Wanting

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Because people are focused on 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, that illness awaits them. 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, letting 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 inspire on the one hand and warn on the other.
Those people who are most obstinate are the most food-seduced, who’re unable to be without animal food. It’s not just a matter of nutrition, it’s the problem of getting out of the habit of it. It’s easier said than done.
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 used to cook for them. Weight creeps up and a ‘live-now-pay-later’ mentality sets in. Kids aren’t warned about the dangers of addiction, so usually 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 burger or chocolate or quiche, 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 animal welfare, let alone animal rights, is something most people never give a thought to. It wouldn’t even be on their radar.
If it is … they’re probably already on their way to becoming vegan.