Veganissimo: My Vegan Story

This blog is meant as an intellectual, fact-based resource for information on how to life the most logically compassionate and positive lifestyle that benefits people, the planet, and all life upon it. First, I thought I'd start off with my story:

veganissimo \ve-gan-iss-i-mo\
1. n : one who is vegan to the highest possible standard
2. adj : the most vegan

Reuben Proctor and Lars Thomsen coined the term in their book ‘Veganissimo - A to Z’, which describes itself on the cover as “A Comprehensive Guide to Identifying and Avoiding Ingredients of Animal Origin in Everyday Products”. It was the first book I purchased when I became interested in veganism, and from an intellectual standpoint is possibly one of the most useful tools for a newly starting vegan. This nearly pocket-sized book is a handy guide to identifying animal ingredients in food, cosmetics, and a whole array of other products you might not have even thought about. Veganism can seem like a very daunting prospect at first, but the one thing Proctor and Thomsen accomplished for me was proving that in actuality, there’s not all that much to it.

(If you're interested in the "Veganissimo" book mentioned above, give it a go) 

I’m the kind of person who likes to know what they’re getting into. I’ve always known what I believed on a philosophical and moral level: that good things come to good people. I was raised a good Christian boy with a strong moral compass, not to mention the fact that I grew up around some a very intellectual group of friends, which constantly pushed me to be thoughtful and mindful in what I did: everything I said at any moment could be at risk of critical analysis from any given person.
Like I said, I knew what I believed and I was firm in it. I had thought it all through, or so I believed. I knew that all people deserved rights, and that “live and let live” was possibly the most important thing ever said. But in truth, there was still a massive blind spot in my ethical code. This I cannot blame myself for, as it exists in most people’s lives and always has. It is not a blind spot for any individual person, but more a blind spot for society. Bar a few, it’s a blind spot to the whole human race.

And that is Animal Rights. Pooh! Booh! Down with the vegan! He likes dogs more than people! (Don’t we all?)
No, but seriously. Animal Rights is the gap for us all, as it was for me. Looking back, I should’ve seen it sooner. I was the kind of kid who felt guilty every time he stepped on a snail, and would sooner take a spider outside than let someone crush it. I thought it was cruel when my brother set out traps for bees and wasps so they couldn’t sting or irritate him, and I’d cry if a beloved pet died in a movie or a storybook.
That’s not to say I didn’t have that attitude towards people too. But I wasn’t contributing to the death of people with my daily choices. Again, it’s not something I can blame myself for, and consequentially I don’t feel I can blame any other individual for it either, because the reason that I hadn’t noticed the hypocrisy of calling myself an animal lover whilst continuing to eat meat and dairy was simple: No one had pointed it out to me yet. Now that’s not to say I’d never been faced with the animal rights movement, or that I didn’t know what a vegan was. It was just that no one had ever sat me down and had a conversation with me about it. All the vegetarians in my life kept relatively to themselves about it. My childhood best friend was a vegetarian for a good many years. He turned after he saw a truck of pigs being carted off for slaughter, and decided that he couldn’t eat that. He turned back to meat again years later when he saw fast-food van and fancied a hot dog. And that was that. But he never spoke about it, and neither did any of the others I knew. I’m not certain I would’ve listened: I vaguely remembered seeing footage of animals being killed in slaughterhouses, but I also remember thinking that I couldn’t really change that, and that it was just how things were. Everyone did it. And I never really let myself register that those were living beings, and that then they weren’t living beings. I didn’t let myself register it because it was too horrible to register. So I just… switched off.

Cue the end of my childhood: I turn eighteen. I’ve changed a lot as a person. And I meet a girl at a party: A vegan girl, who I decide I like very much. Enter romance, enter relationship, montage of sappy stuff. Whatever. Anyway, this girl was a vegan, but she wasn’t by any stretch of the imagination an activist. And that’s a distinction I think is very important.
Let me break it down: the people you see protesting in the streets waving signs yelling “MEAT IS MURDER!” or chaining themselves to a rail of fur coats, or on TV breaking into slaughterhouses, or pressing their opinion on people over social media through blogs and vlogs, the angry, militant, arms-in-the-air vegans that have become one of the few vegan stereotypes; they’re activists. Not only have they decided they don’t want to contribute to animal suffering in their lives, they also have made it their duty to act to stop animal suffering in it’s totality: on top of going vegan themselves, they have set out to convince everyone around them to go vegan as well. Sometimes, these people can be a bit of an acquired taste. But that’s how it always is when you’re a minority group fighting for a Personally, they’re my heroes.

