30 Things That Won’t Happen Just Because You Went Vegan

No promises, though. 


1. You won’t fall over and die, at least not because you went vegan.

2. You won’t live forever, either.

3. You won’t suddenly become a supermodel if you weren’t one before you went vegan.

4. You won’t become a misanthrope. Probably. If you keep aggravating us, though, there are no promises.


5. You won’t get a vegan police badge.

6. Unless you do. It’s completely optional.

7. You won’t suddenly start wearing lettuce leaves for clothing.

8. Oh, god. I swear, this is not required.

9. You won’t face off against the Paleos, snapping your fingers and doing dramatic dance moves a la the Jets vs. the Sharks from West Side Story. It’s fun to imagine this, though.

10. You won’t lose your sense of humor, I promise.

11. You won’t get fat.

12. You won’t get skinny.

13. You won’t force omnis to try your cashew cheese and stand over them with a creepy smile until they tell you they like it. At least, you’ll try to not smile creepily.

14. You won’t transform your vehicle into a mobile bumper sticker display unit.

15. Unless you do just that.

16. You won’t have daydreams about Ted Nugent going hunting with a tipsy, trigger-happy, near-sighted Dick Cheney. Necessarily.

17. You won’t roll your eyes reflexively every time you discover that someone who calls himself a vegan eats fish “occasionally.” You will just never associate with him again.

18. You won’t develop Gummy Mouth Syndrome from eating nutritional yeast straight out of the tub. Necessarily.

19. You won’t walk around the farmers market trying to find shots that will be the most impressive with the vintage-y filter on Instagram. Necessarily.

20. You won’t stamp a vegan message on all your dollars.

21. You won’t because it’s just as easy and more personal to write it out by hand.

22. You won’t strike up conversations with random strangers at the tofu-tempeh-seitan section of the grocery store. You will strike up conversations in the produce section, the bulk aisle, the check-out aisle and the tofu-tempeh-seitan section. Oh, sometimes the meat counter, too, when you’re feeling feisty.

23. You won’t necessarily have your LDL/HDL ratio and blood pressure committed to memory in case you have the occasion to bring them up in a debate. You may just have it written down somewhere you can easily access at any time.

24. You won’t plan your vacations around food. You will plan your whole life around it.

25. You won’t get all excited when you find out that a celebrity is vegan. You know that you are only setting yourself up for crushing disappointment if you do.

26. You won’t sit out your family’s Thanksgiving meal in protest. You will go so they can look at you in the face as they shove body parts, mammary secretions and ovum into their faces.

27. You won’t dress in potato sacks and hemp sandals.

28. Unless you really want to do that.

29. You won’t have a constant bowl of cashews soaking. I mean, if you have a nut allergy you won’t.

30 You won’t have a panic attack when the only bananas at the grocery store are phosphorescent green. You won’t because you already have three bunches of back-up bananas in various stages of ripeness at home, not counting the ones that are already in the freezer.

 Who runs out of bananas? Amateurs.

World Vegan Month Tip #5

Give yourself permission to take "time outs" when you are starting to feel overwhelmed. Being aware of the needless suffering and slaughter done to billions of innocent animals each year can be very painful and overwhelming to know about, which can lead to burn out. Better yet, vow to take care of yourself before burn out begins by always feeding your spirit with the things that nourish you: see movies, take time to walk in nature, meet a friend for dinner, revisit some old hobbies. We cannot help the animals if we become so overwhelmed that we disengage. Take care of yourself! You are important and you deserve it.

World Vegan Month Tip #4

Framing veganism as a lifestyle of deficiency or denying oneself is not a good long-term success plan and it doesn't acknowledge the amazing abundance and countless positive benefits available to us. The next time you find yourself saying, "I can't eat this," or "I can't go there," think about how you are communicating veganism to yourself and to the world. We are so fortunate to be able to live in a time when we can live according to our values. We get to eat amazing, health-promoting, harmless food, we get to decide how we want to spend our money and time. Isn't that an incredible opportunity? Successful and effective long-term veganism happens when we no longer look at the world through the lens of lack and denial but through a clear-eyed perspective of gratitude, abundance and acknowledgement of this rare opportunity we have.

World Vegan Month Tip #3

Don't leave yourself in the lurch! One of the best ways that you can ensure you can maintain your vegan aspirations is to make it easy for yourself. A simple strategy for this is to keep your kitchen well-stocked with items that can be used any time for making a quick meal, like pasta, soups, and so on.

World Vegan Month Tip #2

Give your taste buds some time to adapt to healthier habits. "The longer we eat healthier foods, the better they taste," says Dr. Michael Greger in this short but informative video and the research backs up this claim. Many people claim to not like vegan food, but have they really given it a try?

