I see on your profile that you are an animal rights activist. Good for you. I see your points. I wish I could be vegan but it almost killed me and my daughter, while my elder neighbor's traditional African-American fare brought us both back to life and health.

I regret eating animals, especially animals from factory farms, but I have been truly hungry -- hunger like third world people regularly experience and like most first world folks cannot even imagine. Have you ever been hungry like that?

Having experienced this, I would not dare criticize the traditional ways that keep most of the world's peoples alive and strong over hundreds of millennia. Neither would I dare tell some poor struggling inner-city wage-slave how to make it thru another day.

I wish the world could be vegan but I've been out of the Western bubble and seen how most of the world lives. Have you?

I see and agree with OP @Your NativeFriend's points that veganism is a first world issue. People in traditional cultures -- as well as poor people in Westernized countries -- don't have the kind of choices that you assume that the majority have.

While I admire your passion and ideals, I hope you limit your activism to wealthy people in first world countries who have options. I hope you don't go out to reservations and poor parts of town and third world countries and try telling them how to live. You dismiss my life-changing experiences as "anecdotes." I hope you're not similarly dismissive of the world's peoples' struggles to survive. That's western imperialism at its finest.

Namu Amida Butsu.