Compromise

"I'm a vegan now - but not the eggs." GameFace

We were watching one of our favourite comedy programs last night - GameFace - when one of the characters said the above - or something very similar. Taken out of context it's probably not that funny but it made me smile in, I have to confess, a superior sort of way.

Superior in that I'm sure that the show was poking fun at the notion of veganism, which is easy to do and which I am happy to go along with. Well it was probably poking fun at extremism and veganism seems to be a form of extremism - at least to outsiders like me. I am very wary of extremism of any kind.

To my simple mind vegans won't eat anything from animals basically because of cruelty to animals and caring for the planet. And yes they also make all kinds of claims for it being super healthy, but I think many of those claims are not necessarily proven, and besides to be on a vegan diet is incredibly difficult and if you are not careful could lead to ill health. Well it seems that way to me.

So I could never be a vegan. It's too hard both in the sense of missing delectable things like cheese, butter and eggs but also in working out how to get the amount of protein and other valuable things like iron and calcium.

Eggs though are an interesting illustration of vegan extremes. I found an article entitled If Hens lay eggs anyway, why wouldn't vegans eat them? from How Stuff Works which summed up the thinking thus:

"Most vegans consider it unethical to consume or commodify the bodies or products of other animals." Jesslyn Shields - How Stuff Works

'Commodify' being the key word here. I must admit I have reasoned to myself that if the eggs were organic and free-range - I mean really free-range and organic, not the 'ordinary' free-range that I buy, then what could possibly be wrong with eating them? But no - not good enough. Reasons given are:

• domesticated, even 'heritage' hens have been bred so far away from a wild chicken that they are not 'normal' anyway

• Male baby chicks are killed at birth (true) as being useless for egg production Although:

The egg industry practice of immediately killing male chicks might end as soon as the year 2020, due to new technology that allows farmers to tell the sex of a chick inside an egg, within days of being laid. All they have to figure out now is how to apply this technology to a million eggs at a time." Jesslyn Shields - How Stuff Works

Not that this would satisfy a vegan or animal rights advocate I guess. I mean it's like the abortion debate isn't it? When does life begin?

Back to reasons for vegans not eating eggs:

• Unfertilized eggs are not natural (not true - chickens keep on producing eggs all the time)

• After three years or so chickens are killed anyway because they don't keep laying eggs at the same rate.

I think there were a few more reasons given, but even if you just kept your own chooks in your own back yard and allowed them to roam free (well you'd need to protect them from foxes), and let them live out their natural lives, then what's wrong with eating their unfertilised eggs?

My own reasoning about raising your own applies to dairy as well. As do the vegans' own reasoning no doubt.

What it certainly illustrates is that you need to have money to be a vegan. Well you don't really, but if you want to make use of all those 'pretend' food products then you do. Or if you want to buy free range, organic, and all that. And if you want to spend hours in the kitchen manipulating rare and expensive ingredients so that you too can make things that look like eggs. But I don't doubt they won't taste like one.

Going back to the 'it's not natural' argument about eggs and the chickens that lay them, the same argument could surely be applied to just about every plant that we eat. Centuries of hybridisation and breeding have transformed the original plants into completely different things. You would probably not recognise the originals in some cases.

I do get the basic message - we should not be killing animals for food and we should not be destroying the planet through the industrialisation of animal husbandry. Although it could be argued that growing plants for food can be equally destructive - think about all the forests burnt down for growing crops.

Absolutely it would be better for climate change and the ecosystem if there were fewer large herds of cattle in the world, etc. etc. But it certainly is too hard for most of us to go vegan, even vegetarian.

The poor of the third world may, by sheer necessity, be vegan, or at least vegetarian, but in the 'west' as we still refer to it, I am willing to be that most vegans are not poor. Indeed it may be cheaper to leave meat out of your diet although somewhat ironically some of the cheapest food you can get is the MacDonald's takeaway. Although even they have vegan options now. As an aside isn't there something rather weird about that Hungry Jack's ad in which people are eating a vegan burger and saying it's as good as a Whopper. If they love Whoppers then they are not vegans, so why would they be eating a vegan burger? And if they are vegan how would they know what a Whopper tastes like?

Increasingly, we all compromise. Meat consumption is falling I believe because a lot of us, and I include myself in this, are eating at least one vegetarian meal a week, and when we eat meat we tend to eat smaller portions. I think we are also paying more attention to things like free-range and organic, and RSPCA approved. A quick glance at the egg options in your local supermarket will show a declining amount of options in cage-laid eggs, and an increasing amount in free-range - or the ultimate compromise - barn-laid.

You can't please all of the people all of the time. People (and animals) are unique creatures all with minds of their own. They like different things. And doesn't that make life interesting and always surprising?

It applies to completely different things than food as well - religion, politics, economics, art - you name it and you will find extreme views. And it's the extreme views that are simultaneously to be admired for their dedication, determination and ability to change the world, and despised - for their ability to cause conflict and destruction and their ability to change the world. Diplomacy which tries to get things done - well it should - relies on compromise. And so it should be with food.

At least to begin with. Little steps. We seem to be moving ever so slowly towards a more plant based diet and maybe one day our diets will be completely plant based. Or our meat will be artificially made in a lab. Yes they are working on it. But going to an extreme and castigating others for not following is not persuasive.

So let's compromise for now. Let's be a pescatarian, a flexitarian, an ovo-vegetarian a lacto-vegetarian even an ovo-lacto-vegetarian or a raw vegan. Vegans do tend to be vegans though with no variations - I mean a raw vegan is even more extreme than vegan. I know veganism has been around for a long time - I mean if you are a true Buddhist you would have to be vegan wouldn't you? But somehow it has suddenly become fashionable. Let's hope the basic tenets of the movement do move us towards a more ethically conscious world. Just let us not be bludgeoned into it.