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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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