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138- Going Vegan: "Staying vegan can be difficult at times"
111 Plays2 months ago
Join us in Series 2 of the Going Vegan show for conversations with people about their vegan journeys: The first signs that veganism might be an option for individuals, making the switch, the challenges, the surprises...and everything in between!
In our fourth episode of this second series, we speak to regular contributor to the show- Mark- who tells us about his many decades involvement in the animal rights movement, the challenges of being vegan throughout life challenges, and how his approach to things has evolved with his own circumstances.
To buy Mark's fantastic book 'The Humanity Trigger', visit https://www.earthislandbooks.com/product-page/the-humanity-trigger-by-mark-humanity
If you enjoy this episode, check your feed for the many other Going Vegan episodes that have been dropping throughout the last year & a bit.
If you'd like to hear more of what we do, set up all your notifications, as we release two other weekly shows: Vegan Week- where we discuss the week's vegan/animal rights news- and Vegan Talk- where we go deeper into one subject in particular that is relevant to the vegan movement.
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Enough of the Falafel is a community of people who love keeping on top of the latest news in the world of veganism & animal rights. With our podcasts we aim to keep listeners (& ourselves) informed & up-to-date with the latest developments that affect vegans & non-human animals; giving insight, whilst staying balanced; remaining true to our vegan ethics, whilst constantly seeking to grow & develop.
To get in touch, email us via enoughofthefalafel@gmail.com.
Enough of the Falafel is also on Facebook, Tiktok & Instagram @enoughofthefalafel.
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Thanks everyone for listening; give us a rating and drop us a message to say "hi"; it'll make our day!
Mark & Ant
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Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Overview
00:00:00
Speaker
My name is Mark and you're listening to The of Florida. What about your protein and what about your iron
Media Influence and Perceptions
00:00:19
Speaker
levels? So they call the media and say, hi, sorry. They're arguing like, oh, poor woe is me. Hang on a minute, you waste.
00:00:39
Speaker
long as you don't get the wee brunions with the horns, you'll be all alright. Does veganism give him superpowers?
00:00:47
Speaker
No, I cannot fly around the city. I don't have laser vision.
Mark's Vegan Journey Begins
00:00:52
Speaker
Thanks everyone for joining us for this show, now if you are a regular listener to anything from Enough of the Falafis you've probably heard Mark's dulcet tones before but what we've not delved into in huge amount of detail yet is your journey Mark to towards being vegan and and that side of things. So that is what we're going to focus on today, as with all of the Going Vegan series. And listeners, if you want to hear other people's going vegan stories, just so scroll through your podcast player.
00:01:25
Speaker
um They're the ones with the little green logo rather than the the pink or the black that the normal shows have. So Mark, go back as far into the past as you can with the first kind of little kernels of possibility that living in a vegan way or a way that avoided any kind of animal use might be a possibility. What's the furthest back you could trace those origins?
00:01:53
Speaker
furthest back i can remember any mention of say vegetarianism which is where i was at back in the i suppose early 80s when i was coming coming of age if you like would probably have been Paul McCartney from the Beatles and there'd been a reference made to him in probably every interview he ever did around then that he was a vegetarian and i i was triggered by the idea that people would have this interest in other species to such an extent that they were willing to forego what was clearly a very tasty, convenient food and ah be and be the subject of, at the very best, their curiosity, at the very worst, their hostility, I suppose. you know um and why would And why would anyone do that when it wasn't expected of them, there was no demand being made
00:02:48
Speaker
of them externally to do so in fact there was probably demands being made to not do so I guess really if if you if you were to analyze it yet yet they still did it and then okay so I was brought up in Cork City in Ireland coming of age in the early 1980s before the Catholic Church and began to disintegrate, which which was another 15 years away, really.
Cultural Influences on Dietary Choices
00:03:11
Speaker
and So it was a ah Catholic-dominated ah society that had ideas around a concept called Dominion.
00:03:20
Speaker
which is the, uh, uh, explained in Genesis, which is the first book of the Old Testament, which, uh, is all about the, um, superiority, the superiority of the human species above everything else. And that we are masters of everything we see that crawls, swims or flies. And the implication in that was that we we could do anything that we wanted with them.
00:03:46
Speaker
more or less for any reasons there was obvious there there was sort of a common consensus around that you wouldn't be cruel to your or anyone else's pet but if you didn't have a personal relationship with an individual animal then all bets were off really you know you could you could do anything to it and referring to them as it was a huge part of this syntax and language is symbolic but it's hugely symbolic and how we use the word it when we refer to other beings that are clearly male or female is odd especially when a lot when a lot of people often to refer to boats as she's and other inanimate objects as he's or she's and all non-human animals
00:04:32
Speaker
despite them clearly having a gender as always. as it So i was i was brought up I was marinated in a soup of species.
Media Impact on Vegan Beliefs
00:04:42
Speaker
Since I came out of the womb, trickles of an alternative began to seep through when we first got BBC in in Ireland. Up to then, it was a state broadcast um network called RTE, e which was highly conservative. It still is. Very parochial, very religious, even even now. and Very cheap TV as well because they had hardly had it, so it was very cheap.
