Plant Based

What is Plant Based/Vegan?

The word “vegan” was coined in the late 1940s by the founder of the vegan society; veganism in practice meant abstaining from any practices which exploit animals for food, commodities, work, hunting, and all other uses. The defintion used by the modern Vegan Society was created in 1951 by Oxford theologian Leslie J Cross.

Veganism: The principle of the emancipation of animals from exploitation by man
— Leslie J Cross 1951 - Oxford University theologian and tutor

Who goes vegan, and why?

Today, veganism has seen explosive growth in many countries including the UK. According to a 2019 poll¹ surveying people from almost 100 countries, the most popular reason to adopt a vegan diet is for animals (68%). However a significant number adopt the diet primarily for health benefits (17%), or the environment (10%).

Some vegans who adopt the diet solely for health benefits use the term “plant based” diet. Due to the high calorific content of oils, those looking for benefits may also avoid cooking oils, but this is only for health benefitis and is seperate from being vegan for animal ethics reasoning.

A vegan diet can be extremely healthy (despite what you might think when you see my high biscuit intake…). The NHS has published its own advice for ensuring a healthy vegan diet². They have reported on many health benefits including diabetes type II risk reduction³, and suggest that the diet can be helpful for achieving and maintaining a healthy weight.

Ethical Reasoning

I don’t think it is particularly necessary or helpful to describe my motivations for a vegan diet as solely for either the animals or environment, but instead as a response to an overwhelming number of positive arguments outweighing negative ones.

The most convincing argument for me to turn vegetarian (before becoming vegan) was for the environment. Have a go at calculating the emissions from your current diet using a CO2 equivalent emissions calculator⁴. Most UK made animal produce now comes from factory farms⁵. Large swathes of rainforest are chopped down so that feed can be grown for cattle. The intensive farming processes used degrades the soil and requires large amounts of fertiliser. Deforestation of the Amazon rainforest is largely due to the Brazilian beef industry⁶, the largest in the world.

In order for the ever rising global demand for meat to be met, we require more and more land to grow crop for intensively farmed animals, causing an ever rising amount of agriculture attributed CO2 equivalent emissions.

What about smaller scale non factory farming, is it possible to switch back and enjoy some good old British beef⁷? The answer is overwhelmingly no^8,9, because more traditional animal agriculture still wastes huge amounts of resources and land. Roughly twice as much land is used for grazing worldwide as for crop production, but grazing provides just 1.2% of the world’s protein¹⁰. Traditional farming cannot meet the current demand for meat and animal produce. At the very best, this means we can on exceedingly infrequent occasions enjoy red meat, and on a weekly basis small quantities of poultry, dairy, egg. On the other hand, if we as a nation switched solely to plants, britain could be not only self sufficient, but an exporter of foods.

So we’ve established that meat and animal produce is exceedingly wasteful of resources and land, but why go “fully” vegan. Why not vegetarian, or flexetarian?

The most efficient way to produce meat and animal products is through factory farming. This method of production is abhorrent, and I don’t think many people could watch “Land of Hope and Glory” or “Earthings” and still feel completely comfortable with their diet. So if we do produce even small amounts of meat and animal produce for the world, it will have to be through smaller, more traditional farms, because it is not moral to prefer to eat any animal produce from intensive factory farms.

Under capitalism, traditional farms are still pressured to produce as much as possible from their limited resources. Modern farm animals are bread to be as fat and efficient as possible, often leaving them with greatly reduced lifespans. Whilst government enforced environmental regulations must come in to place in order to meet Paris agreements, it isn’t at all clear that any government is close to implementing rules and legislations that ensure good animal welfare in all farms, when you can’t even trust optional ‘ethical’ standards such as red tractor¹¹ or RSPCA¹² approved.

If we ignore the pressure of capitalism to exploit animals, and imagine a hypothetical farm where all is done in the interest of the animals, this still leaves the following obvious problems (among many other ethical dilenmas):

• To produce meat, you must slaughter animals
• To produce milk, you must remove the male calf from the cow
• Animals have been bread to unhealthy proportions to maximise profit; so we should seek healthier breeds, which are likely to be more expensive.

It is unrealistic to expect a farm would keep animals until they die of old age, and quite difficult to imagine a farm existing in our current capitalist system that would ensure the wellbeing of all calves whilst producing reasonable amounts of milk. Such methods would be very inefficient compared to plant based alternatives.

Producing eggs in an ethical manner would require considering problems like whether using breeds which have shortened lifespans due to overlaying are ethical, is it financially feasible to have truely free range eggs where the hens are well treated and male chicks not killed at birth?

To me, it seems like the arguments for animal agriculture require imagining hypothetical socialist paradise farms, which ignore their inefficiency of land management and workers.

It makes sense to choose veganism.

Veganism is not Consumerism

As a sort of footnote or extra to this blog post, I want to quickly clarify that I don’t see my diet as a consumerist choice, but more as a political or ideological stance.

I want to see justice for animals, and for the environment. But I also want to see justice for humanity. Justice for all people who are exploited by the billionaires who make beyond astronomical profits from our labour.

Maybe there are some occasions where eating meat is ethical, and it depends on personal circumstance. And there are situations where animal lives can’t be protected or are invasive to an ecosystem.

More broadly, there are many who don’t have the means to prepare vegan meals because healthy and natural whole foods are outpriced and inconvenienced by our society reliance on prepackaged meals.

But that is missing the point, which is that we as a society should seriously ask ourselves why we aren’t making a shift not just in diet, but in all our behaviour where our actions have avoidable negative consequences to others. Even if we can’t make all of the changes we want to on an individual level, we should campaign for their more widespread support.

Our world has the potential to provide so much more for so many people, but instead natural resources are exploited to the extreme, with warnings of catastrophic climate change ignored. All so that the wealthy ultra rich billionaires can be even wealthier.