Re-Educated

I grew up in a village that no one had heard of. There were eight other children in my year at school, one of whom ate chalk to amuse the rest of us, occasionally throwing up a colourful lather in the playground as a result. It was a Church of England school, built in 1844 with stone from the local Delph, which had been carried up the lane by horse and cart. It looked as if it might be a farmer’s cottage from the road and was aptly surrounded by grazing cattle in the pastures. It had Bramley apple trees on the edge of the playing field bearing fruit too tart to be eaten, and a pond covered with lily pads that someone would “accidently” fall into roughly once a year. We sang hymns and said prayers in morning assembly, ate chicken drumsticks and rainbow sponge cake at lunchtime, drank miniature glass bottles of milk in the afternoons, read books aloud on the carpet and made animals out of papier-mâché.

I liked making pigs. I hadn’t seen a lot of pigs in real life, even though I lived surrounded by farmland. There were plenty of cows, bulls, sheep and horses in the fields, but I think I’d only seen a pig once or twice, at a petting farm I’d visited with school. Nevertheless, I’d read Charlotte’s Web and seen the animated movie version a number of times, so I felt as if I understood the mind of a pig quite well. They made friends easily, particularly with spiders and little girls, and they had big plans for the future. I also quite liked that they were pink and chubby, that their tails were twisted like pipe cleaners and their rotund heads had the perfect shape for papier-mâchéing. Logically, the snout could be fashioned out of a used toilet roll.

I was a wilful child, but not in a way that was difficult for my parents so much as it was amusing. I told my teachers I was going to be an actress and I merely reaffirmed this with confidence whenever they suggested I might want to focus more on maths and science instead. I did a lot of pondering, did a lot of questioning and I had a lot of ideas.

The first idea I had was that God either wasn’t real, or else wasn’t very likable. I went to Sunday School, begrudgingly, and I read the Bible word for word. I had also played Babushka in our school’s alternative Nativity play and an angel any number of times, complete with tinsel halo and wings fashioned out of foil-wrapped cardboard. I read studiously and I listened attentively, but the more I read, the less I felt certain of. I told my mother first, and the following Sunday I told the vicar. In fact, I told anyone that would listen, until my mother told me off for being blasphemous. Her tone implied that blasphemy was on par with swearing, so not wanting to get banned from the swings or sent to bed early, I decided to brood on something else.

Before I go on, let me explain why I’ve told you this when what I have to say really has little to do with religion itself. What it has to do with is being brave enough to question that which we think we know, even when we suspect that by doing so we might rally a storm and upset the comforting conventionalism of our lives. Socrates said “I cannot teach anybody anything. I can only make them think”, and so if by thinking we are led to learning something new, then my purpose here has been served.

When it comes to religion, we have all dismissed deities (or had deities dismissed for us) in favour of one specific belief system, and we all believe what we believe through a combination of what we have been taught, what we have furthered explored in our own curiosity and what our instinct – sometimes referred to as ‘faith’ - tells us. Whilst some believe what they believe through blind faith, or simply because that is all they have ever known or wish to know, many choose to research their beliefs, leading them to the reassertion or conversion of that belief. Let it now be said that I have the utmost respect for anyone with a belief system based on learning and intuition. With religion, there is no cut and dry answer. None of us are definitively wrong and none of us are definitively right and therefore, I respect any belief system that brings a person hope and guidance, so long as that belief doesn’t cause them to inflict harm or judgement upon other creatures.

The things that I believe in are things that most of the vegans I’ve met seem to believe in also. I believe in understanding and kindness, in acquiring and sharing knowledge, in equality, choice and compassion, and in encouraging love in all its forms. I believe wholeheartedly in the philosophy of veganism: it is the ethical belief system for my life.

As a child of maybe 12 or 18 months, I was christened without even a vague understanding of what Christianity was and, in a comparable way, I had my beliefs about food animals chosen for me too. I was taught that meat and dairy were fundamental to my health, that their suffering and my survival were intrinsically linked, and that these were the basic facts of the world. My parents meant well in this, but they weren’t the life pondering, ever-questioning type that I was. What they themselves had learned as children must surely be true, or so they thought. Being the brave (or perhaps, rebellious) kid that I was, I followed my instincts and decided to question that which was supposedly “true”, despite being aware of the conflict this might cause. As a result, eating meat would be a form of childhood indoctrination that I would reject.

