I am a vegetarian on my way to becoming vegan. I understand both sides of the table, and I also know that becoming vegan is not always as easy as it sounds.
The child who refused
When I was a kid, I refused to eat meat. I could not explain it in words, I just knew it did not feel right. My mom, who wanted the best for me, would prepare it in a way that I would not notice it was meat. It was an act of love. She believed that a growing child needed it, the same way most parents around her did.
I do not tell this story to blame anyone. I tell it because it was my first lesson in how the world around a child is arranged. Even when a child says no, the table has already decided.
How we are taught to accept it
Most of us are fed before we are asked. Family tables, school meals, festivals, advertising and plain convenience all point in the same direction, so meat becomes the default long before we are old enough to choose. When a child refuses, it is called being picky. Over time we get used to it, then desensitized to it, and eventually it feels like it was always our own decision.
In my experience, even those of us who preferred to grow up as vegans were systematically engineered to accept meat and eat it. I use that word with care. Nobody sat in a room and planned it against a child. It is simply a system of habits, traditions and incentives that carries each generation along without anyone stopping to ask why. Seeing it clearly was not painful. It was freeing.
Media plays its part too. Advertising, cooking shows, social feeds and restaurant menus tend to place meat at the centre of the plate, and treat plant-based food as the side dish or the substitute. None of it is malicious, but when everything we see points the same way, it quietly shapes what we think is normal, and what we think is even possible.
From meat, to vegetarian, to vegan
So the path went from eating meat, to being vegetarian, and now towards vegan. Each step taught me something, and each step has been harder than it sounds. In a world built around meat, life can be isolating, and it can be expensive when the environment does not cater for you.
Over the years I have had friends who felt guilty eating meat in front of me, just because I ordered the vegan or vegetarian option, whichever was available. I never wanted them to feel that. I learned to give them space to do whatever their hearts desired, and over time I quietly spent more of my time with people who share my belief system. It has been quite an isolating few decades, mostly because it is difficult to find people nearby who hold similar values.
Accepting people where they are
We humans are unique in every way. Sometimes we will never find the exact same paradigm in another person, and that is something I had to learn. So I started accepting everyone for who they are, without trying to change them overnight. It may take longer than I once thought, and I still believe that people can come to understand, in time, what vegetarian and vegan living means.
Humanity has carried conflict since the dawn of time, and I have made peace with the fact that some people will not see the logic of vegetarians and vegans, however gently it is explained. I think of it like a tree with many branches. They all grow from the same trunk, yet not every branch takes up the same nourishment, and not every branch will carry the idea. That is simply how a tree grows, and I do not hold it against any branch.
Why I stopped convincing and started building
What I learned was this: instead of trying to convince others to become vegetarian or vegan, I would build. A community and a platform, and in time real places and facilities, that cater for people like us and help those who are transitioning to vegan.
Priority will be given to vegetarian and vegan, because that is the vision I am heading towards. But I also accept that not every human being will be able to follow the same model, and that is fine. So we will stay in the middle, the way we practice in Buddhism. If you would like to read more about that, I wrote about it in From the Jungle: The Middle Path. No extremes and no forcing, just a table with room for everyone while we keep moving towards better plant-based food.
Step by step, we will develop more and more facilities, towards a world where we can experience better vegetarian and vegan food, and where people on this path can find a table without searching for hours. Ultimately, I hope to help the vegan community build better and better facilities, because it is hard for us to find them today. To do that I had to become someone with the skills and the mind to build a network of peers who want to build these places, and that is part of why MyCity exists. You can read how it is structured in The MyCity Model.
Media also shapes how I want to build. If the pictures and stories around us keep putting meat at the centre, then the places we build need to tell a different story, and tell it well. That means showing vegetarian and vegan food as the main event and not an afterthought: in real photos from real tables, in the way the places are designed, and in how we share them. It is part of why I am learning to create content of my own.
Here are a few tables I have shared along the way, all vegetarian or vegan, from cafés and kitchens across Sri Lanka.
If you eat differently from me, you are welcome at my table. If you are walking the same path, whether you are curious, newly vegetarian or already vegan, let us build something together. We do not have to be alone in this.
