https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQUo53o6QXg#t=0m30s (strawman opening skipiped) is clearly an exaggeration, but highlights the uncomfortable reality of being "the different one" at the dinner table.
However, I do think one reason vegetarians, especially vegans, get so much social flack is because they typically position themselves as morally superior to meat eaters. I know one incredibly toxic vegan whom I wish would just make the world a better place by kindly dropping dead. In addition to being high handed, she is inconsistent, hypocritical and generally assholish to the max. She is the vegan version of the hellfire-and-brimstone Christians I knew growing up in the Bible Belt who made me feel like "If my choice is to sit next to you in church or go to hell, I will take hell." On top of all her other BS, she isn't even a committed vegan. She is a convenient vegan who promptly adds cheese to her diet periodically for REASONS, all while looking down her morally superior nose at everyone around her.
If you want to be vegan, cool beans. Good for you. But you might get less social flack as a group if you took a different approach (as a group) to how you talk about that choice and how you treat other people who aren't vegan.
I wonder (now that I'm thinking back on instances of "the new and the loud" I've known in my decades) whether some adopt veganism /specifically/ to have an issue to be loud about. When that behaviour is rejected from both the in and out groups, they move on to some other issue. Certainly lines up with some I've seen... I dunno, just spit-balling here.
Many vegans/vegetarians would accept you to their "club" only after being on probation for a year or two.
It's analogous to saying "most martial artists quit in less than a year". For some definition of "martial artist" that may well be true, but it wouldn't be a definition acceptable to those who actually practice.
So, gatekeeping instead? "You're not a real X unless Y," where "Y" changes to keep out the undesirables.
"You're not a real programmer unless you can do Dijkstra's on a whiteboard from memory."
"You're not a real vegetarian unless you don't eat meat for at least as long as I have."
You will not be accepted as a programmer until you've written some code; or as an athlete until you've done some nontrivial athletic stuff. Why should othe categories be different?
From what I understand, many people may make a religious vow or commitment to eat vegetarian for a specific period of time (for good luck or out of gratitude for a benefit they received) and then commonly eat meat again after that period of time has expired. I wouldn't be inclined to say that these people "are vegetarians" in my western sense, any more than I would say Eastern Orthodox Christians "are vegetarians" when meeting them during their fasting days or seasons.
What difference does it make if someone who's been a vegan for 3 months calls themself a vegan? Are they "harming the movement" by doing so? If partaking in the diet doesn't require you to subscribe to the ethics, as you say, then the label should just be a label: someone who doesn't eat animal products. No time frame or reasoning attached.
I honestly think it's reasonable to attach a minimum time frame to a word like this, otherwise it gets a bit hard to know what people mean when they speak. Whether one year is a good choice I don't know, but a minimum is required.
Can you expand on this? If there are two people in front of you, one who has been a vegan for 20 years, the other for 2 weeks, what is the real difference between them, how does that time difference change your interaction with them?
To put it another way, why does one word have to apply to one and not the other because of some inherent time requirement? English, in particular, as a language is inherently vague, and we rarely make this time requirement distinction for other words that describe people.
If I just graduated from the police academy I'm a "cop", just like how the 30 year veteran detective sergeant is a "cop". No, we aren't the same, since the latter has far more experience, but that doesn't mean that only one deserves the title. It just means we use additional qualifiers ("30 year veteran detective sergeant") to elaborate on what type of cop he or she is.
Personally I'd set a minimum of a year.
I'm being pedantic on purpose here because the idea of some minimum time requirement to call yourself a vegan is one of the most pedantic things I've ever heard, and supports the stereotypical characterization of vegans being overall pains in the ass.
I wonder what proportion of the cohort here were in each group.
That doesn't apply here.
We're starting and ending with the same definition.
>A third-of people abandoned their animal-free diets in three months or less, and more than half abandoned it within the first year.
Are you really a vegan or vegetarian if you break in 3 months? In 1 year? Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that 1 in 5 people who attempt to go vegan/vegetarian succeed?
I'm a vegan and I'm active in my local vegan/vegetarian community. There are two camps: people who do it for ethical reasons and people who do it for for health. People who do it for health usually give up and move on to whatever fad diet becomes popular. People who subscribe to the ethics rarely quit. We have a saying: there's no such thing as a former vegan. Just someone who tried the diet.