By-products that are used for food

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Where is your cut-off point? Unless you feel a strong enough empathic connection with the dairy cow (or Animal Rights) it’s likely you’ll make a decision to keep using animal by-products. If you feel strongly about liberating animals in general (from being used for food) dairy must be tackled first.

Because people have most difficulty in giving up dairy products, they don’t look at the ethics of milk production. It’s because of that reluctance that Animal Rights can’t get a foothold. Unless a by-product boycott is established, no amount no-meat-eating will free farm animals.

In the end it all comes down to denouncing all animal cruelty, not just some of it.

Milk and eggs are a big part of daily life, along with cheese, butter, yoghurt, cream and various confections.  The animal by-products are regarded as benign, as if anything so useful or so delicious could ever be tainted, and yet ethically, if not also nutritionally, these products are dangerous. The animals who produce them suffer as do the humans who ingest them. Certainly, behind the production of both milk and eggs is an ugly system of animal abuse.

Dairy products particularly are hard to ignore because they’ve insinuated themselves into so many food products. For example, if you read the ingredients label on almost any commercial cake or biscuit, you’ll find ‘milk products’ (and/or ‘egg products’) have been used. Read the ingredients list. I once counted over two hundred supermarket food items which contained milk or egg. I suspect that most people would not be prepared to deny themselves that many food items for ethical reasons.

            Today we may be well informed, but temptation is great. Few people boycott dairy products or egg ingredients because of the way cows and hens are treated. Most times we remain uninformed purposely; we choose to remain ignorant to avoid the inconvenience of ruling out certain foods. 

Lacto-ovo vegetarianism

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Quoting from the first vegan publication, “Lacto-vegetarianism is but a half-way house between flesh eating and a truly humane, civilized diet ... we should try to evolve sufficiently to make the full journey”.

Vegetarianism is often as far as many people will go, not wishing to look deeper in case they find out more than they bargain for. They don’t want to put milk and egg production in the same category of cruelty as they do meat, because if they did, they know logically that they’d have to become vegan. Milk, for example, is a product involving animal cruelty. It is also a dangerously misrepresented substance - promoted as a good supply of calcium whereas in reality it has the opposite effect, of leaching calcium from the bones. So even though milk contains calcium, it ends up sapping our bones of that crucial mineral. And since it is a processed food, it being pasteurized and homogenised, these processes further alter milk’s chemistry and actually increase its detrimental acidifying effects.

            But milk is a problem on another level. It is ubiquitous, it turns up as an ingredient in so many popular food items. For this reason it’s likely that users of milk will NOT want to know the details of how it is produced for fear of their having to black-list all the milk products they use. They stick with the line that “if cows weren’t milked they’d die” (which is quite true, as far as it goes), but the rest of the story they ignore. The biological details of milk production go something like this:

            A cow’s biology determines the quantity of milk she produces and whilst there’s normally too little being produced to be of much interest, that alters as soon as she becomes pregnant. Then, she makes lots of it. Once impregnated and after giving birth to a calf, her mammary glands go into over-drive. It’s just what the dairy farmer wants. However, the calf, having served its main purpose in uteri, is often then regarded as a dispensable item and killed just after birth to allow the huge quantities of its mother’s milk to be diverted for human consumption. With continuous impregnation (calf bearing) and subsequent loss of her calves, plus constant milking, she is soon exhausted and her milk yield then becomes so low that she is no longer economically viable. She will live only ten of her normally twenty years before being sent for slaughter. That’s all the thanks she gets for producing vast quantities of milk for the farmers and their milk-drinking customers! It’s an ugly story that omnivores often don’t want to hear.

            I suspect most so called ‘animal welfare’ organisations don’t want to hear this story either, since it would oblige them to speak out against the egg and dairy industries. To keep their membership happy, but retain most of the organisation’s integrity, they prefer to concentrate on factory farming and the evils of meat eating. They promote vegetarianism in order to win substantial support from the general public but rarely speak out against the broader welfare issues, for fear of losing the support of milk drinkers and egg eaters, and the users of the many thousands of commercial foodstuffs loaded with these products.

What? No more meat, or milk, or eggs?

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For those people who find giving up animal products difficult to contemplate there is a dilemma. To stop eating meat but continuing eating cheese doesn’t mean we lead a cruelty-free life. The thousands of products on the market, making use of milk and eggs, perpetuates the dairy and egg industry. And a cruel business it is, for the animals concerned. Imagine a biscuit – one the ‘essential’ ingredients is egg, laid by a caged bird (biscuit manufacturers don’t use free-range eggs!). If there’s milk involved in the recipe that won’t be soy milk but milk from the cow. And she has her milk mechanically sucked out of her udder, milk which should be feeding her calf (the calf usually having to be got rid of). That very simply is the situation for all egg-milk producers. Lacto-ovo vegetarians stop eating animals for both health and ethical reasons and certainly they do far more for farm animals than their meat-eating friends. But because not all exploited animals are reared for meat it is debatable as to which suffers most, the dairy cow or the beef steer. Each is held captive, denied any sort of natural life and ultimately has his/her life brutally terminated at the abattoir. The same comparison applies between egg-laying hens and chickens reared for meat, they each live in confinement and each die a terrible death. The milk or egg producing animals often suffer more than ‘meat’ animals.

The start of a slow change

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In 1944 the first Vegan publication put it this way. “The great impediment to man’s moral development may be that he is a parasite on lower forms of animal life”. Since the 1940’s, when some people started to eat solely from plant-based foods - without becoming ill - there was, for the first time in human history, a safe release from our dependency on animals, for food. A vegan regime was shown to be nutritionally healthy. From then on, we were able to look ahead to better times to come. At last there was a safe possibility, to eat from plants and dress ourselves in non-animal clothing; from the fifties with the development of synthetic materials to supplement plant-based fabrics we could avoid the leather and wool and silk. Soon after, there came onto the market plant-based foods like soy milk and textured vegetable protein, in the form of good-to-eat products which could replace meats and dairy products. From then on we could see a time when the use of animal products would be totally unnecessary; we could look ahead to a very different world where meat, dairy, eggs, leather and wool would be seen as inhumane and unsustainable products from a less enlightened era.

Animals that are used for food

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I’d like to go back to basics for the next series of blogs, to recap on some of the reasons why we shouldn’t be using animals for food. This is at the heart of veganism, of boycotting any industry that uses animals for any purpose whatever. Humans have realized that animals can be profited from and that there are no constraints on exploiting them - the general public will not complain as long as the producers give them what they want and no one informs the customer too often about what really happens on farms and abattoirs. The animals themselves can’t fight back so there’s no danger from them.

In the animal industries, worldwide, there is fierce competition for market share, and this has led the Industry to lay aside welfare considerations in order to produce food and clothing at the lowest price possible. Animal suffering is no longer a consideration. I’m mainly concentrating here on the food industry, where animals are used for food.

My reaction to animals being used as production machines is simply to say that it’s inhumane to confine animals, kill them, butcher their bodies and eat them! The very idea of denying animals their freedom or any semblance of natural social life, keeping them in slum conditions, and then, on their execution day, hanging them upside down to bleed to death, is obscene. However badly we may want to eat their bodies and secretions there is nothing which can justify this sort of barbarity.