Having independence of mind is important to personal growth. We should all, I believe, be seeking to know more, every day of our lives and in all that we do, because if we can make better, more educated choices then wouldn’t we want to? This is what it comes down to. This is the question I want you to ask yourself. If you can do better for knowing, then would you not want to know?

Maya Angelou’s famous quote states: “I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better.” 

Prior to establishing myself as a vegetarian, there was never a day that went by when my Nana, a self-professed “feeder”, wasn’t cooking bacon, sausages or pork chops under the grill, frying chips in lard, boiling vegetables to mush and buttering up door-stops of white bread with the devoted intensity of Michelangelo at work. I ate dinner with her five nights a week because my mum and dad worked late, but although I ate a lot of it, I don’t think I ate more meat or more butter than the next person. At the time, unlike now, I had no dislike for meat but I had no particular craving for it either. I got grossed out by the occasional lump of gristle in my sausage, or when I had to pull the fat off the pork or bacon with my fingers because the blunt knife I’d been allowed just couldn’t hack it. But I ate it because my Nana wasn’t going to let me watch old movies with her otherwise.

Something about it always felt kind of amuck though, because I loved my Nana’s Jack Russell, Mickey, probably more than I loved anyone else on earth, and Mickey was an animal, inquisitive and needing of affection, much like the lambs and sheep in the field next door were. They all ran around with silly excitement, had beloved companions, basked in sunshine, jumped on and off hay bales and enjoyed rolling around in the long grass. I couldn’t make distinctions between the creatures I knew, other than that some played in the pastures and some played in the house, but eating meat required me to. It required me to care about the life of one, and not another, and this threw a spanner in my mind’s working even before I knew about factory farming, something I would learn the distressing reality of later on.

I was ten and it must’ve been a Sunday, because my mum had cooked beef for the four of us. My dad was slicing it at the table with a large sharp knife and then placing the slices onto each of our four plates.

“How many roast potatoes do you want?”

“Maybe three?”

“Ok”

“Do you want gravy? You can put it on yourself, no?”

“Yes……

….. Mum?”

“Yes darling?”

“Why do we eat cows?”

“You mean beef? Because it’s tasty and it gives us protein.”

“What do we need protein for?”

“To grow tall and strong.”

“So I wouldn’t grow any taller or stronger if I didn’t eat meat?”

“Well maybe not as tall or strong. Why? Don’t you like beef now?”

“I don’t really like where it comes from, I suppose.”

“Oh dear. You’re not going vegetarian are you?

“I might.”

“Well what’s brought this on?”

“I just don’t feel like it’s alright to be killing animals and eating them, when I could just eat these potatoes and these carrots and stuff, and be fine.”

“Well, it’s up to you, but you might get sick and it’s not going to be easy being a vegetarian you know.”

“I know. That’s okay.”

“So, no beef then?”

“No thanks Mum.”

“Alright darling. Have some more of those carrots then, and another roast potato if you want.”

She said “alright” as if it would only be a matter of time until I saw the error of my ways. I was lucky that my parents hadn’t gotten angry, or forbidden my vegetarianism out of fears for my health, but they didn’t - not because they didn’t care, but because they cared enough to allow me my quirks. If I was wrong, about God or about eating meat, then they knew I was smart enough and humble enough to figure that out along the way. If I was right, and they had to have known there was a possibility of me being right since there was no clear cut argument for or against any of it, then it would perhaps be interesting for them to see where my wilful, non-conformist ideas took me.

My dad, who had been hovering with a slice of beef, had shrugged his shoulders and given the unwanted meat to himself. In such a way and for the time being, I wasn’t saving a cow; merely leaving more beef for the others, and a number of kids at school took the opportunity to point this out.

Certainly one act of kindness will not change the world, but it could very well change the world for one person.

Now I was no mathematician, but I knew that over a prolonged period of time I would save at least one life and, even though I would never know the life that I was saving, I felt great satisfaction at the prospect of it. My ten-year old self was able to ride the bus and beam at the cows and sheep in the field, and feel as if she had done right not only by them, but by herself. In a way, it felt like I was stopping to give food to a homeless man, whilst everyone else just walked on by, pretending he wasn’t there.