World Vegan Month Tip #1

November is World Vegan Month so for the entire month, Vegan Street will be posting a new daily tip to help make veganism easier and more accessible to all. Daily tip #1 (sorry we missed yesterday): Be gentle with yourself while setting concrete goals. If your goal is to reduce consumption of animal products, figure out easy replacements, for example, almond milk in the place of cow's milk in your cereal. Keep finding ways to decrease or eliminate animal products and increase vegan foods. Setting realistic, specific goals rather than aspiring to something vague will get you closer to tangible results.

On Owning Language

Some people really hate labels. I am not one of those people. 

I know that I should shun labels. I am an open-minded, artistic, rebellious type. (Oh wait, those are actually more labels.) But labels are for cans of soup, right? On the surface, yes, but on a level  deeper than that, labels can actually help people to flesh out what was once two-dimensional and inaccessible to them. If you are “out” as someone who identifies with certain so-called labels, it helps those who meet you to understand the richness and complexities of human nature more, not less, and actually see you in a much more expansive way than it would seem that a label would allow.

At a university surrounded by cornfields, I was happy and honored to be able to embrace the label of feminist. Why wouldn’t I be? Feminists were powerful and independent and not taking any nonsense from anyone. It wasn’t long, though, before I learned that it was not so cut-and-dried for the many other young women who made it crystal clear that they did not self-identify as feminists. Even if they were going to college to develop marketable skills and knowledge for professional careers upon graduation, or as a stepping stone to the advanced degrees denied their female forebears, they weren’t feminists, no way, no how. In talking with people, what I learned was largely that they had conflicts with the image and perception of what they thought it meant to be a feminist. To many who disassociated themselves from feminism, it often seemed motivated by a conflict between the image of themselves they were trying to project and feminism.

The same outdated notions prevalent in 1970 were still alarmingly entrenched in 1990. This was what I learned: Feminists don’t shave. Feminists hate men. Feminists don’t wear bras. Feminists are ugly. Sadly, in 2013, all these years later, there is still such a powerful grip the negative associations of feminism has on the word that many women continue to reject the word even as they personally benefit from the advances early feminists fought for years before. In thinking about it, I have to conclude that the universal cultural pressure to be considered attractive might be as powerfully motivating as they come. 

Over the years, I have noticed a growing reticence around the word “vegan” by my fellow herbivores and it also seems to be largely motivated by some similar negative perceptions the dominant culture has attached to us. Vegans are angry. Vegans are busybodies. Vegans are judgmental. Vegans hate people. It’s disappointing to me, as someone who is a proud vegan, to see so many who could be out there creating positive change and challenging perceptions in the world remove their association with the word altogether. I fear that feminism is so full of baggage at this point that I don’t know if we’ll ever rid ourselves of the negative associations attached to it, and I don’t want to see the same thing happen to veganism.

Given the pressing importance of spreading our message of compassionate living, I have to ask this: Whom do we want to control the language and messaging around veganism? Do we want to hand it over to big advertising? Do we want the media to dictate it? Do we want the powers that be, the ones who have everything to lose if veganism takes hold, to control the terms and messaging of it?

I embrace the label “vegan” partly because I am so very grateful to be living at a time and in a place where I can live by my values. This is an extraordinary privilege and it is unique to our age. In embracing the label, we humanize it and then, paradoxically, it becomes less of a label and more of a simple descriptor. If we can live as complex, individual, dynamic and creative vegans, we take the one-size-fits-all label off of us and we create something altogether new and real out of it. This more fleshed out understanding of who vegans are then flows out when we interact in the world so the public will have a more complete understanding, which will help them to reject the shallow clichés that have been tacked onto us. Further, when we take an active role in broaden the public perception of veganism, the people we interact with can begin to imagine themselves as vegans.

I believe that we need to own the language and, yes, the label, because through that, we will expand perceptions and I believe that this will ultimately ripple out to have a positive net effect for the animals. We can’t give up the messaging around veganism to those who barely understand it or want to see it fail: we need to be out there as individuals, showing the world what it means to us to live as vegans. Our beliefs about equality and justice spring from something much richer and more deep than the lazy cultural identifiers the people who don’t understand veganism assign to it so we need to own the word. Allowing others to define who we are will be our ruin and it will ultimately lead to the continued dismissal of the vegan message.

So here is my challenge to you if you don’t like the public perception of veganism: Practice owning the word. Be an out and proud and unapologetically fabulous vegan. Society being able to see us - as artists, entrepreneurs, students, grandparents, scientists, activists, neighbors and everything in between - as unique representatives of veganism is what is going to be the game changer here.

Are you ready?