived in social situations. This is especially true of new vegans who don't have any sort of established support system, whether in their face-to-face lives or in their online meanderings. Eventually, when things settle, it becomes clear that perhaps one of the most difficult aspects of being vegan isn't how others around us view us, but rather our own thoughts and feelings about our friends, families and others in our daily lives who aren't vegan. I always tell folks who ask that the hardest thing about going vegan is navigating through our relationships with non-vegan loved ones. It's alienating enough to walk around in a world where the majority of other humans view animal exploitation as normal; when you're interacting with people you love or like -- people who are closest to you -- that sense of alienation can feel overwhelming.

Sharing Spaces

It can be particularly hard-on-the-head when you're in a pre-existing relationship with a non-vegan. I was "lucky" in some ways (or so I thought). Shortly after my former spouse and I first got together, I became a vegetarian. We moved in together and -- since I loved to cook and he didn't -- I ended up preparing almost all of our meals, so he ate whatever I made and was happy. When we'd go out to eat together, just the two of us, he wouldn't eat meat. This was a decision he had made himself. After a few years I went vegan and, once again, he said that he was completely happy eating whatever I prepared (and using whichever other household products I selected to purchase). I really went out of my way to make sure that we had a wide range of tasty things on-hand, whether healthy or indulgent (or sometimes both concurrently). I bought cookbooks, lurked in vegan discussion forums, experimented with veganizing favourite or nostalgic dishes, etc. Going out to eat became rare since there were very few places in our tiny city at the time offering anything other than a garden salad or fries on their menus without a heap of animal ingredients. So nearly all of the meals we shared together -- or with guests we had over -- became plant-based.

Sharing Others' Spaces

The exceptions were when we gathered with family in their own homes. Even though I would always bring a couple of vegan-friendly dishes along, members of either of our families would sometimes make jokes about his "deprivation" and those were some of the few times I would see him loading his plate with meat and other animal products. It was those times that it hit me just how completely different our ethics were. Although it made life easier that he was happy (and insistent on) not consuming animal products at home, he was, ultimately, a non-vegan who thought nothing of consuming the bits and parts of other beings. This hadn't changed at all in our time together. It led to my dreading family gatherings which revolved around food. I would always end up feeling sad or anxious (or both). I began to resent him, not because I had any expectation that he would avoid eating animal products out of deference to me in those circumstances, but because it was a reminder that he still considered these animal products "food".

Involving Kiddos

I can't even imagine what it would have been like if we'd had kids involved. I've had vegan friends and acquaintances who've had offspring who've shared with me the unsolicited opinions and advice they'd received from non-vegan family and friends. I've read plenty of accounts of the challenges vegans with non-vegan partners have experienced when raising said offspring. Worse have been the accounts of the additional challenges in co-parenting after the dissolution of their relationships with their non-vegan partners (particularly if the dissolution was acrimonious). In hindsight, I'm often relieved that my ex and I didn't opt to have kids. I can't imagine having to spend years navigating parenthood and having to deal with others constantly trying to challenge or undermine any decisions we made concerning our kid, never mind not being on the same page about veganism, or even ending up co-parenting after parting ways and then dealing with being on different pages about everything. Dealing with others, in this sense, would have been exhausting. 

On Managing Expectations 

People sometimes insist that veganism "was too hard" because they couldn't get enough protein, always felt hungry, couldn't afford meat substitutes, lost weight/gained weight, that they hated having to cook, couldn't find enough plant-based options at restaurants or that they just couldn't find what they felt was a really satisfying plant-based cheese. I roll my eyes a little when I hear those things presented as if they somehow became insurmountable obstacles. Most of those issues seem so easily addressed and resolved with a bit of research and a bit of effort. When you weigh them against just dealing with the realization -- each and every day -- that we live in a world where animal exploitation continues to be the norm for those closest to us, they almost seem trivial. And while some folks may feel it's a struggle to manage their expectations concerning restaurant menus, it's an entirely different story doing so when navigating relationships with your non-vegan loved ones. While doing so for the former seems largely about inconvenience, doing so in the latter case is truly about survival. It's a necessity. How we go about doing so will vary from one vegan to another, but sooner or later, it needs to be hammered out.

Tell Me That You Don't Understand Veganism Without Telling Me That You Don't Understand Veganism

The Same Old

There's a long history of people who know nothing about veganism taking it upon themselves to share with the public how little it is that they know about veganism. Of course, they don't present it as such, and other folks reading what they wrote who have even less knowledge of veganism will nod their heads vigorously at the stereotypes, tired old attempts at arguments, general misinformation, et al. brought forward by those writers. (After all, confirmation bias is real!) When the writer decides to throw in some sort of display of victimhood (e.g. "a vegan was once mean to me"), it seems to cast some sort of additional sense of authenticity to whatever they have written, since the hapless reader is led to believe that the author must have put some serious thought and research into veganism after having been so emotionally wounded.

