Like in the 90s, there were zero veg restaurants (in my town, anyways). The best you could do was Indian, and damn I ate a lot of Indian. I was lucky if a store had one kind of tofu. Soymilk wasn't really sold in the store. Fake meats and specialty veg foods didn't exist. No vegan ice creams and desserts and shit. Also no Uber Eats.
I listen to people complaining today and I really have no patience for it. I went vegetarian (not vegan*) at 19. I bought and cooked my own meals. I made a fuck ton of rice and beans. And I had to do this in a suburban hell with no car. Adults in a city whinge that it's hard and I'm like 
Granted, people living in rural Kansas or whatever food desert might have it harder. For the rest, fucking just do it.
*I've been vegan for ten years now
im 20 and been vegan since 12 lol. my parents were not at all supportive
started when i was subscribed to pewdiepie and he made a video reacting to/making fun of a vegan lady criticizing him for eating meat. pretty much everyone was attacking her but her arguments actually made me reflect and check out her channel
Damn, you went vegan when you had basically no material power. That's really awesome. You are legit a based person.
I had one this morning for my birthday and if that's the best thing I ever eat for the rest of my life, I would be satisfied. They are that good.
Not where I'm at! It's bullshit, there is hardly any banh mi anywhere, I moved from an area that was a large percent Vietnamese and I miss the local tofu and banh mi dearly.
Veganism is so much damn easier than your average omni realizes. It requires a step out of that major comfort zone of carnism that most of us end up growing an attachment to from an early age, and that's what psychologically makes it sound insanely restrictive and challenging.
I realized that once my sense of ethics began overriding that attachment to carnism, I actually find it, in some sense, more difficult to be a carnist, not less. Veganism is very second nature to me, and I do not see animal flesh and secretions as food anymore. I do not see animal skin, fur, and wool as clothes anymore. I don't see horses as animals to ride or elephants as astounding entertainers either.
To clarify, this isn't me saying that things like meat "taste bad" (because for some reason, people think being vegan comes with the notion that you believe animal-derived foods don't taste good). However, it really is me saying that the source of said good taste puts me off of it immediately.
Some of the people I grew up knowing but have not talked to in ages, including my late mother who passed before I even went vegan, would be baffled to know that I now have such a strong commitment to veganism because, beforehand, all of my favorite foods consisted of some kind of animal product. Even without fancy mock meats and dairy alternatives, which I won't deny that I enjoy, I'd take being vegan over being a carnist any day of the week. Eating a plate of beanis, potatoes, and broccoli brings me more peace, comfort, and satisfaction than that plate swapped with fried pork instead of beans and the potatoes and broccoli smothered in cheese, and that was a very common kind of meal for pre-vegan me to eat with a smile on my face.
because for some reason, people think being vegan comes with the notion that you believe animal-derived foods don't taste good
Very successful cultural indoctrination: meat tastes good. Vegan food tastes bad, and anyone who eats it must be some weirdo who doesn't like the taste of meat.
Yeah I really have no patience or respect for "but it's haaaaaard
" for two reasons. First off, not being vegan is simply morally unacceptable, idgaf how hard it is. I don't care if your options are eat animals or hike 20 miles up a mountain in a blizzard to get the world's last bean. When there's an option, murder is obviously the incorrect choiceSecondly, it just fucking isn't hard.
It's probably slightly harder if you don't know how to cook at all.
Still not that hard, and vegan food is much faster to make than carnist food anyway.
place rice in bowl, pour in some water, place bowl back in rice cooker, press button. god it's SO HARD
I also went vegetarian -> vegan in my teens in suburbia, been vegan for most of my life at this point. I don't understand when people I organize who seem like they should get it, don't.
It makes it really hard for me to take them seriously, and more often than not I find that their cooking skills suck too
Not all of them! What's frustrating to me is that while a handful of vegans I know are comrades, most are libs. (One person that's a turbo-lib mostly does it for health reasons)
I'm just gonna copy and paste something I wrote elsewhere to describe my thoughts on "vegan for health" and "vegan for the environment:"
I genuinely believe that carnists often refuse to accept ethical veganism as true specifically because, if they do, it leaves them with two options: either they can go vegan, which many of them unfortunately deem too "inconvenient" or they can continue being a carnist while acknowledging the truth, which is hypocritical and therefore considered shameful for many.
So when you have a person who eats a plant-based diet and does not have to deal with the above obstacle that carnists have when it comes to embracing vegan ethics, for them to still have that tendency to eat plant-based while simultaneously professing "Yeah, but I just don't give a shit about animals. I'm only doing this for myself/the planet!" is a bit of a headscratcher for me.
These kinds of people seemingly should have nothing to lose if they are to embrace vegan ethics, so it always leads me to the suspicion that they're likely not even eating entirely plant-based to begin with.
Meat and cheese are literally the most expensive food products out there.
People will literally go out with their limited food budgets and say "okay I need food, I'm gonna buy 4 packs of chicken wings and 3 packs of pork steaks"
Total lack of imagination.
I consider myself an easy mode vegan because I was raised vegetarian and my mother was always experimenting with dairy and egg replacements growing up.
People tell me "A lentil burger? My kids would never eat that!" They would have if they grew up with them. What do you think kids eat in India? Hella lentils.
Now we have this "just egg" and miyoko butter that's actually getting affordable and it's literally indistinguishable? Like what?
I do wish my grocery would stock non sweet plant milks though. Even when they say they aren't sweet they usually are. The shelf stable silk soy and homemade oat and hemp milks are the only things I've found that you can make a savoury dish with.
