The Real Reasons It's Hard To Be Vegan

Spoiler: bacon is not one of them

Being a vegan is hard.

A lot of non-vegans seem to agree with this statement. In my experiences talking with family, friends, acquaintances, and strangers, the difficulty of veganism seems to be a common thread. “I could never,” is a phrase I have heard too many times. The reasons they give are many. The classic, “I just love the taste.” The curious, “but where do you get your protein/what about [insert vitamin here]?” The wildcard, “what if you were stranded on a deserted island…” And so on, and so forth.

I agree that being a vegan is hard. But I think that it’s not really for any of these reasons. Sure, charred animal flesh might taste good, but we have plenty of delicious vegan options, and more are being created every year. Sure, maybe there was a time when it was a matter of life and death, but today, and especially in the first-world country I live in, it’s really not. People are capable of pushing themselves to achieve academic excellence, to go to the gym, to adjust to a new job or living situation. What’s so different about a change in diet? In other words, I believe in our general ability to make changes as substantial as going vegan, despite the challenges that non-vegans claim are in their way.

Three Big Reasons

Before I go further, I must say that this is all from my experience and introspection. I’m not really going to go into the scientific psychology of veganism or carnism; that may be for another post. So remember: maybe I’m wrong, and maybe what I describe doesn’t fit your experience. But I think that what I have to say might fit your experience, particularly if you’re already vegan. Additionally, when I say “vegan,” I primarily refer to people who went vegan for animal rights reasons. Those who went vegan for other reasons may also not feel as well-represented by this post, though some things may still apply to them.

So why is being vegan actually hard? In my experience, the hardest thing about veganism is how vegans are alienated by non-vegans and society at large. There are many layers to this alienation, some of them quite direct, and others much more subtle. I believe that much of it is, in a sense, unintentional. Many non-vegans harbor no ill-will towards vegans, and I do not blame them for the alienation vegans face. Nevertheless, I think vegan alienation is very possible even in the absence of bad intentions, and that I think many non-vegans hesitate to go vegan because they fear being alienated if they go vegan.

The most obvious form of alienation is through aggression by some non-vegans. Vegans are perhaps spared from the most overt forms of violence that some other identities face, but we still face a lot of ridicule and negative stereotyping. Vegans are frequently caricatured as out-of-touch, holier-than-thou, ultra-leftist freaks. Across the internet, jokes and memes disparage vegans and veganism. Vegan food and lifestyles are mocked as being for the weak, coddled, and effeminate. One of the worst things I have seen some non-vegans do is to weaponize meat against vegans. People have done things like deliberately set up a meat grill outside a protest, or ordered a meat dish to a vegan table, or gone vegan in exchange for the vegan eating meat. I have had animal flesh waved in my face and been taunted for not being able to eat it. To be clear, I think that only a minority of non-vegans actively perpetrate these harms, and many times there is no real ill-intention behind it. But this sort of ridicule and harassment still hurts a lot, much like how people throwing around slurs or perpetuating homophobic stereotypes hurts.

Another important but more subtle form of alienation is structural. Concepts like structural racism, structural inequality, and especially structural ableism may be mapped onto structural carnism. One of the things I have heard from discussions of ableism is that disability is structural in nature. For example, Deaf people are capable of communicating as well as or better than Hearing people. In a group of Deaf people, it would be a Hearing and non-signing person who is the impaired one. But because most of society is Hearing, Deafness is considered a disability. Similarly, veganism is not naturally so difficult; rather it is deliberately made to be so. In schools, kids are mandated to take cow’s milk at every meal—despite the fact that many (especially POC and Asian) people are lactose-intolerant. Many popular restaurants—especially fast food ones—feature almost entirely meat, dairy, or egg-based products. Meat is deeply ingrained in our culture—in barbecues, football games, birthday parties, and fancy dinners. I hear so many people appeal to these things when we ask them why they’re not vegan. And this is what they mean when they say that. To be clear, I generally don’t think this is an excuse. For many (including everyone I know), eating meat is not a matter of life and death, but of convenience and comfort, and I believe in peoples’ abilities to have more strength and courage than they believe themselves. Going vegan takes courage because it means breaking from the status quo, from the defaults which have been imposed on us by past generations and present corporations. It’s never easy, but then again, what good change ever has been?