We might have arrived at this point in human history for a reason: to review our own barbarous nature in relation to the way we treat these animals. But it gets worse, for if cruel and callous things can be done to entirely innocent animals like cows, steers, pigs and sheep, how much worse is it for the very young of those species? Imagine how it is for the ‘children’ of the animal world, the six week old pullets, piglets, calves and lambs.

            The sheer horror of what is happening to animals, on a mass scale, all around the world, makes me (and many others like me) want to do anything we can to change peoples’ attitudes, to stop them buying into the trade in animals. Perhaps the most powerful argument we can offer is to point out some of the terrible things being done both at farms and abattoirs. But many of us have tried doing that and found the ‘shock-horror’ approach ineffective; it seems that when most people do what most others do then it allows them to follow suit without the need to think about what they do. The feel covered by common practice. Most people are reluctant to think too deeply about using-animals. “Ho hum” they say, and “All very sad, but that’s just the way things are. We humans have been eating animals for a million years. We aren’t likely to change now!!”.

But we are changing, especially here in the Western world where we are more fully informed about animal exploitation. We are changing because the shame is too great. But change is still slow.

I dare you NOT to read this. But if you do ...

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Right now, as you read this, thousands, no millions, no, in fact billions of beautiful, sensitive, sentient animals are struggling. They are in a hopeless position, powerless against human oppression. They are suffering confinement, harsh treatment, and violence. They are each victims of the singular human intention to have them die a horrible death in an abattoir.

            If you eat anything from an animal, if you wear anything from the animal’s body, then you are connected to the lives of these terrorised animals; you are partly responsible for the conditions captive animals find themselves in. Harsh accusatory words indeed! But would anyone say they were not true?

            Vegans are not connected to any of this, since they have purposely disassociated themselves from the whole ugly situation. Non-vegans are connected (some less than others) simply because they are unwilling to forgo animal-based foods and yummy treats. The omnivore can’t imagine a life without ‘animal’, in much the same way as one can’t imagine life without a car or a computer or a television. In our materialistic world there are so many other items we’re all used to having, but it’s likely that while each one damages the planet or damages our health, there is even worse damage done to ourselves.

            Using items from the hell-holes in which animals are kept and hurt and executed wrecks the human conscience. Nothing else that we do or buy or use compares to our involvement with the grotesque treatment of farm animals. If you saw what they do to these creatures, first hand, you would vomit. You’d scream, you’d run. You’d swear never to be party to any of it ever again. And this is why the guys who run these places never let you into abattoirs or intensive farms these days. The way they treat these invisible billions, including birds, mammals and fish is nothing short of demonic. Each creature is taken out of their natural surroundings, deprived of every social, sensual and sexual experience they’d normally have in Nature, and exploited to the very edge of biological toleration, just to provide humans with their little comforts.

            The inconvenient truth of these angry-sounding words won’t do the animals themselves much good, but if one is describing a hurricane one can’t talk about it in terms of a firm breeze. To describe these animals’ lives in any other way would be dishonest. I know that it’s much wiser to use softer language. If I did you would still be reading whereas I know that most readers would have turned away about three paragraphs ago. But, just for once, I don’t feel like downplaying the shame, guilt and sorrow we should all be feeling. Perhaps it’s because we’ve always talked too timidly about these matters, that we’ve by-passed the full horror of the present situation. I think you’ll agree that this is the one subject that is never properly talked about.

            However, as easily as I could go on at length, to describe the conditions of each animal on the farm, whether they are living on the free-range or in intensive operations, it wouldn’t help people to unravel their own temperamental blocks, that stop them thinking about what they are doing, when eating animal-based foods. Most of our most dangerous behaviours are mindless copying of what others do, because how could you possibly enjoy eating your dinner with thoughts of suffering animals running through your head? 

Next series of blogs starts tomorrow

Why vegan principles are the logical starting point

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What is it that stops people discussing animal cruelty, stops them considering ending their use of animals. They know more or less what happens to animals on farms, they know that the animal industry is implicated in cruelty, but they also know how much they want to eat animal foods. Humans all over the world are addicted to them. They can’t stop watching cooking shows on TV for new ways of preparing their favourite animal based dishes. And if people are addicted to their food they value their freedom of choice; they feel they have a right to choose from whatever is on sale in the shops, whether it be in the form of food or clothing or any other commodity that makes life more pleasant. On the face of things, it would seem unrealistic to hope that people would simply give up these (mainly) foods, not for their own health’s sake but for the sake of the animals. Humans aren’t yet ready to be that selfless. 

            Now, look at it another way. Foods and material comforts aside, is there something in life worth more than anything else, for which the ‘giving up’ of delicious foods would be but a small sacrifice. Some might suggest avoiding animal-based foods will preserve good health. Others though would suggest the need to preserve good ethics. For those of us who highly value ethics there is one central question. I ask myself  “What is my life for, beyond mere existence?”

            The way the world is at present, with it’s crass materialism and routine violence, it forces me to reflect on the extent I am personally involved in supporting such a world. Do I focus solely on myself. Is that a problem for many others? Is this why health enthusiasts are very often vegetarian but have no interest in promoting animal rights or looking any deeper than personal welfare?

            To effectively get to the bottom of things, we surely have to look at the human temperament. Look for clues as to HOW to reform our violent and self-centred natures, and then to attempt to change at that level before we try to change the world. And indeed, we can’t change the world directly until we are a living example of rebellion against violence and self-interest. Because food is so heavily connected with self-interest and violence and the use of food is so routine, this is surely where we must make a start. The first specific change most people need to make should be to the habits which are most damaging, most routine and least thought about. Which is why vegan principle is such an important starting line. 

How we come to see ourselves

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I would argue that today most of our grandest aims are pointless. A blank wall faces most people if only because they can’t see any sort of solution to ‘the problems of the World’. Because of the presence of animal foods (and other animal-derived goods) in our lives, we can’t avoid involvement in violence; if violence can’t be shaken off then any move towards a more spiritually-driven life is meaningless. But for those who have stepped away from this daily involvement in violence there is a chance. For vegans, because we’ve so purposely disassociated from this daily act of violence, there is some opportunity to transform our own lives and be in a position to help others transform theirs. Our boycott of abattoir products is the start of a simple solution, but … there’s always a ‘but’.

We have been walled in. We are few in number and so we suffer from feeling isolated. We are victims of a determined conspiracy against us. We are facing the forces of public persuasion to be ‘normal’. The application of vegan principles to Society would seem to me to be a wonderful thing but to most people it would be seen as a great threat to their way of life. It would mean revolution, so people like us, vegans, are likely to be bad-mouthed by the authorities and the pubic in general. I can imagine how people will be made to think by spreading rumours of cows wandering the streets and tax-payer’s money being spent on sanctuaries for retired farm animals.

Economic factors are very persuasive, but so are ethics. How strong do our ethics have to be, how altruistic or how intelligent do we have to be, to consider becoming vegan? A future point in time, where people no longer keep or kill animals might seem unlikely, and yet where we are at the moment might be the start of a slow movement towards humans becoming conscious of their guardian spirit. If that sense of protectiveness overcame the desire for personal comforts we would begin to see ourselves as caretakers of kids, as caring for climate and planet, and compassionate towards those long-suffering farm animals. In that way we might come to learn who we are and know what role humans will take in the building of the future.

