The power of food

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What the Animal Industries may NOT realise is that a strong counter-culture is gaining ground. People are beginning to wake up to the fact that animal products are dangerous as well as immoral. We know food is obviously essential to life … but not this food. If animal-derived foods are anything, they’re toxic and unethical and detrimental to the environment, and yet almost everyone remains an omnivore. They’re seduced by roast dinners, egg and bacon breakfasts or after-dinner ice cream. They can’t walk past a cake shop without paying a visit.
We can’t get past our own tastebuds and food-tastes. We’re hemmed in by our social eating habits. If we go against eating norms then social relationships are affected, whereas if we eat from the same table we’re accepted.
For people like vegans social isolation is a potent punishment, simply because we eat different food. Perhaps people think we are trying to be better than everyone else. Whether that’s fair or not it happens that way ... but it shouldn’t make any vegan feel insecure or depressed, after all we’ve looked carefully at our own habits and decided to make changes which go against majority opinion. We boycott products and condemn the industries who make their business out of animal exploitation ... and most of us are thankful we’ve gone vegan despite the struggle. One might argue that some life-struggle is good for us, since it develops appreciation for what we have, contributing to a strength in our personality with which we’ll have no trouble attracting people towards us … and eventually towards our ideas. We develop a personality that seems unique and sovereign, and which acknowledges others’ sovereign right to a life. We recognise the unique individual in each other, who is worth something in their own right. If that does nothing else for us it should give us self confidence, enough perhaps to combat the social isolation that being vegan brings. It helps us lead the fashion and not follow it. It says to us, “Yes, go ahead, boycott, do what is necessary and right, and don’t back off when things get rough”. And this is the same confidence that says “no” when we’re tempted.
If that strength of character is a bit lacking in our world, and if people do keep giving in to exactly what the brain-washers have programmed us to want, then our biggest problems are ones concerning conformity. If we are giving in to social pressure to be the same as others we have to consciously go against our better judgement, our wanting to stand firm. And that, perhaps more than anything else, erodes self esteem and self-confidence, proving that we haven’t been able to stand up to the power of food.