No Milk Please, We're Vegan

Livestock and fishing industries are the second biggest source of greenhouse gases: 18% in comparison to 13.5% for all the world’s transport systems. Tony Wardle, Diet of Disaster

While 40 million tonnes of food would eliminate the most extreme cases of world hunger, 540 million tonnes are fed to animals in Western countries every year. www.peta.org.uk

Already I am struggling to remember what the word ‘vegan’ used to mean to me. I do remember wondering who these crazy people were that don’t drink milk. No milk? Why would you do that? Why?

To me, the step from there to where I spend such an inordinate amount of my time saying the word ‘vegan’ that it’s started to lose all meaning whatsoever was not as radical as it must seem to the rest of the world. In fact one spends so much time in one’s vegan bubble that you forget that whilst you gorge yourself of hobnobs, hummus and stuff from skips, the rest of the world goes on thinking that eating meat and dairy is completely logical.

Ahem [clears throat]… it’s not. And it isn’t so much the ridiculous demand that we (although, remember, of course that I am up on my high horse and am therefore exempt from the ‘we’) put on the livestock industry that ever more intensive and nastier farming practices are required to meet it, or that an increasing number of health problems, from heart disease to cancer, are being blamed on the old meat ‘n dairy; it’s the hidden effects that eating cows and drinking their juice is having on the planet and it’s tenants. After all, what’s the point in being nice to animals and being all healthy if the fire and brimstone of climate change means that there won’t be anywhere for them, or us, to live?

You only have to look at the facts to see that the most effective way of lowering your carbon footprint is to turn vegetarian, or even vegan, never mind just taking the bus.

Want less world poverty too? Then stop eating animals, the bulk of whose fodder is grown in countries with the crushing burdens of landlessness, food insecurity and starvation-related diseases, never mind the inefficiency of using valuable water and foodstuffs to keep animals alive while people are starving and thirsty. Suddenly the nut jobs who won’t have milk don’t seem quite so crazy.