Food prospects - maybe yes, maybe no

951: 

We are used to plenty.  We acquire things. We keep things.  We’re reluctant to give them up.  Voluntarily doing something that doesn’t benefit ourselves might seem masochistic.  Veganism seems like making life difficult for little reason, after all, it’s only animals we’re worried about here, not anything important like the environment. 

When 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 all this materialism and plenty-wanting. Our minds need exercising, our spirit needs free air to breathe. Most of us don’t want to feel ashamed and ineffective all the time. We need to prove to ourselves that we’re in control of our lives, that we can make our own decisions and aren’t afraid of upholding gut-instinct values.  If the opportunity arises, like when we grew to an age when we were allowed to make our own major decisions,  we’ll want to try out new things,  to explore.  

As soon as we’re responsible for feeding ourselves, doing our own shopping and cooking,  life becomes both tempting and dangerous,  especially when we’re experimenting with food.  The two forces at play: safety and satisfaction.  We need to know we can survive but at the same time we need to make improvements to our lives.  Food is something we make choices about every day. We eat this and not that, not only according to the taste of it, but according to what’s in it and where it comes from. Food isn’t just about sensation but about habit and worth and how we spend our money. It seems fairly safe to stick to what we’re used to but there again, young people want to explore. There are unknowns in new diets and unfamiliar food regimes, so something new might be fun to try out, but there again, losing familiar foods might not be so much fun. Indeed it might be unsafe or expensive. Yes, I want to toy with the idea of change and I might be attracted to change, but perhaps I don’t want to be amongst the first to risk making radical change.  Let others be pioneers.  Better to wait until it’s more widely accepted.  Hence, the reason why most people are unwilling to be part of ‘a vegan experiment’.

Those of us who have dared to ‘do it’, whose ideal has been applied to the whole of our own food intake, we already know it can be done, that it’s safe, etc, and from that point of discovery we can demonstrate how we did it.  But this is no ordinary experiment.  It’s not for the faint hearted. It might take a generation or more for the majority to break down their own reluctance and take on ‘animal issues,  and then alter their foods accordingly.

In the meantime vegans must pursue their own goals,  whilst continuing to educate others whenever we get the chance.