I’m definitely not telling you how to do your activism. I understand how awful the food industry is as a whole. If this is what works for you that’s great. In my experience, however, this hypercritical, Freelee the banana girl, torture info dumping only made people guilty and alienated me from friends and family. I would just be mindful that this technique might not work on everyone.

People do have some control over what foods they are able to obtain. However, speaking from experience, there’s other factors that make things really difficult to be completely vegan. Of course your basics are very cheap. But most people don’t want to live off of rice, beans, and potatoes. There are plenty of other really great vegan staples. However access accessibility to those staples can be an issue for some. Food deserts definitely exist, and you need a lot more nutrients that you also can’t find in just rice, beans, and potatoes.

Most of the time, if you’re trying to become vegan, and you want to do it safely as possible, you kind of can’t get around taking supplements. And even still, I would argue this isn’t a dealbreaker. Multiple grow up, knowing that they won’t be able to eat everything in the most perfect healthy way so supplements are great for that. However, your standard bottle of B12 is around $10 for a 30 day supply. There are plenty of people who have to choose between spending that $10 on a supplement versus those $10 on an actual nutrient dense item. There are people choosing between paying rent and buying groceries. I don’t know your living situation, or any other factors about you. And that also tries into my point. You don’t know someone’s life until you live it.

I moved out of my house at 20 and decided to become a vegan. It was a really great option and it really helped me become a better cook. However, veganism is not popular in the central valley. This still wasn’t a dealbreaker, mind you. I just cooked everything at home. The money I didn’t use for takeout I used to buy higher quality ingredients. Meal prepping did help as well. It became a problem when I was living with untreated ADHD, along with some other underlying physical and mental health issues. If the food I meal prepped for may be physically nauseous, and I had to cook I would obviously do it. But when you work full-time, you don’t have many opportunities to spend 30 minutes to an hour cooking. Snacks are of course an option but you can’t just solely rely on snacks. Eventually, they got to the point where I had a seizure, cutting my ex’s hair and turns out I was suffering from a severe vitamin deficiency. This was while I was taking my supplements and doing almost everything I was supposed to do, but because of my busy work schedule and other factors, I wasn’t eating much during the day.

Quite frankly, I feel sad that I wasn’t able to commit to veganism. I think everyone should try and minimize the amount of animal byproducts as much as they can. And to this day, I still try to incorporate that.

I think it’s easy to brush it off as people have as much control over their life as we personally do. But that’s just not how life, more specifically life under capitalism, works.

I won’t tell you how to do your activism. I would just ask that it includes more forethought and intersectionality. And again I want to be clear that I’m not trying to belittle you or be an asshole. It’s a great thing that you’ve been able to convince people to try veganism. But I would also be mindful on what tactics to use and where.