How I Became Vegan (My Vegan Story)

I did not become vegan for health
reasons it's a lot easier for me to talk about my reasons for becoming vegan in the negative to say I didn't do it for this reason I didn't for that reason and if I talk about it positively as I've said before I feel like it's going to be a two-hour conversation and that is the meaningful sense in which veganism is not just the diet yes day to day hour an hour the practical part of being vegan that you deal with is diet but it connects to a lot of questions of ethics politics ecology ultimately personal identity and belief values really talking about why you became vegan unpacking what kind of person you used to be the kind of person you ended up becoming maybe the kind of person you aspire to become those are pretty deep issues and they are attached to why I'm vegan and I don't know if that's true for everybody but I think that's true for a lot of people it's gonna be true for a lot of people who end up seeing this video when I first became strictly vegetarian back in around the year 2000 um I I think I had never heard the word vegan spoken out loud and back then I don't think I'd ever seen vegan on a menu I can actually remember clearly the first time someone said lacto-ovo vegetarian to me and my reaction was really negative what what's the point of being vegetarian if you're gonna eat eggs and cheese and this kind of you know um back when I was merely strictly vegetarian I've regarded eggs as an organ of a chicken's body which it is um the fact that it can detach from your body doesn't mean it's not an organ that develops in your body a lot of other gross examples of that in the mammal kingdom but there you go back when I was only strictly vegetarian I did regard buying leather as immoral and was aware both ecologically and economically that the production of meat and dairy relies on the leather industry in terms of profitability of the the full cycle of the industry as a whole leather is one of the high profit items that keeps the rest of the industry going that's worth knowing by the way I mean you may ask yourself how is it possible that meat production and dairy production are limping along and asking for government handouts all the time and are always saying they're on the verge of bankruptcy and so on well the leather industry is not it's a high profit side of things in terms of animal exploitation so way back then in like the year 2000 I regarded all that stuff as immoral and bad and if anyone had talked to me about the difference between ISM and lacto-ovo vegetarians and I would have said the vegans are 100 percent right I don't think I encountered veganism like as a really clear concept until many years later and of course that portly had to do with what was going on my life back then and where I shipped out to so again I don't know if this is interesting to people or not but it was also back then year 2001 that I was getting involved with Buddhism and then I wanted to move to Cambodia I did end up eventually living in Cambodia but it wasn't the first place I moved to in Asia but actually back already in 2001 and there are uploads in the internet that prove this I had the books out from the library for a teacher self Cambodian I was starting to read and write pally in ancient dead language using the Cambodian alphabet and script I already had those interests and I was looking for a life that combined humanitarian interests ethical interests political interests and research into ancient Buddhism so again and just having said that anyone who knows the Buddhist scene either the academic scene or the actual religious scene would realize that I'm alienated from 99.9 percent of what was going on so it's basically a positive thing that I have trouble stating in only a few words or only a few minutes why I became vegan because the answer gets into a lot of relatively deep questions of who I was and who I wanted to back in the year 2000 already starting like 1997 ish I was involved in ecology including formal political movements for ecology at City Hall not really at the provincial or federal level City Hall was the level of government in Canada where you could directly take a petition to government get answers from government for questions to governments give depositions get into the paperwork in the nitty-gritty of a particular power plant being built of a particular plan to manage sewage waste water garbage and that was what I wanted I wanted to be involved in real politics not abstract politics not um let's all sit around and complain until the revolution comes politics I was very critical of the vapor of what was going on in the left-wing in Canada at that time and I wanted to be involved in politics that made a difference on a human level of reality and you know that could include just changing the plans for one sewage treatment plant or one power plant but at least that was something real instead of I don't know making speeches about changing the world and really changing nothing obviously that same impulse took me from Toronto to Cambodia and Laos and took me back again from Cambodia to Saskatchewan to enroll in First Nations University start learning Cree and trying to get involved with indigenous political issues again on a practical level not on the level of ideological speechifying um that haven't been said today in 2015 it's really common to hear you can't be an ecologist though being vegan and I think that's basically true and I think it was completely inevitable given my interests already in 1997 in 1999 that I became vegan or something like it you know soon thereafter at that time in the year 2000 it's interesting for me to remember I had no idea that being vegetarian