September 13, 2024

How Do You Tell If Someone's A Vegan?

So the other day I had an electrician, Luke, round to move some plug sockets (🇺🇸power outlets). We’ve met a few times to get quotes, and he spent a couple of days at my ex-wife’s doing some work there (we’re getting him to put EV chargers in at our respective new houses).

When he arrived the conversation went like this:

Me: Do you want a cup of tea? I’m afraid I’ve only got soya milk.

Luke: Oh wow. That’s brilliant.

Me:

Luke: I’m, erm, a vegan.

Me: You’re kidding! I’m a vegan, so Jules. Wait, didn’t she tell you when you were round her place?

Luke: No, she asked if I wanted a coffee, and I said black coffee please, because I didn’t figure she’d have soya milk.

And of course, it immediately made me think of the infamous, and in my opinion slightly hateful meme: “How do you know someone’s a vegan? Don’t worry, they’ll tell you!”

Now yes, there are some sanctimonious, preachy vegans out there. Every community has sanctimonious, preachy people. But I’ve known people for years without them knowing that I’m a vegan, because it never came up. If I do tell them, it’s usually because they offered me food and I wanted to explain why I was refusing it (so that they knew it wasn’t anything personal). And sometimes, I perhaps do mention it not in any preachy sense, but I want to warn people just to avoid the risk that they might say something a bit crappy about vegans which would then cause a lot of awkwardness when I belatedly inform them I’m one of those people they’re slagging off.

What really annoys me is the double-standard of it. The “supposed truth” behind the meme is that vegans reveal their vegan status in a way that is: a) unnecessary; b) premature; and c) evangelistic / moralistic. But generally you reveal your vegan status for purely pragmatic reasons, either because you’re trying to procure food, or decline food that’s being offered.

Meanwhile, meat-eaters are allowed to be as unnecessary, premature, or evangelistic as they like. (I should stress that the vast majority of meat-eaters don’t do this, but my point is that the rules of society allow them to do it, if they so choose). Meat-eaters are allowed to mention that they really like tuna in sandwiches without anyone jumping down their throat; hell they’re allowed to state their opinion that if you don’t like bacon there’s something wrong with you.

I should point out that things are a lot better than they were ten, fifteen, or twenty years ago. I remember back then making a social media post about how excited I was to find a health shop round the corner from where I worked that did vegan sandwiches (which was very rare back then) and having people reply to tell me how much they hated vegans. I remember people on a pen-and-paper RPG forum talking about how they’d like to set vegans on fire (not surprisingly, I didn’t feel like mentioning I was one of those people they were talking about).

But here’s the thing, it reminds me a bit of homophobic blokes who’ll tell you that they think sexual orientations should be kept private and that they don’t want to know anyone’s sexual orientation, but will then immediately introduce the woman standing next to them not as their “friend”, but as their wife, without any self-awareness of their hypocrisy.

Of course, what they mean is that they think everyone should be straight; so if you aren’t straight, they want you to keep it a secret, but if you are, feel free to shout it from the rooftops. But they don’t realise their hypocrisy, because to them, they’re normal, not other, so the rules for those others don’t apply to them.

It’s the tyranny of a majority free to define society around themselves as a baseline norm, with anyone who deviates from that norm being some flavour of other.

Someone who’s sexually attracted to the same sex has a sexual orientation; they, who are sexually attracted to the opposite sex, are merely “normal”.

Someone whose skin is some shade other than pink has a racial / ethnic identity; they, whose skins also have a shade (pink), are merely “normal”.

Someone who has a moral objection to eating all animals has a dietary code; they, who have a moral objection to eating cats, dogs, or horses, are merely “normal”. (Don’t believe me? What’s the word to describe someone who is okay with eating pigs, sheep, cows, chickens and so on, but would be unwilling to eat dogs or cats?)

Someone who morally objects to cruelty to pigs, sheep, cows, or chickens is “attempting to tell other people what they can and cannot do”; someone who objects to the exact same behaviour if done to cats, dogs, or horses is merely “standing up for helpless animals”.

But here’s the final twist. We all do it, where “it” is using ourselves as a baseline and defining everyone else by the ways they differ from us, and I’m no exception.

And the best example? If you ask me if I’m a vegetarian, I’ll tell you that I’m not. Why?

Well say you asked a vegetarian (or a meat-eater come to that) to define what a vegetarian is, they’d probably say something like:

A vegetarian is someone who doesn’t eat meat or fish.

By that standard I, a vegan, would also qualify as a vegetarian, right? Because by that definition a vegan’s a type of vegetarian, in just the same way that a Border Collie’s a type of dog.

But here’s the thing; that’s not my definition of a vegetarian. I define vegetarianism by reference to myself, which means my definition is:

A vegetarian is someone who eats dairy (milk) and eggs.

I don’t eat dairy or eggs, so I’m not a vegetarian.

So I’m just as bad, except that by living in a society where my definition’s a minority one, I’m very much aware that when it comes to what food is and is not morally acceptable, my moral code’s at right angles to my society’s default, baseline moral code.

I was born with a royal flush of privilege: white, male, straight, cis-gendered, middle-class, developed world, able-bodied. And with such a royal flush, it’s very easy to assume that you’re the baseline norm around which the world revolves.

So maybe its good for my metaphorical soul that in just one small little thing, I’m awkwardly orthogonal to the society in which I dwell.

The Nexus Files is free to read. But if you subscribe you'll get new posts emailed to your inbox automatically, and I won't feel like I'm pointlessly screaming into the void.