00:05:09
Speaker
easy TV, very boring and very right-wing. And then the BBC came on air over in Cork around the same time that Channel 4 started up. And once I got exposed to stuff that Channel 4 were playing, in particular the movie called The the Animals film, which was made in 1982, when I saw that it just blew my mind in terms of the up-close, the personal, loud nature of the imagery. I mean, ah I knew it was happening all around me. It wasn't that I wasn't aware that the ham I was eating or the chicken I was eating had once been moving around and wanted to stay that way. I mean, I wasn't naive to that extent, but seeing it seeing it happen in front of you, even if it's just through a screen, was, I found it horrifying, absolutely horrifying. I could possibly have accepted that as a reality of the world I lived in. What I found fun harder to accept probably was that there was nothing being done about it, really, of any significance.
00:06:07
Speaker
some people might have been talking about it, and Paul McCartney was a vegetarian, but in terms of people challenging this consensus, this status quo, there was nothing happening in Ireland, really, of of any significance. When I say nothing, I mean there was one or two organizations that were a single issue that were banned hair coursing, which is a particularly gruesome so sort of blood sport, or um there was an anti-vivisection society.
00:06:32
Speaker
that spent most of their time condemning the ALF over in the UK than they did drawing attention to the atrocities being carried out on animals in in Ireland. So I i found myself coming of it really sort of coming in in a world where um I felt there was nothing being done to address this ah horror
Activism and Punk Culture's Role
00:06:54
Speaker
at all. And I didn't want to live in a world, or and I didn't want to be in a society where nothing was being done about this.
00:07:01
Speaker
So the only option I had was to do something about it. So I won't go into too much detail about all of that, but um I ended up in the Hunt Saboteurs Association. But you were you were asking about the ah the vegan journey specifically. I went vegetarian when I was 13. The concept of veganism wasn't around, wasn't in my head until I think I was 15 or 16 and I began to get exposed to an oracle punk, Pras, Cerudimentary Penae, Conflict, Fluxipink Indians and these sort of bands who banged on about animal rights and and veganism and had ah contact addresses to the Vegan Society in London on the backs of their albums.
00:07:47
Speaker
So I wrote to them, I got a lot of stuff back in the post. Obviously this is pre World Wide Web, so the World Wide Web was the post office. um So things took longer, but you know, the information was more or less the same.
00:07:59
Speaker
And I devoured this, and i've I've never been a huge animal person. I don't stop ever at every cat. i I walk past to stroke them and talk to them for 20 minutes. I might do that the other time, but I'm not an animal lover in the traditional sense of the word. I do love animals and in the same way as I love people. And then also, I hate some people, and I've come across animals that I hate police dogs. We've mentioned this in a previous episode, I believe. I don't like police dogs. Police dogs don't like me. This is fair enough, given the dynamic that I find myself in when I'm interacting with with these animals. So animals, non-human animals, are people in a sense. They have personalities, typically. So it made complete sense to me, the whole vegan thing. I was just born i was born was sort of facing in this direction, basically. I don't know how or why.
00:08:55
Speaker
it happened, it was a chance, was it was was I exposed to things at a certain point in time that I made sense out of them in a particular way that landed me in this ideology. I don't really know, but I do know that it's it's it's made more and more sense to me as I've been vegan and I turned vegan but when I was 18. But that wasn't always a straight journey either, okay? that I went back to being vegetarian when I was 30 for about eight years. To my great shame, I must say now, and it's it's a head scratcher. We're all products of the society that we're in. When I went vegan, I went vegan as soon as I left home. As soon as I could, I went vegan. When I left home about 18, moved from Cork to Limerick to go to our college, had a wonderful three
Challenges and Health Concerns
00:09:42
Speaker
years. I started vegan day one there and I moved in with another guy who was vegan.
00:09:46
Speaker
and i haven't looked back since except then when i was 30 i went to india for three months on my own um and that wasn't the plan i was meant to go with a friend of mine fell and um that fell through and i ended up there and on my own and as i was there for three months and about a month in i was so weak I found it hard to get out of the bed of the hotels I was staying in. The heat was killing me. The bizarre nature of the society there was really throwing me off. And I felt weaker and weaker by the day. And I convinced myself that I must be lacking protein.
00:10:25
Speaker
or something like this and and the propaganda from the opposition that I've been hearing all my life that veganism has to be bad for you and you'll feel weak and you'll feel this and all that I thought was was coming to fruition. ah Apart from that many years later i was diagnosed with sleep apneea which I don't know if the listeners are familiar with this condition but it's where muscles in your tongue weaken when you're asleep causing your your tongue to slide back over your esophagus causing you to essentially start to suffocate yourself until your brain kicks in and suddenly flips your tongue back into position again
00:11:06
Speaker
and you you breathe again suddenly and that this can it' can be ah pauses in breathing that can last for and up to half a minute. So I was diagnosed with this condition as I say many years later but because I was getting such poor quality sleep every night because I did the time. and This also added massively to my exhaustion. Because I didn't know I had sleep apnea, I believed the propaganda all around me and assumed that and maybe I do need calcium from eggs and and things like this in order to get my energy back.
00:11:47
Speaker
and I said I've got to see if if ah if I go back to being vegetarian if that helped helped because i was I was on my own. I wasn't in danger or ah ah ill or anything but i was I was very weak and I couldn't concentrate. It was actually the heat really more more than anything else that was throwing me out but i I didn't realize this. I'd never been out of Europe before. So I started to eat eggs. ah ah India is is easy to be vegetarian in, very easy. to in In fact it's geared towards that. ah Much harder to be vegan in because they use ghee which is a type of butter
00:12:23
Speaker
Oil in loads of things right it's it's almost an in an indiscriminate use is a bit like sort of fish paste in Thailand and it's increasingly easier to be vegan but back then it it really wasn't and so i started to eat eggs and cheese again. And then when I arrived back in the UK, which is where I was living at the time, I carried it on until for about four or five more years. And i was I was halfway between being vegetarian and vegan. I dropped out of being involved in animal rights. I was ah working as a psychiatric nurse, pretty pretty busy during, yeah and I was, ah I didn't, I never drank milk again and I've never touched meat since I was 13.
