Apologies, this is likely to be long. The TL;DR version is, as I say at the very end:
How much does one share with others about a decision to transition to veganism? Did you include others in your thought process as you started going vegan, or did you just do it quietly? I'm wondering if just keeping it to myself is best.
And here are some of the reasons why I have these questions.
My head is swimming with so many things and I feel I mostly can't talk to people I know in real life about them, so I hope this can be a supportive space for me. Even without me saying a word, people at work have been talking about how awful veganism is in the lunch room, for example. (I was reading a vegan book there once.) It's almost as if me not eating cheese is some sort of existential threat to them.
I've tried talking with friends about what I'm experiencing--not even urging them to join me or anything, but it is something that is happening to me--and they've been very unwelcoming of those kinds of discussions. They shut me down with, "Nothing can be perfect." So because I can't have zero impact, apparently I shouldn't care how much impact I do have? Or something.
So I'm finding I'm not really ready to talk about this in general, with most people. But as I say, my head is swimming. How much of this is even worth saying to other people, and when?
To begin, I come from a family of farmers, should you go back to how my parents grew up. (They aren't farmers, but my grandparents were on both sides. And a lot of my aunts and uncles are farmers.) Any discomfort I expressed as a child about farm practices--which were, I now know, far and away better than most animals experience--was met with anger. As I began to think more about going vegan, it brought up bad memories: witnessing a pig being slaughtered and butchered, for example. The whole family seeming very angry that I had befriended one of the turkeys, who liked to follow me around and would sit down and ask to be petted, just like a dog or a cat would. (The turkeys, they would snap at me while I petted her, were food, not friends.) And the memory that ultimately pushed me over the edge was about asking my mother about chicks--why did the chicks come from the hatchery if they already had chickens? Because you only want female chicks. But she didn't tell me the truth about what happened to the males, I think because she didn't know herself--she thought they were raised as food and sold.
To go against eating animal products is to go against my family, though their farms were a far cry from the sources of most animal products in the American food supply. My grandparents' chickens ran around in the yard as they pleased, pecking at bugs and kitchen scraps. (Turkeys, too, in season.) The pigs had a big yard to roam in. The sheep and cattle wandered the fields. It was a small, diverse farm, with natural food, largely operating only to provide food for relatives. (They grew fruits and veggies, too.) But in retrospect, I'm still uneasy with some of what they did (like the hatchery, and the slaughter stands out in my mind today as an incredibly traumatic thing for me to have witnessed at around age 6 or so--as it would still be today, I imagine, and not because I'm unfamiliar with farm life).
But I can't imagine, for any of their flaws, that my grandparents would have ever raised animals the way most animals are raised on modern factory farms. It goes from being morally questionable to obviously, horrifically wrong in my mind when you move from the small family farm to the huge, cruel, exploitative system employed by most agriculture now. And it also strikes me as less and less necessary all the time. I can buy fake meat. I like fake meat. I can buy dairy-free milk--I like that, too. I can cook my own food; I do that anyway.
I also tried to reach out to a friend to talk about some of my reflections on the Bible. I'm a Christian and have a seminary degree. In my Hebrew class, we translated Jonah.
Most people know of Jonah only as the story of the prophet swallowed by a large fish that spit him out three days later. That's in there. But Jonah is a larger story that focuses, more than any other book in the Bible, on God's relationship with animals.
God speaks to the fish and it does what God says. God speaks to a worm who also does God's bidding, and God tells Jonah not to get mad at the worm. But the thing that stands out to me the most in Jonah is the account of God's concern for the cows.
Jonah is, at heart, a book about God and cows. Or rather, God and cows and a warning to Jonah that God cares about cows a lot and Jonah shouldn't be so angry about that.
I have long had a hard time imagining how anybody reads Jonah, much less translates the entire book from Hebrew, and doesn't come away thinking that God doesn't want us to care a great deal about the treatment of cattle. The cows in Jonah pray, and God hears their prayer for mercy. (My professor said this was a joke, because Jonah is a humorous book. And Jonah is a humorous book, but this seems wrong to me somehow.)
The book ends with God telling Jonah this:
"And should I not spare Nineveh, the great city where more than six score thousand persons can't discern between their left hand and their right hand, and also much cattle?"
In most English translations, the order is changed, so that the last line you're left with is something like, "Should I not be concerned about that great city?" But in the Hebrew, the very last words are, "and also much cattle?"
Jonah is all about the cows, and the fish, and the worm, and how vindictive Jonah is for wanting all of them to die. God is telling Jonah to have compassion on all of God's creatures.
There is much more in Christian scripture to support a vegan diet--even a warning in Romans not to eat meat if your conscience troubles you about it!
But even mentioning this to someone I knew in seminary got a harsh response about how the only ethical concerns involved in eating for Christians were about lack of gratitude, gluttony, or failure to be a proper steward of one's body by jeopardizing one's health--nothing to do with animals. I'm almost being treated as heretical. But this feels right to me. My conscience and my own connection to God don't allow me to disregard animal welfare. I caved to peer pressure for too long, anyway; I'm now nearly 10 years out of seminary and in my mid-30s. But I've stopped buying animal foods (including the hidden ones--alas, my previously favored English muffins had whey in them, so that's the end of that--but I like eating the new vegan ones I found better, because I feel I'm doing something much better that way).
So how much does one share with others? Is there even a point to doing so? Did you include others in your thought process as you started going vegan, or did you just do it quietly? I wonder if I shouldn't be talking to people about it because I come away somewhat discouraged. Even my semi-supportive friend (I have exactly one) says she thinks avoiding things like the whey in English muffins is a step too far. I'm wondering if just keeping it to myself is best.
