Wanting

1218: 

Because people are focused on their ‘wanting’, they won’t listen to what we have to say - vegans can scream all they like, but we know we’re looking at a deep seated fear, often unexpressed; they know what they want but they also know that indulging in the foods they most enjoy will lead inevitably to illness.  Some of these diet associated illnesses are too frightening to think about.  And yet they still prefer to live dangerously, rather than give up anything.

Take a person with heart disease who has to face surgery.  They might have avoided the damage by not clogging up their arteries with fat-saturated food, but they didn’t.  They continued as if nothing was happening, hoping that a little hospitalisation will deal with the problems.

         

So vegans have two jobs: to make plant foods attractive enough to live on without needing to resort to animal products, and to convince food addicts that prevention is better than cure.  On the one hand, we need to inspire and on the other, warn.

         

Those people who are most obstinate are the most food-seduced. They’re unable to kick animal-based foods.  It’s not just a matter of nutrition, it’s the problem of getting out of the habit of always going for it, always conforming to the eating patterns they’ve been brought up with.

For two whole decades, before reaching adulthood, most of us have been powerlessness to change our eating habits.  In this respect most parents are guilty of feeding their children addictive, harmful and unethical foods.  When kids grow up and start feeding themselves, they soon get hooked on the fast-food version of what Mum or Dad used to cook for them.  Weight increases according to the Body Mass Index and the mirror starts to give bad news too.  Then a ‘live-now-pay-later’ mentality sets in.

Kids aren’t sufficiently educated or warned about the dangers of food addiction - when they’re little, they’re happy to ask for all the dangerous foods and so, effectively, Mum and Dad turn out to be the kids’ drug dealers.

         

Like the use of narcotics (or anything else that’s stimulating but difficult to give up) animal foods are in our daily lives from the word go.  And with such a great variety of mildly addictive products on the market, many of them are as difficult to shake off as any of the classic abuse-substances.  Once we’re in the grip of these products there seems to be no way out.

         

If animal foods are addictive, not in quite the same way as narcotics but addictive all the same, then these foods, the taste of them, the thought of them, the low cost of them, make people determined to get them.  It may be a hunger for a burger or chocolate bar or a quiche or pizza, but every day that ‘hunger’ leaves its mark.  For the wealthy Westerner there’s no thought of doing without these foods.  The very idea of giving up a favourite food, because of the link with animal suffering or ill health consequences, is unthinkable.  In fact even the matter of animal welfare, let alone animal rights, is something most people never give a thought to.  It wouldn’t even be on their radar.

         

But as soon as people come to their senses and start to think for themselves, they begin to see how much danger they’re in and how cruelty is endemic to the farming of animals.  Then perhaps they change, even though the reasoning and the logic behind their change will lead them to become vegan.