Answering Funny Questions Vegans Get All The Time!

Whether you’ve been vegan for a long time or only recently made the switch, it’s likely you’ve been faced with a lot of questions. Here are some responses to the funny questions that might come your way.

1. If you were stranded on a desert island, what would you eat?
Here’s a counter question: what if you were not on a desert island? What if you lived in a society with several supermarkets and grocers with an abundance of plant-based food options, and every single day you could make food choices that are not only healthy but also cruelty-free?   The difference between the question and the counter question is that the former is an entirely hypothetical scenario while the latter is our current reality! Which one matters more?

2. Is gluten-free and organic food considered vegan?
Firstly, the answer is no. This question likely stems from the fact that many health food brands do make vegan food that also happens to be gluten-free and organic. So it’s easy for someone new to veganism to mix up the terms.

Vegan food is simply any food that does not come from animals or contain any animal byproducts.

Gluten-free food is any food that contains no gluten, which is usually found in wheat, rye, and barley.

Organic food is any food grown without the use of man-made fertilizers and pesticides.

In essence, gluten-free food may or may not be vegan or organic. Organic food may or may not be vegan or gluten-free.

3. Don’t you feel bad for all the plants you kill?
This question is often an attempt to derail an uncomfortable topic around animal rights. If anyone reading this actually does think that ‘harming’ a plant is comparable to harming an animal, try watching a few minutes of slaughterhouse footage on youtube, and then a few minutes of a video of a vegetable, say, a carrot being plucked from the ground. Let the comparison speak for itself!

Animals, like us, have a central nervous system but plants don’t. Our reaction to pain inflicted on us is evident. Even if someone were to argue that plants might be feeling pain but not showing it, here’s the thing: going vegan is still the solution, because it actually requires far fewer plants to feed a vegan than it does a non-vegan (up to 10 times less), due to the amount of crops used to raise livestock. Yes – what do livestock eat? Plants!

“Veganism minimizes land use, crop use, and lowers the amount of deforestation (1 acre of rainforest cleared every second worldwide in animal agriculture)” – Cowspiracy.

4. Don’t cows need to be milked?
A fair question, actually. The current high demand for dairy products requires cows to be stretched far beyond their natural physical limits, being repeatedly impregnated, and fed growth hormones in order to produce massive quantities of milk every year. This takes a toll on them. Perhaps it’s why sometimes they feel relief when milked. 

However this does not mean cows need to be milked. If it weren’t for the dairy industry’s practices, the cows’ babies would drink their mothers’ milk (eliminating their need to be milked by humans in the first place). Instead, calves are prematurely taken away from the mothers within a day or two of birth so that humans can have the milk that nature intended for their calves. This is a repeating cycle.

5. Wouldn’t farm animals go extinct if everybody in the world stopped eating them?
Well, the whole world is not going to go vegan overnight! It will be a gradual process. Based on simple supply and demand, this is how it would go: the number of people cutting out animal products from their diet would increase over time, the demand for it would proportionally reduce, and farm animals would be bred less and less.

Let’s remember that the domestication of animals was a human invention. There are millions more cows and pigs in the world now than there originally were to begin with! If the world eventually did transition to veganism, it’s likely that the remaining domesticated farmed animals in existence would be living in sanctuaries or roaming free, rather than being erased completely.

We understand it can be tricky to respond to all these questions confidently. That’s why TeamCow is here to support you! Read this article on the common concerns people have about going vegan, and many other interesting and helpful articles on the blog.

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