Seen a lot of posts on Lemmy with vegan-adjacent sentiments but the comments are typically very critical of vegan ideas, even when they don’t come from vegans themselves. Why is this topic in particular so polarising on the internet? Especially since unlike politics for example, it seems like people don’t really get upset by it IRL
Speaking as a life-long lacto-ovo vegetarian who did a ten year stint as a vegan (I’m 30), it’s because there is a subset of the vegan population that’s very gung-ho about their diet and wants to proselytize about it, and no one likes being told what they should eat. When you remark on people’s diets, people tend to get annoyed and defensive about it.
I grew up being told that my food looked yucky, how I can’t call something meatballs since it doesn’t contain meat, how since I don’t eat protein I’ll die, so on, so forth. It got annoying fast, so now I don’t generally discuss my diet unless it makes a contextual sense. e.g. when planning a restaurant outing with people - though to be frank I often just avoid social situations where food plays a role.
I think where the big clashes really happen is when someone has made veganism/eating meat a core part of their identity, having that criticised, however gently that might be, will cause friction and often cause people to double-down on it; even though they may know on some level that the criticism might even be valid. You can see this in the fat pride movement as well.