I am vegan.

I always hate saying that. It is a strange proclamation, weighted with such social baggage. It’s a coming out of sorts. Plant-based, I usually correct when others jump the gun and peg me as such before I get the chance to explain myself. I avoid the label like the plague. I won’t come clean until we are ordering at the restaurant and I have to doctor the shit out of my margherita pizza and you’re curious as to why I took off the only topping and added three more—only then do I sheepishly admit my truth.

I was eleven years old when my parents both decided to make the switch to veganism. Health nuts at heart, they found themselves inspired by the vegan documentaries and literature of the late 2000s. In short, I hated this decision. At this point in my life, I was a particularly picky eater, even for a tween. A ketchup-on-everything, cut-the-crust-off-my-nutella-sandwich type of picky eater. Vegetables did not pass my lips, unless you count potatoes in the form of fries on the side. Vegan eating was so diametrically opposed to what I considered my diet at the time that my parent’s switch was seen as an act of war waged against me.

As my palette broadened, I resisted the vegan food they cooked just the same as I did when I was younger. Much to my chagrin, when I trusted them to cook non-vegan meals for me, I would often discover that they just so happened to swap pea protein crumbles instead of ground beef on our taco nights. Unfortunately for my case, however, I would usually only discover after-the-fact from a conspicuously placed empty bag, and I reacted as if they muddled rat poison in the guacamole. 

Toward the end of my high school years, I was doing some major reevaluation in terms of my incredibly sedentary lifestyle and gluttonous consumption. I had experimented with touts of plant-based eating, but I could not apostatize the Popeye’s fried chicken sandwich. By the end of 2019, at eighteen years old, I shamefully decided to try out the whole vegan thing. Despite being unable to reconcile my identity as a self-proclaimed foodie with veganism, as I still viewed the diet as rabbit food adjacent, my eating habits were becoming increasingly harder to justify through my knowledge of the meat and dairy industries. I was ready for a change.

I believe I am in the minority of people who decided to go vegan for reasons other than animal welfare. Not to say that I endorse the living—and dying—conditions of these animals, but it just wasn’t something at the forefront of my reasoning. The potential health appeal lured me in, but the ecological ramifications are what made me stay. As books, school, documentaries, and the state of the world fomented my interest in the environmental sciences, the reconsideration of my diet gained mind share in tandem.

The actual health component is still contentious, as it can be hard to decipher between what is a legitimate study on the true health effects of animal byproducts and what is dairy industry hegemony and lobbying. What is irrefutable, however, is that animal agriculture cannot sustain a growing population, especially not a growing meat- and dairy-consuming population. This is a matter of fact. With current technology, there simply is not enough arable land to both grow feed for livestock and to house them too, CAFOs and all. 

Bearing this in mind, the denizens of many affluent, meat-eating countries of today will have to seriously reconsider the ways in which they eat. Eco-ethics aside, plant-based eating will need to become acculturated into Western eating habits to a wider extent. The rising levels of deforestation, monocultures, and greenhouse gas emissions caused by animal agriculture continue on an upward trajectory. Having conventionally-grown meat on every plate is simply not sustainable, and a broader acceptance of plant-based foods must be in order if we would like to survive as a species. 

It is rather unfortunate, then, the reputation that veganism has accrued over the years. The common perception of vegans are those of militant ones, where the ethos of their argument is set in a superiority complex and delivered with fire and brimstone. That Vegan Teacher from Tik Tok comes to mind, backed by an army of blue-haired liberals fiercely defending her. And after being immersed in the community and culture for the better part of a decade, I can confirm that this is too often the case for many vegans. This attitude has influenced my own perception of the diet, and has led to my own dissuasion for trying it. 

I myself, a vegan, have even had bad experiences dealing with this variety of folk. An experience comes to mind from the fall of 2021, when I went into one of my go-to plant-based establishments on Orchard St. Before ordering, I was told that they did not care to serve me as I was wearing a jacket with leather and fur, which was against their policy. I was dumbfounded. The jacket in question was thrifted, and leather and fur are some of the most durable materials if cared for properly, but that is entirely beside the point. Vegan eating should strive to be as accessible as possible, and the thought that an establishment would deny service on the premise of one’s clothing is steeped in ethical snobbery.  

