The Vegan Learning Process

What I Thought about Vegans

Before I Became One

I started eating a vegetarian diet when I was 17 while working at a summer camp. It was all or nothing there depending on which team you signed up for and I wanted the healthier options. {I had stopped eating red meat when I was 14 because I recognized that I didn’t need to.}

Eating mainly vegetarian and continually relapsing back to eating chicken for about 3 years until I was 21, I stopped eating all meat for good after watching Baraka, an amazing art film in which they show the inside of a factory chicken farm. (At this point, I didn’t connect that egg-laying chickens were treated the same way.)

The phrase ‘smug vegetarian’ would have somewhat described me, because I felt that I was doing enough (ie. more than the other people I knew). I remember being more comfortable with the phrase ‘animal welfare’ than ‘animal rights’.

I loved being vegetarian because it introduced more vegetables into my diet. I wore the badge proudly, and clung to dairy in various ‘comfort’ foods under the notion that I had already given up the foods that harmed the animals directly.

During this time, I had a few people in my life who were vegan. One was a waitress I worked with. I didn’t particularly like her because I found her condescending. I remember her telling me when hearing that I was vegetarian that I ‘should be vegan’. I couldn’t figure out why she would care about what I ate. We weren’t friends. The comment seemed intrusive.

Now, being vegan, I understand that she was suggesting I go vegan based on her knowledge of the remaining harm my vegetarian diet was causing. If she had explained this to me, I might have been more open to the idea. Now when I think back to her, I automatically like her, knowing she’s vegan because she cares.

The other person in my life who was vegan didn’t talk much about his reasons for going vegan – it wasn’t his style. I felt that everything about him was ‘extreme’. And didn’t necessarily want to be like him. I preferred to be ‘nomal’. When I put milk in my tea around him, I remember feeling guilty and wishing I was around someone who wouldn’t notice this choice. It’s interesting to me now, because my guilt had nothing to do with him and everything to do with my own knowledge that maybe I didn’t need the dairy.

These two people were the ONLY vegan people I knew for the first 28 years of my life (!) My general idea of both of them was that they were ‘kind of a drag’. People who lived purely and judged you for not doing so. So I do understand why meateaters label vegans as ‘almost religious’.

It was wanting to participate in animal rights activism that spurred me to go vegan. I met a small group of people in Vancouver who lived without the use of any animal products. I didn’t even know it was possible before I met them. I would list this as the main reason that it took me so long to become vegan: I didn’t know it was a realistic option.

These new friends simply chose to wear alternative materials, and eat different foods. They’d been doing it for years. I shared my experience with them of cutting down on dairy (which I now recognize they were very patient about, knowing deep down that I didn’t need to cut down, I needed to cut it out). And I did become vegan after a few months of transition. It was a learning process of beginning to crave new foods. This would be my main definition of veganism:

Vegansim: a process of learning to crave new, non-animal foods in the place of animal-based foods.

There was all this food out there that I’d been blind to before and I only needed to create the space for it. It was truly a matter of emptying the ricebowl.

This group of vegan people presented their knowledge to me in flat out facts. Take it or leave it. They allowed me to ask stupid questions (ie. how do you get your protein, etc.). And instead of seeing them as ‘a drag’, I saw them as inspiration to keep learning. They were some of the most active people I knew. They were on to something.

I’m now aware, being vegan, that other people may see me as a drag, an elitist, bossy – all the things I thought of those few vegan people in my former life. I’m pretty vocal about the things I’ve learned, but mainly in a positive way because becoming vegan is something that gives me eternal joy.

I would say vegans in general are not as judgmental as others might assume. Most vegans were not born that way so they know they have no right to judge, and it takes too much energy to judge 99% of the human race. That energy is better spent creating strategies to save the world that actually have results.

I think more than ‘annoying’, the people around me see me as healthy, happy, and as a leader. But I don’t kid myself: I know they also see me as the dreaded interventionist to their inner meatahoilc. They don’t want to be seen as they expect I see them: as someone who harms animals. No one wants to be seen this way.

The bottom line: it’s not my responsibility to take on their guilt. Living a vegan lifestyle is the largest gesture of kindness a person can make and living within this kindness, you become impervious to other’s judgments on you for allegedly judging them.

I don't want to be harmed & I don't want to be the reason they're harmed. That simple.

I have lost friends since going vegan, jobs, family relationships, probably other opportunities I don’t even know of. But I also meet new, amazing people every day who I then have time for when expired relationships die out. Not necessarily vegan people, but people who are open, risk-taking, growing. Being progressive and embracing change is at the core of who I am, and living according to these values naturally attracts similar people.

I acknowledge that people have to make changes at their own pace, but the more they are reminded of the detriments of their choices, the faster they might put two and two together (and not take 28 years to figure it out like me.)

These reminders don’t have to be negative, they can come in the form of vegan baking and dropping the ‘v’ word until it becomes a household word.

It’s not my role to police the universe, but it is my role to protect animals. This is the zone I try to live within.