1. You spend hours in the grocery store, reading every label and frequently consult the many lists on your smart phone for guidance. This makes store security circle you way too often.
2. While you order your soy latte at Starbuck’s, you quietly sneer at the woman ordering her whole milk latte with honey. She can feel the holes you’re burning into the back of her head but is so dulled by the chemicals in her food that she can’t for the life of her figure out where that feeling is coming from.
3. The smell of McDonald’s makes you gag, you know, more than it used to.
4. When you go to your local supermarket and walk by the meat department, you look at the ceiling and pretend it isn’t there. This often causes you to bump into things.
5. Your life has become defined by the location and compassion of your next meal. Like a person shipwrecked, you calculate the distance + time + lives saved for each meal and can’t leave your home base without knowing exactly when you’ll next be eating.
6. You have an inordinately large supply of nutritional yeast and a bag of kale in your purse.
7. Your houseguests can’t identify the purpose of half the food items in your kitchen.
8. You are on intimate terms with words like ‘gluten’ ‘isinglass’ ‘casein’ and ‘bone char.’ While the people who actually consume animals have never even heard these words, you can use them in a sentence.
9. You get excited about quinoa and kale.
10. You have at least one rescue animal and everyone you know has tried to give you another one, at least once.
11. Television and film aren’t as entertaining anymore. You worry about all the animals you see in them and wonder what they’re doing now.
12. You’ve written to your congressperson at least once to protest some form of animal cruelty.
13. You don’t go out as much anymore because your friends keep trying to get you to eat non-vegans foods.
14. You’ve started checking the origin of every beauty product you use. This has resulted in at least one massive trip to the garbage.
15. You cry every time you hear of an animal being mistreated.
