Dear WhelmILY 27.09

I am NOT vegan (anymore): The Journey

You (one person, my biggest fan Ambs) asked, and I’m answering.

Fair warning, I am very well aware that whenever I share the reasons behind my choice, people tend to get uncomfortable because it forces them to think about their own diet. If you’d rather choose ignorance, this post probably isn’t for you.

But here’s the thing: if one blog post makes you squirm, imagine living with that feeling every single day. I feel it when people eat meat in front of me and tell me how delicious it is, when I walk through the grocery store surrounded by dead animals, when a recipe with meat pops up on my feed, or even when I see a cute photo of baby animals.

Before you continue, I want you to think of the movie ‘Babe’. Did you also want Babe to survive? Did you also feel better about it when the message flashed across the screen that said “No animals were harmed in the making of this film”? Why does the catering crew not count under that announcement?

This is the post about my ‘veganism’ journey. Being vegan is about so much more than just a diet - in fact, the food is the easiest part about being vegan. I don’t see animal products as food anymore and I never will.

Before I start, I want to point out a few things.

1. I am not vegan, my diet is only 99.99% plant-based.

2. The three reasons for eating a plant-based diet

3. I go off on conspiracy theories and rants that make people uncomfortable.

Those seem like pretty good headings for seperate sections of this post actually, so let me stick to those 3 points. (spoiler alert, the headings have changed and I kinda failed to stick to it)

1 - I am not vegan

In May of 2021, a South African friend told me she wanted to stop eating meat after watching a documentary (Seaspiracy) and I thought she was going insane. At this point, my brother and his wife had been vegan for years, but I had always been pretty ignorant about it and only saw it as a “save the animals” hippy tree-hugger thing.

I grew up on a farm. I know what it means to slaughter an animal (I helped on a few occasions) and use its flesh to feed a family for a few months. Use its hide for leather. It’s part of the food chain.

At the time, I was eating meat three times a day, guzzling liters of milk, and putting cheese on everything. I am a South African, chicken is a vegetable to us. We braai copious amounts of meat at least twice a week, and 75% of your dinner plate consists of meat, dairy, and eggs. I remember telling my friend nothing would ever convince me that there was anything wrong with my diet, I would eat meat until the day I die.

A few days later, Seaspiracy popped up on my Netflix recommendation list. My curiosity got the better of me. Why would a documentary about fishing make my biltong-loving, cheese-craving friend want to stop eating meat? I don’t even like fish.

About 2 hours later, I decided to stop eating seafood and decided to eat less meat.

I cried when they showed the damage that deep-sea trawlers cause on the ocean floor. For the first time in my life, I was made aware of the environmental impact of humanity’s obsession with the consumption of animal products. To this day, I still don’t know why this is such a well-ignored fact. The information is there, we just really don’t want to know it because we like eating meat. We choose ignorance.

That curiosity became a rabbit hole. I had always been environmentally conscious - I avoided using plastic if I could, I take short showers, I have reusable everything. And here I found out for the first time what an effect my diet had on the environment - the water used to produce a single beef burger is equivalent to a month’s daily showers.

From there, I found the documentary “What the Health”.

Another 2 hours later, I decided I would not cook with animal products again. For convenience, I would eat meat and other animal products when I was not at home - basically like having a cheat day when you’re on a diet. Restaurants can be a challenging affair when you live a cruelty-free life, especially in a foreign country. For the sake of the environment and my health, I just wanted to avoid animal products.

The next day I went to visit a friend in a different town, and on the way there I did some more research and started watching the documentary ‘Dominion’. With every passing second, I was more certain of my choice. I was only a few minutes in when we arrived, and the whole weekend I tried to avoid animal products. It was not easy - mainly because I did not realize the only vegan option in most restaurants is a plate of fries - I ordered kimchi fried rice and it had ham in it (I also didn’t know at the time that kimchi wasn’t vegan). My friends were supportive of my decision, but slightly confused much like myself.

(Side note: the fact that we can’t legally show under 18s how animals are treated shoud be enough evidence that it is a cruel practice. No video about harvesting vegetables is rated 18+)

I was mostly just feeling betrayed. How is it so widely accepted to eat animal products when this information was so easily available? How have we been raised to believe meat is the only source of protein, and that your bones would break if you didn’t drink milk?

On the way home that Sunday, I continued watching Dominion. I made it I think 26 minutes in and reached the section on eggs, and I was crying uncontrollably on the train bound for Seoul. I have still not been able to finish it to this day. I tried, and just decided that I didn’t need to.

I fully believe that every person who wants to eat meat, should watch that documentary. And if you choose not to watch it, you are choosing to be ignorant of the torturous industry that is animal agriculture.

The next morning, I made myself a final bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich for breakfast, like a ceremonial final meal.