00:13:05
Speaker
but pieces of dairy, some chocolate and some cheeses, I just couldn't drop from from from my diet. I'd gotten back into the swing of it when I was in India and I couldn't get out of it again when I was back in the UK. And I'm saying all this soon now, ah sometimes when I'm asked about, oh, how long have you been vegan? And I have 10 seconds to give the answer. I'll say I turned vegan when I was 18. I don't go on like this because it takes ages, but
Social Pressures and Realizations
00:13:31
Speaker
I want listeners to ah they know this already, it's it's it's not necessarily a linear journey, it's not a cult, it's your own journey and it doesn't necessarily involve only going forward, you might come back again, you're a human and you're living in a world that is not geared towards vegans and that has a propaganda against you and if you succumb to that propaganda from time to time and think that they're right, they're not, they're wrong, but you might think they're right from time to time, that's okay, you're a human. And I've convinced myself
00:14:01
Speaker
that cheese was too tasty to give up and the animal wasn't dying and I'd cut myself off from thinking about it and just carrying on like this and it was easy. It was it was easy to not question it because as I say society doesn't really want you to question this. yeah yeah These are things. So as long as I wasn't doing it either then no one was. you know And then I remember one day i was I was back in Europe for the first time in years I was staying in a campsite in France. This is about seven or eight years into back being a vegetarian. Always at the back of my mind, I was thinking I should really go back to being vegan. I really should. But I was able to compartmentalize that and sort of put it away, really. Then one day I was I was um having a shave in this toilets in a campsite in France. And I was listening to ah an audio book by Yuval Noah Harari. Sapiens. I'm not sure i don't know if you're familiar with this book. Yeah, yeah. Excellent book.
00:14:54
Speaker
And it was it was the it was the audio book and he was describing an animal experiment that I had read actually in Peter Singer's book, Animal Liberation, back when I when i first began that journey when I was about 13 or 14. It was the same experiment and it was being relayed back to me as I was looking at myself in the mirror as I was shaving. And the experiment was was essentially, I think it's i mean it's quite a famous one, that I'll briefly describe it. It's where they took a ah baby monkey and put it with a surrogate mother that would produce spikes out of its body on command. It was like a doll that was dressed up to to look a bit like an older monkey and the baby monkey thought it was thought that this doll was her mother and was hugging the mother and the spikes would come out. And it was to see how ah much and familial attachment can overcome physical pain.
00:15:48
Speaker
Now the guy doing these experiments was probably a psychopath himself, okay? I was going to say it's like the that that the mind boggles at the things that the human species can come up with. The depths of cruelty. And when I was reading this when I was 14, it had a huge impact on me then.
00:16:04
Speaker
when it was being relayed back to me by Yuval Noah Harari in his audiobook many years later when I was probably about 38, looking at myself in the mirror and he was describing this experiment and and then at the end of it he said, if this experiment disgusts you then you shouldn't be drinking milk because the same thing happens with the baby calf and mother cow dynamic. It's the more or less the same thing except with the animal experiment it happened to one baby monkey once awful as it was. This happens billions of times every year. And you're paying for it. You're paying for it.
Family and Community Support
00:16:41
Speaker
And ah why are you doing this? And I just I was did the whole sort of it it just it just came. It just hit me sort of head on again. I must and go go go back to the family who were who were staying in the camper van that we were in.
00:16:56
Speaker
announced that as soon as we were back in in New Zealand, we we were actually on our way to back to New Zealand at the time. We were sort of staying off in France, sort of on the way. As soon as we arrived back in a few days' time, we were all going to go vegan. We had one very young, it was me, my my wife, who was vegetarian as well, who had been vegan, but ah but but but i had got really weakened at the time. I had been getting vitamin B12 injections and hadn't gone on to twelve too too ah too well with the diet at the time, many years previous. So when we arrived back here, we decided to all go vegan.
00:17:27
Speaker
And we really looked into it and I was as concerned as the next person is, where is my child going to get her calcium? Where am I going to get my calcium? All these sort of things. So I was like, it was almost like, ah I was like a novice again, even though I'd been involved in animal rights heavily for about 15 or 20 years, taking taking a break for about five, 10 years. Now I was getting back into it again. And a reintroduction to veganism was,
00:17:51
Speaker
the start of my rebirth into activism, which has been going on for about 10 years at this stage, maybe 10, 15 years. So that's a really convoluted, long-winded way of asking the question, of answering your question. And I hope I've answered some bits of it on the way. Yeah, you absolutely have. That's some of my journey for you there.
00:18:12
Speaker
Yeah, no, that's brilliant and thank you for for your honesty and vulnerability there. I'm interested in in and digging into a ah few of your things that you've said um a little more. um You've described an environment where you made that step towards vegetarianism that wasn't really conducive to it, so there's lots of obstacles there, there's lots of objections potentially from the society that you're in and the culture that you're in. I'm just interested, like you've you've you've made that step nonetheless, you've got you've also mentioned some of those objections that kind of stayed with you and and sort of...
