Chiraag's Musings

Five years ago (and change), I finally went vegan. I say “finally” because I had thought about going vegan since 2014; I was in college at the time and figured I should wait until I had more control over my diet to properly switch over. I was already vegetarian (was brought up that way), so the switch was easier for me than, say, for an omnivore looking to do so.

So what caused my change of heart? After all, the narrative I had been told from the beginning was that vegetarianism was the ethical choice (hey look, animals don't get killed because of us!), so for a long time I just...didn't think about it. I started rethinking this, though, as I learned more about the dairy and egg industries (and started thinking about how they can exist in the first place).

The egg industry

Let's start with the easy one (for me, at least). I gave up egg in 2014 once I had decided to go vegan, simply because the main reason it entered my diet was through desserts (so nutrition wasn't an issue). The reason, for me, was simple: We don't have a right to other animals' eggs, full stop.

Notice how none of this relies on the exact conditions of the chickens (free-range versus caged, their feed and living conditions, etc). All of that could serve as additional reasons, but to me those are just additional reasons. The concept of cooping up animals simply to induce them to lay eggs (as I put it, by fake-raping them) is abhorrent to me, even on its face. I just imagine how women would feel if they were treated as factories to produce eggs and the amount of trauma the chickens must experience even in the best case and it's just...gross.

Some will argue we shouldn't anthropomorphize other animals, and that's true: we don't know the full extent of which emotions other animals feel (yet!). But we do know that reproduction is often biologically stressful (and at times traumatic) and it seems blatantly self-serving to assume that is not the case for chickens (just so we can eat their eggs).

It's also a case of 'ownership', right? Who has the 'right' to the eggs those chickens produce? And why should that be us (rather than the chickens)? Why should we get to dictate when and how other animals reproduce? It is one thing to harvest wild eggs sustainably (even that is something we cannot trust humans to do —– think of the dodo), it is another to treat chickens as egg-producing machines and fully ignore the biological reality of why those eggs are produced and the chickens which produce them.

The dairy industry

Dairy was trickier for me because I got a decent amount of nutrition from it (yogurt and milk were staples in my diet). This was what held up my transition for a few years as I wanted to make sure I was not losing anything nutritionally by switching away from it (spoiler: replacing it is relatively easy!). But why did I want to switch away from it?

Well, the answer is simple: At the heart of the dairy industry is rape. Mammals only produce milk when they have given birth to young, meaning that in order to keep the milk flowing the cows must continuously give birth. Again and again and again. We know that pregnancy in mammals is a biologically stressful event (and again, sometimes traumatic), and the thought of constantly literally raping these cows so that we can have milk should be vomit-inducing. We talk about rape culture in our society (which is very real), but we don't talk about how rape underpins the dairy industry nearly enough. If the rapes stopped, the dairy would stop flowing. If you are against rape culture and rape, you should be against the dairy industry.

There is also the secondary point that, much like with eggs, do we really have a right to the cow's milk? I mean, it produced it for its calf and we are literally stealing it. Some make the point that the cow is producing way more than the calf actually needs; if a human is producing more breastmilk than their baby needs, should we be allowed to take it without getting consent? Hopefully we can all agree that would be unethical, so why would the same not apply in the case of cows? They are living beings, not machines.

Much like the egg industry, I could also make the points around how male calves are killed immediately and living conditions are awful and so on. And that is all true. But at its heart, as soon as we literally force the cows to constantly produce offspring just to take the milk, it's already unethical. Even if they are pasture-fed and have tons of living space and are treated nicely, that does not take away from having raped them.

How I switched

Nutritionally, the closest to dairy milk is soy milk, especially the kinds with only soy and water. I also make soy yogurt from whole soybeans to replace yogurt (it has somewhere between the nutrition levels of regular yogurt and Greek yogurt). Once I figured that out, switching was relatively easy —– I never had any problems giving stuff up or finding alternatives as long as I wasn't compromising myself nutritionally.

In terms of nutrition, I switched largely to a whole-foods plant-based diet (WFPB), which emphasizes whole grains, legumes, fruits, and veggies, with some moderate amounts of nuts and seeds. The strictest adherents fully avoid salt, sugar, and oil; I still use salt (hello iodine!), but sugar and oil consumption are mostly non-existent at home.

I tracked my nutrition for a few weeks when I first switched, mainly to make adjustments based on vitamin and mineral levels (particularly iron and calcium) as well as desired amounts of protein and total calories. Nowadays, I don't really need to track anything because I know roughly how much I should eat of different kinds of things to balance everything out.

In short, the answer to “How did you switch?” is “I took the plunge, tracked things, and figured it out over a few weeks”. My diet has never been more nutritious, which should hopefully put to bed the lie that vegans cannot have a nutritionally-balanced diet (no folks, you don't need meat or eggs or dairy in order to meet your nutritional needs).

One final point I want to make: Folks sometimes get up in arms, saying that veganism is expensive and that poorer people cannot afford to be vegan. The thing is, if you compare WFPB protein sources (for example) to meat, WFPB protein sources like legumes and tofu are cheaper (per gram of protein) than meat or fish. Historically, legumes are some of the cheapest protein sources around (and that still holds true today). Sure, if you go for the 'fake meat' options, it will be more expensive, but those are not a necessity (and are also not universally available anyway). In terms of dairy alternatives, you can make alternative milks at home for a substantially cheaper price (and not a lot of effort) than buying it from the store (at the store, you're mainly paying for the convenience), and I pretty much only eat my homemade soy yogurt because the store alternatives are not as good in basically every way. The point is, if you avoid the newer fake meat and such, the stuff you're eating on a vegan diet is stuff you should be eating anyway (grains, legumes, fruits, and veggies are always good for you!), so the only difference is perhaps increased consumption of legumes (rather than buying meat).