This piece is in no way intended to demean vegans or their ideals, as the cessation of suffering in all its forms would appear to be the highest of motives. This is an exploration of our other motives, about food.

YES, lovely vegan friends are coming to dinner tonight. It’s no trouble for me, as I was a vegan in the 1970’s, before the word was even mentioned really, and before it became an ‘ism”.

Historically, the Chinese and Japanese Buddhist sangha eschewed all food of animal origin, “Shojin Ryori”, “Vegetable Cooking” was a high art.

I love traditional vegan foods from Hommos to Miso, and every vegetable, fruit, grain, pulse, nut, seed, these being cultural signifiers in many places, making up the largest proportion of the meal, almost everywhere…. but also, almost everywhere, accompanied by meat/fish/seafood or dairy most of the time.

So dinner tonight will be no trouble for me, and I will get vegan accolades because I’ve eaten like this for 50 years now and am a damned good cook.

In any case I only eat meat 3-4 times a week, and small serves.

Clearly I’m happy to drop the meat and or dairy for the night, as having a pleasant evening is what we all want, enjoying each other’s company, the food and the occasion. 

What has started to bother me, is that today, vegans would not show me the same courtesy.

During my past meat and dairy-free days, on birthdays Xmas or celebrations, I didn’t mind eating the vegetables which were cooked with the roast meat/chook, or the cakes containing eggs and milk.

 I politely avoided the meat and others simply respected that….I was a “vedjo” and all was fine.

Not so today, vegan friends demand vegan food or the event doesn’t happen. Most if not all vegans have been carnivores to some degree for most of their life, and continued living, but once the vegan stance is taken, the word “strict” appears.

 “Strict” isn’t my favourite word, definitely onomatopoeic, resonant of the Spanish Inquisition, nuns, Methodists and clinical hygiene, and  worrying with respect to food.

Recently some vegan friends brought their own dessert, which was helpful of them, but when I pointed out that the dessert I had been making for this yearly occasion, for the last 15 years, had always been vegan…a fab apple crumble, and still was, long before they had even heard that word….they had never noticed, but suddenly it was of such import, they had to bring their own untainted dessert.

Being vegan is not an imperative, unless for clinical reasons. It is pure mind, purely a choice. Arguments re saving the planet by becoming vegan are dwarfed by the effect of the mining and extraction industries; while reduction/rationalisation of (meat/dairy) consumption is realistic, righteousness is not, nor is it well accepted.

I began to wonder what would happen to my vegan friends if they did eat the vegetables cooked with the roast? Or accidentally ate something forbidden. What did they think would happen to them? Would they burst, pus hitting the roof, or sink into a malaise?, diarrhoea, some form of shame, guilt, horror perhaps requiring the absolution of a juice fast to detox?

The answer may be, nothing real(ly).

Having just read Catherine Nixey’s, “The Darkening Age”, subtitled “The Christian destruction of the classical world”, the actions of the early zealot Christians struck a chord. It wasn’t until I read about St Augustine’s pronouncements I realised why.

Augustine was the first important Christian theologian, and a hardliner. He set the mould for structured Christianity. As Christianity stated to dominate the Roman empire, he was utterly uncompromising about the pagans, who were the bulk of folk at the time. 

They should be shunned in every way; not to talk with them, enter their houses, and particularly not to share food with them. 

Of course christians now are generally not discriminatory about food, easy dinner guests. The new practitioners of Augustines zealotry are the vegans, who will not eat with you, though you may eat with them.

Indeed not sharing the meal has become an article of faith.

Is that alarming in the midst of such seemingly compassionate ideology?.

Perhaps what’s needed is a comedian, not a nutritionist, to cure the irony deficiency?

What’s more, the modern vegan trend of invading farms and animal factories, is just what the christian zealots did. All those broken noses on statuary are almost the zealots trademark, and they invaded and trashed  pagan homes, libraries and temples.

Using food as a weapon and a metaphor for societal ills, has an equal and opposite manifestation in the middle kingdom, China.

In their pragmatic manner, Chinese authorities have decided that cows milk is the key food which gives westerners their (evidently envied) body size and athletic abilities. For all history, the Chinese have never eaten dairy products, particularly milk, the drink of yin-deficient barbarians.

 Because of this, the government has purchased as many  dairies as possible in foreign countries ( now causing a political storm in Australia), and turned half of Mongolia into a massive dairy farm .

They are also building dairy plants and lot-feed facilities to maximise production.

The scramble to purchase Australian milk-based baby formula has left supermarkets empty of that product, which is bought up by agents and shipped back to China in huge quantities.

The Soybeans which since time immemorial supplied the country with (vegan) soy milk, dowfu (tofu), soy sauce etc, are now being grown in Brazil to feed Chinese cows (and western vegans).

That there can be such opposite views about milk from the land which invented soy milk and the land which prizes cow milk, demonstrates the culinary dissonance afforded by our prosperity and our new gastro-global minds.

This is a growing confrontation because dietary prohibitions prevent social intercourse, and many vegans, “us vegans”, want this end-game confrontation. It is the new inyourface nonconformism, albeit with visceral roots, the ultimate fuck-you to the system…food is the underpinning of everything.

That is to be understood in the context of a systematic shut-down of most avenues of protest about clearly inequitable and corrupt governments/societies, the system, Babylon.

But as even Sun Tzu would acknowledge, in opposing “the man”, opposing your allies is self-defeating.

Recently as I drove up to a road Stop sign, it had been altered to say “Stop eating animals”, but the carnivorous graffiti scrawled underneath said, “without barbecue sauce”.

-JD