How going vegan for January woke me up
In 2017, a record 50,000 people officially signed up to take part in Veganuary, a month-long challenge where participants live vegan — no consuming or using animal products — for the entire month of January. These are just official registration numbers. I, for one, didn’t officially register but took part in the challenge, anyway.
A report from last year stated there’d been a 360 per cent increase in people choosing to go vegan over the past decade. Given that somewhere into the first fortnight of the veganuary challenge, I committed to going vegan for good, this is brilliant news for me. Not just because of environmental and ethical reasons, oh no, but because as a dedicated foodie-wanker, it’s simple, innit? Demand = increased supply. There’s now a dedicated vegan food only supermarket in London, GreenBay and grocery behemoths like Sainsbury’s and Asda are ever-increasing their vegan stocks to keep up with seemingly relentless (praise be!) demand.
I can honestly say that these past two months have probably been the most enlightening of my life. I feel like I had been hiding under a rock. Despite realising the enormous power held by industry bodies and the seeming control they have over entire economic regions (google: NZ+dairy, for example) I am shocked and appalled about the extent to which we’re consistently lied to as a society. And even though the majority of us would tick a box to say we consider ourselves open minded, I’m also increasingly disappointed by those around me that refuse to even have an open chat about the reasons I’ve made this choice. I mean, there is so much goddamn proof out there, even if they try to bury it and cast those who challenge the cruel, barbaric practices of commercial farming, that a plant-based diet is supremely beneficial to our health and world and yet… even as the evidence of the destruction of the world around us and the evidence of animals — not just pigs and dolphins — having high levels of intelligence mount up, we bury our heads in the sand and mumble something about the food chain.
It’s enough to make you want to scream: wake up! WAKE UP! Read, research, start thinking… why is it that you love your dog and you’d seek blood if you knew some bastard had intentionally harmed her AND yet… it’s OK to drink the milk of an animal that is not your mother and in the process, deny that animal’s own baby the food he was meant to have? Or it’s OK for the eggs you love on a Saturday morning to have come from a chicken crammed into a cage the size of the iPad you’re reading this on? Or it’s OK to skin a living, breathing thing that feels pain — like you feel pain — feels sad, like you feel sad — to carry your shit around in?
No wonder seasoned activists like Gary Yourofsky say stuff like this:
Sometimes I think that the only effective and productive method of destroying speciesism would be for each uncaring human to be forced to live the life of a cow on a feedlot, or a monkey in a laboratory, or an elephant in the circus, or a bull in a rodeo, or a mink on a fur farm. Then people would be awakened from their soporific states and finally understand the horrors that are inflicted on the animal kingdom by the vilest species to ever roam this planet: the human animal!
If you consider yourself open minded and want to be a little more informed — I am happy to have an open discussion about the “benefits” of eating meat, etc, by the way — watch Gary’s speech as linked above. Watch it and if you don’t feel in some way moved or at least a little more aware then I’ll be very surprised. Go on, surprise me.
As a foodie who thought of herself as very knowledgable about food, cooking techniques, “health food”, no sugar, etc. I have to say that the best selfish reason for going vegan is that you get to rediscover food. It’s like being able to forget your favourite book or movie and read or watch it again, afresh. I now know about jackfruit, seitan, cashew cheese, that I can bloody well eat MORE and that actually, there is so much you can eat that doesn’t inflict cruelty that when people say: so… what can you even eat, now?
The way I think about the world around me is different now and I just can’t go back. Cutting a massive amount of “socially acceptable” food (I even find it hard to say food when I am talking about animal products now — technically, humans could be food and yet if we started down that track, well, let’s just back up now) out of your diet forces you to look at things differently. An avalanche of “but the world could be so much better if we all just went vegan” burdens you. Every. Single. Day. In fact, I am going to write a post about how the world could be like John Lennon’s Imagine — if we all went vegan.
I believe that choosing this path is 100% the right decision. The fact that I haven’t had a break out after almost three years of consistent pimples from the age of 29–32 doesn’t really come into this belief either (ok, it does a little bit). I know that as a result of this life-change, I am thinking more deeply about everything. Of course this includes what I consume and what we buy but it’s also deeper — it’s how I look at what’s happening in the world, what’s possible — technology-wise, humanity-wise, what my career and life looks like and how I imagine we’ll raise our future children (if we have them). I’m dreaming more intensely — last night a kangaroo and I had a conversation and when I woke up my first thought was: friends not food. Mock if you like — I am sure many are anyway as I throw my weight behind something I feel really passionate about. But, we’ll have the last laugh. Veganism is the future , after all.