I stumbled across one of these scenarios today. Why someone would choose to write an attack on veganism in an online aviation magazine is somewhat bizarre -- even if it is an agricultural aviation magazine. Yet, a mostly unknown online publication called AgAir Update featured an opinion piece by a self-described "former livestock owner" called Michelle Miller yesterday. According to AgAir Update, Miller is known as "The Farm Babe". I looked her up and saw that she has around 250K followers on Facebook and claims to be a "mythbuster" of sorts who purportedly exposes the "truth" about modern farming and/or agriculture. Of course, one would expect that to include attacking claims made about the horrors of animal agriculture and, almost by default, attacking vegans. 

Her short article shared just yesterday is titled: "Why There's No Such Thing as 'Vegan'". Miller begins by describing vegans as "passionate" and by stating that whichever personal choices we choose to make for ourselves to make us happy are fine. She then draws a comparison to religion and immediately starts dropping words like "extremist" and "abrasive" and segues into how as a "former livestock farmer" she's received "thousands" of hateful comments (and apparently even death threats). She then downplays and admits that these "attacks" were not, in fact, very common. She then changes the subject to dive into the actual topic of her opinion piece, saying: "The good news is that the negative attacks are not very common. The other news? Sorry, vegans: there’s actually no such thing as 'vegan'”. 

Hello, Scarecrow!

She offers that vegetarians don't eat meat, which she seems to view as a valid description of vegetarianism entails. She then states that "vegans claim that they don't use animal byproducts, either" and then uses this as her strawman to apparently demolish veganism. Now, anyone who has been vegan for a while will be the first to tell you that vegans do not claim to not use animal byproducts at all with nothing more said concerning it. We clearly do our best to avoid them, but I agree with her that it is simply "humanly impossible" to do so in all cases. Where she views making that assertion as more or less taking down a house of cards, her using it as a "gotcha" just reinforces that she doesn't really understand veganism.

In a world where billions and billions of animals are slaughtered for food each and every year and both 1) the slaughter industry's wanting to squeeze every last dollar they can out of the bodies of these animals, and 2) manufacturers wanting to take advantage of the cheap cost of using huge quantities of the by-products of the animal slaughter industry, animal ingredients are everywhere. They're used as additives in food, to make clothes, cosmetics and perfumes, toothpaste, et al. They're also used to make some plastics, paper, fertilizer, batteries and/or electronics and many more things in which we would not expect to find animal ingredients. (Miller refers to a chart of items from "Farm Credit" in the article but there is no link or image that I can see, so I am assuming that it was either omitted, forgotten or that I have a weird browser issue. Regardless, it suffices to say that we know the list goes on and one -- we are surrounded by animal products in almost every single aspect of our everyday lives.)

The Miller weirdly asserts in two separate short sentences, as if they're her KO punch: "Yep. Sorry. Your beer is not vegan. Really, though, nothing is." Shortly, the word "hypocritical" is predictably inserted into the article. She takes off running with this and asserts that since you don't even know how something was grown and whether or not it was done with animal-derived fertilizer that you have no way to determine whether absolutely anything you eat or wear is (according to her simplistic definition), in fact, "vegan". Then of course she brings up that tired old argument that animals are killed in all forms of plant-based agriculture (so, by this, she seems to be implying that eating anything at all unless you grew it yourself using veganic or hydroponic farming would make you non-vegan). She takes it even further saying that "you're probably not vegan if you live in a house or drive a vehicle". 

Again, no reasonable and intelligent vegan would ever claim that they 100% completely avoid using all animal products. That would be absurd (and other vegans around them would quickly point that out). That it is absurd, however, doesn't invalidate doing whatever we can to avoid knowingly participating in animal consumption and/or exploitation when and where we can. It certainly doesn't invalidate veganism -- or vegans! Veganism is an active way of living. We use this ethical framework to inform the manner in which we engage with others and the world around us. We reject the commodification of other sentient beings and reflect this rejection of it in our ordinary actions. I like the wording The Vegan Society uses in its description of veganism where it states that we avoid all forms of animal exploitation "as far as it is possible and practicable". 

Just because there are instances all around us where avoiding animal products isn't possible or practicable doesn't mean that we should throw our arms in the air in defeat and then indulge ourselves in those forms of animal exploitation or consumption which are avoidable. Just because it isn't possible to completely avoid using all animal products around us is in no way a justification for anybody to shrug off at least making an attempt to consciously avoid them where it is possible and practicable to do so. 

Not being able to avoid it anywhere and everywhere doesn't make us hypocrites: It just makes us try harder, hoping that the world will eventually change enough to make it possible to do more for other sentient beings around us. It leaves us trying to change that world.