Saturday, November 17, 2012

Doing without


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For everyone, life’s hard enough. But for vegans it’s even harder, in one important way. We seem to bear almost the sole responsibility for persuading people of the wrongness of enslaving animals and the rightness of not using them at all.
            On one level that’s enlightening enough for us but on another level it’s a pit within a pit. We have to deal with our own everyday-participation (in this society) but we're forced to lead a double life, being in it but not of it; we’re true outsiders. But at least we don’t have the food baggage most people carry (which ends up looking bad on the scales and even worse in the mirror).
            The omnivore’s mental conditioning traps them into habits of childhood, the most dangerous of which is a fondness for Nursery Teas. We like to use certain combinations of junk foods remembered from youth, usually in the form of sweetened confections, cheesy concoctions and milky drinks. They’re tempting but they’ve lost their original impact as treats. No longer are they anything special since they’re indulged in so regularly. And every day too most people eat a meaty meal, again something very addictive and harmful to the body.
            As dangerous as these foods are, we indulge in them. On top of the junk food we indulge in a whole range of intoxicants, that fuzz up the mind and probably ease a grumbling conscience, helping us to enjoy the eating experience.     
            Science has been recruited to ensure that animal foods (and as main ingredients of processed foods) are ‘rich’ feeling, taste-pleasuring and stomach-filling. It’s their addictiveness which denies us any chance of easily escaping them, even for a short while. Their daily use keeps us umbilically tied to the norms of our society.
            Veganism takes us past that point. Once we’re vegan we usually never look back to that world again. We get so used to looking ahead, to that world of daily-discipline and boycotting.
The ‘little habits’ of dietary omnivores are hard to let go, especially when the alternatives don’t seem attractive (veganism would be perceived as extreme and a vegan diet therefore unattractive). Perhaps the big lesson here is that perceptions can be changed almost in a flash. Habits too. But ‘going vegan’ isn’t simple.
            Immediately, as soon as the brain says “give it a go”, we face a Catch 22, where herbivorous eating means limiting our choices. Our society is so heavily geared to the animal eaters’ interests that there’s not very much in the way of immediately attractive plant-based savoury foods; there are still relatively few products on the market which replace the addictive-products made with animal ingredients, unless we’re willing to pay high prices for imported goods. Mostly we have to make do without.
            On the face of it, this puts people off vegan lifestyles … but just in that ‘limitation’, with so much being off-limits to us, we benefit greatly. Avoiding animal-based foods prevents our being poisoned by it. And nor are we likely to put on weight, grow a paunch, slow our metabolism or develop diabetes. That’s the big advantage of this particular food discipline.
            Look at it this way. Going vegan helps us pass by certain shops. We just get used to never going into them. For example, nothing in a cake shop is ‘clean’ (of animal by-products), so commercial cakes are no longer something a vegan would indulge in. Now, all this ‘doing-without’ might seem like a big sacrifice to omnivores but to vegans it’s a blessing in disguise. We can’t be tempted by the ‘delights’ of edible or wearable or usable animal products, so we can’t be tainted by them or, in the case of food items, made fat or ill by them. And that’s the ultimate advantage. We don’t have to spend our latter years in the grip of ill-health, at least not because we have, in previous years, indulged in second rate taste-trips.

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