They walk among us, and we never know. They sit beside us in class, eat next to us in the HUB, and live perfectly normal, meatless lives.

Cassi Kohl, a smiling, bright young girl in an orange scarf, is a junior, a singer and, for the past 10 months of her life, a vegan. She says she just woke up one day almost a year ago and decided not to eat any animal products at all.

“When I became vegan, it was more just to try something new and see if I could do it,” Kohl said. “I had always wanted to go vegan, but I’d never gotten past the second-day mark. So I just decided one day to do that, and it stuck.”

Sure, she had been vegetarian before — she gave meat up for Lent five years ago, and she’s not Catholic — but some say the transition from vegetarian to vegan is even harder.

“And I’ve actually been kosher my whole life,” Kohl said, “and I’m not Jewish.”

Kohl, and plenty of others like her, fit in well in a city like Seattle. It’s a liberal town on a liberal coast, where people tend to carry passions and causes around like a wallet or a purse, and where veganism is especially well-received. It’s an open town, a social town, a green town.

The UW, an especially culturally diverse campus, is no exception. The vegan population here is as well-rounded as the campus around it.

Sophomore Anshika Kumar also began as a vegetarian, raised by vegetarian parents in North Seattle. It wasn’t until late spring, on June 1, she specifically recalled, that she decided to move to veganism.

“It started with a class that I took,” Kumar said. “It was split into three units, and the last unit was on dairy farming. … We got to visit four dairy farms in Whatcom County — that was May 30 — and it was an eye-opening experience for me.”

The treatment of the animals, she said, was startling and provided the revelation that spurred her toward becoming a true vegan. Animals at dairy farms are treated differently at every place, depending on whether they’re organic or several other factors, but all the ones she saw still sell animals to slaughterhouses when they can’t give milk anymore.

“I’d always viewed the decision to eat meat and then to be vegan as two very different things,” Kumar said. “But after that trip, I realized one completely feeds into the other, and I couldn’t bring myself to consume dairy. I had never thought I’d be vegan before seeing what I saw.”

The main reason why the UW so smoothly accommodates vegans is because it’s conscious of its students’ biases and lifestyle choices. There’s a vegan choice in every dining area and convenience store on campus, and Housing and Food Services (HFS) is eager to help vegan students in whatever way possible.

“We have daily offerings of sandwiches, salads, soups, bakery products,” HFS Executive Chef Gabe Kinney said. “We brought in some plant-based protein that we could utilize in some of our formats. There was a huge push for this product called ‘gardein’ protein, which is out of Vancouver, British Columbia, and gave us a lot of options to do different entrees.”

Kinney estimates only about 1 percent of UW students who eat on-campus food are vegan, so, naturally, there is slightly less emphasis on meeting their needs than the needs of the rest of the student body. But, Kinney was eager to add, he and HFS are always trying to do better for the relatively small dietary subset that is veganism.

“Overall, we try to meet the customers’ expectations, and overall, we succeed with that,” Kinney said. “But there is always room for continuous improvement, and we are always looking at options for improvement.”

Still, for most vegans, subsisting on a meal plan and a strict no-animal policy can prove difficult. In fact, Kohl moved out of the dorms two months after becoming vegan, citing the need to make her own food as a major factor. And sophomore Liz Weidner, who became vegan on a bet with her sister, gave up a couple of weeks into her freshman quarter in Lander Hall.

“It was kind of a pain,” Weidner said. “Especially living on South Campus, they don’t have as many options as far as food in the dorms. I kind of decided that I would ease back into it.”

Of course, a “bet with my sister” isn’t the strongest conviction, and it was easy to slip, especially when dorm-cooking options were limited to a kitchenette. There was a discernible pain in her voice as she recalled all the meat products she had missed.

“It wasn’t an ethical choice for me,” Weidner explained. “It wasn’t, ‘I want to protect animals by not eating them.’ … If you want to [protect animals], you should write letters or get people together … but not eating meat, I don’t think, [doesn’t] change people’s minds.”

But most vegans, while passionate about their cause, don’t want to convert people with their actions; they’re doing it because they made the choice not to partake in what they view as a morally unconscionable process.

And, that’s exactly what I did. It sounds crazy that someone like me, a die-hard omnivore, would change a major part of their lifestyle as research for an article, but, for one meat-and-dairy-free week at the beginning of the quarter, I decided to put myself through the same gauntlet that Kumar, Kohl or Weidner did when they first became vegan.

My last supper: the biggest bacon cheeseburger I’ve ever eaten.

Read The Daily tomorrow for “Green like me, part two: The misadventures of a misplaced meat-eater.”

Reach reporter Morgan Gard at lifestyles@dailyuw.com.