Whilst it is generally and somewhat misguidedly packaged and promoted as simply a consumer choice, personal preference or lifestyle option, veganism is at heart a moral and political way of life, one that by necessity fits with campaigns against violence, and with social movements against oppression in all its forms.
“Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are” ~ Brillat-Savarin, 1825
Photograph by Paul Tritschler
Getting back into fasting after a break is difficult. In the past, I would
fast for two days in every week, but occasionally challenged myself to
extend that by a day or two, maybe three, until one day — evidently one day
too many — I collapsed like a device unplugged and cracked my head on the
sink and toilet bowl on the way down to the stone floor. Syncope is a lovely
word, but I wouldn’t recommend the experience.
These days I opt for intermittent fasting, restricting food intake to an
eight-hour window in every twenty-four. Thereafter not even a wee measly
sliver of dried mango, a peanut, a prune, a gherkin or grape is allowed
through the gate. I don’t starve, but the tantalizingg whiff of someone’s
bag of salt and vinegar-sprinkled chips occasionally tempts me to tap them
on the shoulder and ask for one. I assure myself the craving will pass, but
not before the prospect of finishing a whole bag alongside a slice of pizza
topped with garlic, herbs and Kalamata olives floods the mind…adding a cake
by way of dessert to complete the repertoire of gluttony.
Such efforts to control cravings for energy-dense foods are effectively
attempts to discipline the savannah brain, more specifically the adaptive
preferences for salt, sugars and fats inherited from our evolutionary
ancestors. These nutrients are essential to human survival, but whilst they
are in abundance for around seven of the eight billion people that currently
inhabit the planet, they were most likely rather more scarce in our
ancestral environment. Moreover, our ancestors did not live the sedentary
lifestyle many of us have today, with all the calorific consequences this
implies.
Anticipating famine further down the line, our ancestral urge would be to
eat as much as possible of these essential foods whenever found in copious
quantities. This inclination remains with us today, but converts to
overdrive in circumstances where foods are widely available, made worse by
being processed in forms that render them health-threatening and addictive.
By imposing a limit on eating times, intermittent fasting therefore serves
as a corrective to some of our evolved proclivities — those urges more in
keeping with our ancestral environment — and if combined with a high quality
diet a relationship with politics is necessarily established; it might not
deliver a mortal blow to the ultra-processed food industry, but combined
with a whole-food plant-based vegan diet it has a part to play in
heightening resistance to some of the shadier tendencies of the food
monopolists.
What do politics have to do with what we put in our mouths? Salt, fats,
sugars and various additives are today produced in combined, and often
concentrated forms by powerful multinational food corporations — global
multi-billion dollar concerns that typically pound the public with adverts
illustrating people looking like mindless zombies guzzling sugary drinks,
emptying cardboard boxes of sugary cereal into breakfast bowls, and
devouring unhealthy concoctions of deep-fried dead things from buckets.
Their express aim is to maximise profit by exploiting the palatability of
desired nutrients, the preference for calories, and the pleasure-seeking
pathways — the latter being an increase in dopamine in the brain’s reward
circuit, or to put it another way, the habit of liking something, getting a
kick out of it, and wanting more. Many people are consequently
undernourished, and in one sense starving, not because there is a scarcity
of food in the category of good dietary quality, but because there is an
abundance of cheap and available energy-dense foods.
The correlation between ultra-processed foods, obesity and food-related
illnesses continues into the realm of food addiction. A glance at the
criteria for determining addiction in the DSM-5, (Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual for Mental Disorders), shows people who regularly consume foods rich
in salt, fats and sugars conform to the stated criteria for addiction — a
condition on a par with being hooked on cigarettes, though many self-report
their experience to be far worse. These criteria include repeated
consumption despite known harmful consequences, needing more of the
substance to get the effect you want, wanting to cut down or stop but not
managing to, craving to use the substance, and the experience of withdrawal.
It’s not difficult to find evidence that links highly-processed foods with
obesity or illness among people of all age groups and all social classes,
including their pets, but evidence does indicate a higher incidence of
obesity and food addiction among lower income groups. That being said, not
everyone suffering from food addiction or food-related illnesses is
clinically obese. Whether we deem the continued use of highly processed
foods the result of one factor, or a combination of several — biological,
socioeconomic, behavioral or substance-related — it is perhaps unsurprising
that many people, on becoming aware that they face life-threatening
conditions, enter a 12-step recovery programme.
