I've been a vegetarian for 15 years. People IRL often do get offended if you tell them you don't eat meat. I try my best to avoid saying it because it often leads to being lectured about proteins. Everyone suddenly becomes a nutritionist when you explain why you don't eat meat.
Yeah. I try not to mention it to people if I can avoid it. I work construction and am surrounded by manly men tring to out man each other. I had one guy offer me bear jerkey and got bent out of shape when I declined. He wouldn't stop. He just kept on me about why I didn't eat meat. After about an hour of him asking again and again why I don't eat meat I said "meat's another word for dick and eating dick is gay". As problematic as it was, it worked.
It never cases to amaze me that a 250pound dude with a 40oz soda in one hand and a mouthfull of gas station pizza thinks he has the responsibility to lecture me about nutrition.
My dad always acts like i'm close to dying because i'm vegan. I work out every day, he eats meat 3 times a day and even his vegetables are unhealthy as fuck. He's so overweight that getting into his car is super exhausting. Pretty weird if someone like that gives you tips on how to eat right.
As a life-long vegetarian, this has been my experience as well.
Why do they believe you only find protein in meat?
Lots of people are really stupid
And we've been (forgive the pun) fed propaganda by the industrial farming and food industry for generations, not to mention the religious right.
From what I have seen, it more stems from the activism vegans are engaged in more than the actual veganism.
Do-gooder derogation Basically, some people perceive others' moral choices as criticism or as some kind of bragging.
Fascinating! Thank you for this article. It exactly describes what's happening: "oh, you think you're better than us? I'll have another steak!"
And some just see those who militantly focus on attacking fellow individuals instead of the systems that are actually to blame (but which they otherwise support and/or benefit from, like capitalism, racism, and ableism) counterproductive, annoying, and hypocritical.
The militant vegans I have come across, and being vegan myself, it's a lot, far too many (E: to the point I actively avoid vegan spaces), are almost exclusively drowning in so much privilege, they can't see how ridiculous they're being in their bizarre militancy of policing other people's plates instead of the actual industries abusing animals (and humans, who these vegans rarely to never pay any thought to, not out loud or in their actions, anyway).
(before I even hit send: if you feel personally attacked by my comment - that's a sign for you to think about it with yourself and ideally do something about it, not try and prove me wrong, inevitably proving me 100% right)
If you accept that there are moral/ethical problems with eating meat (contribution to climate change, health concerns, animals being killed and eaten, whatever), and choose to eat meat anyway, and encounter a vegan, what has to happen?
You can accept that they are making a better choice, but then you have to accept that you're making a worse choice. Most people are cowards and protect the ego at any cost. Rather than shrugging and saying "yeah, i should eat less meat. Good for you taking the high road", which requires accepting that you're not being the best, you can instead grab onto any reasons why no it's really them that sucks. That's easier, more comfortable, and doesn't require any painful introspection or changes.
It's the same mechanism when people get mad at cyclists, pedestrians, people who go to the gym, people who don't shop at Walmart, whatever. They're doing something that makes you feel bad in comparison. Most people are terrible at that and will lash out instead of doing anything productive.
Alternatively, or maybe additionally, people are really tribal, and once they adopt the idea that vegans (or cyclists, or people driving small cars, or people wearing sandals, whatever) are in the outgroup, then they enjoy being hostile to them.
People are ego driven emotional morons. All of us. Me, too. It's terrible.
I've never once in the last decade seen a single vegan post other than recipes. What I do see is constant posts about how "vegans are always throwing it my face/holier than thou", "I'm gonna eat extra meat because vegans make me feel bad". I really don't think vegans are the problem, I think these fools fall for every single piece of beef industry propaganda that comes across their screens.
Holier than thou attitude from new vegans whose world view changed overnight and cognitive dissonance on the part of non vegan with the need to deflect than to make substantial changes.
It's a first world hill to die on, and many of the people who espouse veganism are only able to do so because of their own privilege.
It's a combination of smugness and "I'm better than you" and the lack of awareness that everyone had and continues to benefit from a world that has always used animal products. The Industrial Revolution basically ran on steam engines and leather belts, for example.
I have absolutely no problem with the idea that using fewer animal products and eating less meat is a good idea. I also recognize that feeding the world's growing population is probably going to involve insects being more widely used as a food source.
Vegans literally are suggesting solutions to the growing population because in almost every situation, it is much more efficient by land and water use for people to eat plant-based rather than meat. It's only a "first world hill to die on" if you think poor people can't eat plants. Sorry but I don't think this is a very accurate take...
