Food

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Food comes from supermarkets – grapes, potatoes, apples, lemons, oranges, excellent. The trolley is filling already. In the next aisle are the cheese-ball crisps, to keep the kids happy. And in the next aisle is the rich food, to keep the grown-ups happy. Especially welcome is the time-saver, the ready-to-go cardboard dinner.

I’m over in England at the moment, and I was in a supermarket the other day, which had about fifty metres of coolers ranged down the whole side of one wall. They were full of every conceivable combination of meaty, shove-‘em-in-the-microwave‘ meals. They obviously sell well.

You’d think humans would be after the best fuel, not the very worst. The food most people eat seems like a death wish. And you’d think we’d look after our magnificent machinery, and feed it the lightest, most easily digestible foods, not heavy stomach-fillers full of sugar and fat. Fast food is surely slowing-down food.

The Animal Industry produces all this heavy, clunking fuel, full of animal protein. Am I going too far to suggest ‘conspiracy’ here? Is it a plan to poison people whilst, at the same time, taking money from their pockets? Isn’t this like the dairy-farmer’s attitude to dairy cows – humans being subjected to a keep-em-alive, -milk-em-dry and -keep-em-dull policy?

Everyday we’re bombarded with junk food – we can’t avoid it. We accept the situation because shops have little else to offer. We stay silent. No one acknowledges that animal foods are dangerous or, by extension, acknowledges the holocaust of cruelty inflicted on them every day: and it all happens so that we can consume junk food whilst feeling no shame for the animals going under the knife.

That’s what humans do today, en masse. They kill. It’s happening all the time, now, yesterday, tomorrow, all day, every day, everywhere in the world. In a nutshell, as long as ethics are threadbare and our minds remain weakened (bodies poisoned, etc), the Animal Industries will continue to have a field day. They are not devoted to our welfare but to the making of profit and the poisoning of everything they touch.

So, what to do about it?

My life’s busy. I’m always in a hurry. I’m wasteful. Life’s stressful. I haven’t got time to contemplate ethics. It’s much easier to comply with A.I.

But vegans won’t comply. They look first to ethics. They don’t like what they see. They decide to eat ethically, thence to live ethgically.

Now, you might see ethics as a threadbare garment, unlikely to keep you warm. I regard ethics as a contract I sign, as a condition for entry into human existence. Maybe signing contracts is beyond me when I start life, so I have to wear my elders’ threadbare coat. It’s all I have for survival. But as I grew up I acquired my own coat, a new ‘inner wrapping’, to keep me warm. Almost warm but, in a way, much warmer than I’ve been before. So, the question is - warm enough in what way?

As a vegan I need plenty of motivation, just to survive in a cold, hard omnivore world. So, plenty of warmth I need. And that’s where ethics and passion and resolve combine, to keep me warm in a violence-addicted world (I mean, in human society).

For those who aren’t yet vegan, perhaps ‘warmth’ means something else. Anyway, your temperatures are already quite comfortable – there’s no disassociation to deal with, or any ‘fighting of Society’s values’. The moral values of our society might be taken for granted, and so ‘warmth’ might mean something different. Probably, for most people, it means getting more personal satisfaction. Dysfunctionally, it means wanting ever more warmth to satisfy raging greed, discontent and insecurity - if my life isn’t satisfying enough I’ll want more of everything, insatiably. I won’t want to be questioning the propriety of things either. I’m a grown up now. As an independent cashed-up adult I can afford to have the stuff I’ve always wanted. If a few ethics stand in my way I’ll brush them aside. Not think twice, for if I did my ethics might start asking awkward questions. What we love about morality is that it doesn’t even bother to try to answer the curly questions.

Out of personal convenience we humans have invented an anthropocentric values system. It just about governs all of our daily lives. The downside is that it incorporates double-think. It says, on the one hand, that murder and stealing and lying are wrong but that in certain circumstances they’re okay. A double standard is applied to our fellow sentients in the animal kingdom. Every country in the world promotes this logic-shift, in order to guarantee food supply. (To a vegan a supply of un-essential food).

A supply of all this attractive-but-violent food which is animal-derived is the make or break of Society. Every society in the world ignores ethics when it comes to food. Every country has their own code of moral conduct and all are corrupted by double-think. Morals - these useful little chaps - have allowed people everywhere in the world, to do whatever they want to do, to animals. Everyone knows animals can’t fight back – it’s just too easy for gun-toting humans to exploit them. Each society issues ‘animal-harm licenses’, so that farmers and scientists won’t be afraid of prosecution under their Cruelty-to-Animals laws (if they have any). Each society formulates its own anthropocentric code, embodied in ‘The Establishment’. Bishops, imams, rabbis and elders enforce it. We ordinary people let these people ‘look after’ our morals, in order that we can forget our inborn ethical codes of conduct.

Blind obedience is a worry, less so in children, more so in adults. Our lame compliance with our Poisoning Compliancy Laws is sad enough, but it holds humans in passive sway. We stay weakened and let our outrage fade. People are so hooked on such little (material) things, that addiction and temptation ensures that everyone stays compliant. Specifically, it stops us wanting to protect the animals, who are currently on Death Row.

Animal Rights is urgent and radical, and it has to be because, now, our leaders are greedy, fat, ugly and duplicitous. Not all, of course, just too many.

The protection of animals has to start with a new moral understanding: that humans aren’t to be trusted near animals, any more than paedophiles near school playgrounds. We’ve sunk to these depths because we’ve been persuaded, by established moral codes, and complied. You must agree, surely, that we all deserve the reputation we’ve made for ourselves – the most dangerous animal on earth, the poisoners of the planet. And when it comes to those fellow sentient beings we like to eat, it seems we’ve reached an end-point in self-degradation, and we eat now mainly for psychological reasons. For pacification. And in consequence we’re getting fatter and older quicker. And still satisfaction isn’t reached.

And then perhaps we have to face up to something really nasty in all of us – our insatiable urge to experience every sort of satisfaction possible, in a vain quest for contentment. As violence-addicted humans, we aren’t content with killing animals and eating them, we set out to drive them insane before we eat them. And then we do lots of others things to ourselves and, in consequence, eventually drive ourselves crazy.

Of course the big fear, amongst the most well-informed and educated people is their own march towards eating more vegan food in the future. They reluctantly see the writing on the wall, and hopefully not too late.