00:18:50
Speaker
you know for a period did affect did affect your behavior. Like what what would you say whether the biggest sort of personal doubts or worries or concerns about making that step just at the outset because you know it's you know as as a teenager you at times you can feel very certain about your actions and and your path in the world but but also you you do Know that there are some limitations to what you know and what you have control over like what what would be concerns that you had at the time to be honest so when i went vegetarian thirteen say thirteen and a half years of age i can't remember and i don't recall having.
00:19:34
Speaker
ah Any personal doubts about what I was doing at all i I heard from I didn't hear anyone who had anything positive to say anything positive about vegetarianism Until I met some punks a few years sort of down the line who were themselves actually vegan everyone up to that point was either confused about my decision, about why I would be denying myself this this thing, there's at this aspect of life, ah or were um ah worried for my personal outcomes personal outcome my health. and My parents, my GP, the local priests, my sisters, their friends, their brother's friends, the whole lot, the whole network of people.
00:20:13
Speaker
they're They're practically queuing out the door and saying, you'll be dead in six months, what are you doing? I don't recall that. ah my my My main reaction to all of that was I was perplexed that they were so ah concerned about my well-being and certain about the outcome. they they're They're all contradicting themselves and each other in their responses to my questions. To be quite frank, I've never had any doubts about about eating meat.
00:20:38
Speaker
It's never been a temptation. I've never missed it. It's been offered to me. At times I could have eaten and and no one would have known. it's just it's it's There's never been an attraction back to that again. Cheese was different. That's because there's drugs in cheese, which didn't realize until sort of years later. I never had a problem giving up meat. I never had a problem and being different in that respect. In fact, that's been one of my weaknesses if you like when I'm campaigning. It would it it was only when I was writing a book I wrote about three three or four years ago when I was doing the research on that that I realized how strong fear of standing out is for most people and I don't have that.
00:21:23
Speaker
And I was just born like that. It wasn't something I tried to attain or anything. i In fact, i didn't I didn't realize I had that until maybe many years later, about halfway through my life, that I care a lot less about what people think about me. Probably most other people is what I'm saying, I suppose. And when I was doing research for a book i am and the Irish government had commissioned a big, huge study in 2018 and followed up again in 2021,
00:21:51
Speaker
a study on why people were drifting, why younger people in Ireland were drifting away from traditional affair like ah beef and dairy. And they were going into veganism and why people were taking that up, what what attracted them to it and what put them offered, what made vegans, non-vegans and what stopped non-vegans from becoming vegans. And number one on the list was fear of standing out. It was social stigma.
00:22:18
Speaker
it was ah being the odd one out. It wasn't lack of access to good food or worries about health. I mean all those issues have been done to death now and all you have to do is go onto your computer and look up a few ah facts about nutrition and you can satisfy any doubts you have about the healthiness or the availability or the yeah the tastiness of food, especially these days of vegan food.
00:22:42
Speaker
it's standing out is the thing and ah it this this really threw me and this explains why the movement hasn't been taken up as readily as one would imagine given the facts that we have on our side.
00:22:57
Speaker
We can have facts coming out of our ass, but if people are afraid of standing out, then that would be enough to to put them off. That really hit me for six, that realization. and I didn't realize that there were that many people that were that sensitive about how other people perceived them. Yeah. And I think like people who have listened to to our series as a whole, where we're listening to people's going vegan journeys, that that is a ah common thread, actually.
00:23:26
Speaker
that a lot of people bring up is that actually, no, I don't care about standing up. I'm the same. I'm the same. it just It just doesn't seem to register as as a problem. Is the biggest hurdle dealt with perhaps for most? It is. I think it's it's it's the fear that people have of, oh, if i I'm i'm being um i being presented all these facts about switching to a plant-based diet, for it's an imperative to combat the climate crisis. All these things that are so big, do you think it's a must?
00:23:55
Speaker
But what what people are thinking of, i'll go i'm I'm going out to a restaurant with my work colleagues next week. I don't want to be the guy sitting at the table going, do you have anything vegan? Or is that vegan? And everyone else, all listening in and judging me.
00:24:11
Speaker
silently in their head. it's that That is the off-putter for so many people, not for everyone. And it it varies to some degree. you know It's greater or lesser in most people, but it is a huge factor in why people are inhibited.
00:24:26
Speaker
with veganism. In fact, I would go so far as to think that a lot of people deliberately eat some bits of some annual produce every now and again, so that they aren't fully vegan. They're not in one camp or the
Perceptions of Veganism
00:24:40
Speaker
other other. So someone asks, are you a vegan? They'll rightly say no, because every month I have a bit of cheese. yeah But it's because they don't want to be aligned with what is still considered to be quite a radical, contrarian,
00:24:54
Speaker
revolutionary idea yes well i think that the practicalities of veganism being on the surface being centered around food i mean in in reality it's not it's centered around animal exploitation but just in terms of the practical manifestation of that, you're you're going to come across it when eating, yes generally. It's more physical. Exactly. exactly and and And so to do so secretly is is quite hard because it's it's very difficult to consume food three times a day without being public about it in some so way, shape or form. I'm interested in terms of the practicalities of um of becoming vegetarian when 13 and vegan when 18.
