Every vegan has their own reasons for making this choice, but most of these fit in to the following five categories.

For Animals

Vegans believe that it is wrong to kill animals for food, and that also extends to using them for clothes, accessories and entertainment. Avoiding animal products helps animals both directly (by not killing them for food) and indirectly by avoiding by products such as eggs and dairy, whose production methods also involve death and suffering of animals.

For health

The vegan diet is one of the healthiest there is. Saturated fat is not found in many plant based foods (a notable exception being coconut milk). Nutritionists agree that we need to eat more fruit and vegetables, and the vegan diet provides plenty of these.

For people

Did you know that at the height of the Ethiopian famine of 1984, the country was still growing and exporting crops to feed cattle in the west? Livestock farming is a totally inefficient use of land.
Pollution from livestock farms is a health risk due to intensive farming methods, and the overuse of antibiotics has led to increasingly resistant superbugs which represent a public health danger.

For the environment

We are all aware of our carbon footprint, but did you know that there is another, deadlier greenhouse gas out there? That is methane, being produced by all the livestock bred in order to maintain the demands for meat.
And every year, more and more rainforest is cleared, to grow soya to feed these animals, leading to soil erosion and desertification.

October is Vegan Month of Food at the The Post-Punk Kitchen

Share your own ideas by blogging your best vegan discoveries, tagging them with "Vegan MoFo"

I will be participating over at Experiments in Living