1. Veganism is not a diet. It’s an ethical principle against the unnecessary killing and commodification of animals. 2. An exclusively plant based diet is hard

1. Veganism is not a diet. It’s an ethical principle against the unnecessary killing and commodification of animals. 2. An exclusively plant based diet is hard to maintain but if you look at the research on why people quit plant based diets, (1) it’s because most people quit every diet…even in this article the first “vegan” (he wasn’t vegan, he just adopted a plant based diet for health reasons) did not just quit his plant based diet but also his carnivore diet and will likely settle at a standard onnivore diet. (2) even for people who are actually vegans (ie they are against the killing and commodification of animals), when they do exit veganism it’s because of social pressures. I’m pretty much all of the world veganism requires you to constantly go against the grain. The hardest part about being vegan is living in a non vegan world. If you flip the script, and imagine a hypothetical world in which everyone was vegan, I bet the 0.5-1% of the people who decided they wanted to start catching random sentient beings, torturing and murdering them, and then consuming their blood, pus, secretions and flesh, would not be able to continue doing that for too long either. The fact that many philosophers and thinkers across the political spectrum, even those who aren’t vegan themselves, can admit the ethical value of veganism (for example Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Ben Shapiro, have all publicly said it’s the morally correct principle, and they’re hypocritical to not be vegan themselves) is a promising sign that the principle itself is sound. Also, the closing of vegan restaurants is overstated. Most places where vegan restaurants are closing is because most non vegan places now include vegan options. Setting aside that the restaurant business, especially in the wake of the pandemic sees tremendous turnover anyways, it’s much harder to survive as a vegan restaurant when over a span of 5-10 you’ve gone from having almost no competition to having competition from 50% of the restaurants in your area. And non vegan restaurants offering vegan options benefit further because they can accommodate groups with non vegans whereas it’s more unlikely for a group with a mix of vegan and non vegans to pick the vegan restaurant.