Are Vegan and Vegetarian the Same Thing?
I polled nine people last week on whether vegan and vegetarian mean the same thing. Seven said yes. Every single one of them blew it. It’s the kind of mix-up that feels harmless until you hand a veget
Sarah Rose Levy · Updated February 26, 2026 · 6 min read
I polled nine people last week on whether vegan and vegetarian mean the same thing. Seven said yes. Every single one of them blew it.
It’s the kind of mix-up that feels harmless until you hand a vegetarian guest a plate drizzled with honey and they shrug, then watch a vegan guest interrogate the bread for hidden casein. One crew parks the line at the slaughterhouse door. The other stretches it around the whole farm, the beehive, and halfway down the cosmetics aisle.
The confusion tracks. Both dodge the steak. Both grab the pasta. But the overlap gets paper-thin once you peek past the dinner plate.
I remember sitting across from a vegan friend who spent ten minutes cross-examining our waiter about whether the house red was filtered through fish bladders. The vegetarian at our table had already flagged down the cheese board. Same booth, same menu, two completely different operating systems running underneath.
Here are 7 ways vegan and vegetarian aren’t remotely the same thing.
1. The Definition Gap Is Enormous
Vegetarian is a diet. Vegan is an entire worldview.
A vegetarian drops meat, poultry, and fish from the rotation. That’s the whole gig. Eggs, cheese, milk, honey? Green light across the board. If nothing got killed for it, it lands on the plate.
Veganism torches that rulebook and writes a new one. The Vegan Society cemented the official definition in 1988, and it blows past food by a mile. It’s “a way of living which seeks to exclude, as far as is possible and practicable, all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals.” Your plate, your closet, your medicine cabinet, your Saturday plans.
A vegetarian passes on the burger. A vegan passes on the burger, the leather belt, the wool pullover, the beeswax lip balm, and the zoo trip.
2. Vegetarianism Has Flavors. Veganism Doesn’t.
Vegetarianism works more like an umbrella than a single club.
Lacto-ovo vegetarians eat eggs and dairy. That’s the dominant version in the West. Lacto-vegetarians (huge in South Asian food traditions) keep dairy but lose eggs. Ovo-vegetarians flip it: eggs stay, dairy goes.
Then you’ve got pescatarians, who eat fish but introduce themselves as “pretty much vegetarian” at dinner parties. I’m not here to gatekeep, but ordering a salmon filet doesn’t punch your ticket into the vegetarian camp. Not even in the parking lot.
Veganism has no subcategories. You’re cutting out every animal product and by-product, or you’re not. There’s no “vegan but I still drizzle honey on my toast” track (though people keep trying to invent one).
3. The Cheese Trap Nobody Mentions
Here’s one that blindsides even veteran vegetarians. Traditional Parmesan isn’t vegetarian.
Authentic Parmigiano-Reggiano calls for animal rennet, an enzyme harvested from the stomach lining of slaughtered calves. EU law demands it before the cheese can wear the official name. Grana Padano and Gorgonzola play by the same rules.
I’ll level with you. I had no clue about this for years. Most vegetarians don’t. The workaround is painless: grab cheeses made with microbial rennet instead. But it’s a solid wake-up call that “no meat” and “no hidden animal parts” aren’t the same promise.
Vegans sidestep the whole mess by ditching cheese entirely. Crisis averted (though I’d argue they’ve traded one problem for another, because cheese is phenomenal).
4. The Ethics Sit on Different Foundations
Both camps care about animals. Where they split is which line they refuse to cross.
Most vegetarians run on a welfare framework. The logic: animals can participate in the food system if they’re treated well and don’t get killed. A content hen dropping eggs on a free-range farm? That’s the poster image.
Vegans run on a rights framework. Their position is that animals aren’t resources for us to tap. Full stop. They’ll remind you that dairy cows get artificially inseminated, that newborn calves get separated from their mothers within hours, and that male calves ship straight to veal operations. The egg industry? Male chicks get ground up on day one because they won’t produce eggs and they’re the wrong breed for meat production.
Welfare vs. rights. Reform the machine vs. scrap it. Same compassion, wildly different endpoints.
5. Your Body Notices the Gap
This is where it gets tangible.
Vegetarians who keep eggs and dairy in rotation can nail most nutritional benchmarks without obsessing over labels. B12 rolls in from eggs and milk. Calcium shows up in cheese and yogurt. It’s not a flawless setup, but the holes are manageable.
Vegans face a tighter puzzle. B12 flat-out doesn’t show up in plants. Skip the supplements or fortified foods long enough and you’re staring down nerve damage and anemia. The EPIC-Oxford study flagged that vegans carried a 30% steeper risk of bone fractures once calcium dipped below 525 mg a day.
Can vegans cover every base? Without question. But it demands planning, a supplement shelf, and ingredient-label literacy that vegetarians get to skip. Convenience + nutrition = the vegetarian edge on this front.
(Though now that I think about it, I know vegetarians who survive on frozen pizza and craft beer, so “nutritional edge” might be a stretch.)
6. The Planet Keeps Score Too
Both diets outperform meat-eating for environmental impact. But veganism blows the doors off.
A 2018 meta-analysis spanning 38,700 farms in 119 countries showed cheese cranking out roughly 21 kg of CO2 per kilogram produced. Tofu? Around 2 kg. A vegetarian who trades steak for a cheese habit is swapping one carbon bomb for a slightly smaller carbon bomb.
Vegan diets slash emissions by 46% against standard omnivore diets. Vegetarian diets hit 35%. That 11-point gap traces back almost entirely to dairy and eggs.
I know the common line is “cutting meat is plenty,” but the numbers tell a messier story. A worldwide pivot to veganism could unlock 75% of existing farmland. Vegetarianism can’t get near that figure because cows still need pastures and chickens still need feed crops.
7. Grocery Shopping Turns Into Detective Work
Vegans scan ingredient panels like forensic accountants.
That glossy shell on your gummy bears? Shellac, sourced from lac bug secretions. The red tint in strawberry yogurt? Carmine, which is crushed-up insects. Your Vitamin D-fortified breakfast cereal? That D3 most likely traces back to lanolin, a waxy grease stripped from sheep’s wool.
Vegetarians breeze past most of this without blinking. Vegans can’t afford to.
Even booze gets complicated. For 256 years, Guinness ran its stout through isinglass, a filtering agent pulled from dried fish swim bladders. They didn’t switch to a vegan-friendly process until 2016. Wine houses often lean on egg whites or milk protein for clarification, which keeps the bottle vegetarian but boots it out of vegan territory.
The Line That Actually Matters
Vegetarianism revolves around one filter: did something die for this? Veganism asks a heavier question: did something suffer for this?
That gap isn’t cosmetic. It’s the distance between patching a system and walking away from it. Between drawing a boundary at the slaughterhouse and extending it around every paddock, hive, and testing lab on the map.
Neither route is wrong. Both crush the standard American diet on ethics, health, and footprint. But lumping them together is like calling a bicycle and a motorcycle identical because they share a wheel count.
One rolls further. That’s it.
Sources:
Eat better, meat-free.
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Written bySarah Rose Levy
Covering vegetarian food, restaurants, and grocery finds across the U.S.
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