There’s a Vegan at Your Dinner Table (P.S. It’s Me)

Why I dropped the conversion act—and started inviting people in

photo by Yulia Forman

Last year, I gleefully attended my third Hollywood Climate Summit, an annual gathering of folks in entertainment, science, and nonprofits, wearing a new-to-me Guess jean jumpsuit and orthopedist-approved secondhand sneakers, the perfect ’fit for a climate writer who walks the talk. It marked the first year I’d be attending as a sustainability journalist rather than an actor-writer-producer talking about ways to transform The Biz from the inside.

One day one I met Jim Greenbaum, founder of a foundation that funds high-impact animal welfare work and producer of vegan documentaries. With our shared love for showtunes and animals, we hit it off. The next morning, when we met up, Jim asked why vegan didn’t appear in my bio on my website, and I fell silent.

I’m a lifelong vegetarian and have been fully vegan since 2016. But, as my sister used to lovingly tease me, “Every vegan dish is served with a side of smugness.” All jokes aside, the v-word feels heavy—like a door slamming shut instead of swinging wide to welcome others in.

Research backs this up: shame doesn’t convert. It repels. While guilt can encourage accountability, shame often leads to withdrawal, deflection, or backlash. The animal rights movement, by and large, still relies on the ol’ shame playbook (cue Sarah McLachlan and a sad puppy). While it feels righteous, that kind of marketing doesn’t produce the long-term actions vegans ultimately desire.

But I didn’t always consider how my word choice landed, despite wanting others to live more compassionately. In elementary school, when a new friend would sit beside me at mealtime, thinking I was both giving them a lesson and a gift, I would turn and inquire, “Do you know you’re eating death?”

Unsurprisingly, countless children picked up their food and relocated elsewhere. Yet preteen me genuinely didn’t understand why my opening argument alone didn’t convince them. Given what I’d learned about factory farming, zoonotic disease, and animal cognition, I felt I’d barely scratched the surface!

I desperately wanted people to connect their food with animals, but what I offered—and, more importantly, how I offered it—didn’t feel like education. It felt like admonishment.

Thankfully, my parents didn’t flinch when I refused to eat meat or wear leather, not as a passing fad but as a philosophical stance. Others, too, saw my passion for animals as a virtue. When I was five, I gave a presentation in the adult sanctuary of our nondenominational church about why we must protect beaver dams, complete with a beaver puppet show. People found my story charming and compelling, teaching me that when you disarm your audience by entertaining them, they’ll travel far with you.

Mostly, though, my animal advocacy upset adults. Extended family whispered that this little tyrant held her parents hostage, forcing them to cook separate meals.

“You eat rabbit food,” my grandfather scoffed.

“We don’t have horse teeth,” my aunt—a dental hygienist and now plant-based herself—once said while slicing into a steak.

When I was around 12, on tour with the Colorado Children’s Chorale, my friend Charity and I were the lone vegetarians. We banded together to ask for alternate protein long before dietary preferences had reached the cultural mainstream. The choir director, unamused, snapped, “You’ll eat what you’re served. I’m Catholic, and if I have to eat meat on Fridays during Lent, so be it.” Apparently, she was willing to bend her ethics…and ours right along with them.

That same year, I discovered the Buddhist precept of ahimsa, or nonviolence. Entire cultures had believed for millennia that killing animals was wrong. I wasn’t broken for how deeply I felt; the problem lay in Judeo-Christian and Humanist frameworks of human supremacy.

Like most young people with unmyelinated brains (read: not yet developed) and fervent moral convictions, I universalized this concept to its detriment. I wore a “Die Yuppie Scum” T-shirt that my mom made me change. I protested with PETA and other eco-warrior groups. Instead of trying to win hearts, I only wanted to prove I was right.

A few years later, the Chorale was invited to sing for the Dalai Lama when he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Colorado in Boulder. I watched in awe as the Tibetan-born head of the Buddhist religion, who has lived in exile since 1959, recounted a story: Although he’s vegetarian, when someone invites him into their home and serves meat, he eats it out of respect for the host who sacrificed so much for him.

“It’s compassion in action,” His Holiness told a jam-packed Mackey Auditorium.

Hearing this cracked my fixed-mindset brain wide open. If the Dalai Lama, who has lived through so much, could have flexibility in his practice without abandoning his values, surely I could grow, too. His speech taught me that conviction isn’t just about what you won’t do; it’s also about decentering the label over the mission.