My Nana didn’t stop trying to feed me slices of ham though. I pulled it out of barm-cakes and ate the bread instead. I ate around pieces of chicken and pork chops, and got called a ‘silly bugger’. She even tried to convince me that Scotch Eggs were vegetarian, despite the fact that they were literally eggs rolled in pork. Pot-Noodles turned out to be vegetarian though, and this pleased me greatly.

My younger brother, who found much enjoyment in harassing me and breaking anything that had taken me some time to make, sucked on chicken nuggets in front of me at dinner like they were ice-pops, as if this absurd action was going to make me jealous. When it didn’t, he would throw them directly at my mouth. Fortunately, he was a crap shot.

“You want a burger really”, my friends would gibe as we sat in McDonald’s, ravenous after swimming lessons. But honestly, I never did, and with each week that passed, the decision I’d made felt more and more like the right one. As the months passed, I stopped seeing meat as food; I merely saw it as an animal that had wanted to live. As the years passed and the seemingly simple choice I had made as a ten-year-old led me to a realm of discovery I had not foreseen, the ostensibly inevitable happened and I made the transition to vegan.

When you take a particular interest in something, you tend to read more about it, take an interest when others talk about it, and become by default somewhat of an expert. My father loves wood and knows everything there is to know about trees and their potential uses, and although I enjoy the majesty and shade of a tall tree and the beauty of a hand-carved piece of oak or teak furniture, I know that he’s the expert because he has gone far beyond the mere appreciation that I have. Wood is his passion and his proficiency, perhaps even his “life’s calling”, and I would never contend with him, or anyone, on something which I am less passionate about and almost certainly, therefore, less knowledgeable about. I have found that doing so takes the fire out the eyes of the person telling you about the thing they love, and that is no good thing.

Not as a child but as a thirty-year-old adult, I started to feel intensely passionate about both nutrition and animal welfare. I had always tried to eat healthy and I had always found great enjoyment in cooking, but something – an environmental documentary actually - flicked a switch in me, after which veganism became the thing that I not only wanted and needed to do, but also something I would become passionate about and, through dedication, highly educated in.

Depressingly, what I’ve found since that switch-flick, is that despite having read some of the most scientifically supported and thoroughly researched literature offered on the links between animal cruelty, diet and human disease, I am still commonly assumed to be the one with a weaker understanding of food. I am more likely to be seen as the one who is misinformed, and as someone who is obsessive and extreme rather than educated and passionate.

It’s certainly true that the right path is often the hardest path to follow. Looking back at my life, you might suppose that I prefer the difficult path, but if you were to ask me why I insist upon taking the hard road then I would answer you with a question: why do you assume I see two roads?

“I knew this vegetarian; she was vegetarian for four years and then one day she smelled someone cooking bacon, and that was it! Now she eats meat again!”

Everyone either knows, of claims to know, a vegetarian or a vegan who’s been converted by bacon or, on occasion, a slice of brie. If someone has given up meat and dairy for health reasons, which is likely considering that meat and dairy are leading causes of cancer, heart disease, diabetes, osteoporosis, obesity and Crone’s in our modern society, then I can understand them being tempted back to their old bacon and brie-eating ways just as anyone following a specific diet might eat the occasional slice of cake or bar of chocolate when no one is looking.

If someone has given up animal products for environmental reasons – not unlikely considering that raising animals for food is the single greatest human-caused source of destruction to our environment – then again, it’s uncommon but not improbable that they might consider the occasional chicken sandwich or bowl of ice-cream a non-too-harmful indulgence. 

Animal agriculture is in fact the largest source of greenhouse gases, land use and degradation; the number one source of water pollution and rainforest deforestation and the primary contributor to air pollution, ocean dead zones, habitat loss, and species extinction on our planet. Therefore, if you think that destroying 26 million acres of rainforest each year to produce palm oil is bad, consider that 136 million acres are wiped away every year just so that we can enjoy a hamburger. Raising animals for food uses 45% of Earth’s total land and is responsible for up to 91% of Amazon destruction. If this continues then the ‘lungs of our planet’ will be gone within the next decade.

