Vegan May

I saw a fascinating piece on the 7.30 Report tonight about the world food crisis and one line which struck me was this: There is enough food for everybody in the world, however the distribution is completely inequitable. One of the reasons is that as populations get wealthier and move towards middle class, their diet contains proportionally a lot more dairy and meat, and both of these take up a hell of a lot more food energy and land to produce than diets which are primarily based of grains and vegetables.

Very timely advice seeing that tomorrow, on the 1st May I have declared VEGAN MONTH! Yes for the month of May I'm showing my solidarity with (as my work colleague Sarah so delightfuly put it) the debeaked chickens and the raped cows!

I've been reading an amazing book given to me on my birthday this year, called "The Ethics of What We Eat", exploring the real impact of our food choices. It is fascinating and sometimes disturbing stuff, but riveting and a great read too. I think some of this information should be mandatory in the school health curriculum. How can we be making proper choices on what we put in our mouths when we have no real understanding of the effect these choices have on animal welfare, environmental and human labour issues around the world? Check out this article on it and I highly recommend the book.



After getting halfway through this I thought why not try it, just for a month. I had been considering giving up dairy for a month anyway to see how my body felt as I've never thought it was natural for an adult human to be suckling the teat of a cow. The only problem is that I'm addicted to cheese and yoghurt! But for 4 weeks I can do it and see how I feel.

I'm also a dessert / cake / chocolate hog and I was considering trying to go cold turkey for a month on overly sugary junk treats too. So why not go the whole hog (turkey? hog? Is is a coincidence that I'm using so many animal-related figures of speech?) and try veganism for a month.

Sarah (my wife) is on board too after getting started on the book, and my colleague Sarah from work got all excited when I told her yesterday as it's something she's wanted to try for a while but needed a push. At the moment it's just the three of us, but VEGAN MONTH HERE WE COME!