To New Vegans

[Edited,  1400 words]

944: 

                                                                                                                                             

If I were new to Veganism,  even if I couldn’t get over my keyed-up feelings about the cruelty to animals, there’d be a side-worry.  It would concern health and vegan diets.  I would ask myself if it was safe and if a vegan diet could be efficacious. 

For omnivores, food and nutrition  involves lots of animal products.  In my own past that’s all I knew.  Animal protein was essential and healthy.  It would have seemed reckless to consider any diet that didn’t include them.  Back then, I would have thought it almost 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 it dawned on me that we might all be duped.  I came to consider there’d always been an element of Hobson’s Choice about food.  I began to consider the possibility that we were all victims of 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,  along with good nutrition. I eventually also realised that there’s a time and a place for everything.  But perhaps it wasn’t the right time for this particular ‘good idea’,  for the emergence of that particular consciousness.  People weren’t ready for it.

But things have changed.  Times have changed.  This is not the hungry 1940's in the West.  We are seventy years on.  Plant-based diets have been tested and not found wanting (except our need for dietary 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 some excuse to delay the adoption of plant-based diets,  but that was half a century ago.  We are now  in an entirely different position.  We know far more about good nutrition.  We can regard food in a different way.  Here in the West  most of us have never known what it’s like to feel hungry or even to have too little food in the house.  Since the end of that war-torn period,  people in the developed world have been able to look more closely at what ‘food’ really is.  And surprise, surprise, we’ve found that much of the food we are being fed is both 'crap' and cruelly-produced.  Now we HAVE to look at food in a different way.

Respect must be given to 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 that has come what we now call ‘the vegan diet’.  It liberates the conscience,  boycotts animal 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.    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 has to be established.

If you don’t know much about the vegan diet it might seem like a frightening prospect,  especially if you’re inspired by the ethics but unsure of the safety angles.  Once assured of this, however,  the main danger is a social one.  Moving away from others,  from the ‘normal’ lifestyle and food-eating habits.

Like a reformed smoker,  a vegan can soon forget how he or she felt before they became vegan.  You no longer miss your favourite (animal) foods or fashionable leather shoes or other commodities made from animals.  Hopefully you're wanting something quite different.  An established vegan wants most of all to continue feeling ‘clean’ (like the ex-smoker who 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 - to the annoyance of our friends.  Eventually our veganism might become our reason to be.  If this gets to be a big a part of our new identity,  we can  become too narrow,  as if we’ve only got one interest and that's all we ever seem to want to talk about.  And it shows up most obviously in our ordinary talk with others.  That’s all A-okay of course … until it turns sour.  When it starts to become self-justifying, judgemental talk.   Essential to every vegan's life is the avoidance of anything animal-based.  Sticking to our boycott is foremost.  That’s what we do!  But the reason we boycott must never become an excuse  to  'judge'  people who don’t boycott.  That would be rather like using the ‘animal cause'  to inflate our differences to others.  By talking ‘food’ and ‘values’,  it’s easy to stray into disparaging ‘the meat heads’.  At first it can seem like 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 with how we feel about animals.  We’re frustrated because we have no  POWER  to change anything. …..… So we have to let it out by resorting to climbing on roof tops and shouting - “Look at what you're doing, you bastards!!"  But there’s still no joy.  No one takes a bit of notice.  Free people won’t look at anything when ordered to do so.  It’s always going to be a Mexican standoff.   For vegans,  the bottom line is how we come across.  We are and will be for some time yet,  a small minority and they,  the vast majority.  We can’t yet afford to be too direct over our veganism.

Vegans might have some justification to judge those who are not yet vegan,  but perhaps that’s the very reason why we shouldn’t.   We can’t become too marginalised if we want to make inroads with people.  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 don’t need any pistols-at-dawn. 

Let’s say we go to the movies and see this great inspiring film,  during which we feel our passion moved and our whole outlook changing.  It’s intoxicating stuff!  The film ends and everyone goes home.  And, by force of habit,  we revert to business-as-usual.  Our resolve vanishes and our outlook doesn't change.  We can’t even remember what it was that inspired us.  We can barely recall what the film was about.

Today,  there are so many ideas and so much new information coming our way that we can’t rely on our immediate first reactions to anything.  I wonder how much currency  inspiration has today and how long we can expect it to last if it doesn't touch us very deeply.  Can any of us really be touched that deeply?

All I can do myself is remember,  and it was a long time ago,  that I was shockable and young enough to determine what was the most wrong thing possible and therefore what my main values were to be.  I knew quite clearly what I would have to do about it.  I realised something was wrong and rather naively thought things would change quickly as soon as everyone else discovered what was happening behind ‘closed doors’.  The idea of animals being incarcerated, touched me deeply.  Mainly due to my own horror of being enclosed in small spaces and of invasive surgical mutilation.  In a general sense,  my dislike of any sort of violence.  I can never forget that farm animals have to face all of this.  And that’s really why I feel so passionately (and perhaps hyper-sensitively) about wanting to see an end to the terrible cruelties we inflict on farm animals.                                                                                                                                                            Ed. CJ.