00:25:41
Speaker
In in Ireland like what were their practical obstacles there? Okay, so there was I was I'm from Cork City So thankfully there was there was a place called and it's still there called the key co-op Which is a massive behemoth of a building that was started up in the late 70s by a group of radicals lesbians gays vegetarians macrobiotics folk musicians abortion rights activists. So they all came together and bought this dilapidated building that they turned into a number of things but including a vegetarian ah with some vegan options, a cafe, health food shop and a bookshop. That was all I needed. I just needed that socket to plug into. I just needed one and it was there and I was lucky enough to be in a city that was big enough in Ireland because outside of Dublin and Belfast there was probably
00:26:29
Speaker
and this one place in Cork. There was probably nowhere else in the country that really came close to this, you know. So ah I could go along to this place and I could buy my the Linda McCartney frozen ah ah vegetarian sausages and there was I think they had a burger type of um product as well and they had soy milk. So as far as I was concerned, that I mean looking back, the soy milk tasted like cardboard. The Linda McCartney sausages They were all right, actually. they were And there was like stuff like sauce mix. You know that powder stuff? Absolutely love it, yeah. Brilliant. but didn So I still eat that. And there was a thing like chew a toothpaste, but bigger and it was like a pate. And you it was spread, you put it on toast, whatever. And it was like a hummus.
00:27:18
Speaker
and So it was great. This is Ireland at a time where where hummus probably wasn't sold anywhere. And the the a narrow aisle in the supermarkets of international foods would have stuff like pasta in there. Pasta was considered exotic, barmy, you know, weird foods, you know, in Ireland in the 70s. So it was all it was Ireland had um rationing, post World War Two rationing.
00:27:46
Speaker
for a decade longer than you guys had it over in Britain because we we had depended on you for for our economy. We were still very much hooked onto the British economy. So it took until the British economy was back at its feet for Ireland's economy. So that there was a rationing in Ireland until until the mid-1950s.
00:28:06
Speaker
And then after that, it was all tinned stuff. It was very it was unhealthy, industrial-oriented food for the masses. Cooking was, old veg was overcooked until it came out like a paste. And every Irish mother was, was all the emphasis was on the roast beef.
00:28:26
Speaker
you know, and the and the blancmanes deserter.
Dietary Challenges in Ireland
00:28:30
Speaker
this one So it was all dairy heavy and meat heavy where the attention went and the vegetables were ah ah ah you know, a curiosity to to be looked at, actually little put a bit of colour on the plate, you know, to but to be left behind, Brussels sprouts and stuff like this. So, ah yeah, look, i I wasn't particularly interested in food or my health at this point. I assumed that some of what I was hearing about the negative impacts of being vegetarian, some of that had to be true.
00:29:02
Speaker
and i was willing to take the physical hit because i was driven ah harder than and with the ideology that i was concerned about impacts on the hill yeah i ah really resonate with that and and you know i when i went vegan i was i was lucky enough to to be in a relationship with somebody at the time who who did take the nutrition side of things very seriously. And so she'd do all the homework and I'd just sort of go along with it. But yeah, but I think because it's never been about that for me, I've sort of just thought, well, do you know what, if push comes to shove and I live a couple of years less than than I would have been, it doesn't matter. I mean, the the fact is we know that doesn't have to be the case now. So it's great not to have to make that sacrifice, but I do i do resonate with that.
00:29:48
Speaker
i'm I'm interested, Mark, and in terms of, you talked to a lot about your your motivation and and and the lack of certain obstacles in in the way for you, but nonetheless, the preconceptions that we might have about what a certain lifestyle or ah a certain change might look like, that they're always with foresight and we never actually 100% know what it's going to be like until we do with it. And that that goes for anything, not just veganism. What surprised you? Are there good surprises or bad surprises about what the reality actually looked like? When I realized that ah veganism is actually very good for you, and ah as I was growing older and I was less cavalier about um
00:30:32
Speaker
my my own health and more aware of my own mortality and all the rest of it and and also more genuinely interested in and What actually is protein? What does it look like and where does it come and be 12? What makes you how does that come about and one line I read it was a throwaway comment by some hostile right
Nutritional Knowledge and Myths
00:30:53
Speaker
-wing journalist and he was banging on about Greta Thunberg and her veganism And he he had this this comment where he said her and something like her life-reducing, limiting diet or something, he was he was implying he was more less coming out straight saying that ah veganism cannot be a healthy choice because you will live you will live less healthily and for less long because you're a vegan and nature doesn't allow for you to be vegan because of B12.
00:31:24
Speaker
the idea of B12, or the availability of B12 as his main reason as to why we aren't meant to be vegans. And that really pissed me off. And I did loads of research into B12, and I know far too much that I need to feel about B12 now. And the reason why it's ah hard to access micronutrient in today's world is because of the wastewater treatments and the amount of cleaning and bleaching in the way everything's hyper,
00:31:51
Speaker
cleansed these days including our food supply and our water supply and B12 is made from bacteria and bacteria doesn't get a chance to grow in water which is where most animals would get their B12 from drinking slightly dirty water basically and the water we drink out of the tap isn't slightly dirty anymore.
00:32:09
Speaker
It's got fluoride and other things in it for good reasons, but it means that B12 is harder to access in the modern world, regardless of whether you eat meat or not. But I had to delve into these things because I was being challenged subtly or not so subtly. And it was in my own interests when I was getting into debates or drunken arguments with people about this that I would be able to pull out facts and say, you know, if you get too much protein, it's actually bad for your body. And there's a happy amount here. and Your problem is you're getting too many. It isn't that I'm not getting enough. I'm getting the right amount. You're getting too much. And ah to to be able to pull those facts out of my hat was quite satisfying. And I got much more interested in the health aspects of it. So I'm delighted to to know and to to report to everyone that veganism is among the healthiest, if not the most healthy diets that we know of today. And that's after centuries of research.