The rest of ‘the vegans’ generally speaking fall into a second group: The… not-activists? I guess for the sake of putting a word to it, we could call them pacifists, but that’s just for lack of a better word. These people often unfairly get lumped in with the activist lot, and although I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being passionate about your beliefs, a lot of people have some gripe with activist vegans, and unfairly take it out on the other vegans who are just trying to quietly live their lives and don’t want to cause any trouble. In all actuality, having met an awful lot of vegans, I think most of us fall into the second group. The first group just happens to be bolder and louder and so get all the attention.

I probably veer towards the first group (the activists). I certainly like to think I’m in that group: actively out there making a difference.
But back to the point, this girl I was dating was more in the second group, in that I never saw her try and convince anyone to go vegan, or argue with anyone about animal rights. She never lectured me on the subject, she just was vegan herself, and she was healthy, and the food she ate was delicious, and when I was around her I felt it was only polite to eat what she ate. I couldn’t even bring myself to eat meat on a day I was going to see her, because it felt wrong. And much to my surprise, I never felt I was missing out. If anything, I wondered where these foods had been all my life! I asked myself why I’d turned my nose up at hummus and avocados, and why I’d never thought to try a veggie burger instead of a beef one, just out of curiosity. Because I was never on the defensive, because we never argued and I never felt like she was attacking my lifestyle, the only doubts expressed towards my meat-eating lifestyle were from my own head. And all the arguments I made against those doubts crumbled, because I was arguing with myself.

Initially, in all honesty, I went vegetarian for her. But in the long run, that just opened the floodgates to more questions. I’m not the kind of person to just jump into a massive lifestyle change, and so I research, and I think, and I come to a logical decision, factoring in all the evidence, as to what is the right thing to do. In this way, veganism for me was a logical choice, made through a logical thought process. A thought process brought on by questions: 

Why had I eaten meat? Because I like it. Did I like the alternatives? Yes.

Did I like animals? Yes. Did they deserve to live? Yes.

So why had I eaten meat? Because my family has always eaten meat.
Do I base other decisions in my life on what my family does? No, I like to think I make my own decisions. I’m an independent adult.

So why had I eaten meat? Because it’s part of a balanced, healthy diet. It didn’t take much research to knock that argument out of the water. Carcinogens, heart disease, blood clots, osteoporosis. 

So why had I eaten meat? Religion. I was a Christian; God said meat was there for us to eat. That was its purpose.
“Thou shalt not kill” was not the only verse that shattered that argument.

So why had I eaten meat? It tastes good. I like it. Is that worth a life to me? No. I don’t want to see myself as that selfish.

So why had I eaten meat?
The conclusion this lead me to was the only valid option left: Ignorance.

But why veganism? What’s wrong with dairy, eggs, and honey?

Being single again, I only had myself to answer these questions, so I turned to the internet, and started really researching the topic. And I came across Gary Yourofsky, and “The Best Speech You Will Ever Hear!”. And it truly was the best speech I’d ever heard. It shattered my world-view, and suddenly I went through the same thought process for dairy, eggs, honey, leather, wool, fur, silk, beeswax, hunting, animal tested cosmetics, horse-riding, fishing and so many other things as I had for meat, and I came to the same conclusion: Animal lives matter to me.

I was recently talking with a very old friend on the topic of veganism. I say talking, but really that’s just a polite word for debating, which is a polite word for arguing. So, I was talking with an old friend on the subject, who noted that in person I came across as very passionate about the subject, but on facebook, when it was all written down, suddenly my argument was intellectual; based in facts, with sources and statistics an the whole works.  And he suggested that an intellectual, factual resource explaining all sorts about the vegan movement and WHY it is what it is could be very useful. One that used sources and evidence-based knowledge.

Now, any true vegan out there will point out there are many sources. And they would be right. I would be happy to point you all in the direction of Cowspiracy, Forks Over Knives, and Earthlings; the bitesize vegan, Gary Yourofsky’s lectures, and other such resources on youtube; books like Veganissimo A to Z; websites like nutritionfacts.org; and Google, where you will find a whole number of studies detailing why veganism is the best lifestyle for human beings, for animals and for the planet, and why meat and dairy are bad. But can one more resource really hurt?

So here I am, trying out a blog that will be all about how to live the best, most compassionate and positive lifestyle, to the greatest extreme possible. Let’s hope I can convince some people out there that veganism isn’t all about being angry at the world and judging people, but in actual fact is a logical and pleasant lifestyle. 

 (yea, that's me again. Hi.)