W hen someone you know decides they also want to be vegan, it’s cause for huge celebrations. I say celebrations, because the feeling of elation has many layers. There’s delight that someone you love ‘gets you’ and you now have a buddy to swap tips and share experiences with; that wonderful feeling of not being alone. There’s also the happy realisation that your actions and words have likely influenced this decision: someone trusted you enough to research, question, and make a lifestyle change as significant as you know it to be. A sense of relief can follow on from this (“Oh thank god they don’t all think I’m a weirdo!”), along with the realisation that you now have someone who will always invite you over for dinner. Score! Outside of the personal realm it can feel even more momentous: change is coming, change is happening, and you can see that change right before your very eyes and reach out and give it a hug. In short, it feels bloody marvellous. It’s the stuff of social media status updates, spontaneous presents in the shape of cookbooks, meals out and high fives. But what happens when that person turns round and tells you they’re not vegan anymore?
Delighting in failure
The shift towards veganism is still so new that people ‘falling off the wagon’ is rarely discussed. Heaven save you if you even think of mentioning it on social media, for you are likely to be lambasted into the middle of next week. But I think it’s something that vegans should be talking about – because if we’re not interested in the reasons why people stop being vegan, then who else will be? A lapsed vegan plays a pivotal role in the ‘I told you so’ narrative and can have much more power to influence within our society than a happy vegan. Most of us have witnessed the sheer delight in the face of someone who feels the pressing need to tell you that they have a friend who used to be a vegan, but stopped because they got ill/got bored/ couldn’t hack it/was sick of being laughed at etc. As sure as veggs are veggs, if someone’s stopped being vegan then you, and everybody else they know, are going to hear about it. And that’s not the sort of publicity we want. So what do we do? Well this is the point where I have to confess to not having an answer. But what I do have is experience and my hope is that in talking about it, I can open up a dialogue where we start to address – much more openly – the ‘lapsed vegan phenomenon’.
Making the big change