So I stopped trying to “inform” others and instead simply lived my beliefs. Deeds over proselytization. Whenever I made substitutions while ordering, I’d say, “I’m going to be your problem child today,” owning that identity instead of running away from it. If someone offered me a meatless option, I thanked them warmly. I no longer made a fuss when the only thing I could get at a restaurant was a boring salad—I just ate before dinner.

My college boyfriend told me he was certain one day I’d leave acting and become an animal rights attorney. “Good goddess, no!” I replied. “As Shakespeare said, ‘Kill all the lawyers.’”

I had already begun building my performance career around my evolving worldview, one that now included climate. I’d written about the ethical implications of factory farming and advocated for alternative fuels, all while penning my honors thesis, a three-woman play called High-Heeled Shoes.

Sustainability may not have been my chosen vocation, but it was my way of life.

By 2008, when my sister and I challenged each other to a year of buying nothing new, I began to see just how deeply interconnected animal welfare, consumption, and climate were. But as an actor working in musical theatre with no interest in alienating my peers or sucking up to moralistic adults, my life remained a quiet practice in harm reduction.

Fast forward to the pandemic.

Everything I’d been reading about and acting on for 20 years—public health, environmental collapse, and its connection to animal agriculture—was all over social media. The brokenness of our food systems was no longer a fringe topic. I didn’t have to convince people to join the conversation because people were turning to me for advice.

Amid this cultural shift, I shot what turned out to be my final full-time acting role. At the same time, a friend forwarded me a call for a freelance journalist position at Treehugger, the world’s largest sustainability website. I pitched myself as the underdog: a science communicator with a background in musical comedy—a callback to that puppet show on the pulpit.

I got the job. I spent a year there covering ecology, low-impact living, and, yes, plant-based food, making my old boyfriend’s prediction come true, at least in part: I left entertainment to pursue climate writing and to focus on my health.

If ever there were a time to proclaim my place in the vegan movement, it would be now. Yet here I was in a fabulous swapped and thrifted outfit at the Summit, assignment in hand, with no good answer for Jim.

Vegan went back into my bio.

Then I took it out again.

Instead, I replaced it with language that better reflects the ways I’m working toward a cruelty-free future. A world where animals aren’t treated as commodities or test subjects. Where the planet isn’t stripped for minerals. Where farm and factory workers are paid well and treated with dignity. Where everyone has access to healthcare.

Because anything hinting at moral purity or a politics of exclusion isn’t my objective; encouraging others to compassionately participate in an imperfect world is.

That’s why I start by acknowledging we live under systems we didn’t design and which force us to compromise. For example, I feed my cats sustainably sourced fish because the only insect-based food that meets their obligatory carnivorous needs isn’t available in the U.S. My conscious closet likewise includes secondhand wool and leather instead of non-animal (i.e., plastic) alternatives that will live for centuries in landfills. These choices don’t make me a hypocrite. They make me human.

I also love talking about how we belong to the vast, dazzling kingdom of Animalia and to the even bigger Gaia Hypothesis. Rooted in Earth science and biology, this idea proposes that our planet operates as a single, self-regulating system, collapsing any false divide between “us” and “them.” The more we embrace our place in the living biome, the more we’ll protect our fellow beings—not out of pity, but out of self-recognition and self-preservation.

My hope is that the words I use appeal to humanity’s pride in our big, mammalian brains—brains that evolved to care. Once we apply that emotional intelligence to understanding human oppression over animals, we can map that same injustice onto other structures like patriarchy, racism, and environmental destruction. Soon, those myths, too, begin to crumble like a poorly made vegan handbag.

What matters more to me than any single word is living in alignment with the ancient mantra that all beings everywhere deserve to be happy and free. The same research that shows how shame shuts people down also acknowledges that empathy opens them up. So if the plate in front of me looks different than yours, don’t read that as a judgment. It’s just one small way I honor the wild, wondrous world to which we all belong, no label needed.

Gia Mora is a multidisciplinary creative who translates science into stories that spark joy, empathy, and climate action. Her bylines have appeared in Treehugger, Modern Farmer, Business Insider, Los Angeles Times, and more. She’s a Climatebase and Step Zero fellow, a decarbonization ambassador with Generation180 and The Switch is On, and a public health ambassador for the City of Los Angeles. Subscribe to her Substack, Animal Matters, for research-based guides to joyful living on a warming planet. Gia can help you make everyday choices that build a more compassionate, equitable, and sustainable world for all life on Earth.