My First Encounter With A Vegan Activist

While training for a large corporation earlier this week, I had a chance encounter with a vegan activist – that too during lunch while at the training sessions. This person was one of the attendees in the training program. While he appreciated my training delivery and overall engagement in the training program – he was visibly shocked at me happily munching tandoor grilled chicken. He gave me a discerning look and tried to walk away with his plate filled with salad and sprouted beans, but then paused, stood there perhaps thinking for a while and then sat at my table requesting “May I join you?” I nodded and he settled down with his plate on the table opposite to mine, fork and knife, tissues unfolded and spread across with an eloquent display of elite aristocratic dinner table mannerisms – kind of reminiscent of royal colonial dinner etiquettes that I watched in movies.

After a brief period of munching lettuce and beans, while I was busy with the chicken, he asked me about how I ended up as a technology trainer and I replied explaining my career background and how I ventured into Linux as a hobby and how I ventured into Python along with other dynamic and scripting languages. We had a healthy conversation on the tech stuff, recalling the nostalgia of the dot-com era and a few minutes into the conversation, he said “I’m a pure vegan! I don’t consume food that harms and exploits animals”. I had heard about veganism in the social media circles – primarily Orkut and comments in Slashdot, but I was not fully aware of their agenda or their philosophy.

Recollecting My Diet Experiments in the Past

In hindsight, I remember venturing into this dietary experiment myself for a brief period back in 1999 to 2001. This was a time when I had no idea about the concept of veganism. This was more of a spiritual thought-process experiment. I was aware of vegetarianism practiced by Brahmins, Jains, Lingayats and many other communities here in Bengaluru. As I belong to a caste strata who are primarily non-vegetarians, I grew up eating lamb, chicken, an array of sea-foods (fish, crabs, prawns, squid) and chicken eggs. This has been a regular diet in my family.

As I grew older from my late teens to early adulthood, my spiritual inclination (or rather experiment) drew me closer towards vegetarianism. When I saw live chickens taken out of the cage and mercilessly slaughtered – something broke inside me watching it. I came to a realization that this was barbaric and uncivilized – not the kind of life that I should be living, by mercilessly killing animals and birds to feed my hunger. I stopped all forms of non-vegetarian diet and any food source that I felt came from animals. This included even milk products and eggs. I never knew at that time that what I was venturing into had already been a worldwide movement.

I switched my diet to salads, greens, rice and other pure vegetarian diet – without milk and eggs. Two weeks into it – and I felt lighter, healthier and generally happy knowing that I was doing the right thing. I did have immense pressure within my family about my diet choices – so I consciously avoided staying at home when non-veg was cooked, had food in veg hotels and sneaked back home late in the night to sleep.

One month on, I started to get sick with fever and my body was becoming weak. I began to suffer acute loss of blood and my immunity was going haywire. I used to get bed-ridden for weeks at a stretch and things spiralled out of control when a symptom of typhoid showed up. My doctor while diagnosing, looked at my pale palms and said: “You don’t have enough blood! You lack red blood cells. What do you eat?” My father who accompanied me to the clinic told the doctor that I was not eating well. The doctor asked if we were non-vegetarians, and when my father said yes, immediately she instructed that I should be fed with raw eggs stirred in warm milk everyday and chicken or lamb liver/spleen regularly once recovered from the sickness.

While recovering from my sickness, I lay on bed for hours contemplating on my life and diet choices. I was generally healthy when I was eating non-veg. It seemed to me that the sudden shift in my diet could have shocked my body pushing it into disaster-recovery mode. Once I recovered from the sickness – I was back to consuming non-veg with a sense of guilt personally. A few months later, I retried this experiment again – stopping non-veg consumption, only this time in slow phases. At first I removed lamb and chicken meat from my regular diet, but was okay with sea-food, milk and eggs. Gradually, I stopped sea-food too, but kept consuming milk products (primarily curd, cheese, paneer, ghee, butter) and eggs. I was now a proper vegetarian.

Around four months as a pure vegetarian, I felt this was a balanced compromise and my health was generally okay. But, socializing with friends and colleagues in my company who were non-vegetarians became a hurdle. Every time I saw chicken and lamb served on the table for my colleagues and friends in get-together parties – my brain started to act weird. The craving was getting real and I realized that I had to practice more stringent self-control.

