My vegan experiment
I’ve been reading and thinking about food politics for about the last 18 months, since I first came across Michael Pollan’s In Defence of Food and The Omnivore’s Dilemma. I was a bit late coming to the party, I know, but before reading these books, I really had little idea of what’s wrong in the world of food.
I became vegetarian a short while before my 15th birthday. My girlfriend at the time was the first vegetarian I had met, and she inspired me to follow the visceral response I’d even then long felt to eating meat. (Some meat, that is: I grew up in South Africa, and I loved eating biltong, and missed it when I became vegetarian.) Anyway, that teenage sweetheart made contact recently through Facebook, and when I mentioned that she had inspired me to make this huge change in my life, all of 25 years ago, she remembered, ‘Oh, yes, I remember, I was once vegetarian for a few months…’ The right person, in the right place, at the right time, can make a huge difference in another person’s life…
I had various periods of veganism over the years — when I met with my sister-in-law recently, she reminded me that I was vegan when I stayed with her around my 18th birthday; and when I first moved to England, 13 years ago, I lived in a couple of Buddhist communities that were mostly vegan. But it had been a good few years since I had followed a vegan diet of my own choosing.
Earlier this year, having read several more books on food and animal welfare, I started to feel increasingly uncomfortable and upset — I lived on an edge of tears for a few weeks, as I learned more and more about the conditions in which dairy animals and poultry live their lives. I decided on what seemed to some a counter-intuitive plan: I would be vegan away from home, where I knew least about the conditions which any animal products I consumed might have been subject to; and at home I would eat only free-range, organic eggs and cheese, and drink only free-range, organic milk. We’ve subscribed to an organic vegetable box for several years — each Thursday morning, a box of beautiful, earth-covered, local organic fruit and veg appears at our front door. They started offering organic milk and eggs from nearby smallholdings and farms, and for a few weeks I continued to eat and drink these products.
But as I read on, and visited a few more blogs and websites — especially Compassion in World Farming and Mercy for Animals — I came to feel that I wanted out of all animal products. I didn’t want to be part anymore of the system that keeps animals enslaved — I know that’s very emotive language, but that’s more and more how I came to see the situation of animals held in captivity and exploited for their flesh, eggs, and secretions. Even on the most careful, organic, free-rangey farms, there’s the problem of boy-chicks and boy-cows, and there’s the problem of cows no longer being so productive after 7 or 8 years…
The Vegan Society does some good work — and they’re the prototypical Vegan organisation. I visited their website and saw that they run a ‘vegan pledge,’ which newcomers can use as a support in trying out veganism for a particular period. I decided to sign up for the month-long, ‘Gold’ pledge. They provide some excellent, friendly support, and can put you in touch with a mentor if you want that (I knew enough vegans to ask when I needed help, but really appreciated hearing from the Society’s Information Officer a few times during the pledge).
So, my month passed without incident. I found it quite easy being vegan. Like many new vegans, I found it hard doing without cheese — and so far my experience is that vegan cheese substitutes are really not very good (except for Tofutti’s ‘cream cheese,’ which I quite like…). I expected to miss milk in my coffee, but have found that I actually prefer it black after a few days getting used to it that way. I expected to find eating out more difficult, and although there aren’t many vegan options here in Birmingham, I really had no problems at all.
Being vegan does, though, call for a bit more creativity in cooking, and has stretched me to baking cookies and muffins — if I wanted vegan treats, I realised that I would need to make most of them myself. And that’s been fun, though I’d never baked before. I found a number of good recipe websites, and bought a copy of Isa Chandra Moskowitz & Terry Hope Romero’s excellent Veganomicon cookbook.
During my pledge month, I happened to hear a talk by Urgyen Sangharakshita in which he revisited some of his earlier thoughts on Buddhist ethics. He emphasised ‘imaginative identification,’ the process basically of putting oneself in another’s place, expessed well by Shelley’s affirmation that:
A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his own species must become his own.
His own and every species…
I realised, after hearing the talk, that having once made that identification — or perhaps just made it more deeply than I have before — it would require some loss of awareness to let it go again in the future. After I’d heard of cows trapped in what the dairy industry refers to as ‘rape racks’ so that they could once again be inseminated so that they would be kept constantly pregnant to keep the milk coming, it would be very hard for me to drink another glass of milk.
And that loss of awareness, that forgetting of a new imaginative identification, I believe would be corrosive to my ethics and to my sense of self. And so I decided to extend my vegan experiment… I think now I know too much to blithely return to a vegetarian diet, and I think I’m in this for the long haul — happily, healthily. I’m still calling it an experiment, four months later, and probably will for the first year — but I have no plan to change from my vegan diet.
I found this video produced by Mercy for Animals very inspiring — maybe you’ll enjoy it too:
