The Vegan Community Has a Problem

I was vegan for five years. I say was because over the course of the last two years I’ve strayed. It 
took time and a lot of guilt but I’m finally at a place where I can accept that I’m vegetarian and not 
vegan. Now, many people, primarily vegans, will read that and nothing else here and have an opinion 
about this post. But try to hear me out. I’ve seen and experienced these things and there is a systemic 
problem in the vegan community that needs to be addressed.

To be fair, I’ll talk a bit about why I’m no longer vegan. It’s complicated and hard to put into words, but 
I’ll do my best. First of all, the last two years have been incredibly difficult. Despite meeting my lovely 
and generous boyfriend who I’ve been living with (thankfully), dropping out of school, moving to a new 
place with basically no support system, my dog dying, and having a difficult time holding down a job 
was a terrible strain on my mental health. Further, the fact that I was cycling through employment 
meant that I rarely had very much money to do or buy much. It’s not like I was going from high paying 
job to high paying job either; I worked at nonprofits and Starbucks. Second, like I mentioned, I met my 
boyfriend who I have been living with through this time and he is not vegan. He’s not even a 
vegetarian, though I do all the cooking so he is at home for the most part. When you’re in a 
relationship with someone for longer than six months, you learn to make sacrifices. I’m sure he would 
prefer to eat meat more but he’s made that sacrifice for me. I would love to have a partner with a 
similar diet to mine, but at the end of the day I don’t and I had to make this sacrifice for him. I’m 
hesitant to write this because I know many online vegans who will read what I just wrote and ignore 
everything else and think I compromised my values for some guy. That’s not how it is, it’s much more 
complicated than that, but I can’t stop your from having your opinion so, there it is for you to feast on.

Also to be fair (to myself this time), I will explain my lifestyle now. Veganism is an ethical stance 
beyond diet and once vegan always a little bit vegan. I can’t unsee what I’ve seen, I can’t unfeel what 
I’ve felt. But I get really low blood sugar and have to eat regularly and when I go to a coffee shop I will 
get a pastry without worrying if it has milk or eggs in it. When I cook, I still cook mostly vegan but 
sometimes I add cheese. It started when my boyfriend’s grandmother passed away and I wanted to 
make him something nice, which then carried over to other parts of my cooking. However, I prefer 
vegan food. Dairy ricotta is bullshit compared to vegan ricotta. Just saying.

Outside food, I will only buy ethical products that are animal free and have not been tested on 
animals. This is how my journey began, after all. But I can’t afford to go to Lush to get the tiniest 
mascara ever for $50 anymore, so I buy the most ethical makeup I can find at the supermarket. It’s 
probably not vegan but since I’m not vegan anymore…

With that said, I hope it’s clear that I highly respect the lifestyle and I try to adhere to it when I can. I 
highly respect individual vegans. In fact, most vegans I’ve met in person have been incredibly lovely 
people, but then again I was vegan at the time so there was a bias toward me inherently. All this to 
say, vegans as a whole are very, very judgmental people. While individual vegans might be lovely, the 
community at large is and encourages judgement toward nonvegans, including vegetarians, vegan 
allies, and other vegans who have slipped up or whose ethics dictate behaviors that vary from 
“expected” vegan behaviors.

I first started thinking about this when I was on Twitter and an apparently popular vegan personality 
(who I had never heard of) tweeted that she has decided to no longer call herself vegan because of 
the reaction she got from the community over something very minor, though I don’t remember what it 
was. I read the comments. People on there were nothing short of cruel to this young woman who is 
doing her best to make the world a better place for people and animals. This was during my transition 
phase, but it emboldened me. That tweet and more so the replies encouraged me to no longer identify 
as vegan. What a huge relief. I hated calling myself vegan even when I was one and this one tweet 
showed me everything. It showed me why I hated saying I was vegan, why I hated being called out as 
vegan, why I was embarrassed to be associated with the word at all. It really shined a light on the 
whole problem.

