What is it with vegans?
A mercifully brief article, by a vegan, in the Guardian Weekend magazine, opens with the words “When I eat with one of my carnivore friends…”. The title of the article, which flirts briefly, and mostly pointlessly, with a different issue each week is “What I’m really thinking: The Vegan” Why vegan is capitalised I have no idea, and it’s quite clear that not a lot of thought is actually going on at all as he, or she, defaults to the tiresome – and wrong as it can possibly be – “carnivore” slur.
I’ve written to Weekend protesting this, but I have little hope it will be published – for some reason I couldn’t get a letter published in Weekend if I paid for it these days. Odd, really, since in the past I had a very good strike rate with letters. It’s possibly that my address is different from that in their archives but, hey, even in often strange world of the Guardian, people must move house – no-one stays at the same address for ever. If they think it’s someone impersonating me, they only have to phone and check (you have to provide an address and phone number in emails for publication).
I also wrote about it here, about a week ago (he said, frantically groping for something different to say), and it’s still just as goddamned aggravating.
This tedious vegan also says “…I’m fascinated by the fact that these intelligent, thinking people actually eat the flesh of dead animals.” Really? I’m fascinated by the fact that a person can be so profoundly ignorant of what is normal when it comes to the human diet, and yet is still allowed to spout drivel in a national newspaper. Humans are omnivores – that is, we eat pretty much anything that doesn’t poison us – it’s what we evolved to be and it’s perfectly normal.
Vegans and, to a lesser degree, vegetarians, are the ones who deviate from the dietary norm. That’s fine, it’s their choice, I’ve been there – I just wish they’d shut up about it. (Yes, I know some of us eat far too much meat – I addressed that last week.)
So what is it with veggies and vegans? Oh, hang on, I feel a digression coming one…
In the mid eighties, I worked briefly for the Health and Safety Executive, as their personnel records archivist – and I worked with a vegan who had some very strange beliefs. He wouldn’t wear leather shoes, which is fair enough (though his concerns didn’t extend to the sweatshops of the Far East, from whence his trainers came), but apparently had no problems with leather belts. It was with eggs, though, that he totally lost the plot.
He’d eat eggs – and vegans certainly aren’t supposed to do that – but only if they were unfertilised. “How do you find that out?”, I asked, knowing full well there’s only one way for a consumer to do that. And he didn’t let me down – I crack them into a saucer, he said smugly, and check for the blood spot in the yolk. If I find one, I throw it away.
So, I said, you’re OK with effectively killing unknown numbers of embryonic chickens**, then wasting them by throwing them away? Er, yes… So, tell me, I said, how do you square the loss of all those potential lives with your allegedly vegan principles, you sanctimonious, hypocritical, tosser? Answer came there none.
**Yes, I know that by this time the prospects for embryonic viability were, realistically, zero, but that’s really not the point, is it?
Which is why, the family of vegans I mentioned last time aside, I tend to regard vegans with a slightly jaundiced eye, and am frequently moved to wonder just what is it with vegans?
Perhaps we need more than one category of vegan?
We could have the dietary vegan, who eschews animal parts and by-products (including eggs!), but who, when it comes to the rest of life, isn’t so dogmatic, plus, if you like, the ethical vegan, who refuses to have anything to do with animals and their by-products on any level whatsoever (which vegans are actually supposed to do anyway, but many fall by the wayside).
I admire anyone with such strong principles as the ethical vegan – after all, avoiding all animal products and by-products isn’t easy (though I slipped from veggie to vegan without even noticing, as far as food was concerned, so how hard can dietary veganism be?), but why is it that they cannot – ever – relate to the naturally omnivorous main body of humanity without indulging in propaganda based almost entirely on abuse, distortions, half-truths and flat-out lies?
I’d love to know because, in all seriousness, you do your cause no good at all – after a while, all you do is alienate people.
Give up the hysteria and the calumny – see how that works – because right now, you come across as a bunch of fruitcakes who fail to understand that constantly berating people is counter-productive (we just switch off, or do exactly what you don’t want us to do, out of sheer, exasperated perversity), just as you fail to understand the fundamental difference between omnivore and carnivore.
Here’s a tip – they are not synonymous.
