To new vegans

659:

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.