Essential for life?

1623: 

Despite our great gains as humans, with a long list of brilliant discoveries and advances, we’ve nonetheless succumbed to a central piece of misinformation - that animals are essential to our survival. We’ve meekly accepted that we need to eat them to stay healthy. If this isn’t true, and obviously I don’t think it is, then the whole human race has invested heavily in one carefully crafted con.

Set against this, vegans are emphasising that plant-foods are perfect for humans to thrive on. Nutrition ‘experts’, in the employ of the Animal Industry and therefore of the opposite belief, advise customers to “eat meat or you’ll die”. Few people feel confident enough to risk their own physical well being, let alone the lives of their kids, to find out if this is true or not.

But instinctively, there’s something profoundly wrong about animal food. Maybe it’s something about the fact that we never see the animals we eat, since they’re always hidden away; we only get to see them dead, as meat. And that seems to suit most people, if only because it’s the end ‘product’ that’s of interest, not where it came from. The omnivore doesn’t want to be concerned with the animal which they're proposing to eat.

At some stage in our adult life we consciously enter into a Mephistophelian contract, by trading compassion for lifestyle . According to this contract we can carry on enjoying our food just as long as we understand and accept that vegans are wrong about the safety of plant foods. And this is extended to suggest that vegan types are conspiring to inflict suffering and death on those who reject a plant-based diet; the assumption is that vegans want to spoil people’s enjoyment of their food because they are, at heart, spoilers.