Panacea

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Eating plant foods is not just about healthy eating but about taking a stand, making a statement. I decided to ‘go vegan’ because of the need to liberate animals and encourage people to liberate themselves from their involvement in the cruelty of animal farming. The animal liberation struggle is about humans doing something for the greater good, part of which is the ending animal slavery.

Apart from all the good it does, environmentally and for enslaved animals and for human health, going vegan, plays a significant part in an unfolding drama; for the first time in history we are free enough to examine our own temperament, to reflect on our innate violent nature and attempt to make ourselves become less violent. We can start by not eating animals. Today we have a leisure society in which we have some free time to devote to great causes and the freedom to think for ourselves. By helping to bring about rights for animals we give ourselves a chance to improve the quality of our lives and the chance to save our own souls.

The compromise

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The omnivore mightn’t care a fig about animal cruelty. Or they might not necessarily know about it. But it needs to be said that whatever nutritive value there may have ever been (in animal-based food) is now compromised by the toxic content that is part of it all. And that isn’t taking into account the shame of it. Even if the animal is fed organic food, if it ranges free or is treated with exceptional kindness, the food taken from the animal can never be ‘clean’ since it’s all tainted by imprisonment and an abattoir death; even animals from which by-products are taken (like eggs or milk or wool) are eventually executed.

Animal foods are unnecessary to healthy survival. They serve no useful purpose, in sharp contrast to plant-based foods. For omnivores this corrupted energy source is like ‘drinking from the poisoned well’. With so much chronic dietary-related disease, you’d think the ‘goodness’ of food would be a high priority. And so it would be, if it weren’t for the consumer’s need to conform (social acceptance) and the Industry’s insatiable thirst for profits. Normality takes precedence over everything else – the normal meal always containing meat or cheese, and the meal invariably topped off with sweetened dairy products. Social conformity is more important than any show of individuality. We beware stepping outside social norms by not sharing the same foods as others at the dinner table; if, for ethical reasons, we don’t eat the same sorts of foods as other then it’s likely we’ll never be truly accepted by them. And by being shunned socially, as vegans are, there’s the danger of losing social confidence. For the sake of social acceptance, it’s likely that most people will compromise their principles in order to do as others do.

On the big issues of the day, like whether r not to eat meat, we defer attitude-change; it’s made easier knowing that we won’t be judged for it by others, because they’re compromising in the same way too.

We don’t give something up if we think we can get away with it. If for no other reason, this would be why an omnivores remains an omnivore. But vegans don’t think this way. We might miss peer acceptance but we can look forward to being fit and free of a heavy conscience. To take vegan theory seriously (enough to boycott everything with animal bits) we acknowledge both the nutritional side and the ethical side of the food we eat. People have thrived on a vegan diet since the early 1940s, so it’s not that experimental!

The last word on animal products

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I think vegans are the type of people who, first and foremost, realise that in life we won’t get ‘owt’ for ‘nowt’; we have to work at climbing the hill before we can enjoy the downhill ride. For that to make sense we have to realise first that we’ve spent our lives being duped by our ‘providers’.

It’s not very wise to trust what the ‘providers’ tell us or trust the products they sell. If we examine our own decisions, when it comes to the buying of animal-based foods, it’s clear that we are heavily directed by every authority, from commercial advertisers and nutritionists to parents and school teachers, all of whom have a lot to answer for.

Those who are most involved, and who profit from the success of the Animal Industries, guide so many of our daily shopping decisions. What we do, what we buy and then eat, is not necessarily in our own best interests, but it’s in theirs.

What we are never told is that animal products inevitably let us down in the long run. They please us, fill us, make us feel strong and energetic, then WHAM!, we’re bloated and fatigued. After a full meat meal you don’t feel energised, you feel sleepy. And over many years of ingesting the stuff, once they accumulate in the body they have the opposite effect to what they seem to promise, and it’s this ‘betraying’ effect of our food that is either realised too late or never realised at all.

So, to be ahead of the game we need to remember the history of how today’s foods became popular. ‘Green’ foods were gathered but weren’t originally as nutritious or plentiful as they are today. They weren’t seen to be powerful enough to keep pace with the advanced human brain and human development. So, humans started to supplement their plant-food with hunted meat. The omnivorous diet appeared to benefit mind and body. It eventually occurred to the ‘expanded mind’ that it would be more convenient to ‘domesticate’ animals rather than chase about hunting them. By capturing, corralling and breeding captive animals, animal-based food became far more available and was indulged in to the point where the body began to react badly to it. And now, today, we have a huge demand for hospital beds, for all the ill patients suffering from diet-related illnesses. This was followed, or I should say is yet to be followed, by a return to plant-based foods. But now we don’t need to go our gathering wild plants, we can grown powerfully nutritious and varied foods from cultivated crops.

The ‘idea’ of veganism coincided with the development of many new and delicious plant-based foods which, today, are so available and inexpensive.

In its plant-based form, food is better suited to the growth of stronger (subtler) human bodies. Along the way plant food has become famous not just for its nutrient values but for its capacity to release the human from dependency on animals. And relieves us from complicity with animal-enslavement. As the foods developed (alongside this ‘new ethic’ of compassion for animals) so they came to include a wide range of cereals, nuts, pulses, vegetables and fruits. And from them a vast range of foods have been produced to replace the existing wide range of animal-based food products. Plant foods are lighter and more energy producing. And what is so great about them is that none of them are linked in any way with animal cruelty.

Leave it to the experts

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The flying time from Australia to Europe is three days by propeller-driven aeroplane but just 20 hours by jet. Most long distance journeys go for efficiency, so when we do a long-haul flight today we fly by jet; in the same way plant-based foods are just simply more efficient … and to extend this awkward metaphor a little further, most of us probably think of aircraft technology and ‘flight’ as being far beyond our ken, so we leave it to the experts. They ‘avail us of their services’, always seemingly to our advantage. It’s much the same when it comes to diets and medicines. We leave it to ‘them’ to provide for ‘us’. We trust them to care for us, as a child does with a parent, which leaves us free to pursue pleasure.

But the pleasure we get may be second rate. And we pay heavily, by being recruited into a conspiracy against our best interests, based on ‘what the punter has never known won’t be missed’.

Eventually some people become suspicious, and look around for something truer and deeper.

Omnivores, weakened and seduced by their traditional ‘foods’, conform (in much the same way that farm animals are forced to do); they serve their function of working, earning, spending, suffering from the unhealthy effects of foods they buy, swallowing pharmaceuticals to ease their pains, and then go on to indulge in more anxiety-reducing food stuffs. They continue functioning in the same old self-damaging way, which is not conducive to happiness. 

Are you happy now?

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For omnivores, a vegan regime may sound too radical and even today it seems almost too new to try. They may value personal safety above everything else. But also, they might not want to miss out on any chance of increasing life’s pleasures.

It comes down to being both conscious of bodily safety and not wanting to risk happiness (via the ‘little pleasures of life’). Most of us are a bit precious about our own lives. Most won’t stray too far from tried and tested diets. We won’t be too radical or altruistic in case it back-fires on us; ethical questions aren’t wrestled with and unconventional foods aren’t tried out.