The community itself can be an off-putting group of people. What should be filled with hippie love and acceptance, the cult of veganism is woefully rife with gatekeeping and judgment. There doesn’t seem to be much of a desire expressed in vegan discourse to have compassion and understanding for why people eat the way they do, and it can so often feel that the community is in fact the antithesis of welcoming.

Common ‘recruiting’ methods can also be rather peculiar and play into this sentiment. Passion so often devolves into anger, and quite frankly, moral superiority is not a good look. I’m going to speak for all non-vegans here: Nobody wants to see you plaster animals getting inhumanely slaughtered on your Instagram story, myself included. Most often, if someone is consuming flesh, they know very well that they are indeed eating a dead animal. Watching the means of said death accompanied with a tirade against the industry and those complicit in it likely will not dissuade many from continuing their habits. It will mostly serve instead to incite a sense of defensiveness in the viewer and augment the existing rift between vegans and omnivores.

The way that this culture is imposed upon people of color is especially troublesome. While it is important not to essentialize the community, at the same time, veganism often holds the association of whiteness in the West due to its lack of connection to a specific culture or place. This association is often bolstered through the vegan community’s history of appropriating various food cultures, such as Rastafarian ital cooking, and Japanese kaiseki-style macrobiotics, to name a few. The fact of the matter is that food and diet is an integral part of culture and family, and these often include animal byproducts. Meat, dairy, eggs, fish, honey and the lot are essential parts of cultural practice, and it is morally dubious to ask a group of people to abandon that sanctity to adhere to another eating habit. But unfortunately, vegans quite frequently do. In this sense, new-wave vegans can be seen as colonizers of diet.

Veganism can also hold the connotation of being an incredibly privileged lifestyle due to its very nature of being rooted in the rejection of excess. Which it is. Being able to reject entire food groups, specially low-cost foods, stems from a place of financial security. It also comes from a place of having access to the resources to eat selectively. It pains me to see vegans fighting tooth and nail to convert people to veganism when there are entire communities of people who live under food apartheid and don’t even have access to a grocery store, let alone a Whole Foods that stocks JustEgg and oat milk. 

Vegans often rebut questions of exclusion by claiming that eating plant-based is the most cost-effective diet. While it is true that you can buy bulk bags of rice and beans for cheap, it is incredibly misleading and does not capture the truth. Only a very small portion of vegans eat this way—or eat only this way—and to think that it’s possible to subsist on makes a lot of assumptions. First, it assumes that everyone has access to a grocery store, which, as aforementioned,  is not always the case. It also assumes that everyone has time to prepare their meals, ignoring those who  work two (or more) jobs to sustain their family. It assumes everyone has time to read up on how to cook vegan food, which indeed has quite the learning curve and can involve food varieties that many might not be familiar with. It also assumes that they have access to a doctor who they can discuss their diet with and make sure that they are receiving all of the necessary nutrients that they need, and the time to do research on their own for eating the right foods that contain the right nutrients. If they don’t receive all that they need to, it assumes they can afford the supplements that they would need.

Veganism unfortunately has become more of a dogma than anything else, something to blindly follow, praise, and spread rather than something intuitive and individual. Perhaps dairy doesn’t work for some people, but meat does, or perhaps the opposite. Maybe some people don’t want to eat either, but love bees and beekeeping and want to consume the honey they produce. Maybe even they just really enjoy sour gummy worms and are able to look past the gelatin to have a treat for themselves. And that is okay.

There must be a cultural shift in the vegan community, and work towards shifting the judgment off of others in the ways we consume. People are going to eat the way they want to eat, no matter how at odds with your own belief system that may be. There needs to be an emphasis on creating room for multi-dimensionality in the lifestyle. Attempting to proselytize people will only serve to hurt the vegan cause. While it may seem counter-intuitive, there must be an acceptance that not everyone can be 100 percent vegan in order for the diet and lifestyle to truly take off. In the meantime, we can only meet people where they are with open arms and understand that even swapping out dairy for almond milk in your morning coffee is a great step forward.