vegan essay

Have you recently embarked on a vegan diet due to health concerns or ethical considerations? Are you wondering if this lifestyle is one you can sustain in the long term? This year marks my twentieth as a vegan eater, and I am writing this article because I thought you might enjoy reading about some of the observations I’ve made, living this way for a fairly long time. Everyone’s path is different, but this article should give you a sense of some of the interesting experiences you may have should veganism become your permanent way of life. You may not know anyone in real life who has been a vegan for decades, and it’s my hope that this article will be like a down home chat with a good friend.

Becoming Tree-ish
Lord of the Rings fans will catch my reference to J.R.R. Tolkien’s character, Treebeard. I would say that the benefit of which I am fondest and which I attribute to eating vegan for so long is that I seem to have taken on a different role in the environment than that of most people.

In the natural world, carnivores give off a different ‘vibe’ than herbivores do. Animals scatter to an fro when a lion appears on the scene, but no one is alarmed by the gazelle that quietly walks across the land, nibbling grass. I have no scientific proof, but I believe that longtime vegans may give off a different scent or some other signal than carnivores, and I have had repeat experiences of being allowed to sit alongside wild animals that seem oddly unafraid of me. Suddenly, other people come by and the animals hide themselves.

Part of this phenomenon may be attributable to the fact that I know how to be very quiet in natural settings, whereas some people crash through forests and meadows, conversing loudly, hollering into their cell phones, but I sense that there is more to it than this. I’m not a big fan of weird, mystical belief systems, but over the years, I have come to feel that my presence in the natural world has become something like that of a deer or tree – something non-threatening that appears to puts many animals at their ease. This greatly increases the wonder I am privileged to experience when I get to spend time outdoors. I have had the chance to co-exist peacefully with everything from coyotes to chipmunks and I really value this.

Getting Real About Vegan Health
Any commercially marketed diet is guilty of self-promotion for monetary gain. It doesn’t matter whether this is the National Dairy Council’s well-funded and ludicrous claims that human children must drink the milk of cows or the gentle urgings of some starry-eyed vegan guru to eat your way to health. If money is involved, your discretion is the only defense you have against being fooled by marketed books, magazines and, yes, even blog posts.

Nearly all vegan publications I have ever encountered in my 20 years of vegan eating claim that the vegan diet is the key to good health. What I have come to believe is that the vegan diet is pretty likely to help you avoid the diseases commonly caused by the Standard American Diet, but is no protection at all from the many illnesses that have genetic or environmental roots.

My readers will know that I make a point of disclosing the fact that despite my healthy, all-from-scratch, all-organic vegan diet of decades, I have Crohn’s Disease – a devastating inflammatory condition likely caused by my genetics or environmental aggressors. Some doctors have suggested to me that my diet has helped me to avoid some of the problems associated with Crohn’s and that it may have kept my disease from presenting itself for longer in my life than is typical with this condition, but being vegan certainly did not prevent me from becoming ill and this is something I feel it is vital to share with anyone who reads this blog.

Unfortunately, not everyone feels the calls of conscience quite so strongly and a moment’s glance around the vegan publishing world will turn up claims of perfect health you simply should not trust. Some vegans will be amazingly healthy all their lives – so will some people who eat bacon and eggs for breakfast every morning for 90 years. There is a roll of the dice going on in human health that seems completely unrelated to what we eat and I urge all new vegans to take a realistic view of the too-good-to-be-true health claims they will undoubtedly encounter. I blame one-sided publications for giving space only to the healthy stories of vegan living, offering no troubles and problems for balance. What if you are a vegan who contracts a chronic illness? Have you failed? I don’t think so.

Becoming Immune To Marketing
The vegan diet has not made me the healthiest woman on the face of the Earth, despite published claims promising such outcomes, but it has made me remarkably immune to dietary propaganda. In the 20 years I’ve been a vegan, corporate policies and tactics have not changed one bit. The agribusiness councils are still promoting their factory farming outputs as the key to health and conventional crops are still being grown with horrendous amounts of pesticides and herbicides – substances which are deadly to all life – all the while being marketed as ‘fresh’ and ‘wholesome’. Heaven help all soy-eating vegans who have tried to understand the political back and forth that has been going on for the past decade over tofu, with one side claiming soy causes cancer while the other insists it prevents it.

What has changed since I was a young vegan is that marketers now have vegans in their sights. When I first started eating this way, foods weren’t really being marketed as ‘vegetarian’ or ‘vegan’ to any meaningful extent. Now, whole freezer sections and aisles are given over to processed products being sold this way. These items are often no healthier than their conventional counterparts, and over the past twenty years, a major percentage of the ‘natural’ foods companies have been bought out by the conventional giants, anyway. This isn’t a change I’m all that glad to see.