or vegan was healthier than eating meat I assumed the opposite and I could remember talking to people back then and saying look I'm not trying to win at the Olympics like if being vegetarian is worse for me so what it's worth it's the right thing to do it's the right thing to do in terms of ecology in terms of ethics in terms of all these things you know if you show me some scientific factoid that I can benchpress 2% more by eating meat you know so what this is not the meaning of life for me and I'm not gonna just look at some scientific factoid like that than say okay I guess all rubber-stamp and cosine the whole you know meat and dairy industry these terrible factories were animals live their whole lives and a concrete floor without ever seeing the sunshine and you know die and are eviscerated and broken into pieces to be purchased in a plastic wrapper you know to me how people connect the dots from Oh some scientific report reports as it's okay to eat meat to validating that whole industry that takes a huge leap of intuition and imagination that I'm not willing to take and by contrast to start with my values in terms of caring about ecology ethics and politics to start from those and connect the dots to get to veganism I think is a lot easier a lot more straightforward so I wanted to say a few words about what it was that held me back why I didn't become vegan earlier in life and in a separate video link to below sort of the first draft for this video in the first version I talked more about the subjective qualities or psychological qualities that I have why I ended up taking this road and you know in a way there's nothing really terribly deep or profound about that but whenever we're talking about ethics and politics there's this question of once you know what the right thing to do is will you do the right thing if you know it will you do it naturally for a lot of people the story about becoming vegan is mostly about finding out that it's the right thing to do getting the information their first time seeing a videotape of what goes on in a slaughterhouse their first time learning you know where milk really comes from and how the dairy industry works I understand that so that's they know it and then they do it but for the vast majority of people you know meat-eaters etc people who are compromising people who eat meat but who tell you oh well I only eat a little bit and it's kinds of excuses and people who are trapped in between you know for millions and millions of people in all walks of life the problem is they know what the right thing to do is and they don't do it they don't take the next step the logically necessary morally necessary next step the link between knowing and feeling is weak for them like you know to give you an example I'm not boasting this just part of who I am I feel revolted by wool and there's there's nothing disgusting about wool I mean you look at it at a dead animal with a bullet hole on its head that's disgusting on a visceral level but because I know how wool is made I know what it is where it comes from that knowledge changes how I feel for me the link between knowing and feeling is really strong and it's not for everybody all kinds of people can know that something is the product of torturing animals or torturing people or you know genocide or what have you and they don't feel bad about it they don't feel differently on the basis of that knowledge and so then the question of knowing the right thing to do in principle and being motivated to actually do it is very different years and years ago back when I was studying moral philosophy because I do have an education that involves all the big names in Western philosophy and I went through all the big heavy books on European philosophy before I started working on Buddhism and Asia and philosophies I used to always say some of my professors found this sort of stunning because they hadn't heard it before I used to say you know the prospect of ethics relies on there being a connection between knowing and feeling if there's no connection there if you can know something and it doesn't change how you feel about something then we're no longer really talking about ethics so the purpose of this video of any of these videos on this YouTube channel is not to boast about what a wonderful guy I am because I don't believe a wonderful guy and these qualities these characteristics I'm describing I don't even think they are redeeming qualities I don't think they're they're viewed positively in the social context of Canada in the Year 2015 they're really not um but I can recognize there are certain subjective psychological personal factors that predisposed me to avoiding some things in life and engaging deeply with other things in life that the vast majority of people just want to avoid thinking about or recognizing as real or you know recognizing that they're there the vast majority people in Canada do not give a damn about the history of colonialism and the legal basis for the land they're sitting on the land they may own home to me that's surprising I want to know where things are made and what they're made of and where they come from and that was true of me from childhood I read ingredients on drink cartons before I knew what any of the long words meant I was always fascinated by factories - and how things were made and where things come from I think a lot of children are I don't know more than 20% of children have that kind of view of the world and I was fascinated I mean with architecture for example I was fascinated in how things were made and how they were put together and then again I had that sensitivity of a really strong link between knowing and feeling if I know that something is produced