Vegan lifestyle articles that discuss ways of living in peace with humans, animals, and the environment.
It feels like my responsibility to veganify every person who crosses my path. And yet the truth is, some will never change, and some will change later. All I can be is a willing source of information and support.
When I was laid up last month with a stress fracture, I watched an
embarrassing amount of television. Included in the binge was one stunningly
moving episode of Queer Eye. A white man in the very small town of Gay,
Georgia, had nominated his African-American neighbor not for a typical
reality-TV makeover, but for the completion of the church community center
this woman’s late mother and grandmother had envisioned for the past
half-century.
Thickening the plot, we learn that at least two the Fab 5 (those are the
makeover guys if pop culture is not your thing) had experienced a lot of
hurt and resentment over being rejected by the churches in which they’d
grown up. And the makeover-ee, whose life revolves around her church, has a
gay son who experienced that same hurt and rejection.
In the end – even before the end – the community center was realized and
there was a perfect snapshot of radical acceptance: white and black, gay and
straight, Christians and those no longer wishing to carry that nomenclature.
I can’t say that it will last forever – some moments, like some movies, are
“made for TV” – but it touched my heart just the same.
And it got me thinking. These people shed generations of prejudice, a
lifetime of indoctrination, the pain of abuse and abandonment; and they were
able to embrace others. Why, I wondered, is it so hard to break down these
barriers when a vegan is involved? I think it is because we vegans expect
people to change, and they expect us to expect them to change. In this Queer
Eye show, nobody was being told to change anything. They could come to
respect one another on an “I’ll do me, and you do you” basis. But throw in a
vegan, and it gets tougher.
For starters, we can’t eat together. Well, we can, but we (the vegans) are
always asking, “What’s in this?” “Do these muffins have egg?” “Do you have
any almond milk?” We need this information and yet our presence, our need
for “special” milk, inadvertently shames those who don’t see what we see. In
the show, the woman from Gay said at one point, “You’re not evangelizing
when you’re criticizing.” I thought about that in my vegan outreach. I feign
understanding, but underneath I’m still sometimes thinking, “It’s dead flesh
and cow lactation. How hard can this be?”
And yet in my experience, taking it easy has always been the way to the win.
I get emails every so often in which someone tells me they’re vegan and
thanks me for “not being pushy” about it way back when. And yet I want to be
pushy. Animals are suffering unimaginable pain and terror for what – bacon?
meringue? It’s absurd. If pushy worked, I’d push like crazy. I just don’t
think it does.
My husband, William, is a case in point. He was the first non-vegetarian I’d
dated since having been widowed nine years earlier. I figured, “It’s not
like he’s going to marry me. What can it hurt?” Well, he married me, and
months before that he’d stopped eating meat. The other aspects of veganism
were of no interest to him so I stayed vegan, my daughter too, and we let
him live his life. (This was over twenty years ago, when managing to find —
or convert — a vegetarian mate was like winning the lottery.)
About 4 years later, at a Farm Sanctuary gala, they showed a short video
about a dairy cow and her calf being separated. William leaned over and
asked, “Can we start getting more of that milk like you drink?” I said,
“Sure,” as if he’d asked me to pass the rolls. Inside, I was jumping up and
down with excitement.
He didn’t commit to chapter-and-verse veganism, and when I was out of town,
he’d usually order a cheese-and-tomato pizza one or two nights. That went on
for nearly a decade. Then I picked up a phone call from William – he was on
a train somewhere in the Midwest, coming home from a visit with his mother.
“I’ve read your manuscript,” he said. “Now I get it. I’m vegan.” I’d loaned
him a galley of Main Street Vegan. The book wasn’t published yet, but it
made its first convert.
These days, he is a card-carrying ethical vegan and animal rights proponent.
And yet with his children, still omnivores, he doesn’t push. He models. They
know what he does and why. If they want more information, they know where to
come for it.
I wish the process were quicker. And simpler. But this kind of transition is
seldom quick and probably never simple. We talk about changing hearts and
minds, but that isn’t the half of it. A change of heart and mind only begins
the process. Then we get to changing pantry contents and shopping carts and
family menus. We want people to change their palate preferences, their
nutritional belief systems, even the content of their gut flora. It’s a huge
ask, and I think we do it most effectively by:
Feeding people obscenely glorious food. Don’t go overboard about its being
vegan. You made it. They know it’s vegan. If one person misses that, no harm
done.
Living an aspirational life. Be somebody that people admire. If you’re
helping people and being a force for good that they can recognize, they
either won’t care what you eat or they’ll want to know if there’s something
in it responsible for your kindness.
Trusting each person to find their way. This is hardest for me. It feels
like my responsibility to veganify every person who crosses my path. And yet
the truth is, some will never change, and some will change later. All I can
be is a willing source of information and support.
We vegans can be hard for other people to take. We don’t want them to merely
read a pamphlet and change their position, or sign a petition and support an
issue. We’re asking them to change their very physical being. We want them
to build the bodies they’ll live in a year from now and five years from now
of entirely different material than has composed their physical being since
conception. Even beyond that, our existence in the world says to them: “You
support cruelty – and, by the way, your mother fed you wrong.” Most people
would rather have a legion of Jehovah’s Witnesses at the door than sit next
to a vegan at a dinner party. This is why surveys rank “vegan leather” as
through-the-roof positive, but “vegan relatives” fall on the negative side.
Yes, we’re right. And that doesn’t matter much if we’re not effective. We
are effective when our lives, our love, and our service cause others to see
more deeply into themselves. When the woman on the TV show spoke for her
church about how she learned to accept people, including her son, who have a
different sexual orientation than her own, she said, “I would be a hypocrite
to say that I love the Lord if I don’t love this one standing right next to
me.” I turned off the television feeling vastly more love for everybody:
animals, human animals, telemarketers, even those people who gush, “I never
really felt good until I was keto.” This much I’m sure of: nobody ever opted
out of veganism because of being all loved up, just for being them.
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