Seven Reasons to be Vegan

Health

It would be possible to follow a 100 per cent vegan regime and not be eating healthily - but you'd have to work at it. For example you could have white bread and jam for breakfast, chips and beans for lunch and baked beans on white toast for dinner. Providing you persisted, after a while, if you didn't die of boredom, you'd die of something else. But people who become vegan generally do so only after a lot of thought and the diet they choose usually consists of high-quality wholefood cereals, grains and pulses supplemented with fresh fruit, salads and veg- etables- the diet, in short, that we present in this book and this is what we mean by 'a vegan diet' in this section.

There is increasing evidence that a vegan diet like this is to be strongly recommended on health grounds:

Further evidence was published by the Health Education Council in a leafllet in 1985:

'A hundred years ago, most people ate plenty of fibre from bread and potatoes, but lacked a fully adequate varied diet. Diseases caused by a lack of vitamins and minerals were common. Today, the problems are different. Many people now eat too much meat, dairy produce and sugar, and too little fibre for good health. . . 'Research has shown links between what we eat and many modern diseases. For example:

All the fats referred to in this quote are the saturated type, found chiefly in foods of animal origin. Just over a quarter of the fat eaten in the typical Western diet comes from meat, butter and margarine provide another quarter, milk and cooking fats account for another, and the remaining quarter is made up of cheese and 'hidden' fats in pastry , sweets, ice-creams and other 'convenience' foods.

The simple fact of converting to a vegan diet removes all the cholesterol and nearly all the saturated fat and reduces the total quantity of polyunsaturated fat to the 30-35 per cent of the total energy intake which is recommended by the Health Education Council for general good health and the prevention of heart disease.

If all this leaves you unmoved, consider this: Britain's longest-lived man, Harry Shoerats, died in February 1984, aged 111. He was born in Russia in 1872 and settled in Britain in 1917. He attributed his longevity primarily to his vegan diet of fruit, nuts, vegetables and cereals. He did not retire from his work as a craftsman until the age of 104 and cycled to work daily till his 100th birthday.

Economic

If you follow a diet based on the recipes in this book, you'll certainly find yourself spending a lot less on food on a personal basis, but the Consequences of a shift to a vegan diet among the population at large would be considerably more far-reaching.

Animals reared for their meat have been calculated to use 90 per cent of the plant food given to them simply to sustain their own bodily processes. Only 10 per cent finally arrives on the plates of omnivores. It would be hard to imagine a more uneconomic or wasteful way of using the world's resources.

If there were a major shift towards veganism in the industrialized nations, the prices of plant foods would fall everywhere, especially in the Third World.

Ecological

More than 40 per cent of the world's tropical rain forest has been destroyed this century. The current rate of disappearance is 50 hectares a minute. Most people might think it fatuous to suggest that becoming a vegan could have the slightest effect on this. Yet it is a simple fact that most of the vast areas that are being destroyed and laid down to grass in South America are being levelled for no better reason than the raising of beef cattle for the North American steak and hamburger market. As a result, the world is losing rare species at a frightening and accelerating rate.

Similar pressures apply wherever land is farmed intensively. Britain's countryside is fast being turned into a vast, bleak, prairie-like landscape devoid of hedgerows or trees simply in order to produce yet more contri- butions to the EEC grain mountains, most of which are sold off as animal feed. Countless species of our wild birds, animals, butterflies and wild flowers are threatened as a result.

At sea, intensive fishing has destroyed the vast herring shoals that once roamed around Britain's shores (and the North Sea fishing industry with them) and everyone knows how near several species of whale have come to extinction.

The list, alas, goes on and on. There are hundreds of other species whose habitats are threatened by the millions of omnivores our species counts among its members.

'The average Briton now consumes up to 8 beef cattle, 36 pigs, 36 sheep and 550 poultry birds in the average lifetime.' (The Animals Report, Richard North, Penguin, 1983.)

Multiply this by the 55 million people in the UK and you begin to realize the scale of the problem.

Clearly, every single person who becomes vegan immediately ceases their personal contribution to this inexorable demand for the products of the intensive farming of animals. So everyone who becomes vegan ceases to be part of the problem and becomes part of the solution - helping to ease the intolerable pressure that humanity now exerts on every other species to the farthest reaches of the globe.

