Aunt Feels Conflicted After Letting Her "Vegan" Nephew Meat Eat Meat Behind Mom's Back

If you grew up in a family with strict dietary requirements, you know how delicious the "forbidden fruit" can seem. I can't really relate to that, as the smell of bacon and all things pork were so vilified in me as a child that I never really lusted after it.

That being said, I never ate 100 percent halal as a kid: I still had Burger King, Pizza Hut, and McDonald's, I still ate fruit snacks and gummy bears and worms with gelatin in them. And, I oh of course drank soda made with trace amounts of alcohol.

And while specific dietary lifestyles aren't exactly religions, a lot of people still treat them like they are. Like militant vegans who shun any cuisine or diet that doesn't 100 percent adapt to their philosophy. One aunt is feeling mighty guilty after discovering her "vegan" nephew is fond of the chicken nuggets she feeds her own son.

The redditor, who undoubtedly created the account vegannehphew specifically for her post, wrote about the dilemma she was facing with her sister's son. She wanted to know if she was a total monster for continually feeding her nephew chicken nuggets and the other non-vegan food she feeds his own son, even though she knows it's against her sister's wishes.

It's not as if she's trying to impose her lifestyle on her nephew either. She has made vegan snacks available for the kid, but the young boy prefers to eat the same things his cousin gets to eat, and even expressed eating non-vegan while at school.

She's basically asking, "am I the a**hole for allowing my nephew to eat non vegan food?" The responses from other Redditors were a resounding "no" and people gave a variety of reasons she isn't in the wrong.

The biggest is that the kid clearly isn't interested in being vegan and forcing an ideology on a child who clearly has no interest in it is wrong. It's not like she's trying the kid's burning down buildings or anything.

Heck, the mom should be happy he occasionally eats his vegetables. I know grown-ups who still loathe them consuming them to this day.

Other Redditors called the OP's sister the a**hole for imposing her will on a child and many others said the poster is only wrong for not telling her sister about it as it will only strain their sibling relationship.

But there's one point a lot of people aren't bringing up: vegan diets can actually harm children.

While one can certainly thrive on a vegan diet, those who adopt it are at disk of developing vitamin B12, iron, zinc, and calcium deficiencies. Vegan parents in Sydney, Australia were also recently jailed for imposing their lifestyle on their toddler who had become so malnourished that they couldn't talk, walk, or crawl.

There was another vegan couple from Florida earlier this year who deprived their infant of nourishment to the point the child was "near death." They were arrested for neglect.

An overwhelming number of doctors do not recommend vegan diets for growing children, specifically babies and toddlers. They do say older children can thrive on vegan diets, though they should be closely monitored.

While it's true vegans are often the butts of people's jokes, including famously hot-tempered English chef Gordon Ramsey, there have been cases of their die-hard ideology culminating to a point where they actively shun, insult, and act aggressive towards their fellow humans.

I was ridiculed online as being a "carnist" and that I couldn't possibly understand certain things because of the way I choose to live my life.

I'm not saying this is the case for every vegan, and I do believe several tenets of veganism could benefit society. But the whole "it's always more sustainable to farm than feed livestock" argument isn't always necessarily true. Take areas that are desert or only grow shrubbery, like some parts of the Middle East or even in parts of the American Midwest. Livestock like goats and chickens can live on very little.

Then you have nerds like the dude above who thought he was "in the right" for calling out a woman who was vegan who bought a crying child an ice cream cone to brighten up their day.

He shared his "intentions" behind posting screencaps of his conversation with the woman in the hopes of getting a brigade of Vegans to bombard her on social media to tell her shy she was wrong for buying a sad kid an ice cream cone to brighten their day. Because she wasn't as die-hard of a Vegan as she could be.

This was the woman's post that enraged him so.

He DMs her out of the blue to tell her why she was so wrong to offer up a chilly confection to a weeping kid, you know, because it promotes the slavery of animals and whatnot (never mind the fact that it's been scientifically proven plants can feel pain, too).

She ultimately blocks him after he insisted she buy a kid an ice cream cone that was vegan. The best part of the whole exchange is that he posts the screenshots thinking that she's the unreasonable one.

Personally, I've experienced this same kind of zealotry in my religious community, where people would have piety wars so they could lord over how much better they were than others because they spent more time in a mosque or knew more of the Quran or deprived themselves of eating steak that wasn't medium-rare because blood is bad or something.

Man, human beings are some weird, weird creatures. I don't know any dog or tiger that feels bad for having to eat another life form, or hate others for doing so either.