Why I'm vegan and why it took me a while
I’m vegan. It took me a while to get there.
My first motivation to not eat meat came from watching a factory farming video back in middle school. Maybe you’ve watched a similar one. Shocked at the horrid conditions, I decided to stop eating meat. My conviction lasted about a day, and then I went back to having chicken nuggets for lunch. When your family and your classmates all eat meat, it’s hard to do otherwise.
Later on, I recall talking to a friend about eating dogs. They said they would eat dog meat if it were packaged conveniently in the store, and I recoiled in disgust. However, I had a hard time explaining the relevant difference between dog meat, cow meat, pig meat, and chicken meat other than the cultural detail that folks don’t eat dogs in the States. (1)
Eventually, in January 2019, I started with vegetarianism and converted to veganism throughout the year. (2) No specific trigger caused me to stop eating meat - I saw no inspiring film. I just decided eating meat wasn’t consistent with my values. I wanted to be able to say “I love animals” without the moral quandaries. What helped with this decision was developing a sense of empathy for individual animals. You can read that 99% of animals are factory-farmed and about how terrible factory farm conditions are, but it’s hard to connect with that fact emotionally. There’s a saying that 1 death is a tragedy, 1 million deaths is a statistic. Instead, I try to imagine individual animals having a bad time. For instance, meet Susan the chicken. She enjoys exploring the pasture and searching for grubs. (3)
Imagining Susan on a factory farm makes me sad. If she were an egg-laying hen, she would have very little space (less than a standard sheet of paper) and disgusting living conditions. (4)
The other contributing factor to me becoming vegetarian was that my primary blocker to being veg, a rocky relationship with food, was no longer an issue.
My rocky relationship with food started in the third grade. I started tracking calories because bullies called me fat. In hindsight, I wish I could’ve told them to fuck off. Instead, that was the start of many years of monitoring my food intake and obsessing over healthy eating. I treated healthy eating tips as hard rules rather than sensible guidelines - I don’t recall eating white rice (isn’t brown rice healthier?) or fried foods (too high in fat) during that time.
Since I was already restricting many types of food, I didn’t think it made sense for me to become vegetarian or vegan. I spent a lot of time thinking about what to eat and didn’t want to check for additional constraints. It didn’t help that most vegans I saw on the Internet back then had very restrictive diets i.e. only eating raw fruits and vegetables.
I considered becoming veg after I developed a healthier relationship with food. The main difference was switching my mindset from thinking “I can’t eat that” to “I don’t eat that”.
Thinking “I can’t eat that” comes from a mindset of restriction and rules. For instance, I would see something tasty on a menu and think “I can’t order that because it has too many calories”. I figured I would use being veg as an additional excuse i.e. “I can’t order that because it has fried meat (and too many calories).”
Thinking “I don’t eat that” comes more from my own personal values. Now, If I see meat on a menu, I think “I don’t eat meat because I don’t want to eat a living being.” How healthy the dish is irrelevant to this decision. I can eat meat, but don’t want to. When I think of doing so, I think about killing and eating Susan the chicken and feel disgusted and sad.
Because my primary motivation is empathy for animals, being vegan is not that hard for me. (5) Of the reasons to choose a veg diet (animals, environment, health), caring about animals is the most compelling reason for me. I found it harder to see the link between a veg diet and the environment. Similarly, the effect food has on health isn’t often that strong or visible - unlike Popeye, we don’t get giant muscles from chugging spinach. It’s also unreasonable to always monitor how healthy your food is. I did so for many years, and it was exhausting.
Now, I’m happy that I have a much healthier relationship with food. I trust my body more to eat when it’s hungry and stop when it’s full. Instead of constantly monitoring what I eat, I have a better intuition for what foods I truly want. This enables me to enjoy all sorts of vegan foods - whole plant foods as well as more processed foods, such as vegan ice cream or meat substitutes. This enables me to be vegan, not for health reasons, but for the animals.
Footnotes
(1) I’m going to assert that there is no relevant difference between eating dogs and eating other critters. There are arguments that dogs are smart or that dogs are pets but they aren’t persusive.
Intelligence is an odd criteria for deciding whether certain animals are food. The majority of folks don’t think severely disabled people or babies are food though they’re less intelligent than adult pigs. Also, if some very intelligent alien species came to Earth, I hope they wouldn’t eat us.
Having animals as pets is largely a cultural difference. In the places where folks eat dogs, dogs aren’t pets. Here it’s also useful to have a sense of perspective - in many places of the world, folks barely have enough money for day-to-day sustenance. Having enough means to feed yourself and your pets can be seen as a sign of wealth. It’s not fair to judge people for eating types of animals that you wouldn’t.
As a side note, people have asked me about the stereotype where Chinese people eat dogs. I do not eat dogs or any other critters.
(2) The difference between vegetarianism and veganism is that vegetarians eat eggs and dairy while vegans don’t. I use veg as a shorthand to refer to eating vegetarian or vegan. There’s also a term pescatarian that refers to vegetarians that also eat seafood.
When I first started with vegetarianism, I ate fish once or twice, but being a pescatarian didn’t feel right to me. Eating fish felt too much like eating meat. Unfamiliarity with a species isn’t sufficient reason to decide that it’s food. See the discussion above about munching on dogs.
Here’s what the conversion process to veganism looked like for me. At the beginning of the year, I ate eggs and dairy. However, if you read about the egg or dairy industry, you’ll learn that it’s a bad time for the animals involved. Since I went vegetarian for the animals, becoming vegan was the natural next step. I first stopped buying groceries that contained eggs or dairy. Then, I stopped eating them altogether around March 2019.
(3) Susan the chicken image source is from How to Draw Animals.
(4) For more information on chickens, see this informational piece by Farm Sanctuary. It is mostly on why chickens are neat animals, and the photos are not that graphic.
(5) Sometimes, folks ask vegans what foods they miss. I don’t miss meat because as mentioned above, thinking of eating Susan the chicken makes me feel sad and disgusted. Not eating eggs or dairy is somewhat harder. Egg-laying hens or dairy cows could have good lives though the vast majority don’t. Vegan substitutes help with many cases i.e. using applesauce instead of eggs when baking. Enjoying foods that happen to be plant-based also helps i.e. chilis, soups, curries.