Altruistic

'Why do you people care more about animals than about humans?' is a challenge that is often thrown at vegans and vegetarians by irritated omnivores. Leaving aside the fact that it is clearly an emotional response, probably stemming from their own feelings of guilt, it is simply not true:

'If Americans were to reduce their meat consumption by only 10 per cent for one year, it would free at least 12 million tons of grain for human consumption - or enough to feed 60 million people. . . Indeed, if Americans were to stop eating grain-fed beef altogether the grain thus released would be enough to feed all the 600 million people in India.' (Animal Liberation, Peter Singer, Thorsons, 1983.)

Not to mention the 'few' starving millions in central Africa!

For the truth is that if you wish to put the welfare of humanity first, you can hardly do better than become vegan !

So the next time an irritable omnivore challenges you in this way, why not throw the challenge right back by asking: 'Why are you so indifferent to the starving people in the Third World that you selfishly continue to eat more than ten times the grain you need in the form of animal protein?'

If all this sounds a bit too idealistic for you, consider this: since the case for the vegan diet as healthier is now irrefutable (and generally accepted by the medical profession) what better way can there be of showing your love and concern for those closest to you than by preparing for them not only food they will enjoy, but food that is good for their health?

Compassionate

'A human being is a part of a whole, called by us 'Universe' , a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest - a kind of optical de- lusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us.
'Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.' (Albert Einstein.)

'lf true, the Pythagorean principles as to abstaining from flesh, foster innocence; if ill-founded they at least teach us frugality, and what loss have you in losing your cruelty? It merely deprives you of the food of lions and vultures. . . let us ask what is best - not what is customary. Let us love temperance -let us be just -let us refrain from bloodshed.' (Seneca.)

'I, for my part, wonder of what sort of feeling, mind or reason that man was possessed who was first to pollute his mouth with gore, and allow his lips to touch the flesh of a murdered being; who spread his table with the mangled form of dead bodies, and claimed as daily food and dainty dishes what but now were beings endowed with movement, with perception and with voice.' (Plutarch.)

What would such compassionate and thoughtful men as these have said of the catalogue of misery and suffering we now inflict on animals in the name of profit and of science? For the abuses they wrote of were trifling compared with the scale and quality of the practices of factory farming, or the wholesale abuses inherent in the routine testing on innocent and defenceless creatures of the unnecessary, trivial products of the cosmetics industry?

Most omnivores, if they were forced to spend a single day enduring the conditions of the average factory farm would renounce meat-eating for life. It is not lack of imagination that prevents them from discovering this, but a deliberate, conscious decision to remain ignorant for fear that knowing the full consequences of their demand for cheap meat would be too painful too endure. Such people are more guilty of the suffering inflicted on animals in their name than any German citizen was, in the Second World War, who sought to prove afterwards that he or she simply 'didn't know' what was going on in the concentration camps. But if what is done in factory farms is appalling, it pales into insignificance compared with the horrors inflicted in laboratories in the name of science.

'In Britain, where experimenters are required to report the number of experiments performed, official government figures show that 4,443,843 experiments on animals were performed in 1981. In the United States there are no figures of comparable accuracy. Under the Animal Welfare Act [sic] of 1970 the US Department of Agriculture publishes a report listing the number of animals used by facilities registered with it, but this list is incomplete in many ways. It does not include rats, mice, birds, reptiles, frogs, or domestic farm animals used for experimental purposes; it does not include animals used in secondary schools, or by government agencies; and it does not include experiments performed by facilities that do not transport animals interstate or receive grants or contracts from the federal government.

According to this very incomplete report, somewhere between 1.6 and 1.8 million animals are used in experimentation each year. The number of dogs is 200,000, cats 50-70,000, primates 50,000, rabbits, hamsters and guinea pigs around half a million each. . .

'Surely one day. . . our children's children, reading about what was done in laboratories in the twentieth century, will feel the same sense of horror and incredulity at what otherwise civilised people can do that we now feel when we read about the atrocities of the Roman gladiatorial arenas or the eighteenth-century slave trade.' (Animal Liberation, Peter Singer. )

Ask yourself what possible response can any sane and compassionate person have to this unforgivable lapse on the part of humanity, other than determinedly and single-mindedly to boycott any or all of the products of such practices?

