I got told today I shouldn’t raise kids because I’d purposefully raise them in a vegan household, without animal products of any sort. I was told this would be dangerous and unfair to the kids.
It was a weirdly direct thing for this person to say to me (one of my coworkers). It’s stuck in my head. I was told I should let my potential children choose what sort of morals they have, even though this person is raising their kids Catholic. Their advice to me was to allow my potential kids to choose every night between a meat-based meal and a vegan meal (???). And several other coworkers agreed. Where do they come up with this? No carnist raises their kids like this.
So is anyone raising vegan kids or does anyone know about what it’s like? Or was anyone here raised in a vegan household?
Millions, if not billions of people and families around the world have vegetarian or vegan diets because that’s their food heritage, and because access to animal products is rare where they live. Children grow up eating that food because that’s what it is: food. No questioning about alternatives or dual-meals (Wtf).
It’s rather colonialist and eurocentric to assume that raising a kid vegan/vegetarian is somehow an innovation or something out of the norm, when it’s not the case for most of human history and population.
Vegan diets are pretty unusual, though you’re certainly right about deprivation-based vegetarianism and near-vegetarianism.