Slow sensitisation

949:

Everything is moving relatively swiftly, when you think about it. There is a marked shift in attitude towards animals,  relative to how long humans have been killing and eating them.  But it does seem so slow, the growth of humane consciousness.

It’s as if there is a natural sequence of changes which must be made in the right order,  from stage to stage.   Until there’s a broad community awareness that there is even a problem.  And even then,  there’s a long wait for the action needed to be taken to solve it.  Lifestyles might change dramatically for you and me but there has to be a widespread enthusiasm,  and then a demand for change,  before anything noticeable happens to the collective consciousness.

But it starts with me and you,  and it goes on from there,  far too slowly for our liking but as rapidly as human nature will allow.  I would be wanting the whole thing to speed up,  awareness,  etc.,  but in reality it must go according to sequence.

Take the evolution of speed in travel,  for instance.  When there was no need for very fast travel,  the horse and buggy was adequate.  Horses were slaves and treated badly,  but kindness didn’t liberate them,  it was the internal combustion engine that did that.  As soon as another ‘machine’ emerged the old one lost its relevance.  Once flight was possible,  land travel became less important.  Flight has developed out of sight over the past hundred years.  Think of the brothers Orville and Wilbur Wright.  They didn’t wake up one morning with the idea of jet propelled flight,  the propeller let them fly fast enough.  If they’d tried to develop jet-propulsion in 1903 they’d have failed - propellers had to come first and then be superseded.  That was the sequence of events, the simpler idea came first,  followed later by a somewhat more sophisticated idea,  like the jet engine.  Same with animal rights,  a fundamental awareness of the sentience of animals must precede the establishment of ‘rights’.

There’s probably an obvious sequence to every complex change that occurs.  It’s impossible in the early stages,  of say flight,  to see if an idea like propeller-driven flight will die and the jet engine take its place.  Any good-looking idea must evolve from the earlier stage,  in order to move onto the next.  Before the advent of ‘flight’,  such an idea as ‘the jet’ would have sounded absurd - we’d have had no idea how it might come about; but now,  slow flight is redundant and jet flight has basically taken over.

Eating meat is a bit like slow-travel.  An old idea is always open to improvement,  and there’s none older than the way we fuel ourselves. The human body can only function because of the things we do to it and how we feed it.  Traditionalists still eat what they ate as kids, copying Mum’s meals and adopting the dietary norms of the people they grew up with.  The more adventurous cook will try new recipes,  and the true pioneers will look at food as fuel and look more closely at what food can do for us.  They ask if  the ways we feed ourselves, fuel ourselves, can be dramatically improved.  With hindsight we can see how that can be done,  with all the obvious advantages and long experience of using a plant-based diet,  but when consciousness started to change,  when ethics entered the food business,  we were at the very beginning of a long and significant change,  to lots of things, including human health,  animal liberation,  non-violence,  farming methods,  environmental safety and many other things.

But still,  for many,  a plant-based diet isn’t reality.  They know nothing of it,  nothing of this ‘sequence’.  Nor the bigger picture,  regarding animals used for food.

As I see it,  the sequence goes something like this:  Once upon a time it was mainly plant-based foods that were eaten,  then hunting became successful enabling a more efficient food gathering system.  Food became more plentiful.  People began eating more.  Then something happened,  a new twist.  We gained strength and immunity to diseases,  but as we started to grow fatter we got sicker.  But then again,  with the development of medicine and hygiene we started to live longer.  And now today,  the whole system has gone haywire.  We eat too much,  get too fat,  suffer from decadence-related illnesses,  we live longer but suffer from chronic illness,   which lets us suffer over many more years,  before we die.  But that sequence of events is essential for learning,  stage by stage,  how to improve our lives.  It looks slow on paper.  It looks tragic for the individual.  But it seems that humans have to learn the hard way.  We have to learn from painful experience.

Surely we’ve had to go through all the pain before the penny could drop.  After all the mistakes humans have made,  just in this matter of food,  we can now see the advantages of using ‘higher octane’ fuel;  what we might 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 before is that we had to test ourselves against the temptation of enslaving animals before we could see how stupid that idea was.

Plant-foods don’t work the way traditional animal-based foods do;  they are lighter,  in more ways than one.  They transform us on various levels,  making us physically stronger,  mentally brighter and emotionally more vital.  An added benefit is that they are generally less expensive and they definitely make us feel less guilty,  because we’re no longer adding 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 shows itself to be a 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 for the essential meaningfulness which will sits comfortably with our very soul.