As someone who is not vegan and does eat bacon on occasion, I approve this meme.
I honestly think part of (but definitely not all of) the resistance against veganism is the perceived pushiness of it, similar to the pushiness some have around detesting anyone who eats meat. I’ve tried to be vegetarian several times and found that I personally don’t have the discipline to stick with it because of societal pressures and the difficulty in finding variety, but I know a lot of people that reject even that outright because of the “all or nothing” attitude that media and some groups/individuals presents around vegetarianism/veganism.
Long story short, I’m proud of those who can do it, but I’m just not there yet. Maybe someday.
societal pressures and the difficulty in finding variety
Are there specific things you’ve missed? And are you more referring to cook yourself or eating out?
Sometimes, it’s just a lack of experience. Obviously, ‘all vegan food in the world’ is less variety on paper than ‘all food in the world’ but in my personal diet the variety of stuff I eat dramatically increased compared to the non-vegan past.
In arts there’s the concept of creative limitation and from my perspective that is 100% applicable to food. Restricting yourself to plant based fosters your creativity to break with traditional recipes, try new combinations, replace X with Y or Z. I feel like I barely eat the same thing twice anymore.
I’m 100% with you on this. It sounds like copium, but creative limitation absolutely comes into play here. Before becoming pescetarian, vegetarian, and then eventually vegan, my diet was terrible and had almost no variety despite the fact that I like to cook for myself. If I went to a restaurant, it would be the one thing I knew I liked. At home, even though I could technically make essentially anything I wanted, there was an intense gravitational pull around meat and cheese keeping me in the same sets of dishes with little variety. It was generic burgers or pepperoni pizza or canned soup or basic burritos or pasta Alfredo/with meat sauce or paninis consisting of 90% meat/cheese and 10% everything else. If I was feeling “healthy”, it was either a type of meat with a baked potato and broccoli or a salad of iceberg lettuce with ranch, garlic croutons, bacon bits, and cranberries.
Now, I try (and often end up loving) new foods almost on instinct including the “weird” ones; I’ve come to understand that so many foods I didn’t previously like were either prepared improperly or I wasn’t getting the right kind; the meals are almost inherently healthier; I use a huge variety of spices and sauces to make my meals different and vibrant every single day; and my dishes don’t revolve around essentially “a single type of meat with some ancillary stuff” or cheese and carbs.
Nothing was physically stopping me from doing that on an omnivorous diet, but I personally would never have because I treated meat and cheese like a crutch.
Antifreeze tastes good but no one thinks a diet that excludes antifreeze is restrictive. Because it’s poison!
Of all the humans who will die this year, about ONE THIRD will die from coronary disease acquired from consuming animal products. And that’s just one way animal products kill us, they make up like five of the top six most common causes of death. It’s fucking antifreeze.
People are shocked to find they enjoy food without antifreeze in it. Feel better after eating food that doesn’t have antifreeze in it. No fucking shit!
It does not limit my culinary world one jot to exclude antifreeze from it. I was also forced to discover there was an entire universe of foods that I had been directed away from, that my culture had been induced to forget. All that weird stuff in the produce section and the farmer’s market, where I used to think, “Who eats that weird shit??” … Now I eat that weird shit! And it’s really good!! I have a whole new set of favourite foods, and now they are so cheap and healthy, I can eat them for every meal if I chose, and I would be more healthy than I was when consuming animal products.
Maybe people think you’re weird because you make weird analogies like comparing meat to antifreeze
Based on scientific evidence, animal products are not necessarily unhealthy for individual humans. As far as I know at least, the coronary deseases you’ve mentioned are mainly caused by red meat and saturated fats.
Even though an average vegan diet is healthier than an average omnivore diet, you can eat perfectly healthy as an omnivore. Likewise, you can live of only junkfood as a vegan.
Veganism from my perspective should be about stopping animal abuse and protecting the planet. If humanity keeps going as is, climate change will be what will lead to insane suffering to both animals and humans. Veganism is a key part to lower the impact of what’s ahead of us.
Despite the importance of the topic, we should stick to the facts. Comparing every non-vegan diet to drinking anti-freeze is absolutely ridiculous.
