This Is What Keeps Most People Away From Veganism: Comfort Food
Challenges of being vegan — Part five
This article is the last of a 5-part series on real world challenges one can expect to face while following a vegan diet. Read part 4 here.
Introduction
More than the accessibility to vegan staples, dealing with hostile people, and the lack of outdoor options while travelling, it’s the way in which we unwind and socialize that’s at the root for the dismal rate of adoption of the vegan diet globally.
Here’s the fifth structural issue you might face once you start following the vegan diet:
How we unwind and socialize as a culture
Our fast-paced corporate and work lives change how we unwind and socialize. It also dictates our food habits. For the most part, global corporate culture revolves around the consumption of animal products, stimulants such as coffee and tea, alcohol, and junk food. Healthy options are the exception, not the norm.
Culturally, we’ve come to accept that this is the politically correct way of unwinding and relaxing in the professional and corporate realm. Any other form of rejuvenation is antithetical to established ways and someone following them is either ostracized or will feel left out by those following the mainstream culture.
I personally feel our hyper work focussed culture is to blame when people attempt to consume in any other way other than the socially and culturally approved ways, which are now mainstream. Even vegetarians find it very difficult and impractical most of the time. Unless you’re eating a specific way for religious or medical reasons, you’re going to find it incredibly hard to navigate life on a diet that restricts you from eating 99% of the food you come across outside.
Alcohol and Pizza
In most early stage and bootstrapped companies(and even in some big name organizations) employees don’t possess the agency to pick and choose their food. Take it or leave it. That’s just how it is.
If you’re someone who’s migrated from a smaller town to a bustling metropolis to earn more money and live a richer life, you’re in no position to say no to handouts or freebies just because they aren’t vegan. Admit it. You’re not going to say no to a slice of pizza at the end of a tortorous work week where your team just delivered a project to a big name brand and everyone’s gone out to party.
Imagine this. Your entire team has been slogging for weeks or even months together burning the midnight oil with you and some of your team mates even sacrificing weekends and sleeping over at the office just to complete certain milestones of the project. The only kind of weekend or weekday “overtime” you can expect to receive at such high voltage jobs are Pizza and beer. There really isn’t an option to pick and choose here. If your manager decides to order beer and pizza, then beer and pizza it is.
What are you going to do? Go outside and commute 10 kilometers to a vegan joint? Or order it online for the price of an airplane wing? Vegan pizza outside is ridiculously expensive. If you live within a very strong corporate structure — regardless of which rung of the ladder you’re on — you don’t have that kind of money, time, or energy, but more so agency.
Also, vegan pizzas are made with very different ingredients and it doesn’t hit the spot the same way a vegetarian or non-vegetarian pizza does. At most vegan joints, vegan pizzas are thin crust and don’t even come with vegan cheese. And on the off chance you do find a joint that makes its pizzas with plant-based cheese, that “cheese” is sorely lacking in texture or flavour. So that emotional reprieve and salvation which your brain is desperately craving for in a pizza isn’t to be found.
While everyone else is feeling fulfilled and satisfied ready to hit their desks with renewed energy, you are left feeling empty and impoverished by your plant based meal brought from home.
Coffee and Tea
Unless you’re habitually into drinking black tea or coffee, veganism is a no go for you as you are unlikely to find dairy alternatives anywhere. Globally, the cafes where you’re likely to find vegan alternatives to cows milk are few and far between. Cafes offering plant milk options are usually found only in cosmopolitan cities and big towns. You’re not going to find Almond and Soy milk options while exploring India’s rural villages or the French countryside. (unless it distinctly exists as a tradition like it does in China)
Besides, even if you did find cafes that served plant-based milk, you’d have to:
1.) Develop an affinity for coffee/tea with plant milks.
and,
2.) Be willing to pay a surcharge for them.
Animal rights activists refuse to accept some of these real world challenges that people are sure to face after going vegan and staunchly insist that we must compromise our habits and food preferences for the sake of animal rights.
Here’s the thing right.
