The Australian Vegan Magazine — May-June 2017

celebrity profile

Was it hard becoming a vegan?

No. To be honest, the only place where it

gets a little strange is social events. Mostly

family I’d say; family is a little bit tricky

because there’s a generational gap. Other

young people, it’s not that weird, especially

now. Your parents have been feeding you

meat. It kind of means that you’re suggesting

they were doing something wrong. To tell

your mother who has been feeding you all

your life, ‘Hey, I don’t want to eat that food

that you’ve been making’; it’s offensive.

You can’t be naive and just think: ‘Oh,

why won’t my parents get on board?’. In

the majority of cases, parents do their

absolute best - whether they are doing a

good job or not - they are doing their

absolute best, and you’ve got to massage

that out a little bit. And this is me 10

years later, by the way. I didn’t just come

to this conclusion straight away.

When I first went vegetarian/vegan I was

flying the flag; I’m telling everybody they’re

murderers. I was just as angry and pissed

off as any human being with this new

information. But 10 years later, I know

that you’re going to get very few people on

board - no one likes being yelled at. The

first thing you’re going to do, if someone

yells at you, is put your guard up. Your

fight or flight response kicks in and

you don’t want to listen. So, you sit down

with someone, you have a conversation,

it comes up naturally.

I wear vegan t-shirts and put a sticker on

my laptop - I’m well-known for that - the

way that I eat. But if I’m just hanging out

with friends, or hanging out with family, I

don’t just launch into it. If someone orders

steak and chips, and you order a veggie

burger, they’re going to say, ‘What’s up

with that?’. And I say, ‘Well, here’s my

thing...’. And if we want to look at the truth

of it, yeah, that person’s paying someone

to kill [an animal] so they can eat it - and

they don’t want to know about it. Yeah, it’s

the truth, but you’ve got to have a little tact

if you want to get this message moving a

bit.

What do you say to people who think

vegan food is boring or tasteless?

That’s pretty weak, really. Like, have a

glass of pineapple juice, it’s delicious. If

someone says vegan food is boring - have

dinner at my house on Friday night. Don’t

bring anything, don’t give me any money.

Just come over.

You know, there are plenty of places that

are making burgers now. There’s a tonne

of food that people can eat. You can go to

somewhere like Sydney and you’ve got Soul

Burger, you’ve got Green Gourmet, you’ve

got Om Vegetarian, you’ve got vegan fish

and chips, vegan pies - really, it’s limitless.

I live an hour and a half north of Sydney.