After yesterdays thoughts on a ‘best possible’ diet I thought I might do an experiment for a week, trying out Vegan only.  I want to see if it’s do-able without eating loads of extra imported tropical products – coconut mostly.  Everything specifically vegan seems to have coconut in it!

Walking around Asda a minute ago I found myself in a real grump.  Thinking ‘what’s the point of this? – I don’t know why I’m choosing to do it when I’m quite irritated by the whole Veganism thing going on right now’.  It’s not that I’m against animal rights or anything, I think that animal welfare is a really important topic, it’s just that it all seems a bit extreme, and some what faddy. Yet again someone is profiting off the back of people’s need to feel ‘on trend’, or in with the ‘now’. And how many people are actually thinking about the wider implications of their choices. – Does this vegan product have palm oil in it for a start.  Or, is it highly processed, and therefore adding to the destruction of health, natural environments and the welfare of the planet through the need for chemical additives, processed white sugar, and all the machinery and fuel needed to run a food producing factory.

I wonder how many vegans live in modern homes, snort cocaine, drive environmentally unfriendly cars, and so on and so forth.  I don’t expect vegan’s to be able to achieve a perfect life where they never accidentally kill a spider or anything, but I would at least expect them to have thought about all the wider implications of their actions and understand their own reasoning on this.  And this is what I want to achieve, I want to understand my own position regarding food and the environment and in the end feel that I can squarely justify my own reasoning to anyone who asks.  After all, the world that we are currently privileged to live in, despite it’s multitudinous flaws is pretty luxuriant in terms of food choices, and the fact that it is readily available in great quantity. 

This is what has arisen from the Blackcurrant philosophy, the notion of how easily we get food, and in what quantity.

For me to be able to eat mindfully would require me to slow right down, stop drinking coffee, get over my addiction to sugar (– because this tends to cause the high-speed snaffle reflex), and be able to sustain a varied enough organic (wherever possible) diet of locally produced food. A difficult if not entirely unachievable prospect for someone looking after a family of 5 on a low budget!

The experiment starts tomorrow morning, so I’ll keep updating to keep myself committed, for now I might check out Cowspiracy or something.