Food fashion

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If the food fashion ever moves towards plant-based foods it will be a catastrophe for the market, or so the fear goes. There will be price-rises, unavailability of products and all we’ll be left with are plant-based products. If that is the trend the vegans of today may feel silly for having too little confidence in how things were to work out.

I’m hinting optimism here. What if the native intelligence of fellow humans changes? Shouldn’t we give them ‘the benefit of the doubt’? For we vegans there’s a trap within a trap; it’s shaky self esteem. We’re in need of personal recognition and we won’t get it by pounding the public psyche.

We’re trying to do two things at once - informing people but still needing them to ‘take us seriously’; we want encouragement from people who’re in no position to give the sort of encouragement we want.

Vegan activists don’t like it when people won’t listen. We get touchy. We don’t balance our duty of care, providing the public with information’, with our own ‘need to be noticed’. Of course we want to be respected but we want to act in loco parentis too. If, as activists, we can’t balance these two needs we’ll remain feeling furious at the whole of humanity.

At root, vegans hate the obstinacy of people because we know that they know. But we can sometimes be like a three year old child stamping his foot when he can’t get his own way. I might  want to ride rough-shod over all the people against me.

We need to realise that any ‘rough’ approach always fails. People don’t like being railroaded. Any kind of bullying feels intimidating. It must be resisted.

For us, we need to remember that because there are so many omnivores out there, that they won’t let themselves be pushed around by a minority of vegans. All I’m saying is that no one knows how things will turn out in the future, but that things CAN and DO change dramatically. It’s a handle to hold onto during these early days of emerging animal rights consciousness. When things do change they will probably change quite rapidly. So, if we want particular changes to occur we need to play our part by actively ‘expecting’ change. For optimism to ‘work’ we must maintain consistency - our own personality is the key. The big trap is in letting the idiot public slow us down, with all the tricks they play to preserve the status quo.