I would love to be vegan but I'm weak
Hi Loopy,
You have answered honestly the question I suggested you pose yourself. I will answer the question posed by RogerDis, “Why are you vegan?” Put on your seat belts and sit back. This could be a long ride.
Are you old enough to remember the BBC sitcom “The Good Life”? That is the life my wife and I were leading except we were in the country not in Suburbia. We strived for as much self-sufficiency as it was possible to have in a modern world. And we knew what we were about. I had grown up on a farm. My wife had gone to Agricultural College where just one of her many accomplishments was to be a prize winning cheese maker.
Amongst other stock we kept goats. The surplus milk and cheese were sold. Our children loved growing up with the animals. When a male kid needed slaughter I would take it off to the abattoir and later bring the result home to go in the freezer. Smallholders do this. They look upon the animal as an animal when alive but as meat when dead.
At the dinner table one evening our eight year old looked at the meat on his plate and asked, “Is this Blossom?” We had to answer truthfully. He said he would not eat it and declared himself vegetarian.
Out of the mouths of babes…… We discussed the ethics of it all and decided there and then that he was right. But we also knew that Blossom was not meat because we wanted the meat. Blossom was meat because we wanted the milk from his mother.
We had heard of these weirdo vegan types but had always dismissed them as cranks. We put an advert in the local paper asking for help and hence learned about the Vegan Society. That was the only support to be had all those years ago, long before the internet, but we have been vegan ever since.
We will offer advice if asked by someone we believe is genuinely interested but shy away from mere conversational chit-chat on the subject. What we do not do is to preach. We appreciate that each individual has to feel their own way toward moral convictions.
Roger.
