I Dated a Vegan. My Friends Weren’t Impressed.

What’s up with the weird bias toward people with plant-based diets?

Huybrecht Beuckeleer via Wikicommons.

The new guy I was dating had impressive kitchen abilities: Jamie roasted his own coffee, baked his own bread, and milled his own flour. He gave new meaning to the phrase, “made from scratch.” When I told my friend Kate about him one evening over dinner, shortly before the start of the pandemic, she seemed jealous—understandably so, given her husband’s lack of facility. The week before, her husband had requested written directions for steamed broccoli. But Kate’s envy evaporated after I told her why he also made his own seitan: he was a vegan.

Kate looked away from me, digging into her steak with sudden intensity. When she finished chewing, she said, “A vegan, huh? Too bad.”

Kate was not alone in her anti-veganism. Though pretty much all of my friends consider themselves open-minded and inclusive, every single one of them groaned when I mentioned the V-word—including the vegetarians. My friend Marie divorced a vegan a few years ago, and she swears they’re all a bunch of control freaks. My curmudgeonly friend Dave insists that they are, as a group, “devoid of humor”—a remark he feels qualified to make despite not being personally acquainted with a single vegan. Kate had this to say: “I’m suspicious of anyone who takes so little pleasure in food. I assume they’re too ascetic to be fun.” I believe Kate’s most intimate brush with a vegan occurred during a wedding cocktail hour, when she reached over said vegan for a bacon-wrapped scallop.

Turns out, my buddies aren’t unique in their bias. In 2020, the BBC ran a piece about “anti-vegan hatred.” In 2019, The Guardian reported that vegans “experience discrimination and bias on a par with other minorities.” New York Times columnist Farhad Manjoo thought the problem was serious enough that a few years ago he called on readers to stop mocking vegans. 

But if you think about it for a second, all this vegan hostility is pretty weird. Who cares what other people eat?—especially when their diets do us all so much good. Beyond being quite possibly the healthiest choice an individual can make, eating a plant-based diet may also be the single most effective thing that anyone can do to slow climate change, as Jonathan Safran Foer has argued. Insufferable as Foer can be, I don’t disagree with him on this point.

But I wasn’t without my own prejudice. After Jamie and I exchanged a few messages through a dating app, we agreed to meet in person, over dinner. He told me to pick the restaurant before adding, “My only dietary restriction is that I’m vegan.” 

The only restriction? You mean the one that renders a person unable to eat like 92% of all food served at all restaurants everywhere? Come on. I imagined showing up at whatever place he picked—The No Fun Bistro—only to find a sanctimonious wet blanket who’d look askance at my favorite leather jacket (used! used!) and spend the evening droning on about the impending environmental apocalypse. As if I needed a reminder. 

I haven’t eaten meat since I was 13, when I first started to learn about climate change, and how much more resources are used up in creating a pound of animal flesh as compared to grain. So maybe my eye-roll over Jamie amounted to the narcissism of small differences. Nonetheless, I did tend to think of vegans as militant extremists—difficult, even unhappy people who stress out dinner hosts. Killjoys who clutch their cardigans about their necks in perfectly warm restaurants because they don’t consume enough calories per day to maintain normal body warmth. But by that point, I’d learned enough about Jamie to know we had things in common: We both loved Tolstoy and houseplants. Plus, he worked at a climate research lab, which I thought was cool. Surely I could survive one dinner.

So I went—and the guy who met me at the door of the Thai place was no vegan caricature. His warm smile put the kibosh on my notion about gloominess. He dispelled my preconceptions about humorlessness by chortling at a kooky remark I made about his beautiful gums (I was fresh off a depressing visit to the periodontist). Counter to Kate’s ideas about food-related anhedonia, Jamie ate plenty, with relish. And far from taking himself too seriously, he was so self-deprecating that he confessed to using a vacuum cleaner attachment to cut his hair (the infomercial-fabulous Flowbee).

Jamie wasn’t just on his best vegan behavior that first night, either. Subsequently he never once lectured me about the importance of eating more chickpeas. He never raised an eyebrow when I had yogurt for breakfast or sloshed cow’s milk into my tea. The only time we discussed his veganism,  I brought it up.

“Do you do it for the planet, the animals, the health benefits, or why exactly?”

He shrugged. “Because there are so many good reasons to do it, and none not to.”

Simple as that—no piousness or pedantry. 

Turns out you can be a playful, sexy person and ethically serious too.

I admire that ethical seriousness, particularly in our late-stage capitalist world, where people so easily convince themselves that whatever’s most convenient, like incessant Amazon Prime ordering, is actually fine for the environment—because hey, now they never drive to the store! (Sorry, but that doesn’t cut it.) And even though Jamie and I broke up after a few months, by then I’d had him over for dinner enough times that I’d developed a repertoire of fun, easy vegan meals to make—which were also healthy and cheap. On top of that, they were so tasty that now I’m a lot closer to vegan myself: I used to eat cheese every day to help myself feel satisfied and get enough protein, but now I rely a lot more on tofu.

I’m not ready to give up yogurt and eggs entirely. But maybe I don’t have to. Maybe you don’t have to either. And in fact, maybe we’d all be better off if we stopped seeing the world as The Rest of Us versus The Vegans. Any time anyone eats a plant-based meal, instead of giving them a hard time, give them a high-five for the planet. Anytime you do it, give yourself a high-five too—instead of giving yourself an F every time you have a BLT. Then check out  this recipe for fried tofu with onions and blistered tomatoes—so delicious and rich that Kate has even made it for her husband a few times. That’s what I call progress.

What food-related bias have your encountered from others? Which ones are you guilty of?