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The Vegan Disconnect: Scraping Is For Wallpaper And Windshields Only

by Dave Hewitt | February 23, 2019

The vegan disconnect can be real, especially when you’re in a party where you are asked to scrape the meat sauce off the pasta…

I guess the one thing about being vegan, is that only vegans really know what veganism is. That may sound kind of self-evident, but the void between vegans and many non-vegans, seems pretty wide at times.

The Vegan Disconnect: Scraping Is For Wallpaper And Windshields Only

“So, let me get this straight? You don’t eat fish either?” is a line you may have heard from time to time. In response to that particular line, I have tried to reason, explain and throw in humor too – “Yeah, I don’t eat anything with a face. So that rules out not only animals, but clocks, cliffs and hypocrisy too…”

That seems easy enough to get, right? If so, then why is veganism so very baffling to many non-vegans?

In my native UK, there was a comedy series going back a few years in which a grandson introduced his non-meat-eating girlfriend to his grandmother at a family buffet. Quietly, on the side, the grandmother wanting to know what the girlfriend can eat after suggesting a number of meat products that she would decline, enquires curiously with her grandson “Well can’t she eat wafer-thin ham?”

And so it goes on.

At a recent work’s Christmas party, my vegan wife and I, despite requesting two vegan pasta dishes, were served up with two plates of pasta that were drenched in a rich meat sauce. Pushing the plates to one side, one of my usually erudite and articulate colleagues leant over and asked me, in all genuineness, why we “just couldn’t scrape the sauce off the pasta?”

“Sorry, I accidentally drove an M1 Abrams tank over your beef stroganoff. It’s ok though, just pick the gravel out with tweezers…” is really what I should have said back.

Aside from the fact that my idea of great Christmas party is not really scraping bits of animal parts off hundreds of threads of pasta, the vegan disconnect was clearly strong in this one.

As it is with so many.

Stay strong vegan people, stay strong.

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Dave Hewitt

An Ohio-based British Masters post-graduate, and ever since I was a little kid growing up in 70s England, I’ve always hated animal cruelty and injustice, and vegan for six years. The sense of sticking up for the voiceless, the persecuted and the powerless remains as strong as ever. Married to Monica, my vegan life partner who works for NASA, we’ve been in Ohio since 2015, and have managed to drive on the other side of the road without incident thus far.

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