Sequence

663: 

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 Propellers had to come first and be superseded.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.