Because of the trope that vegans are pretentious twats that publicly chastise anyone not vegan.
Like most things it’s one of those situations that’s blown out of proportion and the vast majority of us will never interact with a preachy vegan. I’ve encountered many vegans in the wild and they’ve most all been decent people, and I love picking their brains for decent vegan or vegetarian foods. I don’t mind vegan/vegetarianism, it’s just not easy to do well, so it helps to talk to people who do it for real. That said, I have encountered a few that are on the preachy side, but whatever. They’re no different than the tool who has the “eat tasty animals” bumper sticker and the like.
The same reason people hate leftists, feminists, trans athletes, "gamer girls", people on welfare, blacks, etc. An image the right cultivated of the group, out of convenient easily-hateable annoying people in it that they could use to create a generalization/stereotype out of. It's something that's able to happen to any group, I could portray any hobbyist or activist in this way the same exact way as these "annoying" groups are portrayed, but the right is particularly willing to just flat out lie, slander, and cheat their way into making countercultural/anti-status-quo groups look as absurd as possible, to the point that the majority of the population falls for it (even those that don't consider themselves to be conservative).
I'll make a comparison. Conservative/"anti-sjw" thumbnails often have a picture of some angry-looking rainbow haired woman, usually the same few, in order to be like "look how irrational and crazy these feminazis are, she must hate men so much" and like 4 out of 5 of those times it's a picture of a woman that was protesting a literal neo-nazi gathering or something, not some sort of radical crazy man-hating feminist. But the internet has conditioned the average person to look at someone like that and immediately think they're an irrational "feminazi", and conservatives showing these pictures everywhere and making 100 videos on the same person makes people subconsciously believe they're rampant and have a massive (and bad) grip on society.
Same kind of thing happens with vegans, you have the same 10 or so internet vegans people use to portray veganism that conditions people to think poorly of the concept "vegan", and when these influencers are confronted about it they say "I don't hate veganism, I just hate the annoying vegans" then they go onto Twitter to complain about the vegans and how they're irrational for not eating meat and their brains must be de-evolving or something. They know what they're doing, but they can hide behind plausible deniability, and the majority of viewers fall for it.
I don't hate veganism. It's a dietary choice and that's fine. What I hate is vegans. They're always pushy and judgmental and hateful and sometimes even destructive in their activism. They're an annoying group of people and I just don't want to have to deal with them.
Unfortunately this is a topic like abortion.
Vegans and pro life folks see what "others" are doing as murder/evil. So naturally, since they view the behavior as absolutely inappropriate, their discussion of the topic is always very energetic.
I am not advocating for any dietary path, or abortion position in this comment. I'm only describing people's behavior. Do not misrepresent me.
Instead of whimsy anecdotes, how about something with a bit more science behind it: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Do-gooder_derogation
The meat and dairy industries have been pumping out propaganda for years, mostly aimed at right-wing dudes. It's just kind of part of right-wing culture at this point to kneejerk react to veganism with tired old tropes and stereotypes.
It was worse back in the 90s and early 2000s.
I said this on another thread posted by a very antagonistic vegan: Acting holier-than-thou, smug, and hostile is not a good way to convince people of your arguments. It pushes people away and biases them against you and the argument you're making.
Far too often I see vegans outright shaming and harassing people for choosing to eat meat, or acting smug and superior because they are making "the right moral decision" and everyone else is lessor for thinking otherwise. I often see them call people "stupid" and "lazy" for not making the same choice they did.
Now, if I came here acting the same way, but I was championing eating only meat and shaming others for eating vegetables, I'm sure vegans would be upset for the same reason.
It's gotten bad enough that a lot of people (admittedly myself included) are put off by vegans and their arguments. Not because the arguments don't have merit (they certainly do) but because enough vegans have acted antagonistic or smug that they get shunned for it when the discussion gets brought up, because it's what has become expected.
If you really want people to listen to you, you need to frame it from a friendlier and more down-to-earth position and not come across as hostile. The human mind tends to close itself off immediately when faced with hostility. This doesn't just apply to discussions about veganism, but any discussion in general really.
I have absolutely encountered way more smug meat eaters than vegans or vegetarians... They go out of their way to make sexual jokes about forcing some sausage down people's throats, too.
Speaking as a life-long lacto-ovo vegetarian who did a ten year stint as a vegan (I'm 30), it's because there is a subset of the vegan population that's very gung-ho about their diet and wants to proselytize about it, and no one likes being told what they should eat. When you remark on people's diets, people tend to get annoyed and defensive about it.