            In general, humans don’t like experimenting too radically with food if it means denying themselves food-satisfactions. If we move away from the daily conventions surrounding food it seems like a very big step. Because food has such a significant effect on our lives our reason for changing our food regime would have to be very convincing; food has great power over mood. It produces a ‘full’ feeling in the stomach, it provides vital energy, it provides a guaranteed sensation of pleasure – we won’t give that up in a hurry.

Many of the foods omnivores use are not efficient. It’s like a propeller-driven aeroplane, it works but it’s slow. By comparison, vegan food is ‘jet-driven’. It’s less cumbersome, digestively quicker to move through our system, it makes our brains work faster and in general a plant-food diet has a noticeably beneficial effect. When, eventually, we take on a workable vegan diet there’s a certain gratifying satisfaction that comes from transforming a simple-enough physical experience into a conscience-cleared spiritual sensation. But is that enough?

The sticking point here, surely, is that humans equate happiness with what they know brings pleasure, and which is readily available. This is surely why we’re reluctant to give things up. Meat and animal products are what most of us know from our earliest years. They feel safe even though they’re addictive. And these perceptions about our favourite foods are encouraged by vested interests who heavily promote them and make them look very attractive. The Animal Industries know that the ‘happy meal’ is always going to be more attractive than the ‘useful meal’.

Whatever brings us pleasure (rich foods, alcohol, drugs and sex) we go for. Next to these pleasures a simple diet doesn’t quite figure. We’re brought up to believe that our food should be instantly gratifying, especially if there isn’t much else to inspire our lives. Food can make us happy, and happy equates to attractive; so what we eat has to be attractive, because eating is what we do so often, to make ourselves feel happier. Animal-based foods give us the ‘rush’ we want at the time, whereas plant-based foods aren’t as powerful in that way. So, can we forgo this immediate euphoria?

Vegans know they can do without it since the addictive qualities of past favourite foods have faded and other subtler attractions of whole plant-based foods have taken over. But, immediate sensation aside, the main consolation is more long term. We experience a marked increase in energy, and that really is worth having. The satisfaction that comes from regularly eating vegan food trumps the rush of ‘yummy’, animal-based foods … but let’s be frank, the ‘rush’ is attractive. All omnivores know this and salivate at the very thought of their favourite meaty, milky, eggy foods. The cakes and creamy-chocolaty foods all guarantee the ‘warm and fuzzies’; they are so immediately attractive that most people can’t (or don’t think they could) ever give them up.

Education comes into the picture here. Where crime is attractive the knowledge of punishment holds us back; where sex is attractive the fear of over-populating the family makes us take precautions, and so it is with food. Food education is the first preventer of many food-abuse problems. It may be that people are not well enough informed to get past their own bad habits, but today we are very well informed. Perhaps then, worse than not-knowing is knowing-but-not-caring. 

It may be that we stick with the foods we know because we’re too lazy or too frightened or too uncaring to experiment. We live conventional lives, eat traditional foods and die of avoidable food-related illnesses. I would think that most vegans find that to be incredibly sad.

Are you happy now?

665:

For omnivores, a vegan regime may sound too radical and even today it seems almost too new to try. They may value personal safety above everything else. But also, they might not want to miss out on any chance of increasing life’s pleasures.

It comes down to being both conscious of bodily safety and not wanting to risk happiness (via the ‘little pleasures of life’). Most of us are a bit precious about our own lives. Most won’t stray too far from tried and tested diets. We won’t be too radical or altruistic in case it back-fires on us; ethical questions aren’t wrestled with and unconventional foods aren’t tried out.

            In general, humans don’t like experimenting too radically with food if it means denying themselves food-satisfactions. If we move away from the daily conventions surrounding food it seems like a very big step. Because food has such a significant effect on our lives our reason for changing our food regime would have to be very convincing; food has great power over mood. It produces a ‘full’ feeling in the stomach, it provides vital energy, it provides a guaranteed sensation of pleasure – we won’t give that up in a hurry.

Many of the foods omnivores use are not efficient. It’s like a propeller-driven aeroplane, it works but it’s slow. By comparison, vegan food is ‘jet-driven’. It’s less cumbersome, digestively quicker to move through our system, it makes our brains work faster and in general a plant-food diet has a noticeably beneficial effect. When, eventually, we take on a workable vegan diet there’s a certain gratifying satisfaction that comes from transforming a simple-enough physical experience into a conscience-cleared spiritual sensation. But is that enough?

The sticking point here, surely, is that humans equate happiness with what they know brings pleasure, and which is readily available. This is surely why we’re reluctant to give things up. Meat and animal products are what most of us know from our earliest years. They feel safe even though they’re addictive. And these perceptions about our favourite foods are encouraged by vested interests who heavily promote them and make them look very attractive. The Animal Industries know that the ‘happy meal’ is always going to be more attractive than the ‘useful meal’.

Whatever brings us pleasure (rich foods, alcohol, drugs and sex) we go for. Next to these pleasures a simple diet doesn’t quite figure. We’re brought up to believe that our food should be instantly gratifying, especially if there isn’t much else to inspire our lives. Food can make us happy, and happy equates to attractive; so what we eat has to be attractive, because eating is what we do so often, to make ourselves feel happier. Animal-based foods give us the ‘rush’ we want at the time, whereas plant-based foods aren’t as powerful in that way. So, can we forgo this immediate euphoria?

Vegans know they can do without it since the addictive qualities of past favourite foods have faded and other subtler attractions of whole plant-based foods have taken over. But, immediate sensation aside, the main consolation is more long term. We experience a marked increase in energy, and that really is worth having. The satisfaction that comes from regularly eating vegan food trumps the rush of ‘yummy’, animal-based foods … but let’s be frank, the ‘rush’ is attractive. All omnivores know this and salivate at the very thought of their favourite meaty, milky, eggy foods. The cakes and creamy-chocolaty foods all guarantee the ‘warm and fuzzies’; they are so immediately attractive that most people can’t (or don’t think they could) ever give them up.

Education comes into the picture here. Where crime is attractive the knowledge of punishment holds us back; where sex is attractive the fear of over-populating the family makes us take precautions, and so it is with food. Food education is the first preventer of many food-abuse problems. It may be that people are not well enough informed to get past their own bad habits, but today we are very well informed. Perhaps then, worse than not-knowing is knowing-but-not-caring. 

It may be that we stick with the foods we know because we’re too lazy or too frightened or too uncaring to experiment. We live conventional lives, eat traditional foods and die of avoidable food-related illnesses. I would think that most vegans find that to be incredibly sad.

Food prospects

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The damage most characteristic of our age is that we’ve gotten used to plenty. We acquire things and we keep things. We’re reluctant to give them up. Like a small child, if you take away my favourite toy I’ll hit you and then probably burst into tears - I won’t relinquish it willingly. And it’s much the same as we grow up; we become ‘conservative’, we conserve what we have, and we don’t like missing out on anything; if anything’s up for grabs we want some of it.

