It’s been almost 2 years since I’ve stopped eating all animal products.

The hardest part however, has not been eating more healthily, but the discrimination I have faced during this time.

In our society discrimination against races, religions, disabilities or sexuality are both taboo and illegal. Sadly, choices of ideologies don’t benefit from the same protection, and people are happy to take advantage of it.

Last year I lost an opportunity at a fortune 100 company because they believed I would bring the ideologies that I publicly state on twitter and blog posts into work. They would be within their rights to ask me whether that would be the case, but they didn’t. They just assumed I would and said they wouldn’t hire me because of that.

I have friends inside that company, who say that now they make jokes when interviewing candidates, requesting to the recruiter that they are not vegan. Can you imagine that being said about Muslims?

All my friends respect me for who I am and what I stand for, and it’s great to have their support. But some people chosen not to be my friends because of their intolerance towards my ideologies. One guy didn’t even want me to talk about choosing a restaurant that catered for vegans - that was already too much for him. He went on to make fun of me with his other friends, who then created a twitter account just to mock me. This someone, worked for the very company that didn’t hire me, yet that company is clearly more tolerant of a bully than of a vegan.

Now I work in an office complex that’s several miles from the center of town, so the only choice of restaurant I have is the one inside the complex. They have a salad bar and a place where you can order warm meals. However, all of their warm meals have animals or animal excretions in them, so my only choice is to eat salad every single day. It may come to many as a surprise, but vegans don’t live on salad. So I made some simple requests to the complex’s manager:

  • In the salad bar, bundle all items that contain animal products together so there are no accidental spills.

  • Label vegan and vegetarian items - or list full ingredients for every item.

  • Make the vegetarian option vegan friendly, or make a vegan option. Or offer vegan meats such as seitan, fried tofu, scrambled tofu, boca burgers, etc.

  • Grill vegan foods in a clean frying pan.

Although those requests may sound absurd to a “meat-eater”, they are also not at all hard to accomplish, so why not comply even if just to keep everyone happy? The answer I got back from them is that I was a minority, and that because this was MY choice, they could not meet any of my requests, however easy.

Had I instead said that I was a Hindu, or that I had severe allergies or a medical condition, they would likely have met my requests, if anything because they could be accused of discrimination if they did not. But the fact that I follow an ideology based *not* on a supreme being’s wishes, but my own, is not considered discriminatory.

In summary, I am a vegan. I am not a monster, I am not a nazi or a racist. I am not deliberately trying to inconvenience anyone just for the kicks. I am not going to show you pictures of dead animals while you eat your meal nor will I chant “meat is murder”.

I know I can be very vocal about the subject on twitter because I know that if people don’t want to be educated about the consequences of their diets and purchases, they can unfollow me - and believe me, many do - believe me too, many do like to be educated and have changed their habits because of my tweets. But outside of twitter, I am a designer, I am a nerd and an Apple fanboy and I’m a nice guy. The fact that I care about the well-being of animals (humans or not) should not be a reason to make fun of me, to discriminate against me, to not be my friend and most definitely not to hire me nor fire me.