One fine day, I met up with new vegetarian friends that I connected with over internet chat (IRC) for a lunch at a vegetarian hotel. The three of them who were Brahmins and Jains assumed that I was one among their caste circles. We had a brief conversation about our lives, work and stuff and eventually ventured into spirituality. The three friends unanimously claimed that non-vegetarianism would induce aggressive behaviour, and curtail intellectual rigor. Embracing vegetarianism would enhance the spiritual connection to God and transform individuals to heightened pure souls. They went on about this topic for a while and asked if I were a Brahmin or a Jain. I answered with a “no”. One of them asked if I also eat non-veg to which I replied – “No. I consciously avoided it and I’m trying to become a total vegetarian”. The three friends cheered and said that I was doing the right thing.

Breaking the Myth with Data

When I got back home, I began to think that something was not right. Does dietary choices like vegetarianism decide behavioural traits? How does diet affect intelligence? My brain went off on another exploratory tangent – this time trying to make sense of available data. If vegetarianism improves intellectual rigor, how is it that meat-eating cultures in the West that included beef and pork in their diet made rapid progress in scientific and technological innovations in the last couple of centuries?

Think of electricity, electrical appliances, gasoline engines, industrial machinery, electronics, semiconductors, radio, television, computer and the Internet – did all of these innovations happen because the scientists and engineers who brought them to the world were vegetarians? No. Of course, some of the brilliant scientists like Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein turned to vegetarianism during the final stages of their lives as a conscious health choice. There is no data that claims that their dietary choices affected their intellectual rigor, in fact quite the contrary.

If strict vegetarianism led to evolving as more intelligent beings, the animal kingdom would have looked different. Now think about it: which animal is more intelligent? A deer or a tiger? Intuitively we could claim that tigers are more intelligent as they possess superior hunting skills built on strategy and planning. But elephants are intelligent too, and so are horses and goats. Chimpanzees would beat them all – but then they are omnivores, just like humans. The moment you bring ancient humans into the picture, the story changes completely.

Our evolutionary ancestors were all omnivores. In fact, this could have been an important feature that allowed them to evolve into the humans that we are today. Why? Omnivores have a larger spectrum of dietary choices. When our ancestral hominids learned to control fire, we crossed a barrier that made us rapidly climb up the ladder to become the most fearsome predators in the wild that even the most ferocious animals like lions and bears would want to avoid, especially when we coordinate in a group.

Most vegetables, seeds and tubers became consumable only after cooking. I believe that vegetarianism in the ancient civilizations could have been a luxurious endeavour. Grains, pulses, vegetables and fruits that we take for granted today were not readily available as animal meat and fish in the ancient era. They became available only after innovations in agriculture, irrigation planning and a slow generational process of selective breeding and cultivation for higher yields and nutritional enrichment. Humans could have evolved to eat wide varieties of vegetables, tubers and grains only after controlling fire and then innovating on agriculture.

While agricultural practices were common in ancient human civilizations since the last 10,000 years or more – vegetarianism became a recent trend – maybe spanning not more than perhaps 2000 to 3000 years or so based on our current available data. For instance, in the ancient Vedic traditions within the Indian sub-continent, meat consumption was common even amongst the scholarly classes. Scriptures in the Rig Veda depict detailed instructions for meat preparations that included beef. However, there were notable exceptions that discouraged slaughtering of cows that produce milk and eventually oxen that were considered essential for ploughing fields for agriculture and to drive cattle-carts that carry load. This decision I believe was aimed more towards economic convenience and sustenance of societies at that time.

Philosophical discourses within the Vedic traditions of the later era gradually pivoted towards vegetarianism with scriptures like the Yajur Veda expanding the list of animals that must not be killed for food. Later factions from the Vedic cultures like Ajivikas promoted ahimsa (restraining from needless violence) followed by Jainism and Buddhism adopting strict vegetarianism based on the principles of ahimsa. Brahminical cultures too adopted them alongside Jainism and Buddhism during this era.

It so happens that these cultural shifts were only possible after agricultural practice at scale. In coastal regions of India (for instance, West Bengal, Goa, Karnataka and other regions), where agriculture was not possible due to non-fertile sandy regions, Brahmins consumed fish and eggs.

Whether eggs are classified as vegetarian or non-vegetarian remains debated even today. Many argue that if eggs are non-vegetarian as they come from an animal, even milk should be considered non-vegetarian. While some religious scholars and educated elite consider eggs as vegetarian in the Vedic sense as they do not violate principles of ahimsa, many other vegetarians believe that eggs are life-birthing entities and should not be consumed.

