Moving to Tallahassee has given me a new perspective on Veganism. There are so many opportunities to experience and learn about the community here. Not only are there farmers markets every Saturday and local vegan cafes to pick up a tasty treat or two, but I’ve also heard of a number of festivals put on by the local community. A few weeks ago I was able to tag along with some fellow Tallahassee locals for my first trip to the annual North Florida “VegFest”, and it was quite the experience. I don’t know what I expected, but I was overwhelmed by the amount of excited Florida and Georgia locals who came out to this event. Lines and lines of people greeted me as I strode into Tallahassee’s Tom Brown Park, all waiting to get their hands on a (compostable) plate of jackfruit vegan barbeque or to purchase a specialty brew of local kombucha. Small businesses and farms drove hours to get to the festival, selling their fresh organic produce, specialty vegan beauty products, and handmade jewelry at the busy venue. Rows of eco-friendly vendors surrounded the park on all sides. It was easy to tell the kind of people the event was aimed at, as I walked by blissful people laying out on mandala-printed picnic blankets with their dogs for company, and watched the older man playing the sitar smile pleasantly at the passersby. Very “hippyish” as my dad might call them. I saw a lot of people who were passionate about the lifestyle they were promoting, passionate for change, or at least people hopping on the bandwagon of this growing movement. On the event’s webpage I found that it was put on by “TalVeg”, the Tallahassee Vegetarian Community, a group which “seeks to promote the benefits of a healthy, sustainable and compassionate lifestyle.” The group expressed that they expected at least “3,000 attendees” for the fifth annual VegFest, and I would say that they probably at least doubled that.
I saw a lot more people of my parents’ generation than I expected when I attended. I’m used to the young millennial vegans that advertise themselves and their lifestyle relentlessly in their Instagram feeds or local baristas that stick up their nose when I ask for regular milk in my latte. Instead, I got an old man holding a pig on a leash handing out flyers to the “Hare Krishna Love Feast,” where there’s a “free sumptuous vegetarian feast” only two blocks from campus every Sunday at 4 PM, along with a Bhagavad Gita class where one could “discover the secrets” about “the soul” and “inner bliss” and the meaning of existence, essentially. He was a cheery man in secondhand clothes, and he seemed grateful that I took the flyer from him. I got more of a sense that his intention was to attract people who felt like they need a place to belong, people who need a community to be a part of. The people I encountered at VegFest seemed to really care, and to me, that’s what I feel a lot of the rising interest in vegan lifestyle is about. People want to be a part of something bigger than themselves and want something to care about. It’s more about the community that you find yourself belonging to, and about that sense of having something more in life because of that community. It’s getting easier and easier to feel helpless in the world we live in, but I think the movement towards “compassionate” living, as TalVeg put it, is an attempt to combat the hopelessness we feel with something we are individually able to control…
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