I ate cheese at an animal conservation event

(No, it wasn't vegan)

Let me explain.

I don’t normally go to PR events and galas. In fact, ‘networking’ ranks near the top of my ‘things I find most intimidating’ list, right next to ‘mingling’ and a few down from ‘talking to my family about veganism’.

However, I was invited to an event being hosted by an international animal conservation organisation. They do a lot of great work protecting wild animals and the event sounded interesting, so I thought, “why not?”, RSVP’d and dusted off my formal blazer.

The event was in a lovely location, but once I arrived, I realised that I didn’t know anyone who was there. It quickly dawned on me that I may have made a terrible mistake and was at risk of either spending the night awkwardly standing around on my own or, more petrifying still, striking up conversations with strangers and, dare I say it, networking.

I did consider leaving the event. However, not only had I put my coat in a cloakroom, I had also bumped into the woman who had invited me - a very nice PR person. Going back to the staff member in the cloakroom almost immediately after handing them my coat would be bad enough, but if this very nice PR person - who had presumably been working extremely hard to organise the event - spotted me making a dash for the exit… well, hopefully you can now understand my predicament.

I was faced with a choice: I could choose feeling awkward standing around on my own, feeling anxious mingling or feeling guilty leaving.

To buy myself time, I pulled out a classic trick - one I’ve mastered during the other times I’ve dusted off my formal blazer - pretending to message people on my phone so I look busy. It works extremely well, but only in short chunks of time: you can’t be on your phone too much, as you run the risk of looking rude and uninterested.

However, upon seeing people walking around with bites to eat, another tactic revealed itself. I theorised that if I was seen to be eating, it would both relieve me of the awkwardness of standing around on my own and also remove any expectation that I should be speaking with the other people there. If I could maintain an appropriate balance of eating and pretending to use my phone, combined with walking around the room so as not to be seen spending the whole time in one spot, I figured I could hold off just long enough to make getting my coat and potentially being seen leaving acceptable. Mission accepted.

It might not have been very James Bond, but I had given myself a license to kill (time).

The first round of food went by without a hitch. The trays had labels listing any allergens in the food, and the first bites offered to me were plant-based. However, I then made one major mistake: I assumed that all the food being handed out at the animal conservation event was going to be plant-based. With hindsight, I realise how silly that was of me.

One of the servers approached with a tray of arancini bites. Obligingly, I took one, popped it in my mouth and was surprised to find an incredibly realistic tasting vegan cheese. A bit too realistic.

Once I swallowed it, I then felt an awful feeling come over me as it dawned on me that I hadn’t checked the label, and all of a sudden I realised what had happened. I located one of the trays of arancini bites and my suspicions were confirmed when I saw that dairy was listed an allergen.

Accidentally eating something non-vegan is really awful. It’s only happened to me on a few occasions and it had been a long time since the time before the arancini. However, this time it felt particularly awful, as I was both annoyed at myself for not checking to make sure it was plant-based and annoyed at whoever had decided that serving animal products at an event for an organisation that works for animals was an acceptable thing to do.

However, animal conservation is, of course, not the same thing as veganism. This feels like a ridiculous thing to write, especially as animal farming is the number one driver of deforestation, habitat loss and species extinction - so how can you campaign against something while still supporting the industries that are the biggest driver of the very thing you are campaigning against?

Our relationship with animals is so paradoxical that even the most glaringly obvious contradictions are overlooked or viewed as being perfectly acceptable. It speaks to how distorted our animal ethics are that events celebrating the protection of certain animals serve food made from the exploitation of others.

That being said, is it wholly a bad thing that animal conservation is being championed by people who aren’t vegan? The response to that question changes depending on if you answer it from the perspective of how things should ideally be or from the perspective of how things actually are.

Ideally, everyone working in conservation (or just everyone in general) would be vegan, but that’s not the world we currently live in. Faced with the reality of the world around me, I am glad that non-vegans are conservationists and care about wild animals. After all, if they didn’t, there would be far less work being carried out to protect these animals and save them from poaching, climate change or whatever other peril they face.

Does this make the fact they are not vegan OK? Clearly not. However, most of us probably cared about animal issues before we went vegan. I became passionate about cetacean captivity, and I even joined a protest before I was vegan. In fact, my outrage at cetacean captivity was one of the reasons why I eventually ended up becoming vegan.

And in the interest of being fair, the food seemed to be meat-free, which, while still clearly not ideal, does at least show that there was some intention and thought put into what food was served. Plus, on a lighter note, I did meet a number of vegans there who I was able to spend time chatting with and, ignoring what was at that time digesting in my stomach, I was able to enjoy the event and still take comfort from hearing about the work that the organisation had carried out to help animals.

Being vegan in a world filled with contradictions means that sometimes we have to find a way to acknowledge the contradictions without letting them stop us from fully celebrating the positive changes that are happening. It is frustrating when meat eaters campaign against dog meat but still eat other animals. However, the end of the dog meat trade would be a huge positive nonetheless. Likewise, it’s frustrating when an organisation protecting wild animals serves dairy, but that doesn’t change the work they’ve done for wild animals.

I left the event feeling conflicted but with a sense of perspective that allowed me to feel positive while at the same time hoping that at the next event the organisation holds, the food they serve will fully reflect the issues they are campaigning against.