The rise of veganism: We are what we don’t eat

CATHERINE CLEARY: ‘Vegans and vegetarians are more visible and vocal now than ever before. If we are what we eat then some of us are becoming what we don’t eat. The word vegan was coined 63 years ago on a sunny November Sunday in a London club when Donald Watson, a South Yorkshire man born in 1910, met like-minded friends. Watson had been a vegetarian for 20 years. As a child he’d been horrified to witness his uncle George killing a pig on the family farm. “I suppose at that point I decided that farms, and uncles, had to be re-assessed,” he joked in an interview at the ripe old age of 92…

Since those postwar days of earnest efforts to make the world a kinder place, the food system has marched down ever-more intensive farming alleyways. Animal lovers have a lot more to be upset about than they did in Watson’s time, when most animals were reared in places recognisable as farms, rather than the feedlots, battery chicken and pork sheds, fish cages teeming with sea lice and mega dairies of industrial farm landscapes. There is a growing argument that Big Ag is wreaking havoc on a par with Big Oil’. SOURCE…

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