About

Image description: Still life on a dark background, three tulips, three pine cones, a shallow dish of blueberries and a shallow dish of almonds. (Photo: Tracy Isaacs)

My name is Tracy Isaacs. I am a philosopher, author, and practicing vegan. I offer this blog as an invitation to all who are curious, considering, or already committed to a vegan lifestyle for ethical reasons. Here you will find philosophical, practical, and strategic reflections on veganism as an ethical practice.

I have been vegan since 2011, but as I say in my welcome post, I am not always perfect. I think there are really compelling ethical and environmental reasons to adopt a vegan lifestyle, not just with respect to food choices, but also more generally. And at the same time I recognize that even people who feel the weight of ethical and environmental reasons struggle with the prospect of becoming vegan.

There is no question that it’s a challenging undertaking in an omnivorous world where non-human animals are considered fair game for human use. This sense of entitlement, we might even think of it as a sense of humans’ “dominion” over non-human animals, functions as an unquestioned ideology, mostly unnoticed because it’s so normal.

From both a harm perspective (vast animal suffering in industrial agriculture, not just limited to non-human animals) and from a sustainability/environmental perspective, it’s almost incredible that it goes mostly unquestioned. But such is the world we live in.

Some years back, I started to wonder whether strategically, for the good of the non-human animals and the planet, there might be a way to offer veganism as an approachable undertaking that recognizes that even if it is supported by compelling reasons, it’s a big ask.

I started Vegan. Practically. as a companion project to a book I’m writing (working title: The Imperfect Vegan: Ethical Eating as a Practice). The blog will be a place for me to explore possible book material in no particular order. So you’ll find information (such as my post about vegan cheese) interspersed with philosophical reflections and reflections on my experiences “out in the field” (i.e. life as a vegan). I’m an academic, and sometimes I’ll be putting on my “ethics professor” hat. But I’m not really planning to teach or preach. I can’t promise that I’ll never rant.

And though I do think the subject matter is of great consequence, we don’t have to be joyless and we don’t have to be mean. I’m happy to have you with me and I hope you find something useful here — something to chew on that doesn’t taste like cardboard.