But there’s another side to this, a better, more engaging side. We want the chance to try new things, to explore. It’s both tempting and dangerous, like changing food regimes, when we’re experimenting with food safety and satisfaction and resolve. We bring into play both survival instinct and our need for improvement. Food is something we make choices about every day, to eat this or not eat it, according to what’s in it or where it comes from. New diets and regimes are unknowns. We might not want to be amongst the first to risk making radical diet changes. We might prefer to wait for others to pioneer changes or for them to become widely accepted. We might be unwilling to be part of ‘a vegan experiment’.

So for those of us who have dared to do it, it’s down to us to demonstrate how it’s done, and then wait for others to come around. But this is no ordinary experiment. It might take a generation or more for most people to break down their reluctance and take on these issues, and alter the foods they eat. In the meantime vegans must pursue their own goals whilst swallowing their impatience and unrelentingly continuing to educate whenever we get the chance.

Food as fuel

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Early in the day the rot sets in. We went to a shop, bought what we laughingly call ‘food’ (that’s anything from food made of the ‘animal-secreted’ to the ‘animal-executed’). The vibrations alone should be toxic enough but by chemically poisoning ourselves ten times a day with it, it has a drag-down effect on just about everything we’re doing.

            For those of us who’ve passed our teenage years, it’s likely we can’t operate our bodies as we’d like to - we no longer run painlessly or do things we know we should be capable of, and both mentally and physically we become more disabled as we grow older. It’s not just down to the food we eat. Our guilt or the suppression of it drags us down too, and yet we keep ‘doing’ those things which make us feel guilt. We think it will go away if we do these things regularly enough, until we don’t notice it anymore … but it springs back. It’s difficult to escape it, especially when ‘it’ comes up in conversation.

If we don’t adopt the simple vegan principles into our life, it’s likely we won’t be able to do anything very meaningful, or achieve anything that’s really satisfying. Good intentions and fine aims are lifeblood and yet we can’t fake it. First things first - we need to atone for our ‘little crimes against animals’ otherwise it will always be with us.  What we do (by proxy) to animals, every day, at every meal, compromises all the good stuff we do.

Ironically, we can’t know this because we can’t allow ourselves to believe it. This conundrum, this mixture of guilt, reluctance and impotence, means omnivores carry a heavy weight with them all the time. And that blinds them to the sequence of events unfolding before their very eyes. Without a feel for sequence there’s no great leap forward, in fact there’s so little ‘leaping’ that we may call it ‘stagnation’.

Food

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In this age of obesity, the vegan diet is a perfect slimming diet. What happens in sport (how runners run faster, how bodies work better) has been known about for a long time; we know a body responds to optimum treatment, which implies getting rid of the popular poison-foods which make the body sluggish. If you aren’t an Olympic athlete or particularly bothered about sport or even worried about your appearance or care two hoots about health you might indulge in all sorts of rubbish food. But if you are a compassionate, sensitive, body-conscious vegan there are various reasons why you wouldn’t go into the cake shop. You’d walk on by. You’d have reason to never eat the crap, albeit yummy crap.

Every great ambition a human might have can be compromised by bad habits and addictions. In this case the daily compromiser is with our daily food intake, and the damage comes mainly from its animal content. This ‘nonsensical component’ of our daily diet slowly, and in many cases painfully, kills us or at least frustrates the ambitions we might have had when younger and more idealistic.

Imagine: we have a good day, then we walk straight into the abattoir and buy a dead animal, consume it, and feel terrible. Why do we do this to ourselves after having an otherwise good day?

Sequence

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If the brothers Orville and Wilbur Wright had woken up one morning with the idea of jet propelled flight and tried to develop it in 1903 they would have failed. Propellers had to come first and be superseded. That was the sequence of events, the simpler idea first followed later by the more sophisticated idea.

            There’s probably an obvious sequence to everything important that occurs in this world, the right time and place for everything. We can see that plainly enough when we look back, but projecting forward into the unknown is more difficult. It’s impossible to see if an idea like propeller-driven flight will die or if the jet engine will take over. All we can guess is that any good-looking idea must evolve from one stage to the next. Before the advent of ‘flight’ the jet idea was absurd because we couldn’t see how it might happen. Now slow flight is redundant and fast jet flight is indispensable.

An old idea is always open to improvement, and there’s none older than the way in which the human body functions, because of the things we do to it. One important way in which we can change body function is in how we feed it. Many people still eat as they ate as kids, adopting dietary norms of the people they grew up with. But if we start to look more consciously at how we are feeding ourselves we might ask if there is a better way? Is it possible that the traditional way of feeding human bodies might be inadequate to the more sophisticated humans we are becoming today? Can the ways, in which we feed ourselves, fuel ourselves, be dramatically improved?

Of course, it’s easy enough now, with hindsight, to see how that can be done, with all the obvious advantages and long experience of using a plant-based diet, but back then, before you and I understood about that …

But, for many people “back then” is still “now”. To them a plant-based diet isn’t yet anywhere near reality. They know nothing of this ‘sequence’.

            As I see it, the sequence of events leading up to what I see as an inevitable vegan-future might go something like this: Once upon a time mainly plant-based foods were eaten, then hunting became successful, then feeding the family came to be much easier. Food became more plentiful. People began eating more, but instead of gaining strength and immunity to diseases we stared to grow fatter and get sicker. But with the development of medicine and hygiene we started to live longer. But there was a catch. We come to today where the whole system is getting out of hand, where we are eating too much, getting too fat and suffering from a multitude of decadence-related illnesses. We live longer but suffer from chronic illnesses, and suffer over many more years before we die. But that was the sequence of events which was essential for learning – humans seem to have to learn from experience.

Surely we had to go through all the pain to gain a more sophisticated realisation, to see the sense of using the ‘higher octane’ fuel, which turns out to be what we call ‘vegan’ food. Plant-based foods revolutionise the way the body can function and thrive. It’s as simple as that. The reason we haven’t tumbled to that idea is that we had to test ourselves against the temptation of enslaving animals and sucking their juices dry before we could see how stupid that idea would turn out to be.

Plant-foods don’t work the way traditional foods do; they are lighter, and in more ways than one. They transform us on various levels, making us physically stronger, mentally brighter and more vital. An added benefit is that they are generally less expensive and they makes us feel less guilty because we don’t add to the misery of animals.

All the advantages of a vegan diet are obvious enough to those who eat that way but you don’t need to take my word for it. You just need to try it and see for yourself.

Once you’ve been eating this way for some time the food itself seems a very natural fuel for the human body, but alongside that important detail there’s something else to consider. A vegan diet involves both the way humans feed themselves and the way they regard animals - it satisfies both our need for a source of optimum energy and of a meaningfulness which sits comfortably with our very soul.

Our advice may not be appreciated

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As a species we’ve thrived on meat eating – we say, “Look at us now. We wouldn’t be who we are unless our ancestors had eaten meat.”

We think we’ve advanced, that we are so much more superior to animals, and that gives us the right to use them and benefit ourselves from eating them.

Vegans find that ultimately frightening but as carefully as we try to convince others how misguided this is, we may not succeed if we can’t get past the value judgement behind our words.