So, most people at least in India are strict vegetarians only because they follow the traditions, scriptures and religious dictums laid out in the later Vedic period.

After a few weeks of self-reflection, I came to the realization that “Life eats life to survive – that’s how evolution brought us thus far.” Reflecting our emotions on other living beings would have made us extinct a long time ago. Our emotions and feelings are narrow, biased and circumstantial – and we need to adapt to deal with it. Eat what your body can take without guilt, respect the food that feeds you, do not waste it and eat only how much your body needs – and you’ll be just fine. Live long enough to be useful, but not a burden on others. These became my thought-process henceforth and I switched back to being a non-vegetarian from then on – just mindful of what I eat, respecting the food I eat irrespective of the food source – be it plant or animal.

Logical Fallacies of Veganism

Veganism seems to be a noble cause in theory. But in practice, it is unsustainable for a large human population. Let me point out a few reasons as to why. Firstly, the principle of not exploiting and causing violence against animals for our food seems altruistic. But then, if all of humanity were to switch to strict diets from plant sources, we would need to switch to agriculture completely – en masse. This would require vast amounts of fertile land, and in order to acquire this land for agriculture – we would require deforestation – culling out the trees and ecosystems of forests to create land suitable for farming food crops. Now, what happens to the wide spectrum of animals and birds that once inhabited the forest? Would vegans adopt them and have them dwell in their backyards? The wolves, foxes, hyenas, cheetahs, vultures, woodpeckers, rabbits, squirrels, wild boars – what happens to them all?

Secondly, the claim that non-vegetarianism leads to more carbon emissions and greenhouse gases is a flawed correlation. The carbon emissions and greenhouse gases are outcomes of a rapidly growing human population. Growing human populations need food, and the meat industry is designed to scale at the rate and pace to cater to these growing demands – agriculture cannot keep up with this pace – due to lack of rich fertile soil, conducive climatic conditions, lack of abundant water, especially for grains like rice, wheat and corn.

Thirdly, the claim that the human body is not designed for meat consumption is a scientifically flawed argument. No, we humans do not possess claws and sharp canine teeth like other wild animals and our intestinal lining is longer than most wild animals. Guess what? Our intestinal linings are a lot shorter than most herbivores – and we cannot consume most vegetables, tubers and grains without proper cooking. Our digestive system was not designed to break them down easily. Ancient hominids survived on raw meat. In theory, if it were possible to consume raw meat immediately after slaying an animal, our bodies could digest the blood and chewed flesh without much effort – that’s how most hunter-gatherers lived a few millennia ago.

Fourthly, the claim that meat is toxic is also scientifically false. The meat we consume from animals as our standard diet is not toxic even if eaten raw immediately after a fresh kill. It becomes toxic when left for a while due to germ infestation. Our ancestors discovered means to preserve meat for longer – either dry it out completely under the sun (a practice followed in Middle Eastern desert regions), or by marinating it with spices. Of course, our ancestors hunted mostly herbivores for their meat. Carnivores were generally rare, difficult to hunt and must not have been palatable due to their tough flesh.

Well indeed vegetables and most plant food sources are toxic in their raw form. Plants evolved to generate toxins mainly as a defensive mechanism against being eaten by microbes, insects and small animals. We humans evolved to resist toxicity to some extent. The heat of pepper, the spicy flavours and aroma of ginger, garlic, onions, mint leaves, curry leaves are all toxins that we humans evolved to tolerate at first and now relish as delicacies. In fact anti-microbial properties of many spices and herbs were employed in ancient medicines. Consider leaves of tobacco that release excess nicotine when chewed that was intended to repel animals. But, we humans evolved to exploit these properties as an addictive substance. Most toxins of plant food sources are neutralized when cooked. Cooking also helped in breaking down complex chains of molecules within grains, seeds and vegetables releasing them as edible starch (carbohydrates).

The claim of animal cruelty in mass adoption of non-vegetarianism seems valid. However, the livestock today have all evolved alongside humans for many generations by selective breeding to cater to human needs. For instance, domesticated cows have evolved to produce excess milk, a lot more than what a calf needs. Domesticated cows, buffaloes, goats, hens and other livestock have long crossed a barrier that today they have a meagre chance of survival in the wild – without human support. Abandoning non-vegetarianism means abandoning these species completely, risking their extinction – a carefully directed selective breeding from hundreds of thousands of years of human efforts lost without a trace.

