Vegan Rage
Last weekend I was at a barbecue at the beautiful wooded house of a couple I don’t know too well, but want to because they’re involved with art and food and a lot of things I’m interested in. We arrived late, after dinner, and the guy was telling us about the meat he’d grilled and how the vegetarians were mad because he wasn’t cooking the eggplant and how they were a bunch of dummies. He was making it funny because he’s a good storyteller. And then eventually the question, “None of you are vegetarian, right?” “I am, actually,” I piped up, small, already injecting a breezy, laughing lilt to my voice. “Then you know they’re dummies,” he said good-naturedly. “Uh-huh,” I continued chuckle-speaking, unable to come up with a rejoinder. The moment passed. It totally wasn’t a big deal.
Except I’ve been navigating that kind of casual put-down for my entire adult life. It’s totally not a big deal, I have a great sense of humor about it. That’s what’s required of vegans and vegetarians after all. “I’m not, like, a militant vegetarian,” I think I used to say when I was younger, to differentiate myself from those self-righteous scolds who drag down a party. I did everything I could to distance myself from them, or at least from that archetype that everyone seemed to imagine they — we —were. I made myself agreeable and light, not unlike the way I wrapped my femaleness in a pleasing and impenetrable shield when I hung out in groups of mostly men. I’m well-practiced at being agreeable.
Vegans take even more shit than vegetarians. A day into her externship, my friend from culinary school was getting grilled by her new coworkers about why she was vegan. She refused to answer, because she was new and self-conscious and just wanted to fit in. People do that, they needle and press, but it’s a trap because if you start to talk to them about animal rights or suffering, then you become the judgmental vegan they thought you were. I was reading Alicia Kennedy's great piece On Milk the other day, and at one point she slips into something resembling anger. “The cultural aspect of cow’s milk as the milk, which is supported with taxpayer money without sufficient animal welfare regulation—if there could even be sufficient welfare regulation of an industry where cows are forcibly inseminated and then have their babies taken from them, as they cry out, so that humans can drink the milk meant for calves and the male calves can become veal—has been the troubling thing for me.” Oh no Alicia, I thought as I read, you’re gonna make the milk-drinkers feel judged! As if that’s the worst thing you could do, worse than actually tearing baby calves from their mothers.
Judgement usually goes the other way around. I’ve almost never seen vegans who criticize meat-eaters unprovoked, but there are plenty of meat-eaters who go out of their way to antagonize vegans, whether playfully or aggressively. The jokes typically rest on the ideas that vegans are prim and ascetic, incapable of enjoying life’s pleasures, or naive and hypocritical, only professing to be better than a system that they’re just as responsible for as everyone else. In professional cooking, you get the sense that anyone who doesn’t butcher animals is not worthy of respect. In all the chef memoirs I’ve read, from Anthony Bourdain to Gabrielle Hamilton, willingness to butcher or kill is characterized as toughness, part of the grit that makes them good at their jobs. If I were at any other restaurant than the one I am, I’m sure I would encounter the same attitudes.
When will it become tiresome to make fun of vegans? I’m afraid the answer is never, because it’s such a useful tool for pushing away the things that people don’t want to think about. Nobody wants to imagine the suffering of animals that are as smart as the pets we cuddle every day. Nobody likes to dwell too much on industrial farming and climate change. Easier to ridicule those intractable, annoying goody two shoes who are always whining about the menu or won’t partake in the gorgeous roast you just made, who pretend to care about all these heavy topics that no one actually cares about that much. Right?
Anyway, I could use a better response to the question, “Why don’t you eat meat?” if anyone’s got one they like. Something a little spicy. I’m not so terrified of confrontation as I once was. I can take some heat.