Friday, March 11, 2011

‘Kwizeen’

Attitude change can’t come soon enough for vegans. We wait impatiently for the human to be compassionate towards food animals. For animal-eaters of course, vegans and their ideas can’t disappear fast enough. We are a royal pain in the arse.
For us though, we want a chance to say something. Not to lecture but talk about our particular interest which may include introducing another type of cuisine. A chief interest for traditionalists however is to talk about their own ‘latest cuisine’. Both want to talk creativity, but each from a very different perspective.
Looking at the psychology of things (why we go this way and not that way) we are sensitive to being criticised for taking the road we have. It’s the psychology of judgement, wanting to caste judgement and learning how it feels to be judged. Why do we react so hyper-sensitively to criticism? Why do we have to justify what we do? Why is it so hard for us to discuss … well, discuss this particular subject?
Surely it all boils down to fundamental attitude change, one that we advocate and omnivores resist. We believe our fellow humans should recognise that animals have rights, omnivores believe they have a right to follow their dream ‘kwizeen’ and NOT have to change if they don’t want to.

Thursday, March 10, 2011

Adultery with animals - a bad ‘do’

If people don’t take this seemingly obvious, if radical, step (adopting vegan principles into their life) they’ll fall far short of doing anything very meaningful or satisfying.
Logically we can’t get anywhere till we atone for our little crime against animals. This one thing never goes away. It kills us just by being in our face … (I hope I’m not getting too heavy here) … because of course it’s in so much of what we do to animals, every day, at every meal (the worst of it done by proxy), where our ‘Animal adultery’ compromises all the good stuff we do. And yet we can’t even come to know this because we can’t allow ourselves to believe it.
This conundrum, this mixture of guilt and impotence, means omnivores can’t achieve happiness because it’s always going to be connected with what one is doing ... and there’s good ‘do’ and bad ‘do’ ... and too much of the bad ‘do’ gives us pleasure at the same time as doing all the serious damage too.

Wednesday, March 9, 2011

Guilt

For grown people, it’s likely we can’t operate our bodies as we’d like to - we no longer run just for the joy of it, we can’t even run painlessly. We can’t do things we used to be able to do. We are unable to reach what we know we’re capable of. And it’s not just down to the toxic food we put in our mouths, it’s also guilt dragging us down. We keep ‘doing’ guilt. We think it will go away if we don’t think about it too much, but it doesn’t. The best we can do with guilt is numb it. Then we won’t notice it anymore … but it springs back, especially when the dreaded subject comes up in conversation. Animals.

Animal-executed and animal-secreted foods

Tuesday 8th March 2011
Earlier on in the day, perhaps, the rot began to set in … when we went to a shop and bought what we laughingly call ‘food’ (that’s anything from animal-secreted to animal-executed). The vibrations alone are toxic enough but add to this chemical content of it and we’ve successfully poisoned ourselves. And we don’t do it once but about ten times a day. Overall it has a drag effect on everything we’re doing.

Cake - yum!

Monday 7th March 2011
Vegans don’t go into cake shops, they walk on by … so they never get to eat the crap, yummy crap but crap nevertheless. Every great ambition a human might have is compromised by crap and addiction. In this case the daily compromiser is within our food, in its animal content. This ‘nonsensical component’ of our daily diet kills us, mainly because it frustrates any worthwhile ambition we may have. We start well, we have a good day. We do all the good stuff, then stroll along to the abattoir to buy our dead animal rations. Then we consume it. We do this to ourselves every day, even after having an otherwise good day.

Sunday, March 6, 2011

Get wised up to a vegan diet

Have you heard about the vegan diet? Did you know that at the Slimming Olympics of 2020 it won GOLD, and who would have thought back in 2010, that such a simple idea would take out the Ideas’ Logies of 2022?
But seriously, what happens with sport (how runners run faster, how bodies work better) has been known for a long time. We know a body responds very well to optimum treatment. Training on vegetable foods (at every meal) and getting rid of poisonous foods, surely this is the wisdom of it.

Slim down, be vegan

Saturday 5th March 2011
Vegan food itself seems very natural but it’s much more that a diet. It’s both a food regime and a statement about animals at one and the same time: it’s both a source of energy and of meaningfulness. (This unfortunately is something our omnivore friends probably don’t know about … yet). Vegan food provides optimum fuel, serving the needs of humans better than traditional diets. And that’s it, but on the Big Plus side, in this age of obesity, it’s a perfect slimming diet too.

