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When I was a vegetarian in the 1990s, an ostensibly healthy restaurant opened in the mall. They had a breakfast sandwich that I think was meant to imitate sausage. It looked and tasted like cardboard. My boyfriend at the time (who later became my husband) was a lifelong vegetarian. He was raised Seventh Day Adventist, which meant he had lived through every attempt at soy and wheat analog meat in America. He commented that until there was a fake meat that tasted like the real thing, veggie fare like the restaurant’s broken attempt at a breakfast sandwich would continue to marginalize vegetarian food as weird and icky.
I went vegan after 20 years of vegetarianism and pescetarianism in 2010. The vegan movement was still obscure when I joined it.
Sun Tzu said that in military combat “if you make the enemy’s path circuitous and entice them with profit, although you set out after them, you will arrive before them.”
The enemy of the vegan movement was obscurity. Why the hell should anyone eat a bland, weird soy burger when they could chomp down on a tasty ground-up animal sandwich? The animal sandwich was cruel, sure, but it was also cheap, fatty, salty, and satisfying. Not everyone was like me, able to take the blinders off to see the blood of the slaughterhouse, to smell the feces and rot, to hear the anguished cries of the pig or the chicken with her beak cut off, to contemplate the staggering amount of waste that went into a slab of sausage. Vegans were not subtle in messaging: the reason I became vegetarian and not vegan in 1989 was because the only vegan I knew was the neighbor kid who was starving himself to death. The only group of vegans was PeTA, and they were psychotic.
The PeTA method, in Sun Tzu’s vernacular, is to “race forward day and night without encamping, covering two days normal distance at a time, marching forward a hundred li to contend for gain”. It is a failing strategy. PeTa has always loved to rush to the bottom line of YOU MEAT EATERS OUGHT TO FEEL ASHAMED instead of going the slow, circuitous route and showing people why they might want to become vegans. In the 80s, PeTA literally attacked those they disagreed with by pouring red paint on women wearing fur coats. If the vegan movement had never expanded beyond PeTA’s chokehold, the word vegan would not have become a household term. Luckily for me, PeTA fell into the irrelevance and disgrace it richly deserved shortly after I became vegan. Hopefully it won’t be back.
The vegan movement got exciting in the 2010s. We had our fearless leaders: Philip Wollen, Morrissey, Woody Harrelson, Moby, Doctors Esselstyn, McDougall, Barnard, Popper, and Williams. We had our generals: Colleen Patrick Goudreau, Ruby Roth, Patrik Baboumian, Emily the Bite Size Vegan, Gary Yourovsky, Melanie Joy, Joey Carbstrong, Earthling Ed, and James Aspey. We knew the terrain: we could argue from any point and win, and we could do it with humor and style, a la Vegan Sidekick. Our varied and myriad approaches to argument (with a great deal of persuasion) were so effective, industries started catering to us. Vegan became profitable. It was in the 2010s that we got Gardein, the world's first consistently tasty, non-weird tasting vegan meats.
The secret to the success of the vegan movement was its variety. We captured the Hollywood elites by giving them the health fad they craved with the virtue signaling they craved even more. We captured the middle classes by putting convenient vegan comfort foods in every grocery store. Plant milk was something you bought only in health food stores in the year 2000; by 2020 it became commonplace in all but the most rural of rural grocery stores. The vegan movement reached the inner cities where it was embraced with enthusiasm and passion, and people of all colors and ethnic origins delighted in bringing vibrant, nourishing meals to former food deserts.
When we “plundered a district” and gained ground, we shared the wealth. Vegans networked around the world to share recipes, to lend advocacy and words, and to relentlessly campaign for vegan options in restaurants.
We knew when to strike and how to do it. We figured out how to make Thanksgiving seem more appealing without the turkey. We knew when to get environmental (Cowspiracy) and when to appeal to vanity (The Game Changers). We knew how to wear the enemy down and strike when they were weak.
We were doing great. The tipping point had nearly been achieved. Unfortunately, the old saying came true: the larger they are, the harder they fall. Vegans everywhere fell for the oldest trick in the book: the infiltration of the movement by idiot co-opters who devoured it from the inside out. The race baiters, non-functioning autistics, and the gullible do-gooders metastasized, and former skeptics who had once worked overtime to disprove the average allopathic doctor’s insistence that eating animals is healthy and good lined up like lemmings to take an experimental MRNA shot. Greta Thunberg heralded the beginning of the end; the vegan movement now is a shadow of its former self.
That which was in order became disordered and that which was tranquil became clamorous. The vegan movement snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, proving that vegans were largely every bit as credulous as the meat-eaters they were trying to change. The same people who laughed at Dr. Robert Atkins and who would not eat the Impossible Burger because it used animal tests to get to FDA approval were perfectly willing to swallow (or inject) whatever animal-tested Pfizer and Moderna garbage Dr. Anthony Fauci shoved in their direction. Whether or not the vegan movement will return is anybody’s guess. For now, it has been vanquished. Looking on the bright side… at least we got a decent breakfast sandwich!
