Nobody has ever asked a vegan about fibre.
Nobody asks how you sleep, or about your iron, or whether you get enough potassium. There is exactly one nutrient that comes up, it comes up constantly, and it comes up from people who have never once wondered about their own intake of it.
That asymmetry is the whole story.
Protein stopped being a nutrient
Somewhere in the last few decades protein got promoted. It stopped being one of the things in food and became a claim on the front of the packet: protein yoghurt, protein bread, protein water, protein crisps. Not marketed as nourishment. Marketed as strength, as discipline, as getting something out of your day.
No other nutrient made that jump. There is no fibre aisle. Nobody sells discipline-branded magnesium.
So by the time the word reaches a conversation it isn’t really a nutritional term at all. It’s a shorthand for whether a person is strong and taking it seriously. That’s why the question puts vegans on the back foot. It’s a loaded question.
Two questions in one sentence
You can tell which one you have been asked by what happens when you answer it. A real question is satisfied by an answer. This one usually gets a follow-up.
Sometimes it’s just curiosity. The difference is whether the answer is enough.
The tell is who gets asked, and how
Asked of a vegan woman it tends to arrive as concern: are you getting enough, are you alright, you look thin. Asked of a vegan man, it can arrive as a test.
That’s the same machinery that produced soy boy as an insult in 2017: a word invented specifically to suggest that a man who eats plants is a diminished one. Same idea, two registers.
The soy panic does have actual science behind it, and the science is dull and reassuring, which we have gone through properly elsewhere. But answering the science does not always settle the conversation.
Which makes it a dating problem
On a first date the protein question is almost never hostile. It’s worse than that: it’s small talk that’s quietly doing an assessment.
It’s checking whether you’re healthy, and whether feeding you is going to become somebody’s project. The second one matters more, because that’s the difference between a partner and a supervisor.
Nobody asking it has thought any of that through. They are making small talk. It still arrives as an assessment, which is why “beans, mostly” said cheerfully does not end it.
You cannot win it, so stop entering it
The instinct is to be ready. Have the figures, know the amino acids, be able to name a vegan sportsperson.
It does not work, because the question was not asking. You can be completely right about protein and still lose the exchange, since what is actually being evaluated is whether you seem defensive about your own life. Arriving with a prepared rebuttal answers that in the wrong direction.
The better move is the boring one. Concede that it’s a fair thing to wonder, give it one sentence, and be visibly uninterested in continuing. Nothing deflates a status question faster than treating it as a factual one and then changing the subject.
Or wear it
The other option is to take the joke off them.
There are badges on Grazer called Soy Boy, B12 Baddie and Hairy Herbivore, and none of them are accidental. An insult stops working the second the target picks it up and puts it on their profile on purpose. A person who has already labelled themselves B12 Baddie has pre-empted the entire conversation, cheerfully, before anybody opened their mouth.
Which is the real answer to where you get your protein. Nowhere interesting. Next question.