00:33:01
Speaker
into these things. So that was a very happy realisation. Yeah, well, well ah especially as as you say, that that's that's not any part of of what's influenced you to to to go down that path at all.
Tools for Navigating Vegan Life
00:33:15
Speaker
I'm interested as to what sort of helpful tidbits or all kind of helpful mantras or or guiding principles, I guess, now helped you navigate those difficulties, whether they those difficulties were practical ones or whether they were um from family and friend um family and friends becoming strangely concerned about your wellbeing or or things like that. like what What have been your biggest tools
00:33:44
Speaker
and in navigating both both the change to a different lifestyle, but also being vegan in a world that predominantly isn't vegan. what What's helped you along the way? what What sort of helped me for the first half of that long, long journey was the rage that I had about this issue that was fueled by an oracle punk, that whole movement. I was fully immersed in that for for many years.
00:34:07
Speaker
And I was carried along on a sea of anger and rage. And it was brilliant. And it gets so productive. If you put that into the ride, it's a huge energy. It's like lightning. And if you can catch that in the bottle and direct it in the right places, it is brilliant. And I highly recommend people getting really angry about stuff like this. And that was pre-internet. I would say now I'm a little bit older and I can't just think about myself ah the ways to anymore. I have kids. I've stood back and I'm doing a more sort of information oriented role but where I get my we with with the internet these days it's really good and really easy to find people like and I forget his name now but it'll come to me there's a few American doctors that are really really good to have these podcasts and ah websites and you go on to them and every aspect of every bit of health they will cover it
00:35:06
Speaker
Dr. Greger is one of them. And then there's another guy, Neil something or something. And I think you have said Bernard, and he goes a lot about find a source of trustworthy information, peer reviewed science to go to. And there's plenty of them out there. But there's Neil Bernard, and the first guy I mentioned are my two to go to. And so that's all your hard and fast facts for any worries you might have about the broader aspects of veganism generally.
00:35:36
Speaker
Second thing I do every year is I get a blood test taken and I get them to look and analyze and count my numbers of for calcium, B's, all the vitamin B's.
00:35:47
Speaker
proteins, all the HDLs, ah all this and I've been doing this for a number of years and I'm always bang in the middle of any range except for cholesterol and that's and high cholesterol, mine is ever so slightly high and that runs in the family. I like beer too much and I like vegan dark chocolate too much and one of them plus running in the family means I was slightly elevated cholesterol. Every other at number is right in the middle so if the if it should be between five and ten times the seven and a half of but whatever it is you know at some right in the middle happy sitting there in the spectrum of all that
00:36:23
Speaker
healthy bandwidths for all these different things. So I know exactly my own physical responses to to my diet and where I stand health-wise. So if I'm feeling lackluster of a day or a bit tired or a bit overwhelmed or a bit that ah this or that, I know it's just something to do with my immediate sort of goings on. It isn't an ongoing health-ready issue.
00:36:45
Speaker
because as a vegan as you know and as any of other listeners out there who are vegans will know you will still have people telling you that you you are damaging your health because you need to have fish or milk or beef or whatever to survive and thrive and that is so untrue it's a joke but and it might get you from time to time but it needn't if you get your blood tests taken it's free at least over here and i think over in the and nhs i phone up my nurse in my clinic ask ask her to get the doctor to prescribe it and it's all done and dusted in a day i go to my clinic you know it's all free and the information is there so i know exactly um where i stand health wise and i know i'm in perfect health
00:37:26
Speaker
and that veganism is great for me and no matter what I hear the detractors say I know that's their issue and it's not mine. Yeah that that that sort of annual MOT if you like is yeah yeah yeah that's be good thing you know nice assurance isn't it yeah no no I get that. I'm interested Mark in that you know a ah lot of people listening to this will be either on their just starting their vegan journey or they'll be sort of on on the precipice of it but but either way you know but they'll be listening to this you know when it comes out in in early 2025 or possibly you know the way podcast work maybe they're listening to it in the very distant future but were you to be starting
00:38:07
Speaker
your journey now in this cultural context? What do you think would be different for you? Because that that's the context in which those listeners are starting that journey. I just wonder if if there are any sort of time-specific things that you think might make things easier, more difficult, or or just different in any way.