Black coffee is not the same as milk coffee. It just isn’t. It’s a totally different product altogether. It’s going to give a completely different hit to someone who’s been accustomed to drinking cows milk coffee all their lives. Same thing for plant milks. When you substitute one ingredient for another, you completely change the composition and taste of a product, and the feeling that it will induce in the mind of the consumer.
How am I supposed to get back to my soul crushing job and perform to the very best of my abilities when my one and only source of comfort and consolation is no longer accessible to me?
Chocolate
“Vegan chocolates aren’t available anywhere”, I once told an Animal Rights activist.
And pat came the reply: “But dark chocolates are vegan!”
As a society, we’re used to binge eating certain products. And chocolate happens to be one of them. Dark chocolate cannot be consumed the same way milk chocolate is. You just can’t. You can’t compare an exquisite Lindt 85% Dark Chocolate to a KitKat bar. The former is an expensive indulgence to be enjoyed occassionally as a treat and the latter is cheap comfort food to be enjoyed every other day. For most people, food is the only thing to look forward to after getting home from a mind numbing and soul sucking job. Small guilty pleasures like chocolates and confectionery are one of them.
I’ve gotten seriously ill in the past binging on whole dark chocolate bars during my initial days as a vegan. Besides the bitterness, consuming dark chocolate in large quantities will make you feel extremely hyperactive and horny as cocoa content is high and sugar is low. There’s no milk in there to balance out the potency of the Cocoa.
Dark chocolate is a luxury item that should be eaten in moderation and is best reserved for momentous and joyous occassions.
Also, not all dark chocolates are vegan. Some do have milk in them, which one gets to know only after reading the fine print.
Ice cream
“Vegan ice cream isn’t available anywhere either”, I told the same animal rights activist.
And pat came the reply: “But sorbets and popsicles are vegan”
Here’s the thing right. Sorbets may be vegan by default. But they just don’t hit the spot the way a traditional ice cream does. No sorbet in the world can take the place of a Banana Split Sundae or a Choco Fudge Brownie ice cream at the end of a hectic week of back to back meetings, stressful situations at the office, and loads of overtime. Besides, they aren’t even available everywhere. At mainstream ice cream parlors, fruit salads or fruit bowls bear the closest resemblance to anything remotely vegan on the menu.
Only if you happen to be visiting an Italian gelato instead of a traditional ice cream parlor, can the sorbet come to your rescue. But if your team from work happens to be visiting a traditional ice cream parlour, then you just have to make do with whatever’s available.
Usually work teams go out for ice cream after a heavy day of work in the afternoons, or on a Saturday night as some kind of consolation for the 6'th working day. It’s way too hard to resist the temptation of a free (or even paid) ice cream when you’ve been pouring your heart and soul out to your company all week long, even if that ice cream contains copious amounts of cruelty in it.
It’s just how it is.
Conclusion
Whether it is ice cream, pizza, alcohol, or any other culturally accepted form of consumption that is unique to a particular country, there’s no denying the fact that going vegan and refusing to indulge in any of the above-mentioned behaviours is the physical equivalent of swimming through a swiftly flowing river in the opposite direction.
Veganism is great when one possesses the money, time, energy, agency, and willpower to keep it going even in the most stressful situations. Sadly, most of us don’t. It’s not like we even have a choice. When you’re part of a rigid structure, you’re forced to behave in certain ways to adhere and conform to that structure. This is to not only make life easier for you, but also to appease certain parts of the system that could be instrumental to your growth and upward mobility in life.
The reason we keep reading about so many movie actors and other highly distinguished celebrities going vegan is because they’ve reached a point in their lives where they possess the agency to do so. They call the shots wherever they go, not others.
I’m not against people going vegan, but it must never come at the cost of your own peace and sanity. Like I said in the beginning, a lot of how we socialize and consume comes down to the choices we’re given at work. It is those choices which then extend to other parts of our lives. We after all, spend the whopping majority of our lives at work. So when those choices don’t align with our values, we’re forced to either compromise with those values or seek employment elsewhere. It’s just how it is.
