Previous Hexbear post on this issue by @ButtBidet@hexbear.net
I have thoughts so strap in. This is a bit of a rant trigger for me.
Food is awesomely important to humans. Every culture I have looked at (layperson, not anthropologist so there’s that) has some sort of food-hospitality ritual. Festivities have particular foods associated with them, you eat and drink certain things at weddings, funerals, birthdays, season changes, whatever. In houses it is often the kitchen which becomes the center of activity and socialisation. Food is probably involved to some degree in the vast majority of good memories you have, from meals with family, self indulgence after a hard or stressful day, meetings with friends, celebrations of achievement etc.
This isn’t that surprising, we are meat and it needs sustaining. A huge amount of effort in any individual’s life goes into securing and eating food.
But if you’re the kind of person that doesn’t view the world through a systemic lens, that looks at structural issues and ideological hegemony as a series of individual moral failings. Well someone raising veganism is obviously doing so to say that you are a bad person and you should feel guilty about all of your good memories. You see this shit directly, people constantly accuse vegans of having moral superiority complexes and wanting to shame people. Research says people vastly overestimate how negatively vegans judge non vegans. Antivegans also conveniently forget that almost every single vegan was non-vegan and thus was complicit in carnism until they were given the chance to change by someone else’s advocacy and education.
Generally the data say that people who anticipate negative judgement less from vegans are more likely to rate vegans as more moral/more positively. Notably this is true even in the absence of any actual interactions. The lashing out is massively driven by a guilt complex caused by a garbage understanding of how human societies and systemic evil actually work.
This makes me wonder if there is an approach to selling veganism that offers the same approach marxism makes when it comes to socialism - not being a moralist about it. I suspect selling to those people would be more effective without the preconceived beliefs they have about vegans and moral judgement. Maybe a specific spinoff branch of veganism without the name vegan, named intentionally to get people to ask what it is. It would potentially enable a foot in the door because it wouldn’t trigger the reactions.
Idk, figure out how to make yourself vegan and get back to me with what opened your mind?
My experience was studying/working in ag and packing chickens I loved into crates to go be murdered triggering a lifetime of guilt and a slowly narrowing list of people it was acceptable to murder for pleasure based on the latest science. Before I realised my null hypothesis was entirely fucked up and kept leading me astray. I can’t really empathise with people who aren’t acutely aware of the guilt and shame in carnism as it happened to me around the time I feel I can start recalling consistent memories (14ish) so it’s hard for me to understand what would be individually effective.
The only times I’ve managed to actually change anyone’s mind in person it has been a process of relentless reminders that another way is possible which has preventing them from embracing the “normal, natural, necessary” required to justify stuff.
Lots of activists try different things, and many studies have been done. But it appears that mind-changing happens over a long time and we’re basically highly persistent to being persuaded of anything once we form our first opinion. The best studies basically say “after such and such an intervention people rated their likelihood of going vegan higher/lower on the exit survey”. Not useless, but it’s impossible to capture what actually converts people that way.
Personally I get the most “huh” faces when I wear my elwood’s dog meat Tshirt and cause random people to come up to me and make most of the case of veganism for me in the face of my apparent inhumanity.
Idk, figure out how to make yourself vegan and get back to me with what opened your mind?
My reasons are dietary. I have IBS that might be crohns or worse or something else (nobody seems to reliably know) that basically makes eating right now a very annoying thing to manage. Everything I do is about being as insanely boring as possible and not upsetting my body when I am seemingly balanced.
Mayyyyybe I could figure out balancing things while also being vegan but the barrier for me is quite high, I become completely incapacitated for days at a time when something sets me off, it’s very severe, and sometimes it just happens all by itself without a trigger. Going low fodmap is helpful. But nothing reliably has fodmap testing and fodmap info isn’t on any packaging for anything despite the prevalence of bowel problems and the well researched fact that low-fodmap diets are well known to help it.
Don’t fence sit! Go vegan, we get magic powers like firebreath (need a lighter) it comes out the wrong end though.