All the time we maintain this sort of judgemental approach we never even get close to dislodging the illogicality behind animal exploitation. As free-willed adults each of us has the right not to be swayed by value judgements. If we vegans want to change people’s views, all we can do is to tell our story without the moral having to be spelled out. To show that there’s something better in life than chasing second-rate, pleasure-inducing food treats, we need merely appear happy to be setting an example as ‘humane’ humans. There’s great pleasure to be had in living for the greater good, and very little pleasure to be found condemning the behaviour of others. 

Green growth is the bigger picture

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How can environmentalists and conservationists be sensitive in one way, wanting to end whaling and deforestation, but be insensitive to the plight of farm animals? They do such great work for endangered species but let themselves down by holding a sausage sizzle at their rallies; they show their sensitivity in one way and their insensitivity in another way - to the food they eat and the animals exploited. What a mixed message they’re sending.

If more greens could widen their awareness and alter their eating habits accordingly, we would have a much more united lobby group against the violation and violence in our modern day society.

Temptation is the problem. Anything useful or good to eat we are drawn towards, and there’s always someone out there ready to persuade us, and make a dollar from us. Surely, the first step of protest is to withdraw personal support from the ‘careless-industries’, to deliberately NOT acquire anything which is produced by violation or violence. The next step is to let others know why there is a boycott and to encourage them to follow suit. And I don’t believe they will be hostile if we simply tell them the story of forest despoliation or the goings-on at abattoirs, as long as we don’t preach or get aggressive when telling the story. If we can open up broader ways of seeing things, act as an information resource and speak from the heart, we’ll be able to communicate. And that’s all that really matters.

As certain energy-intensive commodities become scarcer and more expensive, so circumstances will force these items off the shelves and shopping will become more of a conscious, responsible act that aligns with our overall philosophy. Eventually that lets environmental and animal consciousness make more sense, when people better appreciate the value of the things they buy.

When we start to take more notice of things that we hadn’t noticed before and put our money where our mouth is, then we’ll see the market change; producers will offer more sustainable products to keep pace with the ‘new demographic’. Then the customer will begin to regard wasteful products with distaste and begin to find once-delicious smells of animal foods unbearable. As each sensory experience changes so will our attitudes, and our political stand will then better fit the ‘bigger picture’.

The shackled omnivore

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It’s hard to shift normal behaviour today, especially when vegans are dealing with ‘majority views’.

If a person meets a judgemental vegan, they’ll want to avoid them in the future, the way they’d want to avoid a drunk. For that reason alone vegans may decide not to attempt to influence their omnivore friends. But that doesn’t mean we have to be on our best behaviour. We’re free to rattle their cages. It’s no threat to them when they see that we’re freer of the ‘nonsense reality’ they seem trapped by. Even though our friends may be hooked on their animal foods, I suspect we can still be seen as their possible future ‘escape committee’.

Ours is a prison-world, unless we’re determined for it not to be – both animals and humans are enslaved, they by us and we by ourselves. Humans may not be shackled in the same way that animals are, but most of us are restricted none the less by lifestyle, habit and addiction. But it’s true that many humans have broken away not so much because they have greater will power but because of something far softer, namely a determined altruistic compassion. And it’s because of this that we can walk out of our prisons.

By developing empathy, we humans do suffer unnecessarily and mostly by our own hands because we don’t see the pain of our own lives as being far less than our friends, the sentient non-humans. 

To new vegans

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If I were new to veganism, even if I couldn’t get over my own keyed-up feelings (about the cruelty to animals) there’d be a side-worry. It would concern health and vegan diets, with me asking myself if it was safe and if a vegan diet was efficacious. 

As omnivores, food and nutrition always involves lots of animal products. In my own past that’s all I knew, that animal protein was essential and healthy. It would have seemed reckless to consider any diet that didn’t include them, in fact suicidal to go against the ‘obvious truth’, that animal-produce makes for healthy living. I’d have said that an omnivorous diet had been tried and tested as a diet suitable for humans over millenniums, and that the good sense of it was therefore almost written in stone.

But eventually I came to consider there had always been an element of Hobson’s Choice about this, and considered too the possibility that this had been propaganda, and that we all believed this way because no living race of people on earth had ever seriously considered a totally plant-based diet. Nor had any of us considered our food in terms of ethics with good nutrition. I eventually also realised that there is a time and a place for every good idea, and that up to then it hadn’t been the right time for the emergence of that sort of consciousness.

Now things have changed, times have changed. This is not the hungry 1940s in the West. We are seventy years on. Plant-based diets have  been tested and not found wanting (except for the need for supplementation of vitamin B₁₂). We are also some forty years on from the 1970s when speciesism was first introduced as a concept. Perhaps in the 1950s, for a world starved by war, there had been an excuse to delay the adoption of plant-based diets, but that was half a century ago. Now, we are, attitudinally-speaking, in an entirely different position. We can regard food in a different way. Here in the West we have never known what it’s like to feel hungry or even to have no food in the house. Since the end of that war-torn period people in the developed world have always had enough food, and we’ve been able to look more closely at what ‘food’ really is. And surprise, surprise, we’ve found that so much of the food we’ve been fed is both crap and cruelly-produced. Now we have to look at food in a different way.

You’ve got to have great respect for those brave people who, in the early 1940’s, started to question what they’d been told about food. They dared to buck the system, and out of this has come what we now call ‘the vegan diet’. It liberates the conscience, boycotts the cruelty and outlines healthy nutrition all at the same time.

The nutritional side of plant-based diets has been elevated to respectability by research. Eminent authorities now give their tick of approval to plant-based food regimes. The nutritional side of things is no longer a worry. Indeed it is highly beneficial to health, but let’s not get into that here … except to say that for those of us who are long-time vegans, any concerns we might have had about safety-of-diet vanished long ago. But, for new vegans, that assurance does have to be established.

If you don’t know much about the vegan diet it might seem like a frightening prospect, especially if you’ve been mainly inspired by the ethics of it and are unsure of the safety angles. But once you are assured of it, then the main danger is a social one, moving too far away from others.

Like a reformed smoker, a vegan can soon forget how he or she felt ‘before’ they became vegan, or how she/he no longer misses their favourite (animal) foods or fashionable leather shoes or other commodities made from animals. Hopefully we’re wanting something quite different. An established vegan wants most of all to continue feeling ‘clean’ (like the ex-smoker who now wants clean lungs). If we can ‘clean out’ animal foods from our lives, that’ll make us feel pretty righteous and ten-to-one we’ll start boasting about it. Eventually our veganism might become our reason to be. And if this gets to be too big a part of our identity we start to become too narrow, as if we’ve only got one interest it soon shows up most obviously in our ordinary talk with others. And that’s all a-okay of course … until it turns sour, when it starts to be judgemental talk.

Our boycott is all and all. That’s what we do. If nothing else vegans do this. But the reason we boycott must never be an excuse to go around judging people who don’t boycott; that would be rather cynically using the ‘animals’ to inflate our own egoistic ambitions. By talking ‘food’ and ‘values’ it’s easy to stray into disparaging ‘the meat heads’ (at first, all good clean fun), until it’s obvious that we have a need to do so.

