How Not To Be A Vegan Asshole (And Still Celebrate Ethical Choices)

The joke goes like this.

Priya meets someone new, says "Hi, I am Priya, who are you?"

And new person says "who me? I am Vegan."

So yeah, Vegans have a terrible reputation for making their (mostly ethical) dietary choice their  raison d'etre. The argument for this is that the meat and dairy industry are becoming increasingly and devastatingly cruel, so why not make it a part of our active purpose to bring it to public attention every chance we get? When you look at the amazing number of human problems we've created, cruelty to animals sure stands large and looming. After all it's our sheer ego that makes us believe that our perception of the world is the most intelligent and required (for god knows what ultimate end). This belief is the cause of many suck-ass evils like war, massive environmental damage, poverty, and animal cruelty. OK, so we're all going to agree on that last one, right? Right, so to further the vegan propaganda machine argument - there are loud-mouthed activists for all sorts of social evils: anti-war, anti-capitalism, anti-plastic, anti-exotic pets, yada-yada, so why not the vegan cause?

Well today my regular recipe post is going to be swapped with some ethical thinking. Don't worry, it's not about telling you why you need to be vegan. In fact it's quite the opposite, I am here to tell you the traps of vegan policing and why it matters for both sides - vegans and non-vegans.

The vegan police are no different from any extreme form of thinking. They hold on to a few beliefs: 1. Everyone  should be vegan and if you're not, you're a low-life with a heart made of coal. 2. Be vegan already. 3. You're vegan, but you still use a night cream that was tested on dogs? Fuck you. 4. You say you're vegan but you eat honey sometimes, so really you are a terrible flaky person. 5. Vegetarians are the most idiotic of all, because they support the dairy industry and still think they are compassionate, fuck off vegetarians!

It's no different from any system that controls one level of perceived virtue and then waits for any form of anomaly to occur to pounce. Don't get me wrong, community groups are heaven-sent. If you are a part of a book club, an environmental club, a cooking club, or even a spiritual club you know what the benefits of those communities (offline or online) offer. So when I finally started my vegan journey (something I have wanted to do for years) I was happy to be a part of the vegan community online. I saw mostly good things, helpful things, supportive things, But I also saw a lot of vegan policing within the group itself - a reminder that people are people no MATTER what. Even in a group that, by definition, tries to be the most compassionate.

But, surprise! Being vegan does not make you a better human being by virtue of this one practice. It does not account for the ego, for rabid thinking, insecurity and also for the sense of frantic validation all humans look for. Nor does it necessarily make you more self-aware. I once joined an Indian social media group that supported veganism and child-free living, thinking it was for people who simply choose to be child-free and vegan and let them discuss their lives. Man, was that place a judgement house of horrors. I wrote a friendly introductory post there, saying it was great for a a sturdy number of people believing that that there were indeed enough human problems and consciously not procreating was a choice that should indeed be respected - fair enough, I am one of those non-procreators myself. But I also wrote about how nobody knew how the world actually holds together. Our purpose, our ills, our compassion, and our learning are all part of a gigantic puzzle and for many people, children were a part of that purpose and I respected that. I also shared that we needed more thoughtful parenting, that groomed a child to be more curious of its world instead of being caught up with standard urban pursuits that were obviously facilitating our environmental demise. The responses I got to this rather benign introduction note? Violent to say the least. I was called a "spiritual mystic garbage talker"  and that "no one should EVER have a child no matter what" and how all people who had children were "Stupid and unthinking". So yeah, wowza. Anyway my usual self told them to suck it and I left the group.

I guess this whole experience just taught me the most important part about life: you are here for a reason, and for a lot of learning. You have to follow your own path because that's most likely going to show you the holes in this world that need filling. Every individual has a bucket to fill. These buckets might be different colors but each bucket filled will lead to a better planet. It was a good time not to lose sight of everything: extremism had no place in my life, but nor did apathy and shying away from talking about things that mean something to me.

So, I looked into my own immediate community of friends and thought about the conscious things they were doing. Things that had a purpose to make some kind of impact on our world. And that's the strong extreme answer I have for everyone: if you are blindly living on this planet (and you are on the upper end of Maslow's hierarchy of needs) without making any conscious choice that will affect the larger world, you're kind of being a parasite. Which of course can be argued in favor of: being a parasite is embracing our most primary biological reality, so why shouldn't it extend to everything I do? Well we gotta draw the line somewhere, and honestly if your whole purpose of life is to extract, and extract without a purpose, accumulate things, and then die, well, bah I mean sure be a parasite, but you're going to be a deathly bore.

Anyway, back to the small conscious choices. Here are 4 stories from my immediate circle of friends I admire that illustrate how doing just one thing means you can be compassionate and thinking, and forward moving - because we can't measure human wholeness and the complexity of compassion on a single scale.


