How do you know someone is a vegan? They will tell you!
The old joke is funny because there is a grain of truth in it. Vegans are not simply people who choose not to eat meat or consume products derived from animals; many also see themselves as evangelists for the cause. They will take every opportunity to criticise those who use animal products – not only meat eaters, but vegetarians who drink milk and eat eggs and cheese as well.
The vegan argument is straightforward: we should not exploit animals in any way, shape or form. That is all very well, but it overlooks an inconvenient fact: human civilisation developed alongside our use of animals. We could not have arrived at where we are today without hunting, eating and using them.
There is considerable evidence that eating cooked meat played an important role in human evolution, particularly in providing the energy needed to support our increasingly large brains. Later, hunter-gatherers combined animal protein with grains, fruits and vegetables, eventually developing agriculture and settled communities. So where would we be if humans had never developed the habit of eating animal protein? Perhaps we would still be sitting in caves, watching the grass grow.
Another argument is that all animals are sentient beings and, therefore, should not be killed for food. But there is an interesting contradiction here. If we stopped breeding animals for food altogether, the vast majority of those animals would simply never exist. They would not have been born, lived their relatively short lives and, ultimately, become food. Animals are deliberately bred because we eat them. You might not like the logic, but it is difficult to argue that an animal has been deprived of a life it would otherwise have had.
It is also worth considering the social context of veganism. It is relatively easy to champion an expensive and highly-specialised diet when you are affluent enough to have a wide range of food available to you.
For many people around the world, however, food is about survival rather than lifestyle choices. In parts of Africa, for example, people may hunt whatever animals are available simply because they need to eat. Telling someone who is struggling to feed their family that they should adopt an expensive Western dietary philosophy might seem rather out of touch.
And then there is the question of nutrition. A properly planned vegan diet can undoubtedly be healthy, but certain nutrients are much harder to obtain from plants alone, which is why many vegans rely on fortified foods and supplements. Is that really an improvement on obtaining nutrients from the food that naturally contains them?
The human being is an omnivore. We evolved to eat a wide variety of foods, including meat, fish, vegetables, fruit and grains. Our bodies are not perfect, of course, and we remain susceptible to disease and ageing. But evolution is a process of adaptation, not a journey towards some predetermined state of perfection. Future generations will inherit whatever characteristics help them survive and reproduce. That is how evolution works.
This brings me to children. Is it fair to impose a vegan diet on a child who has no say in the matter? Children need a balanced diet while they are growing, and although a vegan diet can be carefully constructed to provide the necessary nutrients, doing so requires knowledge and planning. If supplements are necessary to make up for nutrients that are difficult to obtain naturally, should we really pretend that this is somehow a more natural way of feeding a growing child?
And where does it end? Should we launch a campaign in the forest to stop bears eating meat? What about lions, tigers and polar bears? A huge number of animals – and virtually all fish – kill other creatures in order to survive. Why should humans be uniquely prohibited from doing something that is entirely natural to our species?
There is, of course, nothing wrong with choosing not to eat meat. If someone wants to be vegan or vegetarian, that is entirely their choice. What I object to is the assumption that everyone else must share that choice, or that eating meat makes someone morally inferior.
The freedom to choose what we eat and what we wear is, in part, a luxury created by generations of people who had very little choice at all. They ate what they could find, wore what they could obtain and used animals because that was how human beings survived and progressed.
So, if you decide to become a vegan, by all means do so. Just remember that the rest of us are perfectly capable of making our own dietary choices. And, if you could keep the preaching to a minimum, we would be grateful. We just want to eat our meat in peace.
As Monty Python so memorably put it: “You can’t have any pudding! How can you have any pudding if you haven’t eaten your meat?”
Jackie@JBeedie.com