How activist vegans are making their voices heard

Veganism is on the rise, and in the UK battle lines are being drawn between the farming community and those that wish they didn’t exist, writes reporter Dean Cornish.

Source: SBS Dateline

Driving through the misty English countryside, cattle and sheep appear out of the grey – as still as statues on rolling green hills. It’s such a verdant and peaceful scene, it’s hard to see what the fuss is about –but here in the UK, battle lines are being drawn. Activist vegans are rising in numbers, and they’re pissed off.

I’m here reporting a story for Dateline  about meat and dairy, and passion –you can’t talk about meat without talking about the environment, and Earth’s exploding population. That stuff most of us are putting in our mouths? Well lots of people think we need to change our relationship with it.

It’s so damn hard to escape meat these days. And by escape - I mean, just, like, not put it in your mouth.

Dateline: The Vegan Wars

It is so hard not to put meat in your mouth these days because you are a human being. In a developed country. In developed countries we eat meat. In fact, that’s an indicator of economic escalation and success. We eat the meat! We can afford to eat the meat, now!

Prosperity means killing and eating and consuming the flesh of stuff. It’s wired into us. It’s how we evolved. It’s what separates us from the animals.

We eat them.

‘Bloody’ is considered a gourmet way to eat a steak.

Bloody is fun and edgy and gastronomical, but bloody is also a reminder. This thing lived, drew breath, and had organs which pumped a viscous, oxygen-rich liquid to nourish the rest of its body which… we consume.

What most of us don’t see – perhaps the garnish blinds us – is the vegan view of the world. Vegans see the death that surrounds us. Cute animals are sacrificed unwillingly– to the tune of 56 billion per year– for our survival.

We don’t give them empathy. We give them ketchup.

Man, these vegans though. They’re empathetic. Empathetic on a whole new level.

Every time you talk to Joey Carbstrong he says: “Imagine if it was a dog”.

Yeah, imagine if it was dogs in multi-layered trucks going to slaughterhouses and ending up as convenience meat or muffin-toppings. Imagine a grass-fed dog being served with great fanfare at your local gastro-pub, with crispy fries thrice-cooked in dog fat.

It’s a great argument. Any human will take a pause for mental self-flagellation thinking about Fido on two-to-three plates a day over several decades of their lives.

But there’s also the idea that if it came down to pure survival, you would eat your dog.

And this is the modern conundrum. We are not struggling for survival.

We could be soon – food insecurity is a thing in big cities in the Western world, let alone in developing countries – and it’s famously said that any civilization is three square meals away from revolution. But damn humans – we’ve got to eat something, and there’ll be almost ten billion of us by 2050. For all of us to get sustenance, we might have to resort to insects – or lab-grown meat, such as that which Peter Vestrate makes.

Peter is so Dutch I can’t even believe. He’s so Dutch that he makes jokes in the same tone that he says facts. Luckily I’m from New Zealand so I understand.

He’s growing actual meat in a biosphere from actual biopsies from cows. It’s ethical ‘cruelty-free’ meet – but made of real cow, which we really have to point out because everyone’s had an ‘Impossible Burger’ now and thinks it’s Jesus on toast. Peter’s stuff is real cow, and it’s grown strand-by-strand like the ear that you saw on the back of a mouse that time in 2004 and it’s weird – but it could be the future, if he can get the price down from $600k per patty which is the current cost of the grand total of two patties he’s produced.

The vegans would like to see the world go meat and dairy-free and so some of them have taken to social media – threatening, bad-mouthing and one-starring meat and dairy producers to the death of their business. Joey said Australian dairy farmers should kill themselves. These empaths extend more courtesy to animals than they do to their fellow humans in some cases. As their numbers continue, we can only hope that the discussion becomes a bit more civil.

Driving around the UK, I decide to put a personal moratorium on ‘convenience meat’. If something’s slapped on a muffin as bacon or ham, just for the sake of it – it’s convenience meat. Beef jerky in the ‘impulse’ section of a supermarket or service station? Convenience meat also. This journey has become a personal one, and I’ve decided that ‘ethical carnivore’ is a term that I can identify with… an attempt to eschew mass-produced animal products. To eat less, and eat better meat.

But ethics are such a luxury too, aren’t they?