If someone doesn’t eat meat or dairy for ethical reasons, then it is highly doubtful that they’ll wake up one morning, smell bacon cooking and forget where bacon comes from. The meat and dairy industries have increased the sum total of suffering in the world more than any other event in history. I have studied it, I have witnessed it and I fought against it, and that acute awareness that I have, and that most vegans have, makes the idea of eating animal products about as appetizing as a raw meat milkshake.

I guess being so resolute is what can make vegans come across as self-righteous. It’s incredibly difficult, however, not to talk about something you believe strongly in, especially when by doing so you believe you can inspire others and bring a greater level of compassion into the world. But even if it never gets mentioned, most people will make assumptions. They will assume you are silly and oversensitive. They will believe you are trying to be difficult and thus seeking attention. They will imagine you to be a scrawny, anaemic, sanctimonious environmentalist hippy and, above all, they will believe you are wrong. I’ve dealt with such assumptions all my life. I’ve dealt with the “but why?” questions, and the almost inevitable dismissal, mockery or hostility that follows any response I make.

Other than saying you’re allergic to meat, there’s ultimately no answer to the question “but why?” that a meat eater wants to hear. But almost as disheartening is when no questions are asked, no efforts are made to be either accommodating or understanding, and you find that the response to your veganism is reserved to take place later, behind your back. That’s when you know for sure that people categorically don’t want to hear about it and this, like all human indifference, is deeply disheartening. However, a great man once said that “the greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance: it is the illusion of knowledge”, and that is exactly what I find myself up against nearly every day.

Naturally, I’ve met a good number of vegans and I’ve found the majority to be unassuming, rather than self-righteous. Like me, they don’t believe themselves to be better or more deserving of emotional consideration than any other creature on this earth; horse or lion, dog or cow. Rather, they consider themselves to be equal; their lives equally as significant, their love equally as profound and their pain equally as agonising. This view of equality makes them not only devoid of speciesism, but also devoid of the ability to think they’re better than anyone else. It’s just an unfortunate detail that people don’t appreciate hearing an inconvenient truth, or the person bearing that truth.

Speciesism, in case you’re just now hearing the term, is a prejudice or bias in favour of the interests of members of one’s own species and against those of members of another species, and it works in the same way as sexism and racism. My parents, and everyone I knew and loved growing up, were all culpable of speciesism, but they didn’t mean to be. It was just how they were raised; just as some generations were brought up to see women as inferior to men, blacks as inferior to whites, Jews as inferior to Christians, and the world as flat rather than spherical. We are not wrong to believe the things we believe; we are just the hapless students of a debauched education.

 Like most of my generation I was misinformed; misinformed by my elders, my teachers and my culture, and growing up I was hoodwinked by well-funded and highly influential advertising campaigns – on the TV, on billboards and in print - from an industry that invests over forty billion dollars a year in moulding the way society thinks.

The way we view animals today - some animals, not all – is a form of speciesism that future generations will perhaps find abhorrent. That we can kick or punch food animals, mutilate them, castrate them, amputate their beaks, dock their tails, brand their flesh, tear out their horns, drag them around by their limbs, shackle them, rape them, deprive them of light, space and comfort, boil them alive, stun them, slit their throats whilst conscious and treat them as mere commodities, all without judgement or repercussion, and all for a food product that we do not need and that increases our risk of illness, is inhumane by mere definition. But we do it because we’ve always done it, because it’s convenient, and because we tell ourselves that this cruelty towards animals that we hear about from our vegan and vegetarian friends is dubious and most likely an exception to the rule…

But it isn’t.

Factory farming, in which animals are turned into food following a short and miserable life where pain, fear and emotional suffering are pervasive, produces approximately 98% of the meat, eggs, and dairy we eat. Approximately 125,000 animals are slaughtered globally every minute and around 70 billion – pigs, cows, sheep, chickens, turkeys; as smart and emotional as infant human beings - are confined in cramped, dark prisons at this very moment. Yet, ask yourself how many of these 70 billion animals have you seen, and why do you think it is that the industry keeps them hidden from our view? 

Ultimately, hiding the truth about meat, egg, and dairy production from us is what these industries depend on, so becoming aware of this truth is essential to freeing ourselves from the system; that is, if we want to be freed. And so I ask you again: why wouldn’t you want to know the truth? Is it because the truth might change you?