Lastly, it is a no-brainer that non-vegetarian diet is more nutritionally dense when compared to vegan diet. Vegans need to follow a well-planned diet regime covering a large spectrum of plant food sources to compensate for the nutrition value readily available just in milk and eggs. In spite of the large spectrum, they would need to depend on protein, vitamin, calcium and iron supplements to ensure that their nutrition intake is balanced.

It seems to me that the ancient thinkers in the Vedic era had this wisdom after all. They did not preach extreme practices of veganism, but rather ahimsa – restraint from needless violence. Milk, curd, ghee, butter were still allowed to be consumed by vegetarians. The pluralistic nature of our ancient traditions allowed non-vegetarians and vegetarians to co-exist, unlike the extreme activism – a kind of radicalism that modern veganism promotes.

Circling back

Coming back to my lunch alongside a vegan activist – what started as a self-proclamation as a strict vegan by this person went on with how good and altruistic vegans are and how they cared about the planet and its well-being and then switched to rant mode with pseudo-scientific claims on the health and environmental benefits of veganism and how non-vegetarians are ruining our planet – yada yada yada. It reminded me of a proselytizing Pentecostal believer claiming that we non-believers are going to face doom if we do not follow their path.

Strangely, I’ve had countless interactions with Brahmins, Jains, Lingayats and others who were strict vegetarians either by choice or their beliefs – and yet very mindful and tolerant about others’ dietary choices and their sensitivities, which this vegan activist thoroughly lacked. I wondered if this was a systemic problem with veganism that they seem to suffer from a “god complex” or is it specific to this person’s behaviour.

Anyways, I finished my tandoor grilled chicken, even chewed on the bones and sucked the marrow paying no heed to his mindless rants – only hoping that he did not exhaust all of his energy from the salad in this needless ordeal. In the post-lunch lab sessions, I caught him struggling to stay awake and be alert. Maybe he was too tired after wasting his energy of mindless rant during lunch.

Reflecting back (~ 2017)

In the past few years, I encountered more self-proclaimed vegans, more than a dozen of them – and I was not wrong after all. Each one of them I encountered did suffer from a “god complex” – it is indeed a systemic problem. They always come up with lopsided arguments so far as to claim that they are on a trajectory of becoming enlightened and highly evolved beings whereas non-vegans (even vegetarians included) are deteriorating to a diminished species. Let us see how evolutionary selection plays out for them 🙂

Reflections (~ 2026)

This blog reflects my experiences and my exposure to data from 2009–2017. Modern nutrition science shows well-planned vegan diets can thrive with planning/supplements, while environmental impacts of animal agriculture have been quantified more precisely (e.g., higher land/GHG footprints in many studies). I have encountered even more vegans since then (around 30+) and view has changed since meeting them. They were mature, tolerant and mindful of other’s sensitivities. And no, they were not suffering from the “god complex” as I had initially quoted. I guess my earlier encounters were chance coincidences or maybe reflection of the world-view by early adopters of veganism here in India. But ever since I wrote in 2017, the vegans I met weren’t arguing their stand, infact they simply said “I’m vegan, I prefer vegan diet” and that’s about it – no more ranting on other’s food choices.

Regarding my arguments on the Logical Fallacies of Veganism, I stand corrected on many of the points as more recent scientific studies show that plant-based agriculture is more sustainable than industrial-scale livestock / cattle breeding that required more land for grazing leading to more deforestation than plant-based agriculture. But then, I am still skeptical of the studies conducted - mostly focussed on western industrial-scale meat production - especially beef. However, in a densely populated country like India with sizeable number of non-vegetarian population, the logic of these studies do not hold. Meat production in India is not yet heavily centralized nor industrialized, but rather distributed into small poultry farms and livestock breeding. Large non-vegetarian populations in India generally avoid beef and stick to mostly chicken, lamb and seafood. Beef and Pork eaters make up a small populace. Most non-vegetarians do not consume meat every day and for every meal. Sustainability is based on balanced dietary choices here.

My current view: mindful, respectful eating in whatever form suits your body and ethics. Just be accomodating and tolerant to other’s sensitivities. Personally, I’ve generally stuck to simple vegetarian diet / salads when in company of unknown since 2015 – to keep my stature look less awkward. After all, mindfulness works both ways.