Wanting

Because people are focused on wanting they won’t listen to what we have to say. Vegans can scream about it all they like, but we have to deal with things as they are. We are looking at a deep seated fear in people, often unexpressed, that illness is waiting to grab them, 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 to clog their arteries, and let the hospitalisation deal with the problems later.
So vegans have two jobs: to make plant foods attractive enough to live on, without needing animal products, and to convince food addicts that prevention is better than cure. We need to be inspiring on the one hand and warning on the other. And we need to be flexible enough to play both cunningly and compassionately, interacting with others on this matter like a proper friend would.

Those people who are most obstinate are the most food-seduced – in their mind they’re unable to be without animal food. It’s not just a matter of nutrition, it’s the problem of getting off the habit … it’s easier said than done. For two whole decades before reaching adulthood, most of us have been powerlessness to change our eating habits, and 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 used to cook them. Weight creeps up and a ‘live-now-pay-later’ mentality prevails. Kids aren’t warned about the dangers of addiction and seduction, so usually Mum and Dad turn out to be the kids’ unwitting supplier.
Like the use of narcotics (or anything stimulating which is difficult to give up), animal foods are there from the word go, in our daily lives. And with such a great variety of mildly addictive products on the market many of them are as difficult to shake 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 heroin 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 the hunger for a burger or chocolate or pizza, but every day that ‘hunger’ arrives and, once satisfied, it leaves its mark, especially since we can repeat the experience whenever we like. For the wealthy Westerner there’s no thought of doing without these foods, unless they’re making us fat. The very idea of giving up a favourite food because of the link with animal suffering is unthinkable. In fact even animal welfare, let alone animal rights, is something most people never give a thought to. It wouldn’t be on their radar.
If it is … they’re probably already on the way to becoming vegan.