Big shiftings

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One of the greatest temptations for grown-ups, who are free to make their own lifestyle choices, is to harden up. By becoming pragmatic and avoiding introspection, they are free to break a few ethical rules. Once they have children they imitate their parents’ values. If adults go astray they lead their kids astray with them. With ten or twenty years of indoctrination, young people might find it difficult to then adopt a truly compassionate personality ... and yet many do.

An instinct in some young people questions their elders’ values; their fellow humans could be wrong about something as fundamental as accepting violence done to animals for the sake of eating tasty food. The problem, as I see it, is that humans develop and entrench certain habits and then forget ever to question them.

Young people, however, have a chance to make changes when they first move away from their parents’ dining table. But theory is not practice, and this is a time when they probably need most practical help, to give them enough confidence to change and establish new eating habits relevant to a plant-based diet.

If they can’t find some useful guidance it’s likely the ‘pressures of normality’ will weigh down on them too heavily and they’ll revert. They’ll give up before they’ve even started.

The rewards for complying with majority ‘taste’ are obvious, in that almost every shop on the High Street offers irresistible attractions. With food alone there are too many food normalities and addictive food habits to forego. Even if one is ready to take up a vegan lifestyle, it might not be taken seriously because shops have such a limited range of vegan foods, and if they do they’re expensive.

If you do take up vegan-living there’ll be an immediate change to your whole life style. Some can handle that. They’ll rise to the challenge. But the reality is that, if your decision to make a radical change of diet is left too long, the social pressure to ‘settle down’ might leave no room for change. By one’s late twenties it might be too late. Unless we make the move fairly early, soon after leaving parental control, it’s unlikely our ‘habit-self’ will allow us to become vegetarian let alone vegan.

How great is the gulf, then, between practising vegans and ‘non-vegans’? Probably enough to need a collective fundamental attitude change to make changing feel less reckless , and for that, in order to hit the ground running, one would need to be free of mind. We’d need to be about two years old, not chronologically but in a person’s freshness of approach, so that the taking-up-of-new-ideas is relatively painless.