Without subsidies on animal ag these would even be cheaper in comparison.
Nooo doubt! I'm 24 years vegan this month, and there are way more options in grocery stores and restaurants than there used to be. As a result, I am more frustrated than ever when I'm in a place with few or no vegan options (certain airports, for example).
100% true. It was incredibly easy to give up meat and 99.9% of animal products but I'm sadly still a liberal (vegetarian). I've found dairy to be such a culinary crutch and have had a hard time giving it up, even though I greatly reduced my intake of it for both ethical and health reasons.
In the end I guess since I was able to just drop most animal products with no issue and switch my diet over, I can do the rest too. Hell, I'll commit to it now that I'm thinking on the subject, there's no real reason why I shouldn't
(Aside if any cool vegans here can hook me up with a good like seitan salami recipe or brand I'd be so fuckin thankful because that flavor is basically the only meat product I've had any sense of craving for since I gave it up years ago.)
So this was me 10+ years ago. My thing was cakes and ice cream. I'd say just remember that casein is kinda addictive, and dairy is pretty bad for your gut as you get older. Giving up diary gives you low level mental withdrawal, but it passes quickly. All of us long term vegans have zero desire to consume dairy, you just gotta get yourself to that point.
(Aside if any cool vegans here can hook me up with a good like seitan salami recipe
Sorry I'm one of those "don't like meat texture" vegans. Hope some other person here can help you.
Even though the texture thing isn't me I get it, respect.
As for the dairy stuff, to be completely honest it's been in the back of my head for a while now, same as giving up meat was some time ago.
I don't remember what it was then but it just took a random catalyst one day for me to stop eating meat; it was surprisingly easy to write it out of my diet and cravings overnight.
I already struggle with executive function pretty badly at times but I wanna say it kinda allows me to just completely drop things permanently for the better too lol. I figure I should commit to eating vegan sooner rather than later so I'll give it an honest try.
I'm glad you're making it. Consider making your question as a post. I'm sure that someone can answer it.
I'm gonna assume good faith here, but please note that this community is not for carnists or apologists.
To start, you're conflating two very strange things here: "not everybody can" and/or "not everybody wants"
To address the first concern of "can," yes, it's true that not literally every single individual on the planet has the capacity, practically speaking, to live a vegan lifestyle. However, please note that this is usually a way of people who are not in these situations at all (as they are extremely rare situations) formulating themselves a "pass" for why they can't go vegan.
Carnists have a very prominent tendency to make bad excuses for rejecting veganism, things that are easy to work around, but they'll believe that these excuses are anything but because the truth of the matter is that they do not take animal liberation seriously. If you don't think that it's a bad thing for a pig to be slammed into a gas chamber and slaughtered for a ham sandwich, it's so easy to be like "pork is just so damn tasty" and take that as a solid justification due to how carnism has been casually enabled in society to such a strong degree.
Carnists overwhelmingly outnumber vegans by a ton, and it's a far more socially acceptable position to be in than being vegan, so it's really fascinating that when vegans do have the time and space to speak up for beings that are being oppressed en masse while they're quite literally voiceless, carnists have to be like "but pwease think about what I feel when you say mean words about the grossly unethical industries I fund on a daily basis."
"
To address the second concern of "want," merely what a person wants to do is an absolutely unacceptable way of handling ethics. This could be used to justify a lot of horrendous behaviors that I'm pretty sure you and many other people would condemn outright, no matter how much a sick and depraved individual simply "wants" to do it.
Most important thing is to limit meat consumption to the minimum.
Last of all is this. This is the "reductionist" or "utilitarian" approach to veganism, but it's a very odd stance to hold. Hell, it's even more odd than just straight-up believing that you should give absolutely zero moral consideration to animals.
On the subject of giving animals moral consideration, why do you simultaneously believe that animals deserve moral consideration but also simply wanting to needlessly kill them for food justifies it? That sounds rather contradictory. It'd be like saying "We should reduce our racism to a minimum, but also, if you have a desire to call a racial minority a slur, feel free to do it!"
Furthermore, it's very arbitrary to have a notion of "reducing" animal exploitation to a minimum. If you don't have a guideline denoting that animal exploitation is inherently bad and to be rejected, what sets your metrics for aiming to be reduce it? In other words, if you're not rejecting animal exploitation entirely, how do you know that you're rejecting it enough?
The reducetarian mentality does not have an ethical backbone, so it can be shifted at any given moment. Even if you wanted to consider a somewhat practical example: imagine someone reducing their animal product consumption to being only 5 days a week, and on weekends, they eat an entirely plant-based diet. If they had a Saturday night where they're craving a steak really bad, is there really any sensible factor in their perceived code of animal ethics to get them to reject saying "Fuck it, I'll have a steak tonight anyway even though it's Saturday." Trying to draw arbitrary lines on when you're "allowed" to eat non-vegan doesn't work just because of that—it's highly arbitrary!
If somebody said "We need to simply reduce our racism," I'd find that abhorrent, especially since it's so damn inconsiderate of the victims of racism. Such a mentality strives to grant convenience to the oppressor, the racist, and it doesn't consider the victim in the regard that they deserve to be considered. This is how the abolitionist vegan mentality perceives reductetarianism, in that if you transition from 7 days of week in which you consume animal flesh and secretions to only 5 days in which you do so, the animals you eat on those 5 days will not care about the ones you supposedly save on those 2 days that you hold as abstinence days.
Serious answer: Eating your murdered victims is the only drastic diet anyone's advocating here, and it's only you.
Good effort post