Our excuse: we’re as frustrated as hell, because no one’s listening or agreeing about how we feel about animals. We’re frustrated because we have no power to change anything … so we have to let it out by climbing on roof tops and shouting, “Look at what you are doing”. But still no joy. No one takes notice. Free people won’t ‘look’ at anything, especially if they’re ordered to. It’s always going to be a Mexican standoff - whatever we feel about them, they’ll as surely feel about us. The bottom line here is about how we come across.

Vegans might have some justification to judge those who are not vegan, but that’s the very reason why we shouldn’t.

If ‘we don’t judge them they won’t judge us’. Restraint here shows that we aren’t interested in winning, but in talking. We need no pistols-at-dawn. 

Let’s say we go to the movies and see this great inspiring film, during which we can feel our whole outlook changing. It’s intoxicating stuff! The film ends and everyone goes home. We all revert to business-as-usual and very soon we can’t even remember what it was that inspired us, and we can barely recall what the film was about. There are so many ideas and so much new information today we can’t rely on our immediate first reactions to anything. I wonder how much currency any inspiration has today and how long we can expect it to last. Unless it touches us very deeply.

I realise the idea of animals’ being incarcerated touched me deeply because of my own horror of being enclosed in small spaces and my fear of invasive surgical procedures and my dislike of any sort of violence. I can’t ever forget that farm animals have to face all of this. And that’s really why I feel so passionate to see an end of the terrible cruelties we inflict on farm animals. 

Going vegan

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If you get past all the obstacles and finally become vegan, the next hurdle, testing our limits, is to talk about it. Overcoming all the obvious anger, shame and new-habit-forming, one has to learn to speak on the subject as if one loves omnivores-despite-everything.

Maybe it isn’t our job to inspire others directly, not by persuasion anyway. Maybe the vegan is merely living out their life as if enacting a play, into which each person will enter, at some time. Just in the act of ‘being’, perhaps we give others something to watch. If they like what our veganism does to us maybe they’ll start to consider the benefits; at first it will appear as self benefit (health, conscience, passion, etc), and later on the principles which attest to something far deeper.

Certainly, in our society, there is a very real concern that veganism is a dangerous path to tread. Health concerns are no longer taken as seriously as the social implications of such a socially-isolating way of life, for it is a very different lifestyle affecting many social situations. A vegan is likely to feel the cold wind of failure, or at least the threat of loss of friends and acquaintances, because we won’t participate in so many social gatherings where food dominates. So, we have to show to people what it’s like to fail in this way, and yet hold fast to principle.

With every failure (and there are many) we have to learn not get depressed about it. There’s always going to be some edge for vegans, at least until many more come on board.

On a personal level vegans sit between two uncomfortable emotions, outrage and intolerance. We feel it and we can’t help but show it, and if we feel it, others will pick it up. Alternatively, if we seem at ease with ourselves they will pick that up instead. For that reason alone we should keep our heads held high (but not too high!), stop vilifying the ‘terrible omnivores’ for disagreeing with us, and simply encourage them to talk. Easier said than done, but by keeping that emphasised strongly we give them no chance to see how vulnerable we might be feeling inside.

If we vegans can ignore our discomfort (over our failure to ‘communicate our message’), we’ll get used to being rebuffed. If we get irritated and suffer for it, it’s always going to be nothing compared to the far greater discomfort the animals are subjected to. Compared with those who’re imprisoned on farms and other hideous torture chambers throughout the world, our discomfort is nothing. Our greatest challenge is to transmute the negatives into a strengthening of our passion.

Intention

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In the West the wealthy Animal Industries do good business out of most of us. In Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer, it is projected that each of us will consume 21,000 animals in our lifetime. Just in that one frightening statistic it’s not only obvious that the ‘no-use-animal’ principle should be taken seriously but that humans are still busy turning our lovely planet into Factory-Earth.

Those of us who try to observe vegan principles, who share a common horror at what’s happening, prefer to stay clean even to the point of isolating ourselves socially. People don’t much like our non-omnivorousness and dislike us personally when we deliberately disassociate from them because of their eating habits.

Luckily for us this is not the 1940s, when veganism made its first appearance. It’s seventy years later and people are so much better informed. There may be more vegans now but not many more, and we are still scattered thinly across the globe. The up-side is that our fellow comrades-in-adversity are good friends for us, sharing our boycott and making us feel less abnormal. Nevertheless it’s not pleasant being misunderstood by just about everybody else, and it’s particularly unpleasant being left out in the cold socially. Poor us!!

But if we ever feel a bit sorry for ourselves, it helps when we compare our social suffering with the lot of ‘domesticated animals’. Imagine what it must be like for them, to feel so utterly abandoned. (They only have us to fight for them).

It’s as if Nature had allowed humans to take and enslave her gentlest creatures so that they may learn the most profound lesson of all, that slavery is spiritually reprehensible. Vegans today can’t expect much company for some while yet, and this is our difficulty. We have problems with omnivores; we have different values that make for all sorts of social difficulties. Omnivores don’t think twice about meeting and ‘eating-animal’ with friends. They don’t worry as much as we do, about food or about conversations concerning food. If vegans mix socially with omnivores, whenever food’s involved there’s always a hint of awkwardness. We often hear the same sort of ‘apology’ given, “Sorry we’re eating your friends”, or more often, “Sorry you can’t eat this”.

The fact is there’s such a gulf between us. Vegans have to get used to that, otherwise we’ll be driven ‘round the bend’. If there’s an event-with-food you’ll always hear the same sort of sentiment expressed - “Oh dear, I’ve just remembered s/he’s a vegan”, and we are expected to take it as some sort of standing joke. It happens everywhere, whether at work or with mates, or with the family, and it’s even there with ‘fellow’ vegetarians.

For us, for me at least, the lack of truly simpatico people makes me feel lonely, unless I’m with another (preferably likeable) vegan. And that can lead to being very negative about omnivores in general. I notice that I can dislike their attitude to animal-use and go on from there to value judge them. I’m often tempted to sacrifice a friendship to gratify the urge to hit out when I’m riled, just to ease my own inner tension.

The truth is that I find myself disliking omnivores for what they do, not just because they eat animals but because they don’t care that they do. But that’s as much my problem for judging them as it is theirs for being the way they are. So here I am, keyed up, trying not to be too obsessed or judgemental … but I’m aware that I still can’t move forward; it feels like driving through sludge with the hand brake on.

As a vegan I know I play a difficult game, especially when I (like everyone else) want approval from others. And yet for all that, I still want to actively advocate for the animals.

When I do get it right, when I think I’ve got my message across and people seem to agree with me, it feels great. There’s agreement without there being any bad feelings. But often, I discover I haven’t really succeeded at all, because, actually, they didn’t follow through. It’s a curious phenomenon, peculiar to our age, that people do intend to do things but once started the inspiration fades too quickly, and it isn’t kept up.

If you say to yourself that you’re going to do something (say, about the animal thing) but end up breaking promises to yourself, you then begin to mistrust whatever you intend.

Someone intending to ‘go vegan’ often experiences this, first up. “I told myself that I was going to try to go vegan”. I was so passionate about it one day, but so cool about it the next day.

