Opinion – Terra Vegana: Is your child going to be vegan?

I never asked my pregnant friends if their sons and daughters would also be omnivores. With me, however, things have been quite different. I’ve been hearing for seven months: is he going to be vegan?

If it were just from the friends, it would be enough to answer “I don’t know, will my son also be a video editor, because his father is like that?”.

But mockery is not at all welcome at family gatherings, when everyone surrounds the pregnant woman and touches her belly while uttering motivational phrases, such as “you are going to die, the Luisa you know today will no longer exist” or even “you will go months, years without sleep”.

In the case of a pregnant vegan, the prophecies go beyond the limits of the puerperium and jump to the sixth month of the baby’s life, when their food introduction can be started according to the WHO, which recommends exclusive breastfeeding until that age – and advocates that breastfeeding should continue until, at least, the child is two years old.

The inquiry to find out whether or not my son is going to be vegan seems to me to be just a ray of the perverse reflection of a society that doesn’t trust its mothers. “Look, the boy will lack protein”, “He won’t grow well”, “His bone will be weak” are some of the phrases I’ve heard.

Interestingly, no one who said them is a pediatrician or nutritionist. Say you’re pregnant, and get advice from unsubstantiated authorities.

I imagine that every pregnant woman —vegan or not— has already been questioned about her ability to be a mother, to care for her calf, to breastfeed, put to sleep, bathe, etc. To survive the puerperium, to maintain your sanity in the face of sleepless nights, to accept that life has changed, and that it has changed forever.

I suppose that the verbiage of which a woman is the target from the moment she announces her pregnancy until the child becomes an adolescent, and the adolescent becomes an adult, has the best of intentions, in most cases.

But the effects can be the worst possible. At social events where the pregnant woman meets friends and relatives, everyone drinks except her. Soon, everyone is excited to tell some “good truths” about motherhood and the baby of everything she needs to do, leaving the pregnant woman only with the patience to listen in the absence of courage to say “we can change the subject ?”.

The person who writes is a first-time mother, and this text inevitably runs the risk of being naive, or even arrogant. Far be it from me to want to raise my child alone with my husband, the famous support network is fundamental and welcome, but we need to talk about limits, since pregnancy.

I don’t know anything about motherhood, other than the desire to be able to live it with my feet glued to the present tense, without being swamped by spikes of anxiety and precocious feelings of guilt. And it’s in that sense that I honestly don’t have the answer as to whether or not my son is going to be vegan.

If it is true that at this moment my baby eats everything I eat, I can say that yes, he is vegan. And he will be born in a home to vegan parents. Soon, when his food introduction begins, he will eat what we also eat.

When I’m older, I don’t know. Maybe you want to try your little friend’s birthday cake. Or even if you kick in front of a package of cookies strategically placed in front of your eyes on the market shelf, and I despair when reading the ingredients — in addition to being ultra-processed, the cookie has whey in the composition.

When I start from his desire to taste something we don’t eat, I’ll just explain the reasons why we live a life without any food or animal products, and leave the final choice to him.

And when I realize that there are people around my son offering a sausage buried in vinaigrette inside a loaf of bread at Sunday’s barbecue, out of sheer dirty tricks, I’m possibly going to turn into a lioness.