My coworker Jake had been doing his bacon bit for fifteen minutes. Same routine as always: holding his breakfast sandwich aloft like Simba, making exaggerated moaning sounds with each bite, catching my eye to make sure I was watching. “Mmm, murder never tasted so good,” he said, grinning. The whole performance was for me, the office vegan, though I hadn’t said a word about his food. I never do.

The strange thing about Jake’s routine—and the countless versions of it I’ve witnessed over the years—is how much energy it requires. The daily bacon theatrics, the “I’m going to eat TWO burgers for every one you don’t eat” jokes, the forwarded memes about vegans and protein deficiency. He probably spends more time thinking about veganism than I do. And he’s not alone. There’s an entire genre of person who can’t encounter a vegan without launching into defensive comedy routines, unsolicited nutrition lectures, or elaborate displays of meat consumption. The internet has given them a whole vocabulary: “How do you know someone’s vegan? Don’t worry, they’ll tell you” might be the most recycled joke on social media, usually posted by someone who talks about bacon more than any vegan talks about kale.

At first, I thought it was just trolling. But the consistency and intensity suggest something deeper. People who feel compelled to mock vegans at every opportunity aren’t really talking about food choices. They’re grappling with questions that make them profoundly uncomfortable, and the jokes are easier than the answers.

1. They know something is wrong with how we treat animals

The most aggressive vegan-mockers often start their routines with admissions. “I know factory farming is awful, BUT…” “Yeah, I’ve seen those documentaries, BUT…” They’ll acknowledge the horror, then immediately pivot to bacon jokes, as if humor could erase what they just admitted knowing.

Jake once described, in detail, a documentary about pig intelligence he’d watched. How they’re smarter than dogs, how they play and form friendships. Ten minutes later, he was doing his bacon bit again, but with a new edge to it. The laughter sounded forced. The moaning sounds went on too long. When someone’s jokes get more elaborate right after they’ve acknowledged an ethical problem, you’re not watching comedy. You’re watching a coping mechanism in real time.

My brother-in-law does a similar dance at family dinners. He’ll spend the appetizer course explaining how he only buys “humane” meat now after watching some documentary, then spend the main course making jokes about my “rabbit food.” The dissonance is so obvious that even he seems to hear it, laughing a little too hard at his own punchlines.

2. They’re disturbed by evidence that change is possible

The mockery reaches peak intensity when encountering a thriving vegan. When I first went plant-based, the jokes were about how I’d waste away, how I’d become weak and sickly. Two years later, when I was clearly not wasting away—when I was actually running marathons and deadlifting more than before—the jokes shifted. Now they were about how I must be secretly miserable, how I was probably sneaking cheese at midnight, how my muscles were “fake” somehow.

The mere existence of healthy, happy vegans destabilizes a core excuse. Every Olympic athlete who goes plant-based, every strongman who lifts without meat, every 70-year-old vegan who looks 50—they’re all walking rebuttals to the “but you need meat to be healthy” argument. When professional athletes increasingly adopt plant-based diets and keep winning, the jokes get more frantic. The mockery intensifies precisely because the excuse is evaporating.

3. They’re anxious about moral judgment that isn’t actually happening

Here’s what I said to Jake about his bacon sandwich: nothing. Here’s what I’ve said to 99% of people about their food choices: nothing. Yet the preemptive defensiveness arrives anyway, swift and certain. The elaborate performances, the unprompted nutrition lectures, the “found the vegan” jokes when nobody was looking for one—it’s shadowboxing with judgment that exists primarily in their own minds.

To be fair, some vegans do judge and lecture. But the ratio of imagined to actual vegan preachiness is wildly skewed. For every one vegan who actually comments on someone’s lunch, there are dozens of meat-eaters performing elaborate defensive routines for an audience that isn’t watching. The fear of being judged for your choices is powerful, but it gets interesting when that judgment is largely self-generated. The vegans aren’t condemning them. They’re condemning themselves, then projecting that discomfort outward. The mockery becomes a way to deflect from an internal conversation they don’t want to have.

4. They suspect their identity might be more fragile than they thought

“Real men eat meat” remains one of the most popular anti-vegan slogans, usually delivered by guys who seem genuinely worried that skipping bacon might cause their masculinity to evaporate. The gendered nature of so much vegan mockery reveals deep anxieties about identity and performance.

