(no subject)
Somebody gave my favorite vegan, glueandglitter, grief about her diet yesterday. This is a person I hold out as an example of how to eat responsibly as a vegan. Giving somebody crap about their diet is bad behavior on a lot of levels. I was orignally going to post a response in her journal until I read the following in the comments and decided I'd throw a little rant of my own. Take note that this was a response to glueandglitter and not a comment she made, or one I suspect she would ever make.
I really do think that the propensity for non-vegans to attack a vegan diet is less about being aggressively pro-meat and more about a sort of odd self protection. I think that they know deep down that consuming meat is both bad for their body and for animals, and by lashing out and trying to make a vegan defensive about their diet they somehow justify in their minds that they are right and the vegan is the 'nut job'.
Meat is bad for the body? Since when? Something like ten percent of the world can support a human population solely on native plant life. For the rest, the growing seasons are too short and the variety of available plants are too small. It's exactly this uninformed, holier-than-thou attitude that riles me most often when people talk about vegan and vegetarian diet. It's not more "natural." It's not necessarily healthier unless you're careful and diligent. To say otherwise invites the reaction that you are, in fact, a nut job.
For instance, my father worked with a guy at Southwest who bled spontaneously because he consumed so little cholesterol and protein that his body couldn't maintain cell membranes. It didn't stop him from continuously ranting about how he was so much healthier than his coworkers because he was a vegan. He eventually killed himself with his diet. He failed to understand that he had to maintain a proper proportion of the nutrients readily available in meat by finding alternative sources in plants. It's not as simple as eating no animals.
Though times are changing, most people never meet a dedicated vegetarian or vegan before they get into college. A significant number for them first meet some douche bag wearing leather shoes and screaming at them that their burger is murder. That first impression is hard to get over.
The impression gets reinforced by the folks who go on and on about how they are single-handedly saving the planet by eating plants while they stuff their faces with diesel-fume covered produce shipped from another continent where it was plucked from fields that have poisoned the water supply with pesticide and eroded the topsoil to nothing. Fields of vegetables may not send columns of methane up into the atmosphere like a stockyard but they aren't a magical fount of eco-happiness, either. There are ecologoically sound ways to farm and there are ways to farm that are decidedly not so.
Eat what you will. Leave others in peace. Most of all, make informed choices about what you eat, where it comes from, and how it got to you. Then, when you speak you can speak with the assurance that even if nobody else agrees with you, you aren't filling your mouth with your foot.
I really do think that the propensity for non-vegans to attack a vegan diet is less about being aggressively pro-meat and more about a sort of odd self protection. I think that they know deep down that consuming meat is both bad for their body and for animals, and by lashing out and trying to make a vegan defensive about their diet they somehow justify in their minds that they are right and the vegan is the 'nut job'.
Meat is bad for the body? Since when? Something like ten percent of the world can support a human population solely on native plant life. For the rest, the growing seasons are too short and the variety of available plants are too small. It's exactly this uninformed, holier-than-thou attitude that riles me most often when people talk about vegan and vegetarian diet. It's not more "natural." It's not necessarily healthier unless you're careful and diligent. To say otherwise invites the reaction that you are, in fact, a nut job.
For instance, my father worked with a guy at Southwest who bled spontaneously because he consumed so little cholesterol and protein that his body couldn't maintain cell membranes. It didn't stop him from continuously ranting about how he was so much healthier than his coworkers because he was a vegan. He eventually killed himself with his diet. He failed to understand that he had to maintain a proper proportion of the nutrients readily available in meat by finding alternative sources in plants. It's not as simple as eating no animals.
Though times are changing, most people never meet a dedicated vegetarian or vegan before they get into college. A significant number for them first meet some douche bag wearing leather shoes and screaming at them that their burger is murder. That first impression is hard to get over.
The impression gets reinforced by the folks who go on and on about how they are single-handedly saving the planet by eating plants while they stuff their faces with diesel-fume covered produce shipped from another continent where it was plucked from fields that have poisoned the water supply with pesticide and eroded the topsoil to nothing. Fields of vegetables may not send columns of methane up into the atmosphere like a stockyard but they aren't a magical fount of eco-happiness, either. There are ecologoically sound ways to farm and there are ways to farm that are decidedly not so.
Eat what you will. Leave others in peace. Most of all, make informed choices about what you eat, where it comes from, and how it got to you. Then, when you speak you can speak with the assurance that even if nobody else agrees with you, you aren't filling your mouth with your foot.