TL;DR: This is a somewhat meandering tangent that doesn’t necessarily have a point to make, but your interesting comment evoked these thoughts in me, so I figured you might find these interesting
I am not a vegetarian or vegan (yet?), but I have many friends who are, and it’s cool how that changes the dynamic. My vegan friends tell me that being the only vegan at a barbecue usually sucks, because there are rarely good options provided by non-vegan hosts. In contrast, when I am the only non-vegetarian/vegan in the group, it becomes trivial, if not optimal to choose non-animal food products, and it’s always striking to me how refreshing that feels.
For example, if everyone orders 3 tapas-style dishes and shares freely with the rest of the table, then I am able to experience more options if I opt for vegetarian/vegan dishes — if all three of my choices contained meat, then it would be pretty impolite to expect the rest of the table to share their food freely with me given they can’t have any of mine. A more balanced path would be to get one meat-containing dish that was just for me, and two dishes that could go towards tapas socialism for the table, but this falls flat if I don’t enjoy the meat dish as much as I expect, because that leads to either wasting good food, or eating something I’m not keen on. In contexts where most/all of my dining partners are vegetarian or vegan, it is easier to for me to go with the flow. The ease of this (especially with respect to the reduction in guilt that you describe) is a large part of why moving to being vegetarian is one of my horizon goals.
Another example is a Jewish friend who often explains her dietary requirements as “basically just vegetarian”, because that’s more straightforward than explaining kosher requirements to non-Jews — especially given that my friend is comfortable eating some things that other Jews might not consider to be kosher, and these nuances aren’t something you can explain to someone who’s just trying to plan food for everyone. If my home is full of vegetarian food, then my friend, who is like a reincarnated gannet who hates food waste, can swoop in and hoover up all my expired and mostly edible food when they visit. And it’s easier to avoid getting to the stage where food should be thrown away if I can share it with vegetarian or vegan friends, so this is another way in which reducing animal products in my lifestyle is a boon rather than an inconvenience.
I tell these mini stories because your comment caused me to reflect on how dependent hassle is on the external context. The way this links to Linux is that one of the things that caused me to switch was that Linux is pretty common in scientific computing, especially high performance stuff. A lot of software works with both Linux and Windows, but I kept finding issues that only arose on Windows versions, or poorer documentation on the Windows side of things. I felt an implicit pressure to switch to Linux, because that specific context and community made me feel like the odd one out. The science stuff didn’t require switching to Linux on my personal PC, but I figured that making that leap would help me to really feel comfortable with the scientific aspects (somewhat analogous to how I have made a concerted effort to learn how to cook food from cuisines that are less reliant on animal products/meat, because it’s a useful strategy to become a more skilled cook).
TL;DR: This is a somewhat meandering tangent that doesn’t necessarily have a point to make, but your interesting comment evoked these thoughts in me, so I figured you might find these interesting
I am not a vegetarian or vegan (yet?), but I have many friends who are, and it’s cool how that changes the dynamic. My vegan friends tell me that being the only vegan at a barbecue usually sucks, because there are rarely good options provided by non-vegan hosts. In contrast, when I am the only non-vegetarian/vegan in the group, it becomes trivial, if not optimal to choose non-animal food products, and it’s always striking to me how refreshing that feels.
For example, if everyone orders 3 tapas-style dishes and shares freely with the rest of the table, then I am able to experience more options if I opt for vegetarian/vegan dishes — if all three of my choices contained meat, then it would be pretty impolite to expect the rest of the table to share their food freely with me given they can’t have any of mine. A more balanced path would be to get one meat-containing dish that was just for me, and two dishes that could go towards tapas socialism for the table, but this falls flat if I don’t enjoy the meat dish as much as I expect, because that leads to either wasting good food, or eating something I’m not keen on. In contexts where most/all of my dining partners are vegetarian or vegan, it is easier to for me to go with the flow. The ease of this (especially with respect to the reduction in guilt that you describe) is a large part of why moving to being vegetarian is one of my horizon goals.
Another example is a Jewish friend who often explains her dietary requirements as “basically just vegetarian”, because that’s more straightforward than explaining kosher requirements to non-Jews — especially given that my friend is comfortable eating some things that other Jews might not consider to be kosher, and these nuances aren’t something you can explain to someone who’s just trying to plan food for everyone. If my home is full of vegetarian food, then my friend, who is like a reincarnated gannet who hates food waste, can swoop in and hoover up all my expired and mostly edible food when they visit. And it’s easier to avoid getting to the stage where food should be thrown away if I can share it with vegetarian or vegan friends, so this is another way in which reducing animal products in my lifestyle is a boon rather than an inconvenience.
I tell these mini stories because your comment caused me to reflect on how dependent hassle is on the external context. The way this links to Linux is that one of the things that caused me to switch was that Linux is pretty common in scientific computing, especially high performance stuff. A lot of software works with both Linux and Windows, but I kept finding issues that only arose on Windows versions, or poorer documentation on the Windows side of things. I felt an implicit pressure to switch to Linux, because that specific context and community made me feel like the odd one out. The science stuff didn’t require switching to Linux on my personal PC, but I figured that making that leap would help me to really feel comfortable with the scientific aspects (somewhat analogous to how I have made a concerted effort to learn how to cook food from cuisines that are less reliant on animal products/meat, because it’s a useful strategy to become a more skilled cook).