The Vegan Diet – A Hideous Thought

1936:

By being inconsistent about what is and what isn’t important we fog up the situation for ourselves. But life isn’t just about clarity. It’s about improvements, made by testing ideals to see if they work, to see if they’re worth following.

Now, to be fair, ideals fog things up too. We get trapped between the unreality of perfection and the absurdity of decadence. It seems logical that we start in the middle, and do something simple and achievable.

The practical, common sense way of doing things must be efficient, otherwise we drop it. For vegans, we think it best if there’s one a simple revolutionary principle at stake. Then anyone can prod and poke it and question it, before deciding to ‘go with it’. Or not. Most vegans would suggest food is the start of such a revolution. But this is sedition for the meat-eater. Even if veganism were just about food, it makes carnivores feel uncomfortable.

I quote a 99 year old friend named Mary who says she admires our vegan principles but the idea of our diet is a “hideous thought”. And it’s true, that people do try to imagine what it could be like. And shudder. Younger people are more familiar with new food regimes. And yet they also shudder, not liking this trend. Well-informed youths know all the stories they hear about farm animals. They know it’s all likely to be true. But they still eat animals, so they don’t want information, because it serves to confirm what they’re trying to forget.