How much does one share with others about a decision to transition to veganism? Did you include others in your thought process as you started going vegan, or did you just do it quietly? I'm wondering if just keeping it to myself is best.
And here are some of the reasons why I have these questions.
My head is swimming with so many things and I feel I mostly can't talk to people I know in real life about them, so I hope this can be a supportive space for me. Even without me saying a word, people at work have been talking about how awful veganism is in the lunch room, for example. (I was reading a vegan book there once.) It's almost as if me not eating cheese is some sort of existential threat to them.
I've tried talking with friends about what I'm experiencing--not even urging them to join me or anything, but it is something that is happening to me--and they've been very unwelcoming of those kinds of discussions. They shut me down with, "Nothing can be perfect." So because I can't have zero impact, apparently I shouldn't care how much impact I do have? Or something.
So I'm finding I'm not really ready to talk about this in general, with most people. But as I say, my head is swimming. How much of this is even worth saying to other people, and when?
To begin, I come from a family of farmers, should you go back to how my parents grew up. (They aren't farmers, but my grandparents were on both sides. And a lot of my aunts and uncles are farmers.) Any discomfort I expressed as a child about farm practices--which were, I now know, far and away better than most animals experience--was met with anger. As I began to think more about going vegan, it brought up bad memories: witnessing a pig being slaughtered and butchered, for example. The whole family seeming very angry that I had befriended one of the turkeys, who liked to follow me around and would sit down and ask to be petted, just like a dog or a cat would. (The turkeys, they would snap at me while I petted her, were food, not friends.) And the memory that ultimately pushed me over the edge was about asking my mother about chicks--why did the chicks come from the hatchery if they already had chickens? Because you only want female chicks. But she didn't tell me the truth about what happened to the males, I think because she didn't know herself--she thought they were raised as food and sold.
To go against eating animal products is to go against my family, though their farms were a far cry from the sources of most animal products in the American food supply. My grandparents' chickens ran around in the yard as they pleased, pecking at bugs and kitchen scraps. (Turkeys, too, in season.) The pigs had a big yard to roam in. The sheep and cattle wandered the fields. It was a small, diverse farm, with natural food, largely operating only to provide food for relatives. (They grew fruits and veggies, too.) But in retrospect, I'm still uneasy with some of what they did (like the hatchery, and the slaughter stands out in my mind today as an incredibly traumatic thing for me to have witnessed at around age 6 or so--as it would still be today, I imagine, and not because I'm unfamiliar with farm life).
But I can't imagine, for any of their flaws, that my grandparents would have ever raised animals the way most animals are raised on modern factory farms. It goes from being morally questionable to obviously, horrifically wrong in my mind when you move from the small family farm to the huge, cruel, exploitative system employed by most agriculture now. And it also strikes me as less and less necessary all the time. I can buy fake meat. I like fake meat. I can buy dairy-free milk--I like that, too. I can cook my own food; I do that anyway.
I also tried to reach out to a friend to talk about some of my reflections on the Bible. I'm a Christian and have a seminary degree. In my Hebrew class, we translated Jonah.
Most people know of Jonah only as the story of the prophet swallowed by a large fish that spit him out three days later. That's in there. But Jonah is a larger story that focuses, more than any other book in the Bible, on God's relationship with animals.
God speaks to the fish and it does what God says. God speaks to a worm who also does God's bidding, and God tells Jonah not to get mad at the worm. But the thing that stands out to me the most in Jonah is the account of God's concern for the cows.
Jonah is, at heart, a book about God and cows. Or rather, God and cows and a warning to Jonah that God cares about cows a lot and Jonah shouldn't be so angry about that.
I have long had a hard time imagining how anybody reads Jonah, much less translates the entire book from Hebrew, and doesn't come away thinking that God doesn't want us to care a great deal about the treatment of cattle. The cows in Jonah pray, and God hears their prayer for mercy. (My professor said this was a joke, because Jonah is a humorous book. And Jonah is a humorous book, but this seems wrong to me somehow.)
The book ends with God telling Jonah this:
"And should I not spare Nineveh, the great city where more than six score thousand persons can't discern between their left hand and their right hand, and also much cattle?"
In most English translations, the order is changed, so that the last line you're left with is something like, "Should I not be concerned about that great city?" But in the Hebrew, the very last words are, "and also much cattle?"
Jonah is all about the cows, and the fish, and the worm, and how vindictive Jonah is for wanting all of them to die. God is telling Jonah to have compassion on all of God's creatures.
There is much more in Christian scripture to support a vegan diet--even a warning in Romans not to eat meat if your conscience troubles you about it!
But even mentioning this to someone I knew in seminary got a harsh response about how the only ethical concerns involved in eating for Christians were about lack of gratitude, gluttony, or failure to be a proper steward of one's body by jeopardizing one's health--nothing to do with animals. I'm almost being treated as heretical. But this feels right to me. My conscience and my own connection to God don't allow me to disregard animal welfare. I caved to peer pressure for too long, anyway; I'm now nearly 10 years out of seminary and in my mid-30s. But I've stopped buying animal foods (including the hidden ones--alas, my previously favored English muffins had whey in them, so that's the end of that--but I like eating the new vegan ones I found better, because I feel I'm doing something much better that way).
So how much does one share with others? Is there even a point to doing so? Did you include others in your thought process as you started going vegan, or did you just do it quietly? I wonder if I shouldn't be talking to people about it because I come away somewhat discouraged. Even my semi-supportive friend (I have exactly one) says she thinks avoiding things like the whey in English muffins is a step too far. I'm wondering if just keeping it to myself is best.