I then looked back on all the groups I have been in over the years, like on Facebook or in person, and 
I started to see a troubling pattern. This one Facebook group in particular was very bad. It’s called 
Vegan Humor and it was recommended I join it by another vegan to help me when I was feeling 
overwhelmed by the enormity of the suffering animals go through. This group posts usually hateful 
joke images about how stupid everyone who isn’t vegan is, including vegetarians and poor people. 
These posts always made me uncomfortable but I figured it’s punching up, right? I mean, vegans are 
a minority so it must be! Looking back, however, and given the life I’ve lived and the circumstances 
I’ve dealt with, I can now look back and see these posts as being at most cruel and harmful and at 
least lazy and embarrassing. Sometimes stereotypes are true, unfortunately, and now that my mental 
block is gone I can see that the judgmental vegan stereotype is actually based on reality.

I get it. The enormity of the suffering of animals is very hard to deal with for the generally empathetic 
and kind people who want to do better by their world. It’s easy to fall into the trap of hating others for 
not wanting to do better, too. But the reality is being vegan can be and is expensive. No, I don’t want 
to eat beans and rice for every meal because guess what? When I was vegan I wasn’t super rich 
either and I did eat beans and rice for every meal sometimes. I do not want to go back to that life. The 
reality is some people, the stupid carnivores, live in food deserts and buy all their groceries at 
convenience stores. The reality is that if you’re struggling to make ends meet by working two or three 
jobs to pay for medicine, rent, and food for your children and for yourself and if you live in a food 
desert and if your boss sexually harasses you or generally treats you like shit and you can’t catch a 
break and if one of your children is sick and you’re just stressed out all the time, no, being vegan isn’t 
at the top of your list. The posts on Vegan Humor and other groups and sites depict all people as 
terrible if they aren’t vegan. Obviously, I think that’s problematic and just plain wrong.

I’m privileged in that I live in one of the most vegan friendly cities in the country. I would love to be 
able to afford to go to a vegan restaurant! If I could afford it, I would only go to vegan coffee shops. If 
I could afford it, I would buy vegan products at the grocery store, of which there are many and they 
are fully stocked. But I just can’t. I don’t think this makes me a terrible person. That is, unless you 
have the opinion that poor people are being punished by God. Which I don’t.

Outside of the online space, when vegans get together, there is a hateful bias against nonvegans. I 
can’t remember specific comments off the top of my head, but it’s there.

I know this because I felt this, too. I used to be a vegan hardliner and secretly judge my nonvegan 
friends. I did have conversations with other vegans about how it’s bullshit that being vegan is 
expensive because beans and rice. But guess what. Being vegan is expensive in the current capitalist 
society we live in. It is an utter privilege to be vegan in the United States.

There are two things I would recommend the vegan community do if vegans want people to go vegan. 
First, drop the judgmental bullshit. It’s a privilege. You’re privileged. Get over it.

Second, fight against the system that has created the problem that in order to be vegan you must be 
privileged. This is not advice for the seriously “woke” vegans who already know this because I know 
you’re out there and I see you. Much respect. This is advice for the average vegan. Capitalism and 
corporate socialism, the economic systems that run this country, created an environment where the 
masses are required to eat meat, dairy, and eggs in order to survive. Government sponsored 
advertising campaigns have convinced the masses that in order to be healthy they need to eat meat, 
dairy, and eggs. Government sponsored meat, dairy, and egg campaigns have increased the amount 
of, for example, cheese in almost all foods. The government subsidizes meat, dairy, and eggs to 
create an economy where it’s cheaper to by dairy milk than it is to buy but milks, for example. Are 
you getting the trend here? The problem isn’t that people are stupid and hypocritical, the problem is 
that the government, backed by these nonvegan industries, has created a multi billion dollar incentive 
for the average person to not be vegan. Take all this and add that food stamps barely cover a month’s 
worth of food. Add that healthcare is so expensive. Add that the poverty line is so low and hasn’t 
caught up to the times that you basically have to be homeless to qualify for food stamps and Medicaid.

Vegans are so ethical and empathetic and compassionate. It’s just that from what I’ve seen being in 
vegan spaces, that ethicality, empathy, and compassion doesn’t carry over to people, too. I think the 
community can do better and should.

#NotAllVegans