When it comes to such a fundamental thing as food and meals and diet and eating habits, we are all so set in our ways. We trust our own guidance, even as children. One of the things we most associate with being a grown up is that we have the right to eat what we like and spend our money as we please. Each free-willed individual upholds their right to live as they like. So vegans, in terms of just food (and much more of course) face a global unwillingness to follow advice so contrary to so many instincts and habit patterns. For those who do eventually become committed vegans, we are up against the sort of stubbornness that will resist or at least postpone anything uncomfortable. ‘Going vegan’ seems, to the outsider, a very uncomfortable prospect. The passion for it therefore has to be very strong, to carry a person safely across the strong current of comfort and habit.

Altruism re-visited

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It’s all very well, altruism. It makes me feel good to think that I’m being altruistic but it’s no compensation for the injustice I might feel inside. What about me and my own interests? Wouldn’t daily altruism be making a rod for my own back? I can’t just ignore my burning anger or my sensitivity to what I’ve seen with my own eyes.

Let’s say that I have the deepest rage about it all, and that I’m in a perpetually shocked state at what some humans are allowed to do to animals. How does it make me feel that they get away with it? And, plus, they’ve got so much power on their side and I have none – that’s impotence for you! So, back to my rage. I get angry about just one thing, that the Vegan Animal Rights movement seems to have no traction in our society. We don’t noticeably influence anything. All we can do is protest publicly or act illegally. We can’t directly influence what is being done to animals because what they do is quite legal and it’s socially acceptable. How does that make me feel? Well, not exactly altruistic. It doesn’t immediately make me want to teach people the truth of things, I just want it to stop. I just want to cry. But nothing is going to stop because I want it to. In reality it’s a long road to travel, the gradual eroding of one mind set and its replacement with another. Humans have freewill and a legal system to support animal slavery. Humans also have a strong liking for all the products of the Animal Industries. To break that down we need maximum patience, commitment and imagination, and a minimum of sympathy-inducing tears.

The profoundest of changes

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Since most of us aren’t in the military we aren’t used to being ordered around. Unless at school or at work or in the military we react badly when someone tells us what to do. Our immediate reaction might be to tell them to piss off. We defend our right not to be pushed around or even advised … but leaving that particular ‘right’ aside for a moment, if someone is bold enough to bring something to our attention (“you’re wearing your shirt inside-out”) it’s not necessarily a criticism, it’s just a helpful comment. It comes down to how we take things – positively or negatively. If I accept the advice then it’s an admission that I still have something to learn.

We’re not talking here, though, about how we’re dressed but about making a profound change to our daily life. If I start to talk about Animal Rights, my comments concern no small matter because they pertain to one’s whole daily food regime. What makes it so profound is that it isn’t just about food; what I decide to do today doesn’t only affect me and isn’t just for my own immediate benefit; my decision directly concerns others too, and in this case it’s about doing something to defend animals’ rights. It’s profound because it’s an altruistically-driven decision to change. 

One person’s meat is another person’s poison

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Attitude change can’t come soon enough for vegans. We wait impatiently for our fellow humans to feel compassion for ‘food animals’. For animal-eaters of course, vegans and our ideas can’t disappear fast enough, we being a royal pain in the arse.

For us though, we want a chance to say something. Not to lecture but talk about another type of cuisine. For traditionalists they want to talk about their own ‘latest cuisine’. Both want to talk about their favourite foods, but in different ways.

Why is it so hard for us to discuss this particular subject? I say everyone should recognise that animals have rights: my opposite half says they have a right to NOT change, if they don’t want to. These positions might seem unmoveable but each of us will benefit from learning why the other thinks the way they do. Each of us can listen without having to change our own position.

Every time I do listen to the reasoning behind the opposite view I learn something valuable. It doesn’t change the way I feel but it lets me appreciate better why other people don’t agree with me. And I think my listening to them helps them listen to me. It’s a two way street.

A win all round for the non-vegan

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For omnivores, it isn’t surprising if they feel invaded, when a vegan opens their fridge and makes comments about the contents. I see inside people’s fridges and of course notice if they have things there that I don’t keep in my fridge. Should I respect the privacy of other people’s larders and cupboards? Of course. Similarly, at someone’s dinner table, I find myself amongst others and I notice, by what they’re eating that they are all omnivore, except for me. My first instinct is to criticise the food, food that has been lovingly prepared. And that makes the cook feel very pissed off.

For hours the cook sweated over the preparations for this meal. It was a creative production. The cook prepares a meal and invites friends over to eat it. And then – WHAM – some unlovely person disapproves. I turn my nose up at it.

Of course I shouldn’t accept invitations without first mentioning the food thing, that is what I don’t eat and why I don’t eat it, all made clear well before I accept any dinner invitation. I shouldn’t get myself into awkward situations where I might feel like judging someone else’s food. If I try to make comments about the food, about animals, etc., I’ll almost certainly change the whole atmosphere of the gathering.

What usually happens, around any dinner table, is that the conversation touches on the food, with compliments to the chef. Imagine then if I say, “Yes, this may be creative cuisine but it’s not good food”, and then launch into the whole animal thing, cruelty, the danger of animal protein. It’s a big slap in the face for the host and for everyone enjoying the food.

There’s nothing like a simple plate of food to spark passions and argument and hurt feelings. Offence is caused and everyone gets to dislike the vegan.

From my point of view I see a golden opportunity to educate everyone at the table, about cruelty issues, about vegan principle and the health advantages of plant-based foods but ... there’s a time and a place. Muscling in on a dinner party conversation to promote veganism probably does much more harm than good. If I ‘ride rough shod’ over people’s feelings, in this case attempting to give everyone a big wake up call, I might feel I’ve done a good job, by speaking up for the animals. But I’ve questioned the cook’s right to prepare the food she chooses. What’s more to the point, I’ve given her guests an opportunity to back her up. And worse, behind my back, my protest gives everyone a chance to bring the incident up again and again, in future table-talk. “When this vegan came round to dinner (who, incidentally, won’t be invited around again!), he said ...”

“I nearly said to him …”.

Food fights always make good stories for retelling, but they can sour whole relationships. As a vegan I try to avoid these dinner invitations. I’m not sure I want anyone to go to the trouble of making special food for me or to eat these ‘special foods’ amongst people who are eating meat. And that means an end to accepting dinner invitations from non-vegans and running the risk of being labelled anti-social.  

Balance

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If vegans ever get round to firing volleys at ‘the enemy’, then let our shot land where it will, and if it misses its mark then we’ll have to try again. We shouldn’t worry about missing our target by pitching what we have to say at the wrong level – let’s not forget that apart from passing on information to the omnivore we are, at the same time, testing our own ‘main approach road’. Communication can only work when we are happy that we’ve got our own approach in balance and just the way we want it.

I often wonder whether we vegans are aware of how we come across to others. We see one thing very clearly, that almost every single human of adult age is participating in some act of animal enslavement. We don’t necessarily see as clearly that we ourselves play a rather cold game of one-upmanship. When we are talking up the principles of veganism does that mean we can ride ‘rough-shod’ over people’s feelings, and ‘hang the consequences’?

            I think it doesn’t, if only because we shouldn’t create a communication problem where none is needed. One unthought-out word or look can scythe down a whole relationship in moments. It can happen fast and it can create a permanent change of atmosphere where friends become non-friends, overnight.