Whether the truth is something that concerns anyone other than animal rights activists is another matter entirely. I cannot teach anybody anything and I cannot make anyone care, but perhaps I can make them think; think outside the box; think for themselves.

I was lead to the truth by a decision I made almost intuitively at just ten years old, and by my own curiosity and the writings of people much smarter than me; doctors, physicians, nutritionists, environmental scientists, animal welfare lobbyists, social justice lawyers and authors committed to unbiased research and exposure of the truth, to name just a few! I cannot tell you how many books I have read that discuss veganism from a scientific, environmental, health and moral perspective, but I have read enough to know with absolute certainty that eating any kind of animal product is bad for the environment, bad for our health, and life and death itself for an animal.

Some people, like me, are willing to question everything they think they know, and this is why veganism is now the fastest growing social justice movement of our time. Meanwhile, some absolutely are not. Most people today, in fact, will side with the mainstream, choosing to believe in the common idea because it’s easier that way, inconvenient not to, and because ignorance can be bliss. I get that, I truly do, because I wasn’t born a vegan as you know. During my 20 years as a vegetarian, I enjoyed dairy products daily and fish and seafood now and again as well. I said the same thing that almost every non-vegan now says to me: oh, but I could never give up cheese!

I absolutely loved cheese - LOVED IT. Stilton, Brie, Manchego, goat’s cheese, mozzarella on my pizza, mature cheddar on my sandwiches, feta on my salad; Camembert baked in the oven. I drank milk by the glass-full and a tub full of ice-cream to myself pretty much every weekend (or whenever a guy broke up with me - same thing). But then that inconvenient truth came along, and it took me quite by surprise - me, the self-professed dairy queen, living in ignorant bliss.

An inconvenient truth is something that jeopardises that which we enjoy, and thus plunges us into moral turmoil. I mean, I loved animals – that’s why I’d been a vegetarian for two decades – but I really loved cheese too and it was hard to imagine my life without it. Was eating dairy really that bad? From a health perspective I was able to read anywhere and everywhere about the cholesterol, casein and carcinogenic content of dairy products and their strong association with increased risk of cancer, but the most important question for me was: is it inhumane?

As it turns out, cows produce milk for the same reason that humans do—to nourish their young—and so calves on dairy farms are taken away from their mothers when they are just 1 day old so that we can drink their milk: a product that, contrary to popular belief, has no nutritional value for humans. Can you imagine what it would feel like to be separated from your offspring after a nine-month pregnancy? A mother cow will cry out for her calf as it is taken from her and continue to cry, staring in the direction via which her new-born vanished, for days and sometimes weeks on end. The sense of loss she suffers is palpable.

Male calves will soon become veal, and female calves are fed milk replacers until they are old enough to be artificially inseminated, following which they will themselves become slaves to the dairy industry. Cows have a natural lifespan of about 20 years and can produce milk for eight or nine years. However, the stress caused by the conditions on factory farms renders cows worthless to the dairy industry by the time they’re 4 or 5 years old, and so at this relatively young age, they too will be sent to slaughter.

No matter how good cheese tastes to me or how many foods I have to say no to in order to avoid cow’s milk, once I’d learned this about dairy industry – which is merely a component of the veal and beef industry - I didn’t want to eat dairy anymore, so that was that.  

When I started out as a vegetarian, I did it for the animals, because when you’re killing 115 million pigs per year, there is neither the time for nor inclination towards compassion. Meeting demand and hitting margins comes first. Since starting out along this path, I have come to know the reality of slaughter houses, even the ones certified as “humane”. Think about the Holocaust and you come close to being able to picture the life of a factory farmed animal. I do not say this to shock you; merely to describe something as honestly as I can, and if the goings on of the annual Yulin Dog Meat festival in China horrify you, then you would be equally sickened by what goes on behind the walls of a slaughterhouse. If you think that the individual who slits sentient being’s throats for a living cares a hoot about animal suffering, think again. One such individual once mocked me and fellow animal rights activists by miming the slitting of his own throat, pointing at the slaughter building and then laughing, as he stood there outside a slaughterhouse in Smithfield, Virginia, wearing an apron caked in blood as the screams of terrified infant pigs pierced the air around us.

