On Self-Serving Hypocrisy

At lunchtime today I was sitting in a new cafe which has recently opened in Northampton, The Green Bean. It's a cute little place and extremely vegetarian and vegan friendly - their VBLAT is my current absolute favourite.....But that aside, what got my attention and made me fume was an incident which occured at the table next to me. As My Beloved and I were waiting for our lunch to come out, we noticed the folks at the neighbouring table receive their food. The older man had ordered tofu with steamed greens and brown rice (it looked awesome, I have to admit) but his younger companion had plumped for a cheeseburger. OK, this is an omni place, so this choice is not surprising in itself.

What blew my socks off was the way they linked hands across the table and bent their heads to say grace. I was really struck by the question - as I watched them thanking their god for the meal - of whether the cow appealed to his god as he faced slaughter. It seems to me, admittedly as a person of no specific religious doctrine, that the act of praising your god for receiving the bloody result of abject misery, suffering and horror (aka 'meat') is perhaps the worst kind of abomination.

I haven't necessarily thought through my feelings on religious people who preach compassion and mercy and then happily consume the flesh of a fellow creature who ultimately knew neither. But I suspect that I have little patience for such blinkered, self-serving hypocrisy.

Stay Vegan, Friends.

Worth Thinking About...

...when they say that veganism is a just new fad.

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"Can you really ask what reason Pythagoras had for abstaining from flesh? For my part I rather wonder both by what accident and in what state of soul or mind the first man did so, touched his mouth to gore and brought his lips to the flesh of a dead creature, he who set forth tables of dead, stale bodies and ventured to call food and nourishment the parts that had a little before bellowed and cried, moved and lived. How could his eyes endure the slaughter when throats were slit and hides flayed and limbs torn from limb? How could his nose endure the stench? How was it that the pollution did not turn away his taste, which made contact with the sores of others and sucked juices and serums from mortal wounds?

[...]

It is certainly not lions and wolves that we eat out of self-defense; on the contrary, we ignore these and slaughter harmless, tame creatures without stings or teeth to harm us, creatures that, I swear, Nature appears to have produced for the sake of their beauty and grace. But nothing abashed us, not the flower-like tinting of the flesh, not the persuasiveness of the harmonious voice, not the cleanliness of their habits or the unusual intelligence that may be found in the poor wretches. No, for the sake of a little flesh we deprive them of sun, of light, of the duration of life to which they are entitled by birth and being."

- Plutarch