I had maybe 3 bites, started feeling nauseated, burst out in tears and threw it in the trash. I could not think of anything else than the torture the animals had to go through for that plate of food. In my mind’s eye, all I could see was the scene in Dominion where the baby chicks are dumped, alive, into a macerater.

In that moment, I became vegan.

It was the best decision I’ve ever made. The only regret I have, is not doing it sooner.

A few years later, in 2024, I decided to stop calling myself vegan. There is an expectation of vegans to be perfectly vegan. This is an impossible expectation, and usually comes attached with ridicule and bias. My choice to avoid harm to all living beings is a target on my back to make jokes about cruelty towards edible animals.

I have a plant-based diet. Well, plants and fungi.

No animals were harmed in the making of this body.

Slightly overthinking sdding this image, but I’m going to leave it there. The myth that a plant-based diet is not nutritionally balanced is absolute bullshit, and I don’t understand why it’s most people’s first line of defense when so many omnivores are grossly overweight. That being said, you can also be vegan and unhealthy.

2 - The three reasons for eating a plant-based diet

The first one is ENVIRONMENTALISM

This is the one that was the most shocking for me. It’s almost a daily occurrence that I am flabberghasted by the ignorance of the scale of damage that animal agriculture is causing the planet.

Water usage, deforestation, greenhouse gas emissions… Animal agriculture is more damaging on the environment than the entire global transport sector, yet humanity loves to shame oil and gas with a burger in the one hand and a block of cheese in the other. I’m not going to say much more about that though, there’s enough information about it out there - a good place to start if you’d like to find out is by watching Seaspiracy and Cowspiracy, or just a few Google searches.

The second one is HEALTH

This is another one that I still fail to grasp how I lived 28 years without finding out the truth about the health benefits of a vegan diet. As I mentioned earlier, by the time I went vegan my brother had already been vegan for 7 years - so I knew it was a healthy diet. But he’s always been an active person and I didn’t bother to compare the health benefits of the two diets. I also knew that vegan food could be delicious, but I would never have chosen to eat it if there was a meat option available…

At least I wasn’t the type of person that thought vegans have any lack of nutrients - I knew the only supplement he’d been taking was Vitamin B12 (something most meat-eaters are also dangerously deficient in even though animals who are farmed for meat also get supplemented with).

What’s shocking is that people are blissfully unaware of the negative effects of a meat-heavy diet. This is where I understand why people eat meat, just not why they eat AS MUCH meat, and the types of meat. To give you some perspective, a portion size of meat is about the size of a pack of cards. Yet if you look at the size of meat on most plates, it’s at least 3 times that amount. And about a quarter of meat that people eat, is processed.

Add that to the fact that there is clear evidence of processed meats (bacon, salami, hot dogs) being carcinogenic - yet children are raised on it and it’s even on the menu in hospitals. The World Health Organization has released multiple studies about the benefits of a whole foods plant based diet, and the food pyramid myth has also been debunked time and time again and yet it’s still taught in schools. How does dairy have its own section on the food pyramid when 70% of the world’s population is lactose intolerant to some degree?

For more information on that, I recommend the documentaries What the Health, Forks over Knives, and The Game Changers. I will add however, a lot of the data is scewed to make an omnivore diet look worse than it actually is - like I mentioned, I understand why meat can be part of a healthy diet.

and then…

The final reason, the one that makes everyone uncomfortable because we love the ignorance of it. We love singing along to “The Circle of Life” while we force domination over the food chain and rarely complete the circle. Human bodies are rarely returned to any ecosystem - most people don’t even want their organs to be donated.

Meat is murder.

This is the part that’s difficult for me to talk about. I am so painfully aware how uncomfortable people get when I point out that their choice to eat the flesh of a dead animal is a cruel choice. You can not have meat without murdering an animal that did not want to die.

That’s it, there is no way to deny that. Yet we choose to say it’s “part of the food chain” while we waste nutritional resources to feed the animals we raise with the sole purpose of eating them. We can feed billions of land animals each year, but we can’t feed the 700 million humans that go hungry every day. Make it make sense.

I understand in the traditional sense - in the perfect world where we live on a beautiful farm and we have an ox that works the land, and when it gets too old we slaughter it and eat the flesh, make clothes from it, use its bones to fertilize the garden. We have chickens who keep our gardens clean of pests and provide us with eggs in the morning.

But that doesn’t happen anymore - most of the animal afgricultural sector just produces waste. I encourage you to do your own research about the actual numbers, from what I’ve read up to half of all animals raised for food never even make it to a plate. Add that to the fact that raising animals is extremely resource intensive, and you have a lose-lose combination.

And not just meat. Eggs and dairy as well. Male chicks are killed almost immediately after birth in most egg farms, male cows are also often culled or sold as veal in the diary industry.