Sequence

Friday 4th March 2011
Of course, it’s easy enough now, with hindsight, to see how a dramatic diet improvement can be carried out - the obvious advantages of a vegan diet - but back then … hey but “back then” is of course “now” for most people; to them a vegan feeding system hasn’t happened yet. They know nothing of this ‘sequence’ of events, the logic that has brought others towards a plant-based eating regime.
As I see it, the sequence of events leading up to The Inevitable Vegan-fed Future goes something like this. Traditional, mainly plant-based foods were eaten, then hunting became successful, then everything food- wise became much easier, then food was plentiful, and that’s where (with people eating more, growing fatter, getting sicker and yet still remaining alive) we are today. Not much else has happened. We eat, get fat and ill and after eighty suffering years we die. Vegan food revolutionises all of that because the body thrives on plant-based food.
It doesn’t work the way a traditional food does. It’s lighter in more ways than one. It transforms on various levels: making us physically stronger, mentally brighter, more vital, plus it’s important to know that the food’s less expensive; it makes us feel less guilty and less slothful, and so on. But you needn’t believe me; you just need to try it. I think the phrase is: “see for your self”.

Friday, March 4, 2011

Looking ahead

Thursday 3rd March 2011
If the brothers Orville and Wilbur Wright had woken up one morning with the idea of jet propelled flight and tried to develop it in 1903 they would have failed. Propellers had to come and go first, in sequence, before such ideas could take hold.
There’s probably an obvious sequence to everything important that occurs in this world, and we can see it plainly enough when we look back, but projecting forward is not so certain. We don’t know the sequential steps of what’s coming next. It’s impossible to see where an idea has to go. It’s impossible to see, unless by intuition, if an idea will die or become as big as the jet engine. All we can guess is that any good-looking idea must evolve from one stage to the next. Before the advent of ‘flight’ the jet idea was absurd because we couldn’t see how it could happen. Now slow flight seems absurd and fast flight is indispensable.
An old idea is as open to improvement as a new idea, and none older than the human body. It functions because of the things we do to it. We can change its functioning by doing things each day (the way people have always done). First and foremost we feed it. We eat as we ate as kids, later adopting a diet in keeping with the people we live with. But when we start to look more consciously at what we’re doing, especially feeding, then, suddenly, out of the blue, we might ask ourselves the preposterous question: is there a better way? Is it possible that the traditional way of feeding human bodies might be inadequate to the more sophisticated humans we are becoming today? Can our diet be dramatically improved?

Wednesday, March 2, 2011

Haranguing in public

As carefully as we try to convince regular omnivores about animal imprisoning, we may not succeed if we can’t lose the value judgement behind our advice. Greg, a Greek friend of mine, would say that trying to resolve this sort of situation satisfactorily is “an impossible dream”! Probably true. All the time we maintain the judgemental approach we never get even close to dislodging the illogicality behind omnivore-thinking. As free- willed choosers of their own food, omnivores will baulk at the moral codes of the smallest minority and be swayed by the laxer codes of the majority. It’s convenient for the omnivore that vegans are judgemental about values and morals - they look bitter and therefore uninspiring. Vegans are in a terrible position here, between acceptance of people for themselves and haranguing them for what they do.
One can’t underestimate the problems this poses for vegan animal activists.

Imprisoning farm animals

Tuesday 1st March 2011
By regularly asserting that we may do what we do to them because they’re inferior to us, we slip into illogicality. We delude ourselves ... so that we can keep on eating them. Vegans would find that ultimately frightening. We feel compelled to persuade omnivores to lift the scales from their eyes, concerning enslaving those weaker than ourselves. Predation is okay but imprisoning isn’t.

Easy

Monday 28th February 2011
As a species we have always thriven on meat eating. “Look at us now. We wouldn’t be who we are unless our ancestors had eaten meat.” That perception and others like it are responsible for making us humans feel superior to animals, which in turns gives us the right to use them and the feel the benefit of eating them. Then that very benefit (call it ‘superiority’) justifies our eating them!

Smelly nasty

Sunday 27th February 2011
Adapting to vegan eating turns up some strange changes in us - we begin taking notice of what we didn’t notice before. Certain smells become unbearable - cremating meat, cooking cheese, the smell of other items cooking, it all becomes nauseating where before we’d have been salivating. A vegan knows the smell of death - a summer’s day in the park in Australia is often spoiled by the stench of barbecue fumes.