by genocide and colonialism if I know that something is produced by skinning a lamb alive I don't even need to see the videotape although in that example I have seen the videotape I have seen lambs being skinned alive that's going to change how I feel about it even though when wool as a finished product is hanging on a rack it's soft and it smells good doesn't smell like a dead animal it's an appealing final commodity but I don't just see it in those ways but look I wanted to include in this video without it getting too long what were the other aspects of my character because again I'm really not bragging about what kind of guy I am but the other aspects of my character that held me back and one aspect of my character from childhood was the kind of traditionalism of valuing tradition and that connected me to ecology in a positive way but connected me to it separated me from veganism and vegetarianism like to give an example when I was growing up and people said they needed to eat meat to such an extent I I can remember saying as a little kid you know like our grandparents ate like 10% of the meat that we now consider normal like our grandparents generation used to eat dramatically less meat than we do our grandparents generation used dramatically less electricity and they didn't think they were deprived they didn't think they were I had a low quality of life because they use less electricity you know you know so again really that makes you a jerk as a kid or as an adult because you regard the other people around you as decadent and self-indulgent and my notion of what was traditional you know was not philosophical was put together in a childish way these little bits and pieces this awareness that just 100 years ago and of course a thousand years ago even more so people didn't used to sleep on a bed they used to be satisfied to sleep on the floor you know and so on throughout the human experience people were not so hung up on the prissy decadent bourgeois requirements of life that growing up in downtown Toronto everyone around me seemed to be obsessed with and that they were obsessed with to the exclusion of ethical and political and philosophical questions that really did interest me for whatever random reason and I had to have kind of a series of realization you know little things like where I just realized you know yeah 1,000 years ago leather was a crucial part of our culture but today it's obsolete today when you see a serious mountaineering team going up a mountain none of their gear is made of leather the gloves aren't made of leather nothing else is the military equipment used today they don't even make the boots out of leather you know US army boots you can take a look how they've changed you know yeah that was something humans needed to do survive a thousand years ago not anymore a wool I actually had a wonderful experience in Scotland visiting a wool farm where you know I mean it's it's kind of funny because you're only seeing one stage of the industry you're not seeing the sheep getting shorn and you're not seeing them getting their throats cut or anything else but I can remember being out in the mountains in Scotland and seeing these beautiful happy animals that come up to you and you know want to spend time with you and as deserve as a child I thought about wool as something that connected me in a positive way to a traditional aspect of human culture that I didn't want to lose contact with but again my mind simply had to change about that I simply had to recognize yeah a thousand years ago that was true and now it's an excuse and it's an excuse for something terrible for a compromise I don't want to make and that nobody wants to make so yeah that's a shorthand for it I mean that really for me was the breaking point I comment in the earlier video for me it wasn't the taste of meat it didn't give a damn the vast majority of meat tasted horrible to me growing up as a kid instinct truly I found meat revolting I found eggs revolting I found any dairy product that actually tasted like dairy revolting and and I just never was the kind of person who thought that my own short term pleasure justified doing something immoral so you know again really doesn't make me a nice guy if anything it makes me a bit of an uncompromising jerk but I thought that kind of tradition was really worth something and I was wrong and when I figured that out which really was kind of the last step towards becoming strictly vegetarian eventually becoming vegan that was sad for me because I was kind of looking back on the history of Western civilization and seeing even more of it as worthless and a lie and execute because you know you already look back on warfare and think yeah we had these excuses for why warfare was good and now I reject them and warfare is bad we had all these excuses for why slavery was good now we look back on it and slavery is bad and you know to look back on the material culture of human civilization and think all of this was an error you know for thousands of years people thought that alcohol made them happy and now you look back and you say well alcohol causes brain damage here in Canada our first nations one of the one of the few things that's true almost coast-to-coast the vast majority of our native people you know their main drug was tobacco you know tobacco use was a huge part of the religion and secular life really getting high using tobacco was a paper well now we've done a lot of scientific research on what the real effects of tobacco are on the brain and you got to look back on that and say oh this was all an error you know so I just say that was a sad and sobering thought and I guess that was kind of the last tether that was slowing me down