Welcome to Small Bites, Sound Bites, a midweek segment of food for thought podcast where I share short, succinct, thoughtful responses to typical questions, myths, and misconceptions related to plant-based eating, veganism, and animal protection.

You can get written transcripts of this podcast by going to joyfulvegan.com slash donate.

Because veganism is often characterized as a diet, it tends to be associated with sacrifice and deprivation, and any number of negative words that characterize diets, temperance, cheating, abstaining, suppressing, portion-controlling, losing, and failing, sometimes it's called difficult, temporary, or extreme.

I think the problem is the perception that being vegan is about saying no, about refusing things that are offered to us. It appears that being vegan is about restriction and sacrifice, and that's the problem, the perception of what it means to live vegan.

If people are on the outside looking in, they tend to see what vegans don't choose. They don't see what we are choosing.

Perhaps in public settings, people see vegans rejecting things, far more than they see them embracing things.

Another misconception about veganism is that there are rules about what vegans can and cannot eat of what we're allowed or forbidden to eat.

Let's be clear, vegans can eat whatever we want, there's nothing we can't have, but there are some things we simply don't want.

Choosing to avoid putting in our mouths or on our bodies the flesh and fluids that come off of or out of an animal is just that, a choice.

We're allowed to eat whatever we want, nobody is preventing us, we aren't adhering to rigid dietary laws, we aren't forbidden to eat animals, we don't want to eat animals.

Being vegan is not about rules or doctrine, it's not about restriction or self-denial, and though being vegan does involve saying no to some things such as unhealthy foods and destructive environmental practices and cruelty toward and violence against animals at its core, being vegan is about saying yes.

It's about saying yes to our values, what's the use in having values if they don't manifest themselves in our behavior?

And how many of us actually translate our values into action? It's nice to say we're kind, caring, trustworthy, helpful people.

It's nice to say we're in favor of eating healthily or that we're against violence and cruelty, most of us are, but how many of us actually take these abstract values and put them into concrete action?

For me, being vegan, which extends to every area of my life, is an opportunity to do just that, to put my abstract values into concrete action.

By choosing to eat life-giving rather than life-taking foods, I'm saying yes to my values of wellness and health, of peace and non-violence, of kindness and compassion, by choosing to look at what we do to other animals, both human and non-human on behalf of and for our convenience.

We're saying yes to our values of accountability, of responsibility, of commitment to truth and knowledge.

By standing up for our beliefs and speaking up on behalf of those who have no choice, no voice, we're saying yes to our values of courage and unity and justice and service to others.

Being vegan is about saying yes to the bounty of plant-based foods available to all of us.

It's funny, not ha ha funny, but funny, that being vegan is perceived as being restrictive since most people, including me before I was vegan, say, don't tell me what happens to the animals I don't want to know.

We explicitly hinder our awareness. To me, that's limiting, that's restrictive.

Being vegan is about being willing to know, being willing to look, and to me, that's expansive. To me, that's vegan.

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