The most difficult thing about being vegan, but one which I never hear non-vegans bring up, is that one is often forced to bear the psychological burden of veganism in isolation. When I first consciously confronted the problem of eating meat, I felt a deep sense of horror. We tormented and slaughtered so many more animals than I’d ever thought possible. I alone had contributed to thousands of gruesome murders, and so had my closest friends and family. Yet there was never a place for this to be recognized, validated, and released. Everyone else acted like this was normal, and some people (ahem, family members) acted like I was the crazy or weird one. It reminds me of this clip from South Park where there’s a school shooting and nobody reacts except Sharon:

"Did You Shoot Up The School?" | South Park

(please excuse that the family has a discussion over animal flesh and products)

The influence of a group’s reaction on an individual’s trauma is, in my opinion, underrated. Social support is a significant factor in trauma recovery, and I think this extends even beyond what we might narrowly consider trauma. Take death, for example. As children, we are socialized to recognize the solemnity of death and mourning. We have inherited strong and (often) very public rituals for dealing with death. By the time we are adults, we are likely to have personally experienced the death of a family member or other close relation. For these reasons, when someone experiences the death of a close relation, they can often (though not always) count on close others to recognize and validate their experience. This is the ideal response to trauma: trauma → most people recognize it’s a big deal → healing of those affected.

Unfortunately, I think there is another response to trauma, the one which vegans face too often, is: trauma → most people don’t recognize it’s a big deal → interference with healing. I’m going to term this the “inverted response” to trauma, since it’s an inversion of what we’ve been socialized to expect. This inverted response was what I faced for years after going vegan. No one in my life had watched as a newly-hatched chick fluttered his wings for the last time before falling into the macerator. No one in my life understood what it felt like to look at a steak or a fish filet and see not food but a desecrated corpse. No one in my life understood how macabre it was to watch a table of people laugh and bond over plates which held unspeakable atrocities. No one in my life made space to talk about veganism, and I didn’t feel really safe talking about veganism with the people in my life. I think, when we are faced with such a lack of understanding, it is only natural that we become discouraged, that we withdraw, that we feel the pressure to give in and forsake our values. We begin to internalize that denial of mass animal abuse and of our own experience, because that’s easier than facing the vicarious trauma that we develop from witnessing mass animal abuse by ourselves.

In my view, these are the real reasons it’s hard to be vegan, ones which non-vegans rarely list but which I suspect many intuit at some level. It’s hard to be the one who’s different in a crowd of sames. It’s hard to be the one to call out wrongdoing in a silent boardroom. It’s hard to stand by your values when you know people won’t understand. This is why people thank us for what we do, but regretfully admit that they won’t go vegan themselves. Because going vegan really is an act of altruism, just not in the ways many of them say it is. To these people, I say this: hesitate no longer. You have more courage and strength and willpower within you than you know. You care about animals, and you feel sorrow when they are harmed. You will lose some comfort and convenience when you go vegan. There will likely be people who question your choice or otherwise resist your change. But ultimately, this is a small price to pay, especially given how many animals suffer for us every second of every day. And I think it is well worth that price to gain the reward of a cleaner conscience and the knowledge that one has authentically stood up for something one believes in.

Join A Community

So if you’re a vegan, aspiring vegan, vegetarian, reducetarian, or just someone who cares about animals, what should you do? I think the biggest thing you can do for yourself is to find and join a local vegan/animal rights community. In my experience, these communities are made up of very compassionate, non-judgmental, and welcoming people. I can certainly say this is the case for the two student groups in Madison, Animal Advocacy UW and ASAP UW–Madison (these are mainly for students, but are open to non-students as well!). If you’re a vegan, vegan and animal rights communities will be spaces where you can finally feel understood and accepted, where you can talk about your experiences and relate to the experiences of others. If you’re not yet a vegan, these are places where you can get support and encouragement on your vegan journey. Despite the stereotypes of vegans as judgmental, I find that many vegans (particularly those in vegan/animal rights communities) are quite accepting of non-vegans. Many of us are careful not to shame or blame people, in large part because we know that vegans and animal rights activists have a reputation for shaming and blaming people, and we wish to distance ourselves from that.

Almost everyone who is a vegan today was not born a vegan, but had to go through the process of being awakened to the horrors of factory farming and going vegan. I would bet heavily that a good majority of people who went vegan did so alone, and perhaps remained alone in their journey for many years. I have been there, and it can be a really crushing feeling at times. Fortunately, due to the efforts of brave souls who came before us, we increasingly don’t have to go through this alone any longer. The path to veganism is no longer just darkness, but is alight with the warm glow of rest stops and halfway houses. Take some time to visit a few. In time, I think you will find that being a vegan is not quite as hard as it once was.