Anyone feel like reading a couple of hundred posts by a pack of white middle-class professional holier-than-though people convinced they are morally superior because they choose to not eat meat; engaging in a session of mutual back-scratching? If so, check out the vegetarian diatribe on ABC Life Matters with Presenter Richard Aedy.
I was going to call it a ‘discussion’ but that would be entirely misleading. It’s actually just one big mutual ego-massaging session full of dull people obsessed with themselves and bagging anyone who has the temerity to admit they eat meat. Inevitably, there’s also a slice who bang on about spirituality, morality etc, but without any in-depth discussion. It’s about as deep as a Bedourie puddle. There’s not even the slightest mention of related issues such as sustainability, recycling, native plant gardens, weed control, water quality & quantity management or population control. No, it’s simply ‘I don’t eat meat so the planet will be a fabulous place as a result.’ And there’s no mention of how ‘mustn’t harm a creature on the planet’ disciples deal with such realities as rat infestations. (Rats are very smart creatures and make great pets. But feral rats are a disease-carrying scourge. Do vegans believe in ratsack, or do they share their homes with vermin?)
And do any of these people produce any food themselves? Well I couldn’t find a single person on the forum that mentioned growing their own food. Only endless talk (and whining) about what they eat that others have slaved to produce for them (and packed, transported, retailed, etc). I doubt any have ever patted a cow or seen possum abodes bulldozed to make way for a soya bean crop to produce their tofu. Let alone thought about the ethical dilemmas of what to do about such problems as domestic and feral cats – which of course eat native animals, from birds to reptiles; and the issue of ‘if you are a vegan and one of your children gets an illness that can only be treated successfully by using animal-derived products, would you do go ahead with treatment or not?’ And what about the reality that if all the world’s food was grown organically, many more thousands of people would die of starvation each year? And that if no-one ate meat, many more millions of hectares of native vegetation would have to be clearfelled, annually, in order to produce sufficient protein to feed the world? But no, those big complicated ethical dilemmas are all a bit too tricky to consider; and anyway when you’re busy trotting off to the local lab to get your iron levels tested every five minutes (at taxpayer’s expense), and there’s dinner to think about, there’s no time.
At a guess, more than 90% of these contributors would live in particular suburbs in southern capital cities; 90% plus would be uni educated; and the vast majority would never have met a farmer – let alone spent enough time working on a farm to have obtained a solid understanding of at least one form of agriculture and the realities of the essentials of life. Let alone have the slightest grasp of the balance of the web of life and the term ‘everything in moderation’ (including self-obsession).
I have enormous respect for anyone producing a serious quantity of food for themselves to eat – whether they are vegan, vegetarian or omnivores. But for a pack of pen pushers who’d be flat out fitting an orange tree into their Paddington Terrace courtyard to go banging on about a topic they clearly know absolutely nothing about, as if they are experts with superior food production knowledge when they actually wouldn’t recognise a food producer if they fell over one, is utterly exasperating. Where do you start educating such people?! Hmmm I guess first they have to extract their heads, so they can at least see and hear. Those they mix with all agree with them, so their one-eyed views are just consolidated by their mates – it seems like absolute gospel to them (‘everyone knows that…’ becomes an absolute truth for them). On the rare occasions they meet anyone who dares to disagree with them, they write these dissenting comments off as ‘defensiveness’ and ‘guilt’ for eating ‘poor defenceless animals’. Yet these vegetarian prophets, yapping on about how many years they’ve been vegan and how they’ve got iron levels now higher than they had when they ate meat, are under the illusion that they’re actually having a discussion. When in fact it’s just a massive monologue.
It is all summed up by someone called Chris, who wrote: ‘…and Sir Robert Hutchinson said “Vegetarianism is harmless enough, though it is apt to fill a man with wind and self righteousness.” (Address to the BMA, 1930). Spot on, Chris, but I’d add massive hypocrisy to the list.
Tags: Australian meat industry, Image of the bush, Vegans & Vegos