Doing without

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For everyone, life’s hard enough. But for vegans it’s even harder, in one important way. We seem to bear almost the sole responsibility for persuading people of the wrongness of enslaving animals and the rightness of not using them at all.

            On one level that’s enlightening enough for us but on another level it’s a pit within a pit. We have to deal with our own everyday-participation (in this society) but we're forced to lead a double life, being in it but not of it; we’re true outsiders. But at least we don’t have the food baggage most people carry (which ends up looking bad on the scales and even worse in the mirror).

            The omnivore’s mental conditioning traps them into the habits of their childhood, the most dangerous of which is a fondness for Nursery Teas. We like to use certain combinations of junk foods, remembered from our earlier days, usually in the form of sweetened confections, cheesy concoctions and milky drinks. They’re tempting but they’ve lost their original impact as treats. No longer are they anything special since they’re indulged in so regularly. And every day too, most people eat a meaty meal, again something very addictive and harmful to the body.

            As dangerous as these foods are, we indulge in them. On top of the junk food we indulge in a whole range of intoxicants which fuzz up the mind and probably also fuzz-up a grumbling conscience, helping us to enjoy a thoroughly indiscriminate eating experience.            

            Science has been recruited to ensure that animal foods (or as main ingredients of processed foods) are ‘rich’ to the taste as well as being stomach-filling. It’s their addictiveness which denies us any chance of easily escaping them, even for a short while. Their daily use keeps us umbilically-tied to the most damaging norms of our society.

            Veganism takes us past that point. Once we’re vegan we usually never look back to that old self-harming world again. We get so used to looking ahead that we take for granted a world of daily-discipline and boycotting.

The ‘little habits’ of an omnivore’s diet are hard to let go, especially when the alternatives don’t seem attractive (veganism would be perceived as extreme and a vegan diet therefore unattractive). Perhaps the big lesson here is that perceptions can be deceptive, and they can be changed almost in a flash. But ‘going vegan’ isn’t necessarily simple.

            Immediately, as soon as the brain says “give it a go”, we face a Catch 22, where herbivorous-eating means limiting our choices. Our society is so heavily geared to the animal eaters’ interests that there’s not very much in the way of immediately attractive plant-based savoury food on the market; there are still relatively few products out there which can replace the addictive-products made with animal ingredients, unless we’re willing to pay high prices for imported goods. Mostly we have to do without.

            On the face of it, this puts people off vegan lifestyles … but ironically, just in that ‘limitation’, with so much being off-limits to us, we benefit greatly. Avoiding animal-based food prevents our being poisoned by it. And nor are we likely to put on weight, grow a paunch, slow our metabolism or develop diabetes. That’s the big advantage of this particular food discipline.

            Look at it this way. Going vegan helps us pass by certain shops; we just get used to never going into them. For example, nothing in a cake shop is ‘clean’ (of animal by-products), so commercial cakes are no longer something a vegan would indulge in. Now, all this ‘doing-without’ might seem like a big sacrifice to omnivores, but to vegans it’s a blessing in disguise. We can’t be tempted by the ‘delights’ of edible or wearable or usable animal products, so we can’t be tainted by them or, in the case of food, made fat or ill by them. And that’s the ultimate advantage. We don’t have to spend our later years in the grip of ill-health, at least not because we have, in previous years, indulged in second rate taste-trips.