I grew up being told that my food looked yucky, how I can't call something meatballs since it doesn't contain meat, how since I don't eat protein I'll die, so on, so forth. It got annoying fast, so now I don't generally discuss my diet unless it makes a contextual sense. e.g. when planning a restaurant outing with people - though to be frank I often just avoid social situations where food plays a role.
I think where the big clashes really happen is when someone has made veganism/eating meat a core part of their identity, having that criticised, however gently that might be, will cause friction and often cause people to double-down on it; even though they may know on some level that the criticism might even be valid. You can see this in the fat pride movement as well.
This is so frustrating. People saying "Oh I just don't like those self-righteous vegans". Thing is, it doesn't really matter what vegans say or how reasonable/logically sound it is, the knee-jerk reaction is always the same.
Because I sat at a table for an hour with a work colleague lecturing me on veganism. I couldn't care less if you don't lecture me.
People don’t hate veganism as much as they don’t appreciate being judged for their choices and chastised by other adults for beliefs that they don’t share.
Personally I have no problem respecting the beliefs of people who are vegan due to their personal morals. Until they start disrespecting the beliefs of others who don’t agree with them with regards to meat, then they become annoying.
Yeah I don't get it either. You do you 🤷🏼♂️
As long as people aren't trying to force their views on me (veganism, religion, what have you), I couldn't care less.
This is my experience as well. People don't hate vegans specifically, they hate evangelists generally.
There in lies the rub, though. Most vegans are vegan for a moral reason that they believe applies to you:
There are more fringe reasons for veganism such as: diet, health, etc. But those aren't relevant to the point I'm making.
"Live and let live" doesn't apply to situations where we're talking about global warming or the abuse of animals. Most vegans are trying to educate others and - yeah - they probably vote for things that would result in more expensive meat or less meat being available in your local markets. I believe most vegans are hoping their efforts will slow global warming and provide better living conditions for livestock.
I'm not trying to sit on a moral podium here and judge. I eat meat too. I'm not vegan. Though I've tried to reduce how much meat I eat in yet another small, feckless, civilian effort to slow global warming. All I'm saying is: I sympathize with people who want to improve the world and I understand why they spend time and effort talking about being vegan.
But meat in america is cheaper than the vegan stuff and definitely tastier. So it's hard for us to meaningfully change.
Usually it’s not veganism, itself. Rather, it’s the vegans.
Specifically the annoyingly loud, self-righteous, insists-everyone-must-join-them vegans.
Unfortunately, most people only really see this sort of vegan- rather than the more common, average sort of person who happens to also be vegan.
It’s part of a shifting norm and shifting norms are always controversial. Especially norms that involve opening up bodily autonomy, dignity, or respect to previously excluded groups.
My personal experience has actually been quite whew opposite of everyone here apparently. Of the 3 vegans I've spent time with, not one of them has ever brought it up to preach or to sound smug. It only ever comes up because I ask for a recipe they served and they say something along the lines of "now, this is a vegan recipe, but you should be able to substitute 'x' with 'y' if you wanna avoid that." It's never preachy, it's always in the "don't let this being vegan ruin it for you" kind of way.
My low stakes conspiracy is that vegan hate on the internet is like people that don't like the word moist. They either watched friends and decided to adopt that as a personality trait, or they look up to someone that did just that. They hate veganism because they watched a comedian quip about it and agreed or they saw someone that watched a comedian and agreed. It's all too consistent to not be feeding from the same bowl.
I'm an ex vegan (about 5 years) so I've been on both sides if it. Here's my opinion.
When I was a vegan it was very much a part of my identity. It was something that I thought about 2-3 times (at least) per day when I ate, and any time I went to buy food. I remember being actually insufferable about it for a long time and I'm pretty sure I've lost friends over it, being annoying and preach to a friend's husband and then eventually just not getting invited back for game night. So people are definitely feeling burned/rejected/otherized by vegans who, if not just coming right out and saying it, strongly infer that you are a "bad person" for consuming even small amounts of animal products, or at least let you know that you're being judged for it. As an ex-vegan I've experienced this myself.
On the other hand, non-vegans are also insufferable about food. My friend in college didn't like cheese. Hated how it tasted, hated the way it felt in his mouth. But he loved pizza. He would often buy pizzas for everyone, with cheese on, pick the cheese off himself, and eat it without. I swear that every time he did this someone would say something about it, "what? You don't like cheese? Why?!" I personally had to endure a lot of weird questions and looks, and comments when after volunteering for a whole day at a baseball field for my son's team, and they served pizza after which I just refused. I just quietly didn't get myself any, and people had like 20 questions about it. I didn't even bring up that I was a vegan, I just said I wasn't hungry, which was odd and apparently unacceptable.