Food addiction and food-related illnesses are set to become our highest
health concern. Setting a trend for the world, the US Centre for Disease
Control and Prevention in 2023 stated that over 40% of adults and 20% of
children and adolescents in the USA are obese, whilst 70% of adults overall
are overweight. Those rates are currently lower in Europe, but the trend is
no less troubling. Obesity Statistics from the House of Commons Library in
2023 suggest UK obesity rates are running at 25% for adults and children,
and that almost 40% of adults are overweight. The Scottish Government’s
Health Survey of 2022 indicates that the highest rates of obesity and
related illnesses in the UK are in Scotland, and those health risks include
diabetes, strokes, sleep apnea, dyslipidemia, hypertension, coronary artery
disease, fatty liver disease, a variety of cancers, and possibly cognitive
dysfunction — such as poor decision-making and memory impairment.
In light of the individual suffering, the increasing strain on medical
services, and what amounts to an impending societal if not global health
catastrophe, the heavily-marketed campaign for intermittent fasting should
have proved highly beneficial. The overwhelming focus of the programme,
however, was not on individuals relinquishing highly processed foods, but
simply on their reduction by restricting food consumption within set times.
This was a widely-advertised lifestyle intervention, not a challenge to the
dark side of the food industry, and as such it was hardly the worst outcome
for the unsavoury food giants: continue eating rubbish, just less rubbish.
One might argue that any reduction in food intake, even at the level of
basic survival mode, is welcome during an epidemic of obesity-related
problems — an epidemic that is currently affecting a quarter of the world’s
population. But endorsing highly-processed and addictive foods on the
intermittent fasting program, albeit in lesser quantities, not only leaves
people ultimately facing failure and a range of health problems, it somewhat
suspiciously sidesteps the chance to publicly condemn the food giants. When
one considers the vast number of television programmes and magazine articles
devoted to dieting, one can’t help but wonder if perhaps a parasitical
connection exists between the dieting industry and the food giants, and
whether they are in fact motivated to kill their host. Fat, after all, is a
monetarist issue.
The effectiveness of intermittent fasting hinges on the extent to which it
is allied to programs of high dietary quality, otherwise it is no better
than the ludicrous calorie-counting diets, some of which even allow
chocolate bars and cakes to be counted. If they include foods that are
correlated with health concerns, and with added sugars that render them
potentially addictive, then even if they help people to lose excess weight,
it is difficult to see how they could hope to clear a pathway to optimal
levels of health and longevity. On the self-discipline front, speaking from
personal experience, intermittent fasting combined with a high-quality diet
has worked well in the context of everyday circumstances. However, I must
admit that when I’m out of the country, fasting all but goes out the window.
Wandering in foreign parts, as I often do these days, it’s easy to lose
track of time and for fasting boundaries to become outrageously stretched.
Being vegan, there is the additional challenge of finding suitable food, of
laboriously checking ingredients, and of struggling to explain across the
language barrier what should be left out of prepared meals. After a while it
gets easier to navigate, and even in the once vegan-oriented but now
notoriously meat-heavy Japan, I eventually located vegan restaurants in
Tokyo, Kyoto and Hiroshima, found options in restaurants that were otherwise
a horror show, and eventually sampled the buddhist cuisine of shojin-ryori.
Although vegan alternatives are not always on advertised menus, they can
often be conjured up if asked. Even in those obscure and in some respects
forbidding narrow alleyways in unknown lands, some with vents of rising
steam that one might imagine belong to a mythical underworld, people with a
pot, a flame and a mix of ingredients will often cobble together something
on the vegan front, and in fact I think many people find the challenge fun.
Food is frequently the lingua franca in interethnic situations, of which
veganism has often proved to be a particular dialect that many of the people
I met were curious to learn.
There have, however, been communication failures. By way of a well-meaning
meat alternative, I’ve been offered a variety-bag of deep-fried long-legged
bugs, a bowl of baby octopuses with quail eggs stuffed into their brains,
and manure-scented peanut brittle; the latter I licked, causing a week-long
bout of projectile vomiting and propulsive diarrhoea. I wanted to die. On
the plus side, the food poisoning did render it a little easier to get back
on the intermittent fasting track once home…not that I’m recommending that
particular course for anyone.
Places where monks hang out are always a fair bet, and I’ve been offered
vegan platters in or around Buddhist monasteries in Myanmar, Thailand and
Laos, Sikh gurdwaras, Jain basadis and Krishna temples across India, Taoist
pagodas in Vietnam and Cambodia, and Hindu mandirs throughout Indonesia. The
trend continued in Malaysia and Borneo, where the most edifying
establishments, built from the ground up for moral instruction and
intellectual nourishment, tend also to be the best eating joints…or to be
neighbouring them.
