Yesterday, I read an article about the ‘true moral bastions of society’ whose efforts are ‘ridiculed, abused and written off …’

Was it about Rosa Parks and the civil rights movement? Volunteer doctors who fly overseas to respond to an ebola outbreak? The Virgin Mary’s mum?

No. It’s about someone who is proud to be vegan. (So stop with the tofu jokes, dammit.)

Good on them.

Well, except for the assumption in the article that the only reason other people don’t think as they do is because they are morally inferior. It’s an assumption that we’ve all encountered before. From the entitled.

The fact is, Being Vegan is a luxury of the well off. And by ‘well off’, I mean, the average person who is lucky enough to live in Australia—where fresh food is plentiful and what you eat (or don’t eat) gets to be a choice.

What about people in countries without the resources to buy fresh food? Look at, say, Nauru. A country with so little arable land that it relies on imported, highly processed food to feed its population. It has 90% unemployment and the highest obesity rate in the world. All made worse by Australian intervention in the form of phosphate mines and refugee centres. How should we tell someone there about the morals of Being Vegan?

Further afield, there are millions of people in the world that wouldn’t eat animal products for years at a time—because they don’t actually have access to them.

Those people aren’t Being Vegan either—they’re just Being. Surviving.

So, be vegan if you want. And be proud, if it makes you feel better.

But just remember that it’s not a badge. It’s not a cross. It’s just a choice—and we’re lucky that we’ve got one.

[End lecture]