00:38:30
Speaker
It's the vegan journey today is so different from when I started mine. And mine is so different from when the earliest pioneers started theirs in the mid 1940s that it's almost like a different planet. But that's a hard realization to actualize in your in your head unless you've experienced it, right? So vegans starting off their journey today will experience the same feelings and problems as I did but they won't realize that um it was actually much harder back then. So they they will come up again. And again, it'll be the social stigma thing. I'm going to stand out. I'm going to be the subject of conversation. People might wonder about me. Is it really healthy? Am I hearing just a propagandistic side of view about this? Do we not need all the, as soon as you sort of seriously considering this as a position to take,
00:39:26
Speaker
all the subtle social consensus sort of ideas will start flooding into your head like oh I heard somewhere that unless there's cows shitting onto the grass then the grass will go all this sort stuff right and it's just a mishmash of nonsense okay but it will come out because I guess in a way it's like giving up giving up a drug is a strong word but you're breaking with convention and that takes um and that will be challenged in your own head by what's being put into your head by the world around you and no matter where you live stuff will be put into your head by the world around you and if you live in this species of society there'll be speciesist ideas of what is normal in there and
00:40:12
Speaker
that that will be a challenge. And it doesn't matter how much harder it was for me 20, 30 years ago, this will still be an equally weighty challenge to newbie vegans today. ah Me saying to them, oh, it was so much harder on my day. We only had linen macaroni and sausages and cardboard milk, and it was all shit and expensive. and I had to cycle for three miles to the only shop. It sounded salty. And now it's so easy and blah, blah, blah. And that doesn't make much of an impact on people when they're add when this is going on in their head right so i think having good support network at knowing that their health is in good hands and knowing how to go about it i think is a good and being presented with sort of a block of tofu just sort of wobbling away in front of you and not knowing what to do with them how to turn that into a tasty appetizing
00:41:01
Speaker
protein-rich meal might be a challenge. So ah learning learning how to cook is vital, maybe not vital, but very handy. ah Fortunately, I love cooking, so I like spending time in the kitchen. ah Coming up with new stuff and learning how to cook with stuff like tofu and turning what looks like an intimidating blob of nothingness into a really tasty meal that people who ah generally eat just chicken will be commenting on how tasty it is. you know It's going to be that good. you know So I would say learning the rudiments of vegan cookery, and the rudiments of vegan health, and maintain maintaining the anger in your heart is good as well. And I've never had a problem with the the anger, but I've never had a burnout, which I'm going to crash when I'm 60. I'm going to crash against the wall. It so burns out, but if you won't recognize me. But I've i've been active in animal rights since I was about 13.
00:41:56
Speaker
And I'm 53 now, so ah more or less unbroken, not entirely. And I haven't experienced burnout and I've been as angry. I'm almost as angry now as I was then, really. I may or may not be a good thing. I'm not encouraging it or not. I'm just saying that that that's my default position, whether I like it or not. as Yeah, I think we're richer for it, Mark. I'm i'm glad you're angry. um ah yeah you you You've mentioned, the with with like I say, at admirable honesty and vulnerability, that the the way that your your journey has progressed and and sort of um turns that it's taken that that now with hindsight you've
00:42:36
Speaker
You know, you you did express some ah some shame that that things had had gone in a different way for a period.
Reflections on the Vegan Journey
00:42:43
Speaker
I just wonder if there are things that you wish you had done differently. I mean, from from where I'm sitting,
00:42:52
Speaker
there's actual incredible value as a whole if a movement comprises people who have done what you have done and sort of taken a ah bit of a step off the train for a bit actually because I think it I work with young people um predominantly in my work and very often what will make them dig their heels in ah about making a ah new decision is actually that the fear that they can't go back actually and and I think in the vegan movement we can be quite hesitant to to advocate for that because we're we're worried that we're basically advocating for animal abuse or or things like that but I think as a whole these stories are quite helpful because actually we can see that actually despite that your
00:43:40
Speaker
you know, you've now been back on that train for a significant amount of time and and and that's that's still a net win, isn't it? But just just in general, like, is there anything that you would change about your journey or things that you could have gone about differently or or anything like that?
00:43:58
Speaker
I think given the situation I was in with the resources that I had and have, I've basically done as much as I always could. for During my active years I've always been fully on. If I'd been born in a different country, things would have been different. I was born in a country where there was not much going on, where what was going on was what we were making going on. If I could have plugged into something Bigger things might have been bigger in that sense. I'm being deliberately coy No, no there isn't no there isn't I'm ashamed that I went back to Consuming dairy, but I learned I learned from that people shouldn't think that this is a
00:44:42
Speaker
This is a black and white demand. that this This is a hard thing. when when i went When I decided to go back to being vegan, when I was listening to that awful story about the monkey being tortured by the psychopath in the name of science and equating that with the dairy industry that I was part of at the time, I said to myself that, okay, look, if once in a while, if I really want to eat a dairy chocolate bar, I will, otherwise I'm vegan.
00:45:11
Speaker
Now, to a lot to a lot of vegans, you're not a vegan because you have you you you haven't 100% committed to being vegan. You've allowed this clause once in a while in order to maintain the veganism for 99.9% of the time, there'll be a get out clause for once in a while, because I know what I'm like. So I said, Raquel, I and me and my wife and my young child will all do this vegan thing.
00:45:40
Speaker
If once in three months I'm at a supermarket checkout and I see a Mars bar and I really want to eat the Mars bar. I'll get that Mars bar and I'll eat it and I'll eat it really quickly and I won't tell anyone and I'll just do it. And then the second afterwards gone past my mouth, I'm vegan again. Okay. So I made this commitment to myself cause I couldn't commit to a hundred percent veganism, even though I've been active in this movement for decades at this point. This is when I'm in my thirties and I'm still in the front, in the French cancer and even someone with my depth of sort of involvement in this.
00:46:16
Speaker
I can step out of it for a while, back to being vegetarian, be called back into it, but still have to make this pact with a part of my brain that says, okay, look, once in a while, if you really want to have, it would never happen with meat. That necessity, that mental hack never was required with giving up meat. That was just instant. That was a black and white thing for me. Dairy was different.
00:46:45
Speaker
why maybe there's a thousand reasons I could theres it there's a few reasons I can think of you know easily but it it was it it was just in my head I had to have this Faustian pact saying okay once in a while so it's either it's if it's the case of either I'm not going to go vegan because I can't totally commit or I will go vegan but once every three months I'll have the dairy chocolate bar which is better it's the's the latter option that I'll go more or less vegan I'll do the staring thing if I really feel the need to, or I'll allow myself to have that option. Was the was the arrangement in my head?
