IMO the real answer is that veganism is not an essential part of EA philosophy, just happens to be correlated with it due to the large number of people in animal advocacy. Most EA vegans and non-vegans think that their diet is a small portion of their impact compared to their career, and it’s not even close! Every time you spend an extra $5 finding a restaurant with a vegan option you could help 5,000 shrimp instead. Vegans have other reasons like non-consequentialist ethics, virtue signaling or self-signaling, or just a desire not to eat the actual flesh/​body fluids of tortured animals.
If you have a similar emotional reaction to other products it seems completely valid to boycott them, although as you mention there can be significant practical burdens, both in adjusting one’s lifestyle to avoid such products and in judging whether the claims of marginal impact are valid. Being vegan is not obligatory in my culture and neither should boycotts be—unless the marginal impact of the boycott is larger than any other life choice which is essentially never true.
IMO the real answer is that veganism is not an essential part of EA philosophy, just happens to be correlated with it due to the large number of people in animal advocacy. Most EA vegans and non-vegans think that their diet is a small portion of their impact compared to their career, and it’s not even close! Every time you spend an extra $5 finding a restaurant with a vegan option you could help 5,000 shrimp instead. Vegans have other reasons like non-consequentialist ethics, virtue signaling or self-signaling, or just a desire not to eat the actual flesh/​body fluids of tortured animals.
If you have a similar emotional reaction to other products it seems completely valid to boycott them, although as you mention there can be significant practical burdens, both in adjusting one’s lifestyle to avoid such products and in judging whether the claims of marginal impact are valid. Being vegan is not obligatory in my culture and neither should boycotts be—unless the marginal impact of the boycott is larger than any other life choice which is essentially never true.