Publisher’s
write-up:
‘Millennials, people between the ages of 15 and 34, make up nearly half
of the current vegan population. Despite being dealt a bad deal by prior
generations, this generation is increasingly able to see past all the ways our
society indoctrinates us to use nonhuman animals.
Millennial Vegan offers support to this important group by providing
tips for advocacy, strategies for communicating with unsupportive peers, advice
on issues related to dating, and information on maintaining personal wellbeing.
The movement for nonhuman animals depends on the support of millennials, and
this guide will help this already aware group maximize their ability to be the
best vegan advocates they can be.’
Millennial Vegan is a book on navigating everyday life as a young vegan written
by the clinical psychologist Casey T Taft. This book deals with various aspects
of life that a young person would go through while being a vegan – be it with
parents, at school, facing bullying, or choosing relationships.
This book is split into chapters that are easy to navigate and also deals with some of the most common questions that vegans face
– such as ‘how people get their proteins’ (a myth that has been debunked
several times), and also the bullying one might face in school as a result of
that. He also talks about the anger that one could have, given that being a
vegan, one has already seen several atrocities on non-human animals, and also
how the system is quite rigged against millennials, when it comes to the cost
of living or the price of property.
Despite the book
being well presented, I wonder whom the author was targeting and if he was
merely preaching to the choir, if this book was meant to be read only by people
who are already vegan. Moreover, I felt that the author used millennial interchangeably
with ‘teenager’ and I feel the latter and their parents would have been the
most appropriate target audience for this book. This is considering how the
author did not talk about dynamics at the workplace, social events as to how to
politely decline a non-vegan snack offered, or even bullying faced from adults.
As a vegan
myself, to me it was an easy read but again, I was uncomfortable with the
author’s assumption that the only reason why any person becomes vegan is over
compassion for animals – while that is true of many; to me the clinching
argument was the environment and for many others, there could be several other
reasons – or a combination of many as not all of them are mutually exclusive
either.
To conclude, I
had an enjoyable, quick read, mostly content that I already agreed with and
could relate to many of the situations that the author spoke about, but it
could have tried to reach a wider audience. On that note, I award the book a rating
of six on ten.
Rating – 6/10
Have a nice day,
Andy
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