Why it took me a while to go vegan

The reasons to become vegan are well-known, (here are some reasons to go vegan), and it’s not as hard to go vegan as one would think. This post is specifically about why I never went vegan earlier than when I actually did. Reasons for me to not go vegan I did not grow up in a vegetarian family, and the inherent casteism of Indian vegetarianism[1] (it’s mostly about ritual purity rather than actual care for animals, since they’d be vegan otherwise) alienated me from vegetarianism, and by extension, veganism. If you start thinking about minimising suffering from a utilitarian perspective, there is almost nothing you can do to not be involved in it, at least indirectly. There is intense slavery in the globalised supply chain[2], for example, and if one wished to clean their hands of everything wrong with the world, there’s not much they could participate in. I always thought people positioning veganism as the only moral option was unfair on indigenous people who live(d) sustainably as…