We know better today

If we vegans can sink our discomfort (over our failure to ‘communicate our message’) we’ll not suffer so much from being rebuffed – it always brings us back to where the real suffering is, namely in the great discomfort the animals are subjected to. Those imprisoned on farms across the world, our discomfort is nothing compared to theirs.
If I were new to veganism, even if I couldn’t get over my own keyed up feelings about what I’ve seen, there may still be a big side-worry, about health and the vegan diet. How certain are we that it’s safe? Is a vegan diet efficacious? How can we judge it?
As omnivores, all we ever get to know about food and nutrition always involves the ‘essential’ animal products. That’s what we know. It would seem dangerous for any diet not to include them. It would even seem suicidal to go against the ‘obvious truth’, that animal produce is essential to a healthy life. An omnivorous diet has been tried and tested as a diet suitable for humans … but maybe that is written in stone simply because no living race of people have proved otherwise, concerning the efficacy of a totally plant-based diet.
However, things have changed. This is not 1940 but seventy years on, the diet has been tested for that long. Nor is it 1970 when animal liberation was launched – it’s forty years since then. Perhaps uncertainty about plant-based diets was valid half a century ago but now we know better. You have to have great respect for those brave people who, in the early 1940’s, started to question what they’d been told about food. They bucked the ‘obvious truth’. And out of this has come the vegan diet we know today. It has almost come of age.