After I posted my SoyJoy entry, Cyrena told me that she had recently been at the apartment of one of her vegan friends as the friend received a free box of SoyJoy in the mail (as part of a promotion going on at the time). The vegan friend, and another vegan who was over, excitedly opened the box of SoyJoy and perused the ingredients. Vegans can never be too safe, and of course their vigilance was warranted: they were shocked to find that SoyJoy wasn’t vegan.

According to Cyrena, they then discussed the absurdity of a non-vegan, soy-based product for about half an hour, angry and confused that anyone would ever make such a thing. They then threw away the entire box.

Even though…

- Eating the bars would have done no more harm to animals than throwing out the box.

- Eating the bars would have done no more harm to the environment than throwing out the box.

- Eating such a small amount of animal ingredients would have had no impact on their health.

If you look at all the reasons vegans are supposedly vegans (The Vegan Trinity: Animals, Environment, Health), none of them is served by throwing out a box of snack bars. Yet this is what almost all vegans would have done.

This is because there is a secret fourth reason for veganism that compels vegans more than anything that has to do with saving the world: individual purity.

Say a vegan and a meat eater go out to dinner together. The vegan orders a seitan steak, and the meat eater orders a steak. The vegan wishes the meat eater had ordered something moral for a change, but oh well. The waiter arrives with their dishes and accidentally swaps them, giving the meat eater the fake steak, and the vegan the real one. Somehow they’re unable to detect the mistake (unlikely, but theoretically possible, if they both have no tongues) until the vegan tastes gristle on her last bite.

Realizing now that she has been eating meat all along, the vegan will feel sick, distressed, and overcome with guilt - much more so than she was by simply being at the same table as a meat eater: even though the plate-switching had no affect on the environment or the life or death of any animals, since no matter what, there was going to be one meat plate and one vegan plate at the table.

She cannot feel more bad for the animal for being eaten by her rather than the meat eater, since the result for the animal is the same. She feels bad for herself. Who gets which plate doesn’t matter to animals or the environment, but it matters to the vegan.

You could say that perhaps she is worried about the health effects of this non-vegan plate, but that doesn’t explain the SoyJoy example. Vegans feel an intense dread just from eating a product that has a little bit of whey in it. Yet they have no problem sending back a steak that was accidentally given to them, knowing it’s going straight to the garbage. As long as vegans are dumping non-vegan food outside of themselves, they feel fine, despite the fact that the effect on the outside world is the same as if they had dumped it down their mouths.

Purity and vegan identity are the most important elements of veganism. It’s less about the animals, and more about how the vegan feels about ingesting them. By eating animals, even ones that are totally done for anyway, vegans absorb some of the evil and death of the world. Better just to throw that shit out.