Watch how quickly the jokes turn to soy and estrogen, how the mockery becomes tinged with gender panic. A friend’s boyfriend once spent an entire dinner party explaining how he needed meat for testosterone while nervously eyeing the plant-based bodybuilder across the table. Sociologists who study food and identity note that meat-eating has become symbolically tied to traditional masculinity in ways that make any questioning feel like an assault on identity itself. The guy who jokes about vegans being weak might actually be worried about what it means if strength doesn’t require steak.

The identity defense extends beyond gender. “But I’m Italian, we eat prosciutto.” “I’m from Texas, beef is in my blood.” Food becomes a shorthand for belonging, and questioning the food feels like questioning the self.

5. They’re uncomfortable with people who follow through on values

Everyone claims to love animals. Most people say they care about the environment. The majority express concern about health. Vegans, whatever their motivations, are just people who decided to align their actions with stated values. And that follow-through makes others uncomfortable.

The mockery often includes variations of “must be nice to be so perfect” or “sorry we can’t all be saints.” But nobody’s claiming perfection—they’re just making different choices about food. The woman who shares dog rescue videos while mocking vegans, the environmentalist who gets defensive about his burger, the health-conscious person who calls plant-based eating “extreme”—they’re all grappling with the discomfort of the gap between professed values and actual behavior. It’s easier to mock the person who closed that gap than to examine why your own remains open.

6. They recognize, deep down, that habits aren’t arguments

The most common defense against veganism isn’t nutritional or philosophical—it’s habitual. “But I’ve always eaten meat.” “It’s tradition.” “I was raised this way.” These aren’t arguments; they’re descriptions of patterns. And somewhere in the mocker’s mind, they know this.

I watched this play out at a conference dinner where a colleague spent twenty minutes defending his meat consumption to a vegan who hadn’t asked. His arguments cycled through tradition (Sunday roasts with grandma), convenience (it’s just easier), and pleasure (but bacon tastes good). When he finally ran out of justifications, he sat quietly for a moment, then said, “I guess I just never really thought about it.” The honesty lasted about three seconds before he launched into a joke about vegans and protein.

That’s why the jokes often sound hollow, why the defensiveness seems disproportionate. They’re not defending a position they’ve thoughtfully considered and chosen. They’re defending something they’ve never really examined, and that vulnerability makes them lash out. The mockery fills the space where actual reasoning might go.

7. They’re grieving a worldview that’s already shifting

The sheer volume of vegan options exploding across supermarkets and restaurants tells a story that no amount of mockery can drown out. Investment in alternative proteins hit record levels, with billions flowing into plant-based innovation. Burger King has an Impossible Whopper. Athletes are going vegan and winning gold medals. The cultural tide is turning, slowly but visibly.

People who compulsively mock vegans are often wrestling with the recognition that their worldview—where meat is necessary, natural, and eternal—is already becoming outdated. They’re watching their kids order oat milk lattes and their favorite restaurants add vegan sections to the menu. The jokes get louder as the ground shifts beneath them. They’re not really mocking vegans; they’re mourning the loss of a world where their choices never needed defending.

The Reddit threads and Twitter battles, the Facebook memes about “spot the vegan,” the Instagram comments under every plant-based recipe—it’s all a collective processing of change that feels both threatening and inevitable.

Final thoughts

Jake still does his bacon routine, but something has changed. The performances have gotten shorter, less enthusiastic. Sometimes he forgets to do them entirely. Last week, he asked me about oat milk—quietly, when no one else was around. “Just curious,” he said, then quickly added, “I could never give up real milk though.” Yesterday, I saw an oat milk carton in the office fridge with his name on it.

The fascinating thing about the anti-vegan mockery phenomenon is how it reveals more about the mockers than the mocked. Each joke is a small confession, each performance an admission that something has gotten under their skin. They’re not really angry at vegans for existing. They’re uncomfortable with the questions that existence raises.

The next time someone launches into an elaborate anti-vegan routine, pay attention to what they’re actually saying beneath the jokes. Listen for the anxiety about identity, the grief about change, the discomfort with unexamined habits. It’s rarely about protein or tradition or taste. It’s about the discomfort of living in a world where the old excuses are wearing thin, where the comfortable distance between values and actions is collapsing, where change feels both impossible and inevitable.

The mockery isn’t really mockery. It’s the sound of wrestling with truths that are getting harder to ignore. And sometimes, like Jake with his secret oat milk, it’s the last sound before something shifts.