Welcome to the Vegan Theory Club Weekly Megathread!
Question of the week:
What’s a tip you’d give to someone transitioning to veganism?
Feel free to talk about anything, whether it’s vegan-related or not. This is a chill space for connecting, sharing ideas, and supporting each other.
Looking forward to hearing what everyone’s up to!
Honestly, that I think “baby steps” isn’t a very effective way of transitioning to veganism despite what r/vegan says. When you try to take it slow and do it one thing at a time then I find it much easier to fall back into old habits. I tried to do this originally and became a meat eater again quickly, if I had tried a different approach I most likely would have become plant based a lot earlier than I originally did.
I completely agree, to me the transition to veganism should be overnight LOL
Every single meaningful change I’ve made in my life has been hard cuts. Temptation is the motivation killer, if you expose yourself to reasons to fail then you will fail more. I’m a big believer in just pulling the bandaid off and getting on with life.
Besides, you are not days away from dying of malnutrition. You can eat like shit for months before it really becomes a problem provided you get enough vit C which is in abundance in plant based diets. Like pasta with peas and soymilk will sustain you for an extremely long time, or oats and peas, or just tofu and greens lmao. Even if you end up eating like how carnists think vegans eat with like a garden salad and block of tofu you will simply be bored.
If being a bit bored with food is too much to handle for a rights movement then I don’t know what to say but that’s an extremely difficult position to respect.
For me it took only but a few minutes of watching Earthling Ed. Easiest thing I’ve done in my life lmao
I think when I decided to go vegan, I tried to do it with the next grocery trip? So I finished up what I already had but tried switching animal products to making up a lesser part of my diet during that time.
Baby steps means they don’t really get it.
It’s okay if they don’t yet, maybe they will… But I don’t think you can truly grasp the issues with carnism and say, “I’ll still eat eggs for a while…” And I say that as someone who baby stepped.
It’s different if you are dependent on others for life necessities. That’s not baby steps, that’s doing what you can for now.
I don’t know… When I was a vegetarian I informed myself about why the fuck people were vegans and to my dismay discovered that the point raised by vegans were very true and that I could not be an ethical vegetarian. So I had to make a choice there. And that choice was to become vegan.
But.
I was right on the verge of a year of work and travel in New Zealand. I just couldn’t imagine making the transition there, not while beeing so far removed from my everyday live. So I made a vow to myself to transition on the day I came back and moved into my new flat.
So, yes, no baby steps for the transition, that was hard and total once the time for it arrived (that was back in 2011 btw). But I was very much able to continue with a vegetarian diet for a year, fully aware that it was ethically not correct. So I disagree on that point, from my experience. I think you can understand, realy understand, that what you are doing is wrong and still make the decision to continue with doing it.
I find your story very interesting. On your main point:
I’d like to ask a few questions. It’s a potentially sensitive topic, I hope you understand I’m not trying to like beat you up here but uh what was it like? I mean I’ve done things I know I shouldn’t but they’re usually done with a lack of real understanding. Like behaving selfishly and later, when seeing the result, being tormented by a deep feeling of shame and self loathing when forced to really confront the consequences rather than the abstract in my imagination.
Given that you’re vegan, I would assume you view non human animals as at least almost if not equally significant in moral weight to human animals. Is that a fair assessment? If it is, do you think you could have gone a year like killing and eating humans? Does it haunt you or is it something you otherwise deeply regret?
Has how you think about the life of a non human changed since transitioning?
By all means, please ask away.
I’ll add some details to answer your question. First off, keep in mind the time. It was 2010 when I was over there, just 14 years but a world removed from how traveling (and honestly, living) is these days. I had no smartphone back then. Internet was something I only had access to every few weeks in libraries, and then I used it to Skype with home. So, there was little possibility for sensible research about veganism while traveling. Possible, sure, but definitely not practical.
Regarding Veganism, things were quite different. When I eventually started, back home in 2011, I had to explain what “Vegan” is to every single waiter when eating out. There simply were no viable vegan menu options, often not even vegetarian ones. Not a single product was labeled in the shops, so my first year or so consisted of reading the backside of products and making a list of which ones I could buy. Sometimes the non-vegan component was hidden behind a word that could mean any ingredient really, like “Aroma”. So, you had to look those up online in the shop. And if you couldn’t find it, you would write to the company and ask. Plus, there is the whole dietary side of Veganism. You need to know what you are doing if you eat a plant-based diet, otherwise you will run into deficits eventually.
I was aware of all these factors and seeing how much work it was back home, in my country with my language and my local products, to get started back then, I’d say it was a sensible decision. In New Zealand I would have run out of steam real fast, I recon (but of course I don’t know if that is true).
Would I have eaten humans? I guess, if I had grown up eating humans and lived in a society that normalized it to the degree eating animals is normalized, yes, likely. Did I already see animals as equals back then? Not to the degree I do now, no. As a theoretical construct, sure. I worked on a vineyard and was delegated to work with the farm guy for a week. I saw with my own eyes with how little respect he treated the animals there. They were nothing but steaks on legs for him. I think seeing that up close realy started a process of feeling true empathy. Then again, i continued to use milk for the rest my stay, for the reasons stated above.
I guess this happens more often than not, to be honest. I’m writing this on a laptop, whose minerals have been mined under horrific conditions, that was assembled by de facto slaves some majority world country. I wear clothes that were made under similar circumstances. I am aware of all that, but it doesn’t “haunt” me. More like a nabbing voice in the back of my head that I can’t quite silence. But such is life. I can’t and very likely not be perfect and live up to every single ideal I have. If I had the money to buy ethical products, I would. Until then I will have to live with the dissonance. I’ve been a vegan for 13 years now. It has been one of the main driving forces for every purchase since then. Considering I don’t know if I would have managed to become a vegan if I would have started earlier, I think I made the right call back then.