Among several areas in which temple followers excelled and I failed was
fasting. I have often been beckoned by the aroma of sizzling street food
wafting through the tropical night air, and must admit to having devoured a
wee Pad Thai at midnight — well outwith my fasting hours. In my defence, it
is difficult to stick rigidly to a fasting regime whilst wandering wildly
for miles in vast areas ten thousand kilometres from home, and when
uncertain where the next meal will come from. Stirring up the atavistic
remnants of our distant ancestors, I’ve eaten heartily when food was in
abundance in preparation for anticipated periods of scarcity, and
occasionally compromised to the extent of eating highly processed foods that
are potentially detrimental to health. Interrupted fasting might be a more
apposite name for my version of intermittent fasting — when I’m abroad, at
any rate — but at least I’ve not strayed from the vegan path.
On that side of things it was disheartening to learn that the Jainist, Hindu
and Buddhist priests, monks and nuns I encountered — whilst at the level of
rhetoric they avowedly adhere to the principles of ahimsa: of having respect
for all living things, and the avoidance of violence towards others — were
not in fact vegan. If not meat itself, monks and adherents to each of these
religious orders (though there were some exceptions), use dairy, and
consequently commodify nonhuman animals for personal benefit. Perhaps many
would hope to find consolation in the fact that they are vegetarian, but
this is no less barbaric than the exploitation of animals as things for
clothes or meat and various products. Bizarrely, some Buddhist orders
formally announced meat-eating to be at the discretion of the individual — a
position that not only contradicts the principle of ahimsa, but effectively
condones violence towards all.
One could no more tolerate violence selectively applied towards particular
groups of sentient beings, than one could selectively condone human rights
abuses, or selectively discriminate against particular religious or ethnic
groups. Just as it is not possible to disentangle exploitation from
violence, animal or human, there is an equivalence between speciesism and
other forms of discrimination, such as sexism and racism. For their
perception of ahimsa to be anything less than hypocrisy, they would need to
stop eating, wearing, and otherwise using nonhuman animals. Breaking the
rules of fasting, and even crossing the line for short periods into the
terrain of ultra-processed foods, is one thing, but the moral injustice of
exploiting sentient beings as objects of property, no less than human
slavery, is quite another.
It is perhaps worth emphasising that animals don’t have to demonstrate a
certain level of lucidity, logic or reason in ways characteristic of humans
in order to matter morally. They need only be considered sentient: to
perceive and feel things, to want to live and to avoid pain and suffering —
and one must accept that ending one’s life prematurely, against one’s clear
intention to live, imposes suffering. If we agree all sentient nonhuman
animals matter morally, then we must conclude they have a right not to be
considered possessions, a right not to be used as assets of value at human
disposal. If we subsequently ignore that moral characteristic, we give
grounds for slavery. In a civilised society that rejects discrimination,
abuse and slavery, that wishes to avert ecological catastrophe, and wants to
end hunger, it makes no sense not to be vegan. It is a choice we make each
time we sit down to eat.
Becoming vegan does not mean that by definition one upholds the principle of
non-violence towards all, but it is impossible to uphold that principle
without first becoming vegan. There are many countries around the world with
a relatively high percentage of vegans among their population, and
occasionally we even hear boasts of a commitment to the extent that the
uniforms and boots of their military are made of vegan materials, yet some
have a reputation for oppression, war, ethnic cleansing, and a wide range of
human rights abuses. Becoming vegan will not automatically render us any
less the most murderous species on Earth, but we cannot hope to reverse that
trend unless we become vegan.
Precisely because they participate in the exploitation of nonhuman animals,
the meat-eater who professes a commitment to spiritual, ethical or indeed
socialist principles is at best deeply flawed in their thinking, and at
worst morally suspect. The fact that non-human animals are sentient beings
that avoid pain, and have a desire to live their lives to the full, renders
veganism a moral imperative. In other words — and quite apart from the
benefits conferred by veganism with regard to personal health, the global
climate, and world hunger — killing animals is clearly contrary to reason
and to what is morally right. Whilst it is generally and somewhat
misguidedly packaged and promoted as simply a consumer choice, personal
preference or lifestyle option, veganism is at heart a moral and political
way of life, one that by necessity fits with campaigns against violence, and
with social movements against oppression in all its forms.
In the 1820s, the French politician and author of The Physiology of Taste,
Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, said, “The destiny of nations depends on the
way in which they feed themselves.” It may be read as a cautionary statement
about the choices we make and the future we want to see. To put it another
way, to change the world, start with yourself.
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