A Vegan No More

For bonus points, keep track of hidden meat, like gelatin in 'yogurt' and marshmallows, isinglass in your wine, or bonechar in your sugar, or lard, oyster sauce, fish sauce or chicken broth snuck into otherwise vegetarian dishes.

I agree with most of what you have to say, but I want to make a note about this:

Opting out of meat entirely does nothing to change the industry, because most people will always eat some meat if they can afford it.

I think opting out does a few things. It puts pressure on restaurants to offer alternatives to meat, so we're not all forced to eat it because it's the only healthy option. It pushes our culture to give people a choice. Honestly, all I really want as a vegan is for people to have a good choice every day, at each meal, about how much/what kind of animal products they consume. Right now in most places there just aren't choices, because 99% of people have a "well, I'll just keep eating what I always have" mentality.

Also, opting out of meat does get me into conversations regularly about the meat industry. The fact that I only eat very specific kinds of meat in specific occasions opens up conversations with other people about when and why they eat meat. I don't care if people eat meat on purpose, for their own reasons, but I do care that they wolf down pounds of it every day for no particular reason because it's what's put in front of us. My opting out creates a context for other people to consider opting out.

And given that's my motivation, I'm pretty careful about how I engage people. I don't shame people, I don't push them. I honestly don't give a shit what they decide. I just like having the options all out there.

Note: I consider myself vegan. I eat meat and dairy sometimes. I eat vegetables, and vegetables are grown with animal products. Meat and dairy are not the basis of my diet. I eat a plant-based diet, so I consider myself vegan. You can call this "reform vegan" to the "orthodox" if you like. But anyone who's really looked at the realities of the situation (including the OP) comes to understand that there is no such thing as 100% vegan, and that what matters most is the health of the whole ecology.

And others are unsuccessful at being omnivores.

There are a host of other nutrition problems that may be completely unrelated to whether meat is in one's diet. It's not very fair to blame vegetarianism, which is usually considered a pretty safe diet.

For what it's worth, I don't think of people who eat diets supposedly free of animal products as "vegan". I think of them as "fundamentalist". To me, veganism is about creating a culture where we don't abuse animals. It happens that part of that work for me involves mostly not eating meat. But sometimes eating meat is exactly what I need to do.

Eating meat, in specific ways, can be a way to connect with people, a way to nourish myself... there are lots of ways in which eating meat can lead directly or indirectly to my helping to lessen animal abuse.

And I think that's profoundly vegan. I think the OP feels the same way, but she's apparently not as comfortable hijacking the word "vegan" as I am.

The way she uses the word, and the way most people use the word, makes it useful only to marginalize people. What a waste of a word. I'd use it to inspire people.

Like the mormon who might occasionally share a beer with their sister, in the spirit of love and family and togetherness (important mormon values)... a vegan can eat meat. These labels do not have to be so cut and dry.

This post has some great lines in it:

* As a revolutionary feminist and anti-imperialist, veganism seemed to be yet another way I could fight the injustices we are facing.

* Capitalism has turned food, and especially grains, into a commodity, a weapon of war, and a way to make a profit, instead of the inalienable right it should be. The way to prevent hunger is not to feed the starving masses the food we currently feed to animals (excess food production and the resulting food dumping is one of the causes of hunger in the first place), but for the chronically hungry people to throw off the shackles of neo-imperialism and to gain back control of their local food systems.

* It was shocking to realize I had been expounding on the need to transform agriculture and farming without even knowing the bare minimum of what it takes to keep an ecosystem healthy.

Really? Was it really shocking? Really? I feel like I'm in a missing scene from Monty Python's Life of Brian.

On the other hand her 3 paragraphs about the 3 kinds of bad people (the frauds, the foolish know-it-alls, and the evidence deniers) sparked instant recognition and made me realize that those are the exact people that irritate me more than just about anyone else in this world.