Okay, my title is a bit harsh. Maybe the title should be “Things I Dislike” or “Things I Find a Double Standard In.” Or something with even worse grammar.
I bring this up because of a conversation I had at /orate, about meat and vegans and, you know, the general shit that gets discussed on an online message board because we’re all trying desperately to show how mature we are. It was in a thread about “Walls of Glass,” a slideshow of pigs and cows being butchered, from the moment they’re wrangled up and killed to the moment they’re hung up on racks. Now, of course, that kind of imagery is shocking and disturbing, and I’m an animal lover so it sucks to see animals being killed. But on the other hand, I like meat. I think it tastes good and I think it’s good for me, so I eat it. I’ve had plenty of arguments (most of them on the internet, go figure) about the morality of eating animals, so let’s just skip that and move to the heart of this post: why I dislike veganism.
People who practice veganism range from really cool people to downright assholes. This may not seem surprising, as that wide range of personality extends to the general populace — ah hell, what am I talking about? Let’s get down to brass tacks.
Vegans are setting a double standard, and it goes like this: if I am having a dinner party, and a vegan is coming, it is usually assumed that I must make something for the vegan to eat. So if we have steaks, then I gotta make some kind of non-steak dish for the vegan. This way the vegan won’t feel “left out” (and also won’t starve, I guess). This would be okay in my book if it were reciprocated, but it’s not. If a vegan has a dinner party, the vegan will make only vegan foods, and will not make “meat” foods. This is a double standard. In fact, if I go to a vegan’s house for a dinner party and, knowing that they won’t prepare any animal products, bring a steak to make myself, there’s a pretty good chance I’ll be chewed out because of it. Why? Because of the poor treatment of animals, blah blah etc. My point is this: that’s not fair. At every party I’ve been to where there is a vegan (and Heidi, if you’re reading this, know that I think you’re awesome but hear me out), the vegan will always get some “vegan food.” For example, if we’re eating pizza, there will be one regular pizza and one pizza without meat or cheese on it. No one else is going to eat that pizza. Only the vegan will eat that.
Which means the vegan gets their own food! A whole pizza to themselves, while I have to share a pizza with a bunch of partygoers who are now going to eat twice as much because they’re terrified of gnawing on a bunch of crust and tomato sauce. That’s not fair! And alternately, if I’m at the vegan’s party, I have to gnaw on that crust! I’m forced to!
“You’re not forced,” the vegans say. “You don’t have to eat.”
Well you don’t have to eat at my party! Take that!
Sometimes vegans, in order to placate the dirty meat-eaters, will use strange alchemy skills to change the taste of tofu into the taste of something like meat, only rubbier and not like meat at all. They say, “See, this tofu tastes like meat!” This leads me into my second point: vegans eating meat-tasting things that aren’t actually meat. This is a disgrace to veganism. Vegans, to me, are an ascetic people, who live by extreme and stringent rules. They’re monkish, in other words. If this is true, then wouldn’t eating something that tastes like meat betray their own morality? Wouldn’t it mean that they want to eat meat? I think that if you’re going to abide by such stringent rules, then you shouldn’t eat things that taste like meat, because that shows that you want to eat meat, which means that deep down in your tree-hugging heart, you have a taste for murder!
My solution for this issue is for vegans to bring their own food to the party. A lot of them do that already, and those vegans are nice people. Or they help pay for their vegan pizza. But alternately, you have to allow us meat eaters to bring food to your parties, and if that is meat, then by god it’s meat, and we’re going to eat it and love it.
And that’s what I think about that.