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counterproductive. I'd rather set an example and be welcoming. (Yet I acknowledge that it's possible I wouldn't be able to do this effectively if aggressive vegans did not exist. Aggressive vegans help create the space where I get to look "reasonable" and "welcoming." The blogger Kinsey Hope once wrote a really brilliant activist typology that describes these dynamics. And of course, it's worth noting that I'm often characterized as an appeaser by feminists, too.)

So. That said? If you think you're going to Get Upset Or Offended by this post, please just don't read it. Seriously. But if you're willing to not freak out for a moment, then here are my two primary arguments for why you should go vegan:

1. It's easy. Yes, there will be some shitty social situations: awkward moments at restaurants, pushback from your non-vegan friends, and so on. Yes, you will have to avoid some very delicious foods. And food labels will become a whole new world of confusion. But even with all these factors, veganism really isn't as hard as people make it out to be.

There's a lot of delicious vegan food out there. A number of my favorite foods were vegan before I went vegan, and some of yours probably are as well. (Recipes coming up!) Here is a free online vegan starter guide that includes recipes. Here is a very comprehensive list of vegan cookbooks; they range from "easy" to "incredibly complicated Martha-Stewart-land." I am a fiend for baked goods, and I like Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World by Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero. And there's an increasing number of high-quality all-vegan restaurants. My favorite ones in Chicago are Native Foods (delicious cardamom rose cupcakes!) and Urban Vegan (delicious fake orange chicken!).

I won't get involved in appeals-to-healthitude, because I know both healthy vegans and unhealthy vegans, and the science is inconclusive... but I will point that out again: the science is inconclusive. Unless you have an unusual disorder, modern nutrition has identified no conclusive scientific reasons for not being vegan. Plus: If you aren't vegan, but you don't pay any attention to eating healthy food, then you're being a hypocrite if you make a "health argument" for being non-vegan even if the science was conclusive, which it's not. And! If you're really into health, there's a highly-recommended book called Thrive written by a vegan professional athlete named Brendan Brazier.

Some of my friends specifically do things like convince people to try veganism for short periods, or run Vegan Weeks at universities or whatever, just to show how (a) delicious and (b) easy vegan food can be. It works surprisingly well. A key ingredient in my own adoption of veganism was knowing vegans, and seeing how simple it was to be vegan. I used to push back really strongly... I think I resisted mostly because it was very hard to acknowledge that by eating animal products, I was participating in an incredibly fucked up system. First I had to recognize that I was doing something really bad, that I had been doing so for my entire life, and that most people I love do it too. This is a familiar problem for activists, of course; most people resist acknowledging that they participate in a racist, sexist culture, too. (As one of my vegan friends puts it: "I've found that people usually go through the strongest asshole anti-vegan phase right before they convert to veganism.")

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