5 of the Funniest Things I’ve Heard as a Vegan.

Doing whatever we can to protect animals, improve human health and to save the environment are three of the main, solemn reasons for people taking up veganism.  So, I think it fair to say that every vegan I’ve ever known has been very serious about their cruelty-free lifestyle.

I have been vegan six years now and in that time, I have had frank exchanges of opinion with non-vegans on many occasions, during which I have heard some very valiant attempts to justify being an omnivore and some absolutely hopeless attempts too. 

However, the following 5 accounts have left me laughing about them to this day.

So go ahead, dawn your Kale University T-Shirt, and check these out, if you have any of your own funny stories or memes, leave a comment – there’s a book in this I swear.

 

Vegan Strawberry Fields Forever

In late 2014, I found myself a single man again at the tender age of 44.  After a few months, I found myself in a fairly casual relationship with a fitness instructor by the name of Deb.

Now Deb was nice enough, but was as alien to veganism as one could possibly be.  I tried some gentle discussion as to why I ate the way I did, but to no avail.  I knew in my heart of hearts that it was a relationship that wasn’t really going anywhere fast, so I kind of plodded on.

In December of that year, a bunch of us, including Deb and I, headed off to Cardiff in Wales for a pre-Christmas jolly-up – all good stuff.

Now, what happened, I can’t put down to a glass too many of wine on Deb’s behalf, because what I am about to detail happened right at the start of the night.

As we waited for a few others to join us in the hotel lobby, the conversation, as it can do, swung on to veganism, with me being the only vegan of the group. 

As vegans, we get asked a lot of the time “you can eat fish though, right?” (wrong), “does wafer thin ham count as meat” (of course it does) and “what’s wrong with cheese?” (more a case of what’s right with cheese?) 

What I’d never before heard, and nothing could ever prepare me for this, was Deb’s winner-takes-all question:

“Are strawberries vegan?”

I’m fairly sure that at that precise moment, a church-bell rang once somewhere in the distance, a ball of tumble-weed bounced through the hotel lobby and time all throughout the universe stopped just for a second or two.

Deb and I split up not long after.

 

Is There No End To His Evil Ways?

Look long and hard at man in the picture.  You can be very sure that at no point in time did he ever orchestrate the invasion of Poland, the Soviet Union or anywhere else come to that.

That’s because this is Englishman Donald Watson, the “founding father” of veganism, no doubt reading up on the cause of animal rights and not the likelihood of the USA joining the war any day soon.

Watson came up with the term “vegan” in 1944, using composing the first and last parts of “vegetarian” as that was the real start and end of being a vegetarian.

Fast forward 72 years to a supermarket check-out in Sandusky, Ohio, USA.  My vegan wife and I are making small talk with the cashier about our being vegan.  We are never pushy about it, just try and be factual and polite.

Unfortunately, for the guy stood behind us and in ear-shot, it was all too much for him.  While simultaneously gritting his teeth and trying to sound well-informed, he curtly offered up the fascinating insight that “Hitler invented veganism you know.”

As Monica and I both picked our jaws up from the floor, we exchanged disbelieving glances and didn’t really say anything else.  He was a big guy.  A very big guy. With a shopping cart full of Cheetos, animal parts and doughnuts.  Which in part no doubt accounted for his size and his seeming ability to work up a sweat by just breathing.

To this day, we think that somehow in his omnivorous (and proud of it) brain, he was taking up the widely touted theory that Hitler was vegetarian and putting it on steroids to suit his meat-eating agenda and putting vegans straight with a killer-punch about Hitler.

Funny, but a little unnerving too.

 

The Raw Power of Veganism

I have to confess, this one is from my vegan wife, Monica.

Where she works is a very “red meat” engineering environment and day in and day out she has to give as good as she gets.  The constant barbs, jibes and general cheap shots at her vegan diet – that sort of a tiring thing.

Like all us vegans, she’s heard her fair share of crank theories about her vegan diet.  How it’s not healthy, unnatural and if animals weren’t meant to be eaten, then why are they made of meat and so on.

One particular colleague of hers, Jesse, managed to take this to a whole new level – both spectacular and at the same time utterly devoid of any mooring in reality, so quite the combination.

Over the break-room lunch table, Jesse announced to both Monica and the surrounding pack of colleagues that he had it on the very best authority that vegans could, and this deserves a drum roll, no, make that a dozen drum rolls, “eat meat if it wasn’t cooked.”

Not only did that church-bell chime again somewhere in the distance, but even the meat-eaters as well as Monica looked stunned.  There were simply no words available to reply to that – be that in English, German, Greek, Bantu or as spoken by a yet to be found alien culture on a planet fifteen million light years from Earth come to that.

To be fair, Jesse by all accounts likes to come out with “shock and absolutely no awe” comments. He even went vegan for a day or two, or so he said.  Until he turned up with a tuna-mayo sub from Subway.  Which he steadfastly claimed to be vegan.

We think he’s got a thing for Monica. 

 

So Very, Very Lonely

We’re back in England for this one, not long after I had gone vegan in 2012.

Now I know that vegans are, sadly, very much in a minority.  Of course, in the last decade, their numbers around the globe have started to blossom, which is a very good thing.

So even back in 2012, it is safe to say that there would have been millions of vegans around the world.

One Saturday morning, I was Skypeing my cousin Paul in Australia.  He introduced me to a friend of his, Mitch, who happened to call by.  It was all good stuff, people from countries on the other side of the globe from one another reaching out and bridging cultural divides.  And then Paul happened to mention how I’m vegan. 

Mitch, not knowing what that really is at all, gets a polite description from yours truly – no meat, no dairy, no eggs, etc.  These were clearly unchartered waters for Mitch as he took on the appearance of what I can only describe as being a human question mark.

After a few minutes of trying to explain the unexplainable to Mitch, he threw me a line that I still get lost in today.

“So, do you think anybody else will ever do this Dave?”

Needless to say, the fact that I, not Donald Watson, turned out to be the founder of veganism is something that I wasn’t totally aware of at that time and I really do need to have on my CV / resume.

Maybe veganism will catch on?

 

The Pain of it All

Ok, for those that have read one or two of my blogs on here, you’ll know that I have a particular fondness (not-fondness) for the slightly wired to the moon omnivores last gasp battle cry of “plants have feelings too.”

I never tire of thinking just how utterly bonkers that assertion is. Just like trying to eat a grandfather clock or count all the traffic road-signs in the world, there really is absolutely no point to it.  And yet it persists!

The fact that some sort of moral equivalence between beating a dog with a stick and beating a pineapple with a stick is being made by the “plants have feelings” crew is, quite frankly, ludicrous.

With that in mind, you can imagine my unbridled joy when, against my better judgment, earlier this year I got involved in social media debate about veganism.  (I usually avoid such debates like the plague as just like when people get behind a steering wheel their character changes for the worse, the same can be true of some when they get behind a keyboard.)

So, I’m afraid I can’t tell you who it was or where they were from, but what I do recall to be able to tell you, is the following phrase used in all genuineness:

“I heard a carrot scream when it was pulled from the ground.”

It’s at that point that the temptation to immediately switch off the computer, take a long walk to the top of a large hill, sit there and say “wibble” really does take over.

You cannot argue with crazy.  All you can do is laugh.