Imagine you decided to go vegan September 1 2003 while eating a beef. You were supposed to eat a 180g beef fillet, but while eating that meal, you found out that enough is enough: only non-animal ingredients from now on.
So you bought some books, surfed the net and found out about animal ingredients in products you didn't think of, a few micrograms here and a few micrograms there. The first week you became very busy reading labels.
So far, so good - nothing is better than if as many people as possible stay away from animal products as much as possible: we all agree in that.
(Of course writing one of the companies and request them to make the product in question without animal ingredients in it may be a lot more effective - but that's another story.)
Some vegans are 'obsessed' with labels and avoid micrograms because it's important for them, it feels right/it makes them feel better. Others find it exhausting, and would feel guilty if they claimed to be a vegan and consumed a few micrograms of animal products now and then. If avoiding every animal products on a microgram level feels right/good, great; and since every microgram helps, it helps animals too. If not, read on.
Some people find the idea of going vegan exhausting, for example if they read descriptions keeping old myths about stereotypical vegans obsessed with reading labels alive.
Let's say that you find a product that has added 3 microgram something which is animal derived, or which may be animal derived - but you don't know if it is.
180g meat = 6 ounces
180g = 180,000 milligrams = 180,000,000 micrograms.
Before I continue: Please don't get me wrong, I'm of course not at all suggesting that you should use animal products.
If you would go vegan a few hours later that day in 2003, you would have been eating 180,000,000 micrograms of animal products, which equals eating a product with 3 mcg animal products in it every day for 60,000,000 days. That's more than 164,383 years. Even on a vegan diet, you won't live that long.
It would take 164383 years of avoiding those 3 micrograms of that animal product to achieve the same effect (in terms of saving animals) as if you would have gone vegan after dinner instead of before dinner that day in September 2003.
I bring this up because some vegans may find it exhausting to avoid those microscopic amounts of animal products in their daily lives, and some potential vegans may think that going vegan may be difficult since there sometimes are animal products in unexpected places. They may even be suffering from perfectionism on a neurotic level, and think that 'if I can't be 100% vegan, I'll skip it'...
I used 3mcg as an example... it popped into my ming because that's the amount of B12 that often is mentioned as a daily requirement of B12. Now, many vegans don't eat supplements, and there are lots of B12 supplements containing non-animal based B12, so getting vegan B12 of course isn't a problem at all.
But to the 'Semovs' out there: don't exhaust yourself and use those tiny, tiny amounts of something as an excuse to say that it's going to be hard to continue to be vegan. You may spend a lot of time in achieving something that in terms of saving animals only represents the difference that you would have achieved if you had gone vegan a few minutes or actually seconds earlier. Or even less: see below.
We don't live for 164,383 years. Maybe we'll become 80? 16383/80 = circa 2000.
Sorry for bringing up that bloody beef again, but if it takes 10 minutes to eat it... that's 600 seconds, and 600/2000 = 0,3 seconds.
These daily 3 mcg of something animal derived for a whole life equals, (measured in a somewhat silly gram pr. gram setup, I know), the same amount of animal products that you would have avoided by becoming vegan 0.3 seconds earlier than you did - if you became vegan in the middle of eating that meal three years ago. Please don't get lost in the numbers, they are are only simplified, constructed and silly examples. A scientific comparison of the two ways of consuming/producing animal products would have to take a lot more factors into consideration.
Sorry for the long post... For some people those perspectives are totally un-intersting, but they may be useful for others.
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