I went vegan after 20 years of vegetarianism and pescetarianism in 2010. The vegan movement was still obscure when I joined it.
Sun Tzu said that in military combat “if you make the enemy’s path circuitous and entice them with profit, although you set out after them, you will arrive before them.”
The enemy of the vegan movement was obscurity. Why the hell should anyone eat a bland, weird soy burger when they could chomp down on a tasty ground-up animal sandwich? The animal sandwich was cruel, sure, but it was also cheap, fatty, salty, and satisfying. Not everyone was like me, able to take the blinders off to see the blood of the slaughterhouse, to smell the feces and rot, to hear the anguished cries of the pig or the chicken with her beak cut off, to contemplate the staggering amount of waste that went into a slab of sausage. Vegans were not subtle in messaging: the reason I became vegetarian and not vegan in 1989 was because the only vegan I knew was the neighbor kid who was starving himself to death. The only group of vegans was PeTA, and they were psychotic.
The PeTA method, in Sun Tzu’s vernacular, is to “race forward day and night without encamping, covering two days normal distance at a time, marching forward a hundred li to contend for gain”. It is a failing strategy. PeTa has always loved to rush to the bottom line of YOU MEAT EATERS OUGHT TO FEEL ASHAMED instead of going the slow, circuitous route and showing people why they might want to become vegans. In the 80s, PeTA literally attacked those they disagreed with by pouring red paint on women wearing fur coats. If the vegan movement had never expanded beyond PeTA’s chokehold, the word vegan would not have become a household term. Luckily for me, PeTA fell into the irrelevance and disgrace it richly deserved shortly after I became vegan. Hopefully it won’t be back.
The vegan movement got exciting in the 2010s. We had our fearless leaders: Philip Wollen, Morrissey, Woody Harrelson, Moby, Doctors Esselstyn, McDougall, Barnard, Popper, and Williams. We had our generals: Colleen Patrick Goudreau, Ruby Roth, Patrik Baboumian, Emily the Bite Size Vegan, Gary Yourovsky, Melanie Joy, Joey Carbstrong, Earthling Ed, and James Aspey. We knew the terrain: we could argue from any point and win, and we could do it with humor and style, a la Vegan Sidekick. Our varied and myriad approaches to argument (with a great deal of persuasion) were so effective, industries started catering to us. Vegan became profitable. It was in the 2010s that we got Gardein, the world's first consistently tasty, non-weird tasting vegan meats.
The secret to the success of the vegan movement was its variety. We captured the Hollywood elites by giving them the health fad they craved with the virtue signaling they craved even more. We captured the middle classes by putting convenient vegan comfort foods in every grocery store. Plant milk was something you bought only in health food stores in the year 2000; by 2020 it became commonplace in all but the most rural of rural grocery stores. The vegan movement reached the inner cities where it was embraced with enthusiasm and passion, and people of all colors and ethnic origins delighted in bringing vibrant, nourishing meals to former food deserts.
When we “plundered a district” and gained ground, we shared the wealth. Vegans networked around the world to share recipes, to lend advocacy and words, and to relentlessly campaign for vegan options in restaurants.
We knew when to strike and how to do it. We figured out how to make Thanksgiving seem more appealing without the turkey. We knew when to get environmental (Cowspiracy) and when to appeal to vanity (The Game Changers). We knew how to wear the enemy down and strike when they were weak.
We were doing great. The tipping point had nearly been achieved. Unfortunately, the old saying came true: the larger they are, the harder they fall. Vegans everywhere fell for the oldest trick in the book: the infiltration of the movement by idiot co-opters who devoured it from the inside out. The race baiters, non-functioning autistics, and the gullible do-gooders metastasized, and former skeptics who had once worked overtime to disprove the average allopathic doctor’s insistence that eating animals is healthy and good lined up like lemmings to take an experimental MRNA shot. Greta Thunberg heralded the beginning of the end; the vegan movement now is a shadow of its former self.
That which was in order became disordered and that which was tranquil became clamorous. The vegan movement snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, proving that vegans were largely every bit as credulous as the meat-eaters they were trying to change. The same people who laughed at Dr. Robert Atkins and who would not eat the Impossible Burger because it used animal tests to get to FDA approval were perfectly willing to swallow (or inject) whatever animal-tested Pfizer and Moderna garbage Dr. Anthony Fauci shoved in their direction. Whether or not the vegan movement will return is anybody’s guess. For now, it has been vanquished. Looking on the bright side… at least we got a decent breakfast sandwich!
