Comment by Eisenstein

I completely agree with you about 'vegan purity'.

Making people abstain from meat completely will turn people into the meat-eating equivalent of alcoholics. I bring up the comparison because sobriety is contingent on a period of continued abstinence along with veganism or vegetarianism. You will be mocked if you called yourself vegan and ate meat a few times a month, as you would be mocked if you called yourself sober and drank a few times a month.

Many people look at a lifetime of denying themselves a basic pleasure and rightly balk at the prospect and put it off to some distant 'later' or create a rationalization for why they don't need to do it. This wouldn't be nearly as much of a problem if we quit using absolutist terms like 'vegan' and instead came up with a way to make it a moral issue to acknowledge the problems associated with meat consumption without shaming those who limit it but do not abstain from it.

Basically -- advocating that the solution is a 'vegan' one is probably not going to work, and if it does it will create (at least initially) a population of guilt-ridden people and an associated culture of shame. Let's think of a better way to do it.