Eating out and speaking out

I go into peoples’ places and I’m offered the usual snacks and drinks. I’m met with utter incomprehension when I decline. If pressed, as soon as I tell them my reason, I’m considered a little weird. Nice people race around and find something I can eat. But nice or otherwise most people are defenders of the faith. They secretly resent my finicky eating habits. For that’s what they seem to them. I sometimes pick up a mild sense of irritation. I may be slightly respected for my “philosophy of compassion” but not often does anyone ask me to explain anything.
If they did they’d expect uncomfortable answer. They’d feel guilty however hard I try to soften the blow. They’d expect me to say something about today’s food - that it contains too much fat or sugar, or something about food being too high in protein. They’d expect me to mention it being harmful to health … yes, yes, they’d agree, to a point. But it’s a tight balance for anyone venturing into this mine field. On the subject of animal rights or veganism non-vegans find themselves standing on a razor’s edge. They want to agree but just enough to put us off the scent – they dread us moving onto information about the animals themselves, hens in cages, etc. So as a vegan I’m usually not asked to give reasons for my food choices. They may give me a smile but they see me as a social pariah. Vegans have to not care about any of this. How can they think otherwise? In most cases people know so very little about this subject.
What is it, apart from the animal thing, that makes it all so awful? The foods people eat every day? It’s hard to go past the word ‘poison’ – animal foods make us fat, they encourage heart disease, diabetes and cancer, and perhaps worst of all they cause guilt. Any sensible person, not too badly addicted to any one animal product, wouldn’t go anywhere near meat counters and dairy sections of the supermarket. Always passed. Avoided. But that’s where it often ends, privately, a plant-food buyer, an avoided person for fear of their words.
But sometimes we do get to talk about some of this. We come to a point where we’re given permission to speak, and it’s then we need to be ready. Up our sleeve we should all have a few interesting points, facts, something to catch the attention, something that will stick in the memory. Given the chance we might say something, not too much though. We hopefully say something that sounds reasonable, as if we aren’t making sweeping statements. If we try to be too outrageous we draw too much fire and making it easy for them to change the subject or get us bogged down in fine details … all the familiar tactics used to control the discussion in one direction to avoid dealing with more uncomfortable things.
As animal activists we won’t be ale to answer all the questions about diet and nutrition and health but we should try. Our best approach is to appeal to the heart, to assure people of the general safety and health of a plant-based diet and then move on to how the animals are treated. We might at some stage want to mention that they are treated like machines.