I have determined that the best thing to do is to avoid processed foods and pay no attention to marketing. I will not read those ad-packed glossy magazines so kindly given away at the Whole Foods checkout. I can’t honestly believe that my good health lies in consuming 23 supplements on a daily basis, any more than I can believe that eating carcinogenic factory farm chicken will help me thrive. The content of the various messages matters very little because their concern for profits unifies them into an identifiable whole. I do believe that careful science will help us discover new things about the human body over time, but I feel real concern over the food-fad addiction our nation suffers from, constantly trying one expensive product or another because health is being promised. I think we’d do better to trust our ancestors than Monsanto or Whole Foods and this brings me to my next point.

Respecting All Lifeways
My belief is that compassion is the heart of the the vegan life. Not faddish health claims, not celebrity endorsements, not anything more powerful or more simple than a wish not to cause needless harm. Ironically, if you encounter a caricature of vegans out in the world, it tends to depict them as rabid extremists, willing to commit acts of violence for the sake of their cause. There is a grain of truth in the stereotype and I believe it should be discussed.

Dedication to the promotion of animal rights had prompted many ethical vegans to take wonderful steps on behalf of the domesticated and wild animals whose voices are completely unrecognized in American society. As a child, I turned to veganism out of horror over what I learned about factory farming and the agony of the animals involved is something that will never cease to haunt me. This is a cause well worth working for.

But it is also a cause that demands the utmost in non-violent opposition, as has been demonstrated by some of mankind’s most compassionate leaders. I have been repeatedly disgusted by the activities of so-called vegans who make violent assault on those they view as their enemies. Being vegan means causing as little harm as possible – and that means to human beings, as well as other animals. Sending death threats, throwing pies is people’s faces and taking a holier-than-thou stance against people with different belief systems is wholly inconsistent with the compassionate underpinnings of what I consider to be authentic veganism. I want to embrace, learn from and celebrate all cultures…at the very least, I want to understand something about them. I have learned the most about sustainable eating from Indigenous cultures and regard them with love and admiration.

I have found especially nauseating animal rights advocacy that pits Indigenous peoples against vegans who are so ignorant that they have made no effort to understand, for instance, that peoples of the far north have always survived by hunting seals or whales. As much as we may hate to think of the suffering of the animals involved, such lifeways are ancient and, frankly, far beyond the jurisdiction of a vegan Californian who can walk into any supermarket at any time of the year and find plenty of vegetable foods to subsist on. The work of compassion is the work of understanding – truly embracing all peoples, regardless of differences – and, perhaps, having a good effect on one another. To see compassion twisted into hatred is horrific. We can only judge what is right or wrong for our own selves and act accordingly; unless you fancy the role of dictator, forcing your views on others is abusive, short-sighted and as far from compassion as you can possibly get.

Having A Positive Effect
Apart from the demonstrable ecological benefits inherent in a plant-based diet, compassionate vegans do have a wonderful chance to be a positive influence in the lives of those dearest to them, simply by setting a quiet, good example. For many years, I was the odd man out at family parties, quietly eating food I’d prepared myself rather than the annual turkey and gravy.

Fast forward two decades and all three of my sisters are now vegetarians – not vegans, but vegetarians – two of them for ethical reasons and one for health considerations. I am also proud to see that one of my nieces has now begun to consider the ethics of a vegetarian diet and her parents are allowing her to make her own decision about this. While I can’t claim to be responsible for the thought processes each of these family members has undergone to arrive at their current diets, I do feel certain that just seeing me around and eating some of my food must have been useful in presenting ideas for them to consider. Never once have I advocated the slightest change in any of my kinfolk’s eating habits, but get-togethers now feature vegetarian foods alongside the other choices, because this has become a norm in my family.

We were not raised vegetarian, by any means, but our parents were deeply committed to bringing up children who felt bound to give moral questions serious consideration. I am sure my parents would never have predicted vegetarianism as an outcome of this, but if we feel it a personal duty to obey the dictates of conscience, it is because of the teachings of our childhoods. I am thankful to have such caring parents.

Coming to Terms with the Fallacy of Perfection
I have high expectations of myself, but being perfect has never been an ideal of mine. The central tenet of the vegan life is to do no harm, but no matter how hard you try, you will never achieve this while living on the Earth. Even if you were so upset about causing suffering that you decided to live under an apple tree and pick up the fallen fruit to sustain your life, chances are, you would sit on a bug and kill it.