00:47:21
Speaker
and And I found ah after about a year, so I did that in the first year, I had dairy confectionery about two or three times in that year, surprise purchases at the checkout, you know, where they have all the chocolate and all that, you know, yeah yeah have that tu drink quick and no one's looking and I don't eat it quick. And, you know, it was almost like, yeah, it was a weird, weird situation. And I was so underwhelmed by the taste of my mouth.
00:47:47
Speaker
And I was like, really? Is this she really for this? Really? You know, fuck it. Just and head over heels in. so but So and at that point, after about a year, 18 months into the vegan journey, at the second vegan journey, I was like, OK, just it the the taste is so banal. Is this what they mean by the banality of evil here? that there There's hardly anything to this. And people are banging out, oh, I couldn't give up Mars Mars. I couldn't give up this and that. Really? They aren't that much, you know what I mean?
00:48:15
Speaker
and so So it was a it was a bumpy journey. You know, it was it was a bumpy road. It wasn't. And I appreciate the um difficulties that people who are less committed and less immersed in the inaugural punk direct action sort of milieu and philosophy, which is most of the people, if I'm having these struggles,
00:48:35
Speaker
then other people are having them as well, you know? And and so what I want to stress to people who are listening to this who are considering beginning veganism or beginning veganism is that it's it's it's up to you. It's you. It's not a cult. There's no one judging you. Well, there probably is, but people are all judging each other but it's not a political party, it's not a religion, it's a personal thing and you deal with it the best way that you know how. You're working against the odds and working in a machine that is anti the way you think essentially. So there will be compromises, there will be psychological hacks that you might have to trick yourself
00:49:14
Speaker
with, but now I can safely say and this has been decades plus, ah decade plus. I have no interest in consuming these things at all. Industrial capitalism has managed to replicate most of these things in the vegan world. Fantastically, as much as I hate industrial capitalism, they've done a good job of managing burgers.
00:49:33
Speaker
and i So I've never ever missed a meet. The idea of people saying, oh, rashers though and all this, it's just an alien. It's like saying, oh, dogs, legs, you know, it's, it's, there's no appeal whatsoever. Even way back in my sort of lizard brain, it's just not there at all. Dairy was a bit more difficult. Dairy was a struggle, but now I put it down and put it to death. I despise the dairy industry. The more I learned about them, the more I despise. I despise even more than the meat industry.
00:50:02
Speaker
They're despicable. And what they do is so violent, and violent, and so psychologically torturous. Having had kids myself, I have two now, wonderful kids, both vegans, obviously. The idea of separating a mother from her young is such ah an evil, Hitlerian thing to do. that ah The idea of involving myself in that is just, it's it's it's another planet, it's a different thing. i'm as That's the thing about veganism is that it tends to attract sort of anarchists because we find it easier to set outside society and veganism, whilst it's much more mainstream than than it used to be, is still seen by a lot of people as being quite freaky.
00:50:45
Speaker
which I had no problem with, belong but of people do. But I'm rambling now, Ant. No, you're great. You're great, Mark. You're great. that Thank you for for all the detail you've gone into. Like it's it's yeah like I say, I'm so much richer for for having but having heard this, and I know listeners will be the same.
00:51:04
Speaker
just ah if I can paint one final little hypothetical situation to you. And that is, I don't know whether it's the same in New Zealand, but over here, when when people had gone for like their COVID vaccine, they got a little sticker that they would put on saying, oh, I've had my vaccine today. Like they were sort of seven years old or something. Anyway, um I want you to imagine you're you're in a lift and someone's just got in and um they've got a sticker on and it says, um I'm trying Viganury or I'm,
00:51:34
Speaker
you know I'm just starting to be vegan or whatever. Okay, so you've just got, wherever wherever they're going to in the lift, whoever gets out first, you or them, you've got you know just a few seconds to so have some input um to them. So what what are you gonna say?
00:51:50
Speaker
I would say to them that the ah longer that you stay vegan the more you will see beauty in the world because you stop seeing things and things in the world as being just stuff to eat and you see them for for their own sake and you will realize the beauty of the world as it is and ah veganism is the most important thing that they can do for themselves I think as well for their own health so there is there is no downside to this. Nice one. I i really like that and I yeah like the fact that you've you've covered even if they're just getting out of the next floor you've got a nice succinct message there to give a ticket from, that's great. Mark, thank thanks so much for your time, that's been a ah really lovely, really lovely message and listeners if this is the first time that you've um you've heard Mark speak do look back at our archives because he's been featured on the show many, many times including one where he goes into a lot of detail
00:52:43
Speaker
um about the the topic of his book which we'll put a link in the show notes for as well but yes lots of lots of good Mark content out there on the platform for you all thanks very much Mark
00:52:58
Speaker
This has been an Enough of the Falafel production. We hear just a normal bunch of everyday vegans putting our voices out there. The show is hosted by Zencaster. We use music and special effects by zapsplat.com and sometimes if you're lucky at the end of an episode you'll hear a poem by Mr. Dominic Berry. Thanks all for listening and see you next time.
00:53:39
Speaker
This episode may have come to an end but did you know we've got a whole archive containing all our shows dating back to September 2023? That is right Dominic there's over a hundred episodes on there featuring a brilliant range of different guests, people's stories of going vegan, philosophical debates, moral quandaries and of course around a dozen news items from around the world each week so check back on your podcast player to hear previous episodes and remember to get an alert for each new episode simply click like or follow and also subscribe to the show thanks for your ongoing support wherever you listen to us from