I am vegan. I stopped eating animals almost a year ago. Although I stopped eating meat and fish nearly 30 years ago, I continued eating dairy and eggs from other people's chickens until last January, 2015. So I will celebrate the end of year holidays as a vegan for the first time. And so far it is tasting quite good.
I have written about this before and tried to generate some conversation, especially among people of faith or people who believe strongly, as I do, that animals did not evolve on Earth simply to be used by human beings. I don't usually get much response. I think the topic scares people because if they stopped to really think about what they were eating, they might have to change, or feel bad about past eating habits or their own inability to control diet. But feeling bad is not helpful. People should just set out to change.
Diet, after all, is culturally imparted and dependent on the particular bio-region where living creatures evolved - including humans. Our parents make the choice between animal foods and solely plant foods long before we are able to decide with any consciousness. Milk from a human mother is the only mammal food that is specifically designed for humans and that design plan is only until weaning sometime before the age of 2-3 when human bodies are sufficiently formed to process other foods. In spite of this completely obvious fact, many women have been led to believe that bottle feeding cow mammary gland secretion to their babies is just as good. Someone benefits by this approach but it is not the baby, the cow, the calf or the mother since breast feeding offers a great deal of comfort between mother and child.
Today babies begin getting solid food anytime after 4 months... earlier for some, much later for others. There are culturally adapted protocols for introducing foods to infants. In the USA pediatricians tell new moms to offer plain cereal first, followed by pureed vegetables and fruits and last of all meat of any kind. Baked or hard foods wait until the child has teeth. The body takes time to adjust and grow. Meat is the hardest adjustment and is given last. I suspect that is because meat is not an essential part of our diets and it takes enormous energy to digest.
Look this up! Animal flesh sits in the gut for at least a day, generally more, as it begins to breakdown (rot) in the gut so as to be digested. Carnivores in the animal world generally have short intestinal tracks so that rotting flesh food and byproducts get in and out quickly. Creatures that eat a plant based diet have longer intestinal tracks. Humans have a long track. The small intestine is between 6-7 meters in length. Add to this that vegans are healthier over all than omnivores. Why ever did we think we should eat meat and dairy and lots of it?
In spite of the data, human history is filled with meat eating stories. Hunting, skinning, cooking - barbecuing, gravies and meats for special events: lamb, turkey, chicken and beef. But rarely, if ever, do humans refer to what they are eating as a formerly living creature. Who would eat veal served as "unborn baby calf?" or a roast referred to as "a piece of a cow's upper leg muscle." A cow or steer on the table is beef, wild deer or antelope is venison, in Europe a lamb is mutton, while those same animals in the farm yard or nature have different names. Likely the name changes help anesthetize the eaters to the fact that they are eating an animal that used to live, move, eat, drink, bear young and seek a life free from pain and oppression.
I enjoy taking my family out to dinner or having them all over for a meal of some kind. These days meat is only a side dish if it is present on the table at all. The main courses are interesting delicacies made entirely from plants. No one is starving. Everyone is healthier. And, I still get lots of compliments. Meat is not necessary. When I am responsible for the whole meal, the only meat I will order as a side dish for others who still think they need to eat animals, is chicken. At least it goes by its real name.
As children many people enjoy storybooks where animals are depicted like "odd little humans." Winnie the Pooh, Peter Rabbit, Alice in Wonderland, Frog and Toad, The Hobbit, and many many more books come to mind immediately. We have a fascination with animals. We are curious about them and find their lives intriguing, especially as children. I think that if we ever want to give animals a real chance to survive into the future we need a new kind of animal story that depicts the horrors that animals face; loss of habitat, cruel traps, random hunting, incarceration in zoos or labs or worse, mammals conceived artificially, separated from their mothers, confined, fed with the goal of creating tasty animal protein for other mammals, and slaughtered without ever setting foot on Earth, seeing the sky, tasting grass or other natural foods. Animals raised in CAFO's (concentrated animal feeding operations) are terrorized from the moment of separation from their mothers until the day that is picked by their owners for them to die, be cut up in pieces, and served as food for other animals.
Perhaps if enough people read such stories and allowed themselves to feel the pain and injustice of the whole meat-dairy food industry people would be less likely to continue eating the same way. A few days ago a friend from the past stopped by to see me. We were just catching up. She commented to me that she no longer ate dairy products. Then she said, "I never knew that baby calves are killed so that people can drink the milk that their mothers were producing for them." When she found out she just stopped consuming dairy. Just like that. Clearly knowledge is a very powerful tool.
If you would like to begin or continue learning, try www:onegreenplanet.org.
What kind of animals are we anyway?
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