How vegan is vegan enough?

Back in the 90’s, when I was an idealistic teenager, I stopped eating meat with a vengeance. I’d freak out if I found a piece of gristle in my soup or if someone’s pepperoni pizza slice touched my cheese slice. I’d go into McDonald’s bathrooms and tag “Meat is Murder” with my black sharpie and plaster the stall with McMurder stickers. I adopted a turkey named Leonard through Farm Sanctuary and put his picture on the table for Thanksgiving dinner.

Around that time, a friend convinced me to go vegan, but when I became a poor college student in NYC, I let it slip. I resorted to a lot of dollar pizza slices and whatever was on sale at the grocery store. I was also getting tired of having to spending an extra fifteen minutes studying food labels for anything I wanted to buy. Remember, this was before Whole Foods, Trader Joe’s, and vegan butchers and bon-bon shops. When my dad would tell a server I was “vaygun,” he just got back puzzled stares.

The Bloody Egg

With my veganism on the back burner, I lived a typical vegetarian lifestyle, eating scrambled eggs for brunch, devouring cheese and crackers at parties, and buying leather boots and bags. But then there was the bloody egg. One morning I was making omelets and cracked the last free-range egg into my mixing bowl. I screamed and jumped away. Attached to the yolk was a bloody, mucousy glob. I made my husband wash all of it down the sink and we had waffles instead.

A quick internet search answered my question about why there could be blood in an egg (and also informed me that, according to superstition, I would die soon). After learning that blood in eggs is apparently no big deal and safe to eat (eww!!), I realized that I couldn’t remember what I was really eating when I ate a chicken egg. Another five minutes on my laptop revealed to me, in graphic detail, what I had once known about the egg industry, but had chosen to forget. The egg, hence the name, is an unfertilized egg that starts its journey in the ovaries and eventually comes out the chicken’s lady parts. For the vast, vast majority of chickens in the food industry, this is a miserable existence, full of suffering and death.

So, eggs were out and tofu and VeganEgg were in. But what about milk? What about cheese? With milk, I think I had lazily bought into the notion that the cows who produced my organic milk all had names, like Daisy and Maisy, and spent their days grazing with their cow family across vast green pastures. While it is true that some organic dairy farmers have higher standards for animal treatment than your typical feedlot operators, it’s not like I had really done the research on what I was buying and I was still propping up an industry full of bad actors. With so many delicious nut-based milks, there was really no reason for me to keep drinking cow’s milk, so I stopped.

Cheese was my final hold out. I didn’t want to give up pizza, goat cheese croquettes on my beet salads, gooey enchiladas, or ravioli bursting with ricotta. Whereas the world of meat and milk substitutes offers a dizzying array of scrumptious alternatives, vegan cheese still leaves a lot to be desired.

Of course, I broke with logic in telling myself I was ok eating the finished product of cheese but not the main ingredient. Telling someone, “I’m vegan except for cheese,” is akin to someone saying, “I’m vegetarian except for chicken” or “I don’t smoke except for cigars”—it just doesn’t make sense. As someone who values consistency, I eventually dropped cheese from my diet too.

Crisis of Conscience

As I make this shift in my life and as the debate goes on about the vegan-ness of almonds and avocados, how vegan is vegan enough?

What motivated me to limit and eventually eliminate animal products from my diet were the animals. It breaks my heart to see innocent animals suffer and die. I don’t want to support and perpetuate their suffering and I don’t want to bring it into my body and spirit by consuming it. The bounty of the plant world more than meets my nutritional needs and I love the natural flavors of the Earth. There is simply no reason for an animal to suffer and die so that I can eat. There are other extremely valid reasons that support a plant-based diet (like climate change!), but I am vegan first and foremost for the animals.

But a tour of my house might suggest otherwise. While we have a vegan kitchen, a visit to my closet tells a different story. A large percentage of my shoes have leather components or, like my knee-high boots, are basically all leather. My favorite handbags are leather. To stay warm during Minnesota winters, a couple of years ago I bought a new winter coat that is basically a giant down sleeping bag. Walking into my bathroom, are all my skincare products cruelty-free? My make-up? I always assumed so, but truthfully, I don’t know. Opening the pantry of cleaning supplies, which ones were tested on animals or made by a company that tests on animals?

I had a crisis of conscience. My first reaction was to get rid of anything that could be traced back to animal suffering. But I almost immediately started hedging. I could part with my old Michael Kors purse and leather computer bag, but what about my Gucci tiger bag? I lusted over that for weeks before deciding to blow my bonus on it. I could do without my brown boots, but what about my black ones that have perfectly molded to my feet the last ten years. Would I sell my car with its leather seats? Where would I draw the line and would the very existence of a line undermine what I was trying to achieve? Also, as I thought about selling or donating, how could I be sure that would really reduce purchases of new products and make any kind of a difference?

With this turmoil inside, I did what a lot of people do when they feel bad about themselves—I turned on others. At the grocery store, I stopped a couple in matching Canada Goose jackets to let them know that the fur trim on the hoods was made from wild coyotes caught in steel leg traps. My intention was simply to make them aware of what they had bought, since I’ve found a lot of people are surprised to learn it is real fur. But of course with all of my charged emotions, it didn’t come across like that. Not only was it a fairly unpleasant exchange, but I was wracked with this feeling of hypocrisy. I may not own any fur, but I walked away from them in leather shoes. Who was I to judge?

As I turned the mirror back to myself, I saw a lot of shame. I was ashamed at my complicity in having supported something that I now see clearly and am so whole-heartedly against. It raised questions of integrity and whether I am living in alignment with one of my core values. I felt like a poser, like every time I wanted to ask in a restaurant about whether something could be made vegan, I would be audited for how committed I was to the cause. What if I had come to the restaurant with a leather handbag slung over my shoulder? Did I have the right to potentially inconvenience someone in the kitchen to satisfy my request?

Leading with the Heart

Sitting with this discomfort, I realized two things. First, it is fully within my power to make future choices that honor my values and support dignity and compassion. As in recent months, I will make choices with my heart and seek to cause the least amount of suffering as possible. When deciding where to spend my money, I will make sure I am supporting businesses that enable positive choices and are changing the world for the better. I will also support the respectful education of others so that ignorance becomes less and less of an excuse for perpetuating harm.

Second, I need to absolve myself of the guilt and shame over decisions I made when I didn’t know better and wasn’t viewing these choices through a value-driven lens. To impulsively get rid of everything I own that can be traced to animal suffering would be to give in to those low energies and disrespect the animals that so selflessly gave their lives for what I have. Left unchecked, those feelings of guilt and shame will just lead me further astray and push me toward a life of perfection and absolutism that isn’t healthy and I know I can’t live up to. I will never be that level 5 vegan.

Perhaps another lesson coming out of this is that I don’t need to be perfect to care and I shouldn’t judge others for their imperfections, especially if they are trying. Creating a better world for animals and all living things doesn’t require complete perfection, but caring and compassion. I should relax in the knowing that I am doing the best I can. If splurging on a big cheesy Italian dinner every once in a while will bring me joy, I can give myself permission to experience that without guilt or shame. By following my heart and holding my love of animals in it, I know I’ll make the right choice.

Author: Carolyn Brouillard
Image: Fabio Bernardi (Flickr for commercial use)