Going in for the kill

557:

Judgements shock, especially when we judge someone’s values. “You’re wrong doing what you do, eating what you eat”. It’s a criticism of the mindlessness behind the eating of every chocolate bar and every ham sandwich, eaten simply because it tastes good.

            We tell people, “You are wrong ...” and that, of course, is intended to undermine a person’s sense of being right. And maybe no one, before, has criticised what we eat, not from a moral point of view anyway.

            Along the way, most people have met vegetarians advocating healthier food and better animal welfare. We’ve all heard of battery eggs and the need to switch to free range eggs. But maybe never before have we been confronted about the wrongness of ALL foods connected with animals, including by-products.

            To almost everybody, eating is like breathing fresh air, it’s not something we think about. We’re brought up to ethically question many things, but not food. The foods we eat are what Mum and Dad fed us. It’s all one thing – it’s just ‘normal food’. How can food be ‘wrong’? How can almost every meal our parents provided for us be ‘wrong’? How can the traditions of every community on Earth (over countless previous generations) be wrong? If meat and milk is so poisonous why aren’t we all dead?

            Perhaps over a long period we have worn down not only our immune systems but also our greatest potential, and it being so incremental we just haven’t noticed it. It’s rather the same as getting used to war and hatred and lingering illnesses, as if it were part of normal life, as if it were unavoidable.