Wednesday, January 20, 2016

Give People What They Want, 2016


A few days ago, I met a highly intelligent lawyer who was recruited to one of Dr. Esselstyn's vegan diet studies. She told me, "My cholesterol went way down, I lost weight, and I had so much more energy!"

However, she missed cheese and eggs too much. At first, she thought she could just add those back in, but soon found herself back on her previous diet.

Now it is easy to mock, ridicule, or attack her, but I'd like to make two points:

1. This is exactly the type of person we need to convince to change her diet if we are going to bring about a truly different world. So it is better to understand than insult.

2. I find it easy to understand where she's coming from. I first stopped eating animals 30 years ago now, and being vegan is generally super easy for me. But for most people, vegan is as difficult and unthinkable as raw foodism is to me.

Seriously – you could utterly convince me that going raw would fix my chronic back pain, my Crohn's disease, my insomnia, and also prevent another lung collapse, and I still wouldn't go raw!


Food is one of the major pleasures in my life. It simply isn't enough to just have a longer life; for me and for most, we need pleasure and joy in our life.


This is why I believe we not only need to be joyful examples of compassionate living, but we also have to actively promote cruelty-free food that will bring pleasure to our non-veg audience. And we should also support all efforts to advance plant-based food science so they can displace animal-based foods.

It may not be our current personal diet (whole foods, non-GMO, gluten free, raw, etc.), but it is the way to actually get more people to eat more cruelty-free meals. This is the only way we'll have fewer animals suffering, which, of course, remains the bottom line.


1 comment:

Jean Bettanny said...

I could not agree more! I tried giving up Sjaak's chocolates this week and it cured nothing. Makes no difference - Hooray!