Vegan

This vegan pie was made with peas, mushrooms, vegan gravy, and mock meat produced from soy protein. Vegans can get most necessary nutrients from a plant-based diet, with the exception of vitamin B-12.

Source: Wikipedia/Peter Halasz

A vegan is a pure vegetarian who chooses to eat a totally plant-based diet, avoiding any food taken from an animal, such as flesh, eggs, or dairy. Veganism is typically motivated by ethical concerns over animal rights or welfare but can also be motivated by health and environmentalism. Ethically motivated vegans often embrace it as a lifestyle rather than just a diet, boycotting all animal products, including clothing and products tested on nonhuman animals. Donald Watson, founder of England's Vegan Society, coined the term vegan in 1944 to differentiate vegans from “ovo-lacto” vegetarians, who will eat nonflesh animal products such as eggs and dairy. Because veganism is stricter, there are fewer vegans than vegetarians. For example, vegans make up no more than 1 percent of North Americans, whereas 2–3 percent of the population is likely to be vegetarian. National percentages for Europeans are similar, but the United Kingdom is an exception, with vegetarianism being twice as popular there. Worldwide statistics on veganism do not exist, but a portion of Buddhists, Hindus, Taoists, and Krishnas worldwide practice some version of vegetarianism, with India possessing the largest concentration of vegetarians—several hundred million—based on class and religious beliefs.

When it comes to ethical and spiritual dilemmas related to animal farming, killing has been the primary contention, which is why so many spiritual principles exist to regulate how and if animals can be slaughtered morally. Before the advent of industrialized animal farming, or “factory farming,” nonfatal animal products such as eggs and dairy were less of an ethical issue. However, modern egg and dairy industries kill the hens and cows who work [Page 438]for them once individual production dies down to less-profitable levels. This results in increased suffering for these animals, more so than for animals raised primarily for meat, as egg-laying hens and dairy cows endure a year or more of intense production in confinement before being killed for low-grade meat.

Hens are typically raised in dark warehouses, where they are confined in cramped, stacked cages. The tips of their beaks are seared off at birth to prevent them from pecking their cage-mates in a futile attempt to establish a pecking order in these crowded conditions. Calcium depletion causes bone fractures, especially during the rough trip from crate to slaughter. Cows used for dairy are increasingly raised on dry lots instead of pastureland. Constantly impregnated to keep their unnaturally engorged udders lactating, they are attached to milking machines several times daily for the majority of their pregnancies. When a mother delivers, she is typically only allowed to nurse her calf for a few days before the farmer separates them, despite the mournful bellowing of both. Male calves are either killed immediately or crated for veal, and female calves become the next generation of dairy producers.

A minor proportion of eggs and dairy come from small, free-range farms that may be more sustainable and humane than factory farms. Welfare proponents may find these products ethically acceptable because they reduce suffering. However, vegans tend to adhere to an animal rights philosophy that goes beyond a concern for suffering toward a concern for the rights of the individual animals to live freely and control their own bodies, eggs, milk, and offspring. This philosophy eschews domestication and breeding animals in captivity for human use and boycotts all animal agriculture products, including clothing such as leather, fur, wool, and silk and by-products such as gelatin, casein, and whey. Depending on strictness, some vegans avoid honey and refined sugars (which use animal bones in processing). Ethically motivated vegans also tend to boycott any products tested on nonhuman animals, primarily cosmetic and cleaning products.

...