The blinkers come off

January 3

By Alice Shopland, founder of Angel Food

I’m marking Veganuary 2025 by publishing a blog post a day.

Being vegan means avoiding exploiting animals. I remember the shock of clearly seeing that my omnivore life depended on animal exploitation. And I remember the shock of seeing the arrogance of humans revealed: we assume we have the right to be at the top of the animal kingdom, making use of all other species as we wish. That was society’s lie that I’d been born into and in which I’d been unwittingly participating. Now I had removed my blinkers and my worldview had expanded.

Being kind to animals and avoiding “unnecessary” cruelty was no longer enough. It was sobering to realise that almost every aspect of my life involved some form of animal exploitation. It wasn’t just my food that I now saw in a new light: there was also the matter of my second-hand leather shoes and vintage embroidered lambswool/angora cardigans, the beeswax candles I loved to burn (they reminded me of Cook St Market), my boar bristle hairbrush and the cosy feather duvet I slept under. It was a lot to take in.

I felt certain I would eventually become vegan because of this new understanding. But it felt overwhelming, so I didn’t consciously decide to make the change to being vegan but I did start changing my diet. I stopped eating red meat, then chicken, then fish. This is a well-worn path in terms of a transitional diet because it’s easier for us to empathise with fellow mammals than with birds, and in turn, that is easier than empathising with fish. The more similar other beings are to us, the more ready we are to care about them (just as we naturally care most about the humans who are closest to us and most similar to us). I remember getting a bag of chicken wings out of the freezer during this phase-out period and seeing them not as food items but as chickens’ body parts – and realising how much my perspective had changed.

Billy took me to Sunflower Thai Vegan Restaurant (which at the time of writing is still going strong, on High Street in central Auckland – their barbecue vegan duck is my favourite). It was the first vegan eatery I had been to, and my initial reaction was confusion: almost every dish on the menu (which was hand-written on the walls) seemed to have meat in it. Of course, it was vegan meat, but that was a strange concept to me then. It shouldn’t have been, because I had eaten vegetarian bacon when on holiday with some vegetarian friends. I remember thinking how weird it was that the manufacturer had gone to the trouble of replicating the look of the white fatty layers in the vegetarian bacon (it wasn’t vegan, because it contained egg white). I’d also had vegetarian sausages and burgers from the supermarket, but that was about the limit of my plant-based meat experience, and they were not a patch on the quality and variety that is available now.