How to lose friends and alienate people. — this vegan life

Exhibit L: 

This is the friendship toast maker. I reiterate, he loves meat so much even said toast has Bovril on it. This man will never, ever give up meat. (And trust me, his farts smell all the more deadly for it. He is rotting inside.) 

He is my dearest friend, despite our now hugely contrasting lifestyle choices. We didn’t see each other much last year as our circles spun in divergent directions. This year we promised to make more effort. 

Guess bloody what? As our weekend of fun approached, L sent me this text: 

‘I’ve booked two vegan restaurants. Let me know which one you’d prefer to go to.’

I WAS NOT EVEN DREAMING! My bestest, oldest friend, my meatiest, grizzliest, most anti-anything friend, had booked TWO vegan restaurants. FOR ME!

As we said our goodbyes, I excitedly told him now that I knew he didn’t hate me, we could try out other vegan restaurants together too. 

‘Yeah, don’t push it,’ he said. But hey, we’ve made a beautiful start haven’t we?

These are just three examples in many. My friends have been the legends I always knew they were, hence bagging them in the first place. I love them all the more for how they have reacted to the V-gang. 

Exhibit Facebook

I’ve gloated about my amazing friends enough. This post is called how to LOSE friends for a reason. And that reason is not just that the sentence came to me in the middle of the night and I thought it was funny and now I’m trying to spin a blog about it.

Ah… Facebook. Where 563 people you once knew, now lurk, silently judging you as you age. As my choice of status update evolved from frivolous photo to footage of agricultural animals getting beaten up in slaughterhouses, people I have not seen IRL for years emerged to battle me. 

Some were offended. Others shot remarks about me being ill-informed. Apparently those sheep getting kicked and bleeding from too hasty a shearing were not categorically sheared for Uggs, as Peta were suggesting, and so I was a fool. 

In my ten-year old Facebook account, I’ve never entered into any kind of agro with anyone. In my one-year old vegan life, I’ve become accustomed to Facebook spats. I’m now a Facebook spatter! 

Omni’s can get ANGRY! But the good thing about veganism is that you have facts and stats on your side. To paraphrase Rudyard Kippers, if you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you, you win. Don’t tell the omnis, but their every argument beyond an honest: ‘I don’t care about the animals or the environment or my own health, I just like the taste of meat’ requires some serious logic gymnastics and if you can stay calm and recall the facts, you can come out of these spats relatively unscathed. I mean, they give me mild panic attacks but confrontation always has, so nothing new.

No-one likes to have their life choices questioned, no-one wants to see animals suffer. No-one likes a vegan bore. It took me a few months to figure out what sort of stuff was worth sharing on FB and what alienated me from people I hadn’t even seen in more years than I’ve got fingers. Such is life. These days I try to keep it light so that people see veganism can be coolio iglesias.

But really, if you’re deciding to comment on my post for the first time in 15 years because those particular sheep may or may not have been sheared specifically for Uggs, I think the real question is, why are we still ‘friends’, by definition of Facebook, anyway?