Let's start with my own life partner Indra. He's your standard Bengali boy with a love for fish, meat, and a fair amount of dairy. He's come to understand the meat and dairy industry a lot more, and after having being a dog dad for more than 2 years, understood the human-animal bond on a much grander level. He has switched out his daily milk with cereal for soya milk/almond milk and reduced his chicken and meat consumption by 50%. The vegan police would shrug their shoulders at that, but that very act has reduced his carbon footprint significantly and also put money towards the vegetarian economy. That's a conscious choice, and that's a choice of someone who is fully aware of the cruelties and environmental impact of meat and dairy consumption, which proves it's NOT a lack of compassion or understanding of the industry that prevents him from being vegan - it is the complexity of habit, culture, and personal ability and motivation to the cause. And that is fair enough because he is actively choosing to reduce his consumption of these things.

Soy can be better than a MOO

Ok so let's forget diet impact. Here is Sohini who, for as long as I've known her (mostly through social media), has been one style queen. She has got her hair, makeup and smile in place, this lady. Stunning and all she is. But you won't catch her wearing the regular brands (read: the most accessible forms of cosmetics) that test on animals - and let me tell you, from your floor cleaner to your shampoo, most of that crap is tested on animals. This is especially terrible because we don't need to test on animals for cosmetic reasons (it's enough they test human medicine on them). Sohini researches all the brands that test on animals, puts up lists of cruelty-free make up and cosmetics on FB to let people make that simple decision of choosing vegan cosmetics. It seems simple now that you read it, but let me tell you that I still have products in my house that are animal-tested. I've been inspired by her to be a conscious consumer now and educate myself on those brands that are kinder. Although let me tell you,  finding everything you use in your life that has NOTHING to do with an animal is fairly impossible. It's not about being a puritan, it's about making a conscious choice of doing the best you can.

Killer Lips. Non-Killing Lipstick

Love at first sight

Now let's move to Kalabati, dearest business partner and sister, who's been composting like a rockstar for more than a year now. If you haven't heard of daily dump yet, you should click and head there now. But it's not just about getting excited about getting a compost pot, it's sticking through that process for life. And that is hard. When Kala decided to get a composting pot, she decided to buy a larger one even though she lives alone. This is because she offered to put the pot downstairs and let her neighbors also use it. She told them how much wet waste could be recycled and left out of the garbage mines, they all enthusiastically agreed. I don't think it lasted very long, soon she was the only one composting. This is what she says about it: 'I am a person who handles her own garbage. my help doesn't get rid of it. i do. So everyday I tie it together, I smell it. I get my hands wet.' That was kind of nasty, amirite? But she continues:

'So within few weeks of composting, I realized how drastically the garbage quantity goes down. I was taking out garbage now only once in 3 days. and it was completely dry and so much more manageable. How much of your garbage is kitchen waste is shocking.(60% of the city's waste is organic.) I mean we all know these things but till you see it you don't understand the gravity of it. Also after your first cycle of composting, which took about 2 to 3 months  for me, it's magical to see what those kgs of kitchen waste reduce to. I went and distributed the compost in my lane."

Now let's move to her second cool thinga-ma-jig....

A symbiotic Life. Kala's plants live off her wet waste. A composting garden looks pretty bomb, eh?

Kala's cousin Chiquita who inspired her to take care of streeties

Paanch the dog and her friend getting treats at Kala's house

Kala does one more thing very consciously and that is feeding a couple of her streeties regularly. When I asked her about that she said: 

"I have nothing to say about feeding and adopting streeties." - a bit of a climax pooper there, thanks Kala. But then (thankfully) she continued:

"Except chiquita (her cousin) inspired me. She feeds crazy amounts of dogs everyday. and she has been doing this from a very very young age."

Kala's compassion and curiosity for animals does not have to be proven, you can see it by the way she interacts with them. The vegan police would call her a hypocrite, but here's another example of the complexity of human compassion, it works in different ways, and it lights up in different paths. 

Now onto Rahul whose story is especially cute. He keeps industrial sized amounts of  biscuits in the back of his car. A conscious choice he makes to give out to traffic-light beggars and kids. His wife Namita is the one behind this inspiration, and one he gladly picked up. I think it's especially cute because it's that simple act of good faith, a small token of respect from one human to the next. I know lots of people who offer food to those in need, but very few who actively carry packs of it in their cars no matter what day it is. 

Free swag included in Rahul's car

Rahul the boy on the Left. With his friends (yay) 

So what's the moral of the story puppies? Well if you're a nihilist, you could say jackshit. Nothing is nothing. Fair point. But if you're a Wednesday night cough-medicated blogger like me, then I'll have to sum up with more gusto.

The moral is that doing everything purely out of ethics, morality, and a love for the environment can't be done by one person at full capacity on all levels. But that's not an excuse to not be aware. Learn from each other, be aware. You don't have to make the same choices, but you can be inspired to see what part of what issue or cause lights your soul up (because every muthafucking soul can be lit up), and then you need to examine how high the bonfire you can make with that issue. Whatever it is, it's something, and we need it. We need it to evolve, to be more than we are today, to appreciate the good in others, and to tell the world that love and compassion will always win because our army might wear different boots, but we're still in the same army. I have no idea why I used that military reference, I am not even pro-military. See? Nobody's perfect.

Don't make your life about what you can make other people can do (that's the problem of every extreme group out there, ethical or not), but ask yourself what you can do for the world. Did I just plagiarize and jumble a couple of cheesy quotes from the Greats? I think so, but you get the picture.

Next time there'll be a recipe.