Vegans and vegetarians also get judged for their diets, there are plenty of non-v people who will become like preemptively defensive about it, and let you know they think you're weak and unhealthy. You get otherized and judged, even if you dont care what people eat and you just patiently say that its a personal choice, for health or the environment or whatever. This actually deepens the in-group acceptance/out-group rejection of everyone involved. The next time a vegan has to hear about their choices they'll be less patient with the person asking; the next time that person eats an egg around a vegan and gets lectured, they'll be less patient and around and around it goes.
I have theories about why this is, some of which maybe are apparent from what I've written. I think people do construct identities around consumer behavior, and they feel rejected when someone doesn't share those same consumptive habits which they take for granted. I'll get into it if anyone gives a shit.
But I think theres a problem with public discourse that encourages this kind of ingroup/outgroup good/bad acceptance/rejection, so much that it is implied in all discourse whether a vegan or not. This is the thing that drove me away from veganism: I think that vegans are right about a lot of things, but they can't actually see the world for what it is, they can mostly only see through this lens. This is basically the same problem with liberals, conservatives, religious, atheist, whatever. Its the cult of the individual having eroded any experience of interconnectedness, even though we are interconnected. As such, people can't see the world for what it really is, we can only see it from behind the fences of our specific camp.
People like to characterize those they already want to disagree with by the worst, most extreme examples of the group. So before even considering the benefits/drawbacks of veganism, people have already chosen their position after thinking "vegans are just so preachy and annoying".
It's putting outrage before reason, and it's really common in social media and news:
Think about how Fox News viewers picture liberals as the least coherent, unreasonable individuals that they see get interviewed, when in reality most are just normal people.
Or the reverse: how people in liberal circles might see conservatives depicted as Maga-hat wearing weirdos who think 5G is killing them.
Same with how many religious people evaluate atheism or atheists think of religion by their worst representatives.
In short, I think the answer is that it's a symptom of tribalism and identity-politics.
My ex was vegan. While I have absolutely no problem with the practice of being vegan, she would critique and criticize nearly everything I ate. It was extremely exhausting. Nothing against vegans personally however some of them won't shut up about it and try to make you feel bad
People don't like to be made to feel uncomfortable (via knowledge) about something that they enjoy
I don’t hate people who are vegans.
I do hate the person who righteously yelled at me about eating meat while I was eating her vegan food at her house which she invited me to. And then proceeded to send me Facebook farm videos that were obviously staged. I worked on a farm… so when I corrected her what actually does happen on a farm Vs what these idiots were staging to get reactions, it was even more disgusting to me that she wasn’t doing any of this for the animals as she claimed but doing it so she could feel important. So she can fuck right off up a mountain.
So no:I don’t hate people who are vegans. I hate self involved, insincere shitheads.
That said yeah, we need to address commercial farming. It’s an issue. We need to cut down the meat products that are getting produced and stop creating diets that get capitalists richer. But also we need to be honest with what is actually happening. No, they do not give hormones to animals on farms. That practice was discontinued prior to the 1990s. We need to out assholes who spread this bullshit online, dampening the real issues as to why introducing more plant based food is necessary. We also have to keep plant based food healthy and not just inject it with sugar ,salt and fat creating the same health issues we had with consuming commercialized meat.
Also I think this is why vegan is a ruined word and why ‘plant-based’ is now becoming a substitute. To replace this damage that many of the self called vegans did that were just as much lying and cheating as the industry they so much hate. two wrongs do not make a right. So I’m all about the pivot away from that dumpster fire
You tend to get two groups who dislike it. Ignorant folks who think something like no animal stuff means no protein means you shrivel up and die, and the ones who've encountered a few too many militants in their time and ain't interested or are downright sick of their schtick. Vaguely similar to atheism, except replace the animal product stuff with something religion related, ofc.
Because the only way most people interact with vegans is through activists using it as a bludgeon to project hate towards them.
It's not the diet or anything that bothers me; it's the vegans themselves. They're basically religious zealots but for food. If a meat eating atheist went around yelling at vegetarians and theists in unrelated discussions, I'd hate them too.
Defensiveness
I think it’s guilt actually. Most people deep down kind of know that eating meat is wrong, but if the whole world does it, you can’t be blamed cause you have no choice.
And then there comes someone who is not participating. Their existence breaks the logic above and implies that it’s a personal responsibility.
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!