Monday, February 10, 2014

The cream-bun mentality

962:

Delicious. A  fattening cream bun. If you’ve eaten one you’ll know what it is - a taste and texture experience. But what’s behind this confection? The cream that comes from milk, comes from cows who’ve lost their new-born calf, in order to make their milk available for humans. But the product itself, the cream, despite it being unhealthy, is delicious to our taste and has been cunningly inserted into a sweet bun to make it attractive to eat. Irresistible. That attraction, multiplied a thousandfold across the range of equally delicious food items, represents a typical food temptation.
If we are concerned for the enslaved animals who produce ‘our’ milk, then we have to choose to either satisfy our taste or rise above it for the sake of sticking to a principle, namely the need to boycott anything taken from abused animals.

The question is, can the cream bun be eaten or can the temptation be beaten? The vegan’s job is to find ways in which denying oneself this figurative cream-bun makes sense, not merely to avoid putting on weight but for improving one’s ethical self-esteem. 

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