That’s a somewhat extreme example, but there are other choices that will confront all American vegans on a daily basis. You can buy non-leather shoes, but chances are, the assembly line may have leather parts in the process. What about bugs, birds and rodents that may have been killed on large farms in the process of growing vegetable crops? Should you refuse to eat cabbage because a gopher may have been killed by a tilling machine? What about the factory farming manure that even organic farmers use on their crops? How can you avoid supporting that? Sea salt probably has little bits of long-dead sea animals in it. Does that make it off-limits? What if you get really sick? Should you refuse to take medicine that would save your life because it’s only available in gelatine capsules?

As you can see, being vegan for twenty years has given me plenty of time to consider a lot of questions that may not yet have occurred to a newcomer. My answer is this: you cannot, will never and should not try to attain a state of having no effect on life while you are on Earth. By simply taking a walk, you may kill something, but only a mentally ill person would conclude that she must therefor stay inert.

Something I like to share with readers is that ancient Native Americans, frequently mistakenly cited as leaving the least impact on the continents despite inhabiting them for thousands of years, actually shaped all of the land to their own uses. Far from having no effect on their environment, they created a giant food garden from Canada to South America. They just did it so well that Europeans mistook it for nature when they arrived here. We can strive not to make negative impacts on life, but we can’t reasonably strive never to cause any harm. Just like the animals we love, we, too, require sustenance to live and no just Creator would blame us for accidentally eating a bug in a salad any more than that power would blame a zebra for eating a bug on some grass. And even when we have to make a knowing choice, such as in the case of taking non-vegan prescription medicines, the gift of life demands that we sustain life. We must first take care of ourselves before we have anything to offer others – be they people or animals.

My advice is, live as low as you can on the chain of events, but don’t be goofy about this. You are not perfect, this world is not perfect and doing the best you can is all anyone could ever expect of you.

What Diet?
You never hear people talk about a ‘Mexican diet’, an ‘Italian diet’ or a ‘Chinese diet’. That’s because these ways of eating have been around for so long, they cease to be thought of as a set of rules. They are simply a native cuisine. For me, after 20 years eating the so-called vegan ‘diet’, I just don’t think of how I eat this way anymore.

I think when I first started eating vegan, I did read literature that taught me the basics of how to avoid animal products in my food, clothing and household, but once I understood how to do this, there was really nothing left to learn. Unlike what I might typically think of as a diet (counting calories, avoiding carbs or whatever people get themselves into), eating vegan is just normal now. There is no ‘avoiding’ anything. There is just harvesting food from our farm and buying good things from local farmers and markets. Should you find yourself eating this way for a long time, the way you eat will simply become your cuisine; just as natural to you as your handwriting or the way you brush your hair.

One side effect of a vegan diet, however, and it’s not a very nice one, is that animal products can be very difficult to encounter. I’ve noticed this more and more with the passing years. When I was a child and went with my mother to the butcher, I don’t believe I noticed any smell. Now, when I go past a meat counter, the smell of that dead meat is almost intolerable. If you’ve ever had a mouse die inside the wall of your house, you know the smell of decay I mean. It’s pretty bad. Similarly, I accidentally once picked up a glass of cow’s milk at my mother’s house, thinking it was my rice milk, and took a swig of it. I had to run to the sink and spit it out…it tasted so sour and rotten. It wasn’t spoiled milk…it just tasted spoiled and bad to me from not drinking it for so many years. Interestingly, the smell of cooked animal products (meat, baked goods) doesn’t seem to repel my senses the way things like raw meat and cheese do, but I thought it was worth mentioning how I’ve noticed this as long time vegans may be unlikely to be employed in a grocery store without suffering from nausea, due to the smell.

In Conclusion
Vegan eating is right for me – or at least – it has been right for me for 20 years. What started out as a refusal to abuse animals has turned into a long and interesting journey that has led me to conclusions that don’t exactly equate with by-the-book veganism. Most importantly, I’ve come to believe that beyond simply being vegan, growing and preparing my own food is absolutely key to my overall well-being. Technically, you could be a vegan and subsist on microwaved veggie patties from the freezer section, but I think it’s possible to get deeper into the nurturing aspects of life than this. For me, there was an interesting bend in the road once I started seeking a good life – a road that branched out from veganism into homesteading. I think it all comes from the same place in my mind – that part of me that wants to take responsibility for as many of my actions as I can, whether this is not harming others if I can help it, or not depending on uncaring corporations for my carrots and potatoes, if I can help it. I move slowly, live quietly, think deeply, consider what I’m doing. It’s how I’ve become, and I think ‘tree-ish’ is a good word for it.

Twenty years isn’t such a long time, but it’s a significant portion of one human life, and I hoped it would be interesting to hear from me on this subject, as there aren’t all that many long time vegans. As time goes by, I expect there will be more, and it’s my sincere hope that every effort in this direction will be rooted in humility, hope and compassion.