The free-range label is a farce and, in fact, language is almost never trustworthy when it comes to the animals we choose to eat. Even reputable supermarkets like Whole Foods Market are guilty of misleading their customers and of using the word “humane” as the loosest of terms. Words, devoid of meaning, are often used on packaging and in marketing campaigns to misdirect and mask the truth. Some words, such a ‘veal’ and ‘foie-gras’, help us to forget what we’re actually eating. Some, like “free-range” or “grass-fed”, can mislead those whose consciences seek consolation. Some, like “happy”, mean the opposite of what they would seem and some like “natural” and “organic” mean next to nothing.

Have you ever noticed that eggs, whilst often referred to as “fresh”, “free-range” and “packed with protein” are never labelled as “safe to eat” or “healthy”? This is because they aren’t and cannot be labelled as such by law. Says who? Says the United States Department of Agriculture.

It’s okay to question what you’ve been taught, and to seek out the truth even if you don’t seek to change. My intention was never to change anyone; it was merely to open people’s eyes, to re-educate them and allow them to then use their newfound knowledge to select the right path; to define – through learning and intuition – their own belief system as opposed to the one they might have been brought up with.

Over twenty-four years my not eating meat has undeniably done some good, and giving up all animal products has made me healthier and more conscious of the world around me. At an estimate, I have probably saved the life of at least one cow, about four pigs, five sheep, six turkeys and around 300 chickens. At thirty-four years of age I am fit and agile, healthy in weight and appearance, and I honestly can’t remember the last time I got sick or even had a cold. It turns out I never needed animal protein in order to grow tall and strong - we can get all the protein we need from plants and, to date, no vegan has ever been found to be protein deficient.

 It’s incredibly satisfying to be vegan, but it’s not always easy - or convenient - and few of us are perfect examples of it, least of all me. It’s been a learning process for me, because being vegan involves great commitment and awareness. Knowledge has a beginning, but no end, so I keep my eyes and ears open, constantly seeking to find how I can be better. Through doing so I am able to grow in ways I never imagined.

My oldest friends, who I now differ from in many ways, are perhaps concerned by my relatively recent transition from commonplace vegetarian to vegan animal rights activist. They perhaps think I’ve changed into someone who they no longer recognise, someone tiresome, radical and self-righteous, and the truth is that I have changed. I’ve changed because what I know has changed, and I’m aware of things now – things that I think are incredibly important – that I wasn’t aware of before. The health and environmental implications of what we eat and the abysmal reality of the dairy industry are just a couple of example of things I knew very little about before, and I have used what I now know to reset my moral compass and to try to educate those whose health is of concern to me: namely my family and friends. I have not become extreme but rather the opposite, since I believe that people who choose to ignore that meat and dairy caused over 76 million cases of food borne illness in the US alone last year to be more extreme. I have merely stopped participating in that which I believe is wrong, and I have simplified my life to doing only what I believe to be right.

“I did then what I knew how to do. Now that I know better, I do better.” 

Veganism is a big part of my life; how can something so important and so openly an expression of who I am not be? However, it is not all that I am, but merely how I chose to live my life. The fact that I love clothes and heels, art and historical literature, travelling the globe and partying with my friends, going out to dine, drinking wine and running with my dogs – has not changed, and if you judge me to be “dull”, “extreme” or “ridiculous” because of how I choose to eat – because I choose to eat consciously – then you are not really my friend at all.

I am as flawed as the next person, and I know little or nothing about a great many things. I know a lot about animal welfare, about diet, nutrition and environmentalism, but I don’t even come close to knowing all there is to know about these subjects and I probably never will. I don’t look at other people, at meat eaters, and think less of them. I see only myself in others, before I knew better. And whilst on the inside I am desperate to tell the people I care about the truth behind that glass of milk they’re pouring for their child, I cannot do that because they have not yet decided they want to hear it. I respect that; I have to.

In the past 15 months during which I’ve been, to the best of my ability, a vegan, I’ve been in a couple of situations whilst traveling abroad where I’ve actually chosen to eat seafood instead of eating nothing, where I’ve accidently purchased leather, swallowed milk or thought that horse-riding wasn’t exploitative. The good news is that these moments have caused me to stop and think, and to thoroughly examine who I want to be, after which, I’ve found myself right back on track to becoming the person I want to be.

I am not yet who I want to be, but I am going there.

My final question for you is: Who do you want to be, and how will you get there?