As a vegan (not a perfect one and not ashamed to admit it) I’ll do my best to explain. The venom is astounding. Vegans are literally willing to sit at the table and eat a bowl of leaves no complaining or performing mass conversions which makes the vitriol unkind.

If you are considering Veganism as your way of life, or an experimental eating adventure, prepare your mind before you prepare your body. It is a mental minefield to be attacked and ridiculed.

People you know to be intrinsically kind and fair minded will ridicule and attack you. Is it the triggering effect of a person at the same table who chooses to ‘eat ethically?’ Does witnessing this burden rational minds? Maybe, because that little voice their heads know the truth is out there and decades of training tell them, the farther the better.

Incredibly upsetting at the outset, it dawns on you, the anger is not directed at you. It is about the lie. The compulsion to justify lies so beautifully packaged as ‘truth’ is self defence.

Because the truth means facing upto deception by family, friends, educators, our most trusted circle. The powers that be have taken your most fundamental need- sustenance- and made it their own. If you can’t control your food choices, what can you control?

Veganism is not restricted to food choices. It is a world view and way of life dedicated to a mindful co existence with the planet and its inhabitants. Back to basics.

This is not an epiphany it’s one incident and experience at a time. And your conscience all of a sudden strings together the truth which has always been in front of you. It may begin as a child, your questions vaguely answered or dismissed altogether.

But you come to realise it is a cycle of lies and misinformation – social media did not invent misinformation and propaganda, it began with cults, religions, politics and eventually to the greatest power a person or corporation can impose upon you.

Your sustenance.

My journey to veganism (I did not know the term for it at the time) began around the age of 3 or 4. A privileged life and up bringing meant we ‘ate well’ and lived removed from our sources of food. It appeared in edible form on the table and we ate. When questions were asked answers were at best vague or altogether absent. The damage to a growing mind is irreversible.

Parent and off spring are products of the world we live in who readily accept the “animals are food narrative”. So when I enquired if the chicken on my plate had died (the infant mind assumed there was no other reasonable explanation to eat this bird) I was assured he died of old age.

Yes aboriginal, tribal, local, whatever the term peoples consume animals, but they do so with a reverence and understanding. They take what they need and leave what they do not. Mindful of the fact they share their home with millions of species and beings.

That’s the first lie we are told about food. In our homes, from our most trusted sources of information, knowledge and eyes to the outside world. There are two kinds of infants the compliant and the contradictor. The compliant never questions a ‘fact’ and the contradictor questions every piece of information.

And so through adolescence, young adult hood and adult hood you are labeled an ‘animal lover’ or radical because you question. Society at large – your family included- is designed to ‘take the emotion out of you.’ (If you are an empath, I know you are nodding your head as you read this, the suffering leaps off the plate)

What makes the vegan at the table the most problematic dinner guest and family member? Somewhere in the recesses of our ancient being and brain must be the memory of a better life in sync and with respect for each other, our home the planet and the creatures we share it with. We must care about the planet, or we would not be so conscious of “Earth Day.”

When you ask why no one spoke for the animals they have no answers. But you are the radical, crazy leaf eater.

So the modernization, mechanization and march of civilization is littered with the remnants of “good manners, good eating and living.”

Vegan beware, there is no moral superiority here, because the carnivore across the table has two choices- mock you, or debate you.  They choose the former because the latter means a difficult introspection and rail against common sense. Acknowledge that a typical carnivore is trapped in a societal lie  – one they cannot tear themselves away from and some cling to it as an integral part of their personality.

The truth of our eating habits are perpetuated by an educational system, devoid of the courage to teach students the reality of their existence.

It also indicates the vulnerability of the human mind, to be so easily moulded and malleability that this carnivore now, asserts their ‘I have no emotions’ by eating the meat on their plate.

It behooves us as vegan to remember your own journey. And turn the energy of argument and debate to the system which perpetuates it, not the individual trapped in it.

The carnivore across you hears- ‘your meat or your morals” and we know a trapped or cornered animal does not surrender, it fights.

Photo by Dayvison de Oliveira Silva: https://www.pexels.com/photo/red-pepper-placed-on-yellow-background-5695888/