3 - Conspiracy theories incoming

“Big Farma” as I lovingly refer to Animal Agriculture has been getting away with literal murder for way too many years.

Everyone has probably stopped reading after the last point in the previous section, so I’m just going off on a rant now to get this out of my system. I don’t care about writing a decent blog post anymore. I am having a shit day and I have been giving too much of a shit about not offending people with my opinions in the past, so here we go. Put on your thick skinned armour and wade through the truth for once, snowflake.

Like I mentioned in the previous sections, I understand the consumption of meat. IF done ethically and sustainably. The issue is that we are so far removed from farming these days - both with animals and plants - that we live in a constant state of ignorance. And this is 100% by design.

There is money in the meat industry, and the powers that be don’t want to lose the chokehold they have on us. If you still believe that your government cares about your health, I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news. The ‘system’ wants you sick. They can make money from you when you are sick.

Why is it normalized to take handfulls of medication with side effects, but hippies are vilified in the conservative culture because they choose natural remedies? The healthcare system is beyond fucked, and the more carcinogens they can force down our throats the more we are funding cancer research and not focusing on what is causing the damn Big C. All while 70% of antibiotics worldwide are fed to ANIMALS in agriculture - then you wonder why:

1. Healthcare is so damn expensive

2. We are becoming antibiotic resistant

Antibiotics are not used for treatment, but rather prevention of disease. It’s also used to grow the animals fatter and bigger faster so there is a bigger profit to be made from them. Even the fricken WHO has called this one of the biggest global health threats of our time, and yet we still give a shit about getting humans national healthcare… Take animals OFF national healthcare…

Here’s my favourite example of cognitive dissonance… The veterinary oath literally says they’ll “use their knowledge and skills for the benefit of society through the protection of animal health and welfare, the prevention and relief of animal suffering.”

And then they go home and eat a steak!? Vets pledge to relieve animal suffering, and then they cause it three times a day with their own knife and fork…

Oh here’s another fun one. I used to live in Asia (Korea). The amount of people who have VERY concernedly asked me if they eat dog meat is insane. Why do you give a shit about dog meat when you have been eating meat from other animals your whole life without batting an eye? Before I went vegan, I would honestly have eaten dog meat if it was offered to me. What’s the difference? If the dogs were bred to be eaten, how is that different from pigs, cows, chickens etc that were bred to be eaten?

“The dogs are tortured” has been an argument I’ve seen before… Again - NO DIFFERENT than the cows, pigs, and chickens that have been tortured.

“Dogs are pets” - so are cows, pigs, and chickens - you just don’t find them at pet shops.

“Dogs are smart” - Pigs are the smartest of the group. Cows are at least as socially and emotionally aware as dogs.

“It’s not normal” - maybe not for you, but your idea of normal is only based on what media has fed you for the past few years, or what you were brought up to think is normal. You can advertise meat everywhere, but one vegan just asks for a single item on the menu that they can eat and you complain they’re shoving their choice down your throat.

There’s also always the hunter/gatherer comments, very conveniently forgetting the gatherer part of the equation and the fact that our ancestors would definitely not have wasted their energy hunting had they access to all the nutrients they needed by gathering it from a supermarket. Hunting and eating animals was done out of necessity, not choice. Meat has always only needed to be an OPTION, not the only choice. Beans are a much easier and way less cruel option for all your protein needs.

Another interesting one is when people wonder about lab-grown meat and eating protein derived from bugs. I get it, it’s interesting - but you do realize you can just eat beans right? Why are we putting so much money and effort into a science we don’t need? While we’re on the subject of fake meat, can we please focus more on whole foods instead of processed vegan food? It’s expensive, unhealthy, and bad for the environment. I understand that it can sometimes be convenient, but I have the same issues with it than I do with meat. It’s not necessary. Just eat plants!

That reminds me - a plant-based diet is honestly much cheaper if you avoid anything with the label ‘vegan’. When’s the last time you went into a fruit and veg section and called it vegan apples, vegan pumpkins, and vegan avocados?

Honestly at this point I’m used to people losing respect for me as a person because of my choice to eat plants instead of animals. Yet it’s seen as a good thing to avoid products tested on animals - why can you eat them but not use them to test that products are safe for humans? Nobody bats an eye if you ask for cruelty-free makeup, but don’t you dare ask for cruelty-free food…

I guess this is enough for now. I’m tired. I don’t want to be angry anymore. I don’t want to be the crazy vegan anymore, even though I dislike radical vegans as much as the next person. I know vegans are irritating. I promise they mean well, though. They’re just trying to be a voice for the voiceless.

I don’t expect anyone to go vegan overnight like I did. I just want people to maybe choose the vegan option at a restaurant, think twice about buying too much meat, and order the breakfast without bacon.

OK, rant over.