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Things I’ve learned since going vegan
- You can slice someone’s throat and still love them.
- The word “need” can also mean “could easily live without but do kinda want”.
- The word “humane” can mean literally anything you want it to.
- It’s ok to call people out for harmful behaviour unless that behaviour involves bacon.
- Plants definitely feel pain and lawns scream when you mow them.
- Crop workers are exploited but slaughterhouse workers definitely aren’t. No exploitation here, no sir.
- Meat is the only food that contains protein.
- “Found the vegan” is still funny and original the millionth time.
- Before humans came along, cows were just wandering around with massive udders praying for someone to invent industrialised agriculture.
- Steak is cheaper than beans, rice, pasta, and canned vegetables.
- While 99% of all meat comes from factory farms, no one eats that meat.
- Everyone only buys local, organic, humane, Dalai Lama approved meat.
- Everyone has an uncle who owns a farm straight out of a 1950’s Americana magazine
- Everyone has a degree in nutrition and evolutionary biology.
- Everyone knows that one guy who went vegan and almost died.
- Everyone is free to talk about their identity, beliefs and interests without being shamed for them. Unless they’re vegan. Vegans can fuck off.
One of the points in my waking up to carnism was when I mentioned an interest in hunting rabbits (a so called invasive pest here) over dinner with my family as a late teen.
My father expressed an incredible disgust at the idea of hunting, made some comment about sadists or something. The rest of my family were more reserved but similarly aghast, that I would be willing to participate in the process by which meat, which we were eating, was created represented some sort of character flaw.
Yet at the time we had gone fishing, and I had done work experience on a farm. I volunteered at the school farm and had raised broiler chickens and helped load them onto a truck to a slaughterhouse.
It made me realise how utterly disconnected we all were and how the people around me were utterly repulsed by the violence required for their pleasures.
I moved out shortly after and went pescatarian largely due to the soul searching that prompted. Becoming vegan later when I realised Nirvana lied to me.
I grew up in a hunting environment and just never got into it. I also never liked things like steak, fried chicken, or other foods which are essentially a slab of dead animal. Eating something like a steak where you’re confronted with the fact it’s ONLY an animal was a lot more uncomfortable than something like a hamburger. And I never cooked meat myself as an adult because the thought of the blood and handling it were out of the question.
I wish I’d realized it sooner. When I finally went vegan it was at a very difficult time in my life. I’d been working crazy long hours, and one night I was eating a sad frozen lasagna that had far too much beef. It kept getting stuck in my teeth and I started thinking about the cow’s life and how miserable I felt, but once I thought about how infinitely worse that cow’s life must’ve been I just couldn’t take it anymore.
Yea interesting. It really is the beef v cow thing entrenched directly in the culture.
I wonder if, in anglo-phonic culture, it has roots back to the french-aristocratic v anglo-serf divide in Norman England. Looking to the Netherlands, Scandinavia and Germany as comparisons could be illuminating. I’ve certainly heard stories from non-anglo people about relatives raising, slaughtering and eating their own animals, but never anglo.
Idk, my mum was born in Poland and came over to aus as a teen. She still seemed horrified, but also she was big on “assimilation” (as the country was at the time).
interesting