How Green Was My Vegan?

With apologies to Richard Llewellyn

by Les May

THE last seventeen years of my working life included taking part in week long biology field courses for young adults.  We had to teach them, make sure they did not come to any harm and feed them.  One told us she only ate meat, another had strict religious dietary requirements, vegetarians were abundant, but we always managed.  The one problem we had was a young man who said he was a vegan.  We explained that as the field course was on an island off the Scottish mainland and an islander would be catering for us, we were not able to guarantee that the food would meet his requirement.  Eventually he agreed to cater for himself.

Now my attitude to people who say they are vegans is ‘whatever floats your boat’. But when I saw the food he brought I could not help noticing that it all seemed highly processed.  Now I’m fairly catholic in my diet.  Apart from ritually slaughtered meat I will eat most savoury things.  But I would have drawn the line about eating what our vegan student was happy to eat.

I had forgotten about this incident until I read an article in last Thursday’s Guardian by the food writer Joanna Blythman in which she wrote:

‘Supermarkets, global food manufacturers and biotech and chemical companies have enthusiastically embraced Veganuary.  Fast-food enterprises, formerly seen as the nemesis of public health and the environment, have recast themselves as their saviours.  McDonald’s was feted when it launched its first vegan Veggie Dippers meal: nuggets that contain around 40 ingredients, many of which can’t be found in any domestic larder, served with chips and a soft drink…..Just when ultra-processed food manufacturers were being skewered for the health damage their products cause, the plant-based push has given them a get-out-of-jail-free card.’

Blythman’s piece is perceptive, but where I don’t think it goes far enough is that she fails to point out that many of the foodstuffs which can best supply the protein in a meat free diet, lentils, soy beans, chickpeas etc, carry the burden of lots of ‘food miles’ because they are themselves imported. We could grow substitutes in our climate. Field beans, sold as Horse Beans or Tic Beans for animal food, grow well in this country and it is the introduction of these into the west European diet in the early mediaeval period which is credited with allowing the population to grow. In their present form they are an unattractive dark brown in colour. The garden form is the Broad Bean which is larger and more attractive. It was derived from the Field bean by selective breeding. Further selective breeding could be used to produce a bean with fewer ‘food miles’ which could replace our dependence on imported pulses.

If you want to tell the world that vegan food is more healthy and switching to it will ‘save the planet’, it might be useful to do a bit of homework. Blythman’s article is a good place to start. You can find it at the link below.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/22/veganuary-animal-foods-plant-vegan

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/feb/12/quorn-revolution-rise-ultra-processed-fake-meat

Len McCluskey states the obvious about Labour

Media Bias & Public Taste
by Brian Bamford

Len McCluskey Hits the Deck! (photo - Daily Telegraph)

THE leader of the Unite union, Len McCluskey, in a telephone interview with POLITICO magazine*, was merely stating the obvious when he says that it would be 'extraordinary' if Labour won, and went on to say that it was the Labour party leader's problem of his public image that was to blame, and for this he accused the media of 'media bias'.

He blamed all this on the media's 'constant attack' on Corbyn, internal party divisions, and on the consequences of the public support for the Prime Minister Theresa May when she was 'jumping on the bandwagon of hard Brexit.'

He said he was not holding out much hope for an upset victory despite the popularity of many of Labour’s left-wing policies, unveiled at the party’s manifesto launch in Bradford, West Yorkshire, today.

McCluskey claimed the working class voters who say they are going to vote Tory for the first time are doing so 'because their mind is being turned by the constant attack of the media on Jeremy Corbyn and the image that they’ve pinned on Jeremy.'

For McCluskey it is the same old story, as it is for most of the left, blame the media when things go wrong.  How can they be so surprised about media bias?

Meanwhile, today in the New York Times the novelist Joan Smith writes about the sexualisation of British politics in which 'Mrs May lounged on a sofa in a pair of leather trousers for an interview at the end of a momentous year that saw her move to No.10 Downing Street.'

Joan Smith, a feminist, justifiably suggests;  'The public probably knows more about what she wears than it does about what she wears than it does about her policies, confirming just about every sexist stereotype'.

Only a mediocre Marxist mind or a feeble-minded feminist, would expect that the public would find politics more fascinating than fashion and leather pants and especially 'eye-catching footwear'.

Ms. Smith writes:  'Isn't it demeaning, not to say sexist, to focus on how she dresses?'

In summing up Ms. Smith writes:  'This is all the more disappointing at a moment when the Conservative Party has overturned the traditional order of British politics by fielding a competent, personable woman against a male opposition leader, Jeremy Corbyn, who looks and sounds like a throwback to the 1970s.'

Are the media to blame for focusing on what they believe the public like?  Or are the British public to blame for preferring fashion and the sexy style of Mrs. May to the dreariness of Mr Corbyn and John McDonnell?

* Overnight Mr. McCluskey underwent a change of mind on this matter, and on the BBC this morning he said that 'following the launch of Labour's manifesto, which he said had been warmly welcomed by his union's members'.  This only suggests a kind of collective catastrophic psychological condition in which Labour supporters, like McCluskey, don't know whether they are coming or going.