Ethical

'If man's aspirations towards right living are serious. . . he will first abstain from animal food because. . . its use is simply immoral as it requires the performance of an act which is contrary to moral feeling -killing.' The Ethics of Diet, Tolstoy.

But are humanity's aspirations serious? We often claim to have attained the highest level of consciousness of any living creature on earth. Whether this is true or not - and it must be open to doubt in view of the mindless, institutionalized cruelty of our factory farms, vivisection laboratories and the torture of our own kind in prisons around the world, it is certainly true that we have become the guardians of this planet and of all its life forms. So, with all our faults, we must try to behave as responsibly as we can.Is factory farming a responsible way to behave? Even the most recalcitrant meat-eater can hardly deny that cruelty and suffering are inherent in it. In an attempt to divert attention away from their own doubts, which often stem from the fear of having to change, such people launch into debates about how much pain animals can suffer compared with humans. But this is irrelevant. If we agree that suffering is bad, and that animals do suffer as a consequence of our actions, then it doesn't matter how much they suffer but that they suffer at all. So we must change our actions or stand condemned of callousness. Nor is it good enough to support the theory but fail to support the practice: 'They pity, and they eat the objects of their compassion. ' (The Citizen of the World, Oliver Goldsmith, in Collected Works, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1966.)

'lf a boycott is the only way to stop cruelty, then we must encourage as many people as possible to join the boycott. We can only be effeclive in this if we ourselves set the example.' (Animal Liberation, Peter Singer.)

'A vegetarian diet is the acid test of humanitarianism.' (Tolstoy.)

Spiritual

Orthodox Buddhists and Hindus have always been vegetarian and often vegan for their religions are founded on the belief that life is sacred - not just human life, as in Christianity, but all life. But just as importantly, both these great religions also teach that not only is a vegan diet correct in ethical terms, but that it is also more conducive to spiritual peace of mind and the acquisilion of the virtues of humility and compassion. Christians have, of course, always admired just these two virtues above all else in their Own founder and leader, so it is odd how little heed is paid to his own words on the subject:

'Not by shedding innocent blood, but by living a righteous life shall ye find the peace of God. . . Blessed are they who keep this law; for God is manifested in all creatures. All creatures live in God, and God is hid in them. . . The fruit of the trees and the seeds and of the herbs alone do I partake, and these are changed by the spirit into my flesh and blood. Of these alone and their like shall ye eat who believe in me and are my disciples; for of these, in the spirit come life and health and healing unto man. . .' (From The Gospel of the Holy Twelve, trans. by G. J. Ouseley .)

It would seem that the Jesus in this apocryphal gospel is advocating veganism. In another early gospel translated into English directly from the Aramaic tongue Jesus is thought to have spoken, there is a specific warning of the dire consequences of the killing and eating of animals:

'And the flesh of slain beasts in his own body will become his own tomb. For I tell you truly, he who kills, kills himself, and whoso eats the flesh of slain beasts, eats the body of death.' (From The Gospel of Peace of Jesus Christ by the Disciple John, Trans. by E. B. Szekely, C. W. Daniel London 1937.)

But isnt it enough to be vegetarian? Why do I have to become vegan?

The problem is that the industrial produclion of milk, butter, eggs and cheese is totally dependant on the existence of the rest of the factory farming industry with all its odious praclices. Repeated frustrated pregnancies are required to keep dairy cows lactaling and in any case they are slaughtred for meat as soon as their milk yield drops, and it is the fate of their unfortunate calves to be removed from their mothers at birth and sent either straight to the slaughterhouse or to veal produclion units. Most eggs come from battery systems of course (including those with names like 'Farm-fresh') but even free-range egg produclion entails the killing of the unproductive - the cocks (only half of a batch of ferlile eggs will hatch into hens) and even the produclive hens are sent for slaughter as soon as their laying days are over.

So we see that even buying a carton of milk in a supermarket or half a dozen free-range eggs in a wholefood shop, makes a liny, but significant contribution to industrial slaughter.