Shopping for food

1448: 

It all happens in the shopping aisles of supermarkets.  This is where most people make their biggest food decisions, either based on taste or ethics.  This is where vegans use their money to support cruelty-free enterprises, and this is where we withdraw it from cruelty-products.

I, like most people, am food-seduced.  I’m drawn to foods that trigger “biochemical effects not unlike those of addictive drugs”.  I was brought up on and came to like sugars combined with creamy chocolaty crunchy rubbish-foods, and on the savoury side I got hooked into things like cheese, eggs and meat. I let my taste buds be my guide and do the choosing for me.  I would salivate over certain foods as I visualised the coming meal, for which I’d bought the ingredients.

         

All that was to change when I replaced animal-based foods with plant-based foods (and leather and wool replaced by non-animal footwear and fabrics).  All I needed to do was to read the fine print on ingredient lists, boycott anything with animal in it, and then try to find an alternative product.  Not always easy, especially a few decades ago, but then as now it all comes down to finding replacements.  And if there is nothing to replace the animal product then it's a matter of doing without rather than caving-in.

If one stays locked into animal-food one is always going to be faced with an ethical dilemma - either to please the senses by ‘screwing the animals’, or bringing that to an end.  Who’d have thought something as ordinary as every-day shopping could pose such a test?