baroque_mongoose

I don't do the New York Times Wordle, because I fell out with the NYT a while ago. I do a different one instead. But apparently yesterday's NYT word was "vegan", and this thoroughly annoyed someone I know... who is not, I hasten to add, vegan. She maintained that the word was not allowable in a word game, because it was a proper noun and should therefore have a capital letter; and when someone else (also not a vegan as far as I know) very gently tried to point out that it was used without a capital letter all the time, she got extremely annoyed and replied "IT'S NOT MY FAULT IF OTHER PEOPLE ARE PIG IGNORANT" (actual quote, caps lock and all).

Consequently, as one of these pig ignorant people she was talking about, I was quite scared to say anything; but in the end I felt that, as possibly the only vegan present, I really should. So I very apologetically explained that I didn't understand what she was talking about, although I've been a vegan for several years now, and asked if she would kindly enlighten me.

Well. It turned out that in 2020, some organisation I've never heard of had made a "ruling" (her word) that "vegan" and "veganism" should henceforth be spelt with capital letters, because it's an ethical and philosophical stance (in the same way that names of religions get capital letters). It's worth adding that the Vegan Society here in the UK, of which I am a member, has either never heard of this "ruling" or chooses not to accept it, because I frequently get e-mails from them, and the only place where they spell it with a capital letter is in the name of the society... which is correct, as it's a title.

So I explained, as gently and politely as I could (but I'm afraid I still probably upset her, so I have just apologised for that this morning), that a) the Vegan Society didn't go by the "ruling", and b) I would personally be extremely uncomfortable using it with regard to myself; though, of course, if other people wished to be referred to as Vegan with a capital letter, I would obviously respect that. I had to tell her that, while I am a vegan, that is not my religion.

Which leads neatly into exactly how being a vegan meshes with being a Christian; and the first thing I'm going to make very clear is that Christianity does not have food regulations. Of any sort. (I mean, yes, some denominations do have set fast days at certain times, and a lot of people find those very helpful; I'm not in the least knocking those who do, but the fact remains that you do not have to keep particular fast days to be a Christian.) There is nothing in Christianity anywhere that says either you have to be a vegan or you must not be a vegan. Jesus definitely ate fish (it's recorded in one of the Gospels), but that doesn't imply that eating fish is compulsory, only that it's not intrinsically wrong. (I could also go into the whole implications of the fact that there is no lamb mentioned at the Last Supper, despite the fact that it was a Jewish Passover meal and therefore lamb would have been expected to be central; but that is probably a whole 'nother post.)

It's also true that everyone, vegan or otherwise, values life on some form of sliding scale. The scale always exists; it's just that the points on it are different for different people, and if they're quite a long way along, you're going to be vegan. There are some people who don't appear to value non-human lives at all; there are some who value pets but not farm animals; there are others who value mammals in general (and maybe birds) but not so much fish or reptiles; and then you get people who will tell you they value all life, but in fact they don't. I don't. I freely admit that. It is probably impossible to do so. I don't put a very high value on insects; granted, I won't kill them unnecessarily, but if I have ants invading my kitchen, then I need to kill them. I don't enjoy killing them, and I'd far rather they just went away, but that is not what ants do. And even if you draw the line even further along and you don't kill the ants, you kill the bacteria, and I'm pretty sure you don't think twice about it, vegan or no.

That doesn't mean it's hypocritical to be vegan. Veganism is not an all-or-nothing thing, and I think it is helpful to recognise that this sliding scale exists. To be a vegan is simply to say "I draw the line further along the scale than most other people do." It's also an acknowledgement of the fact that we live in a time and a place where we have choices; some societies have had to eat meat in order to continue to exist. I don't see how that can be classed as a moral failing. Even in societies where you rarely got to eat meat unless you were rich, people still needed animal products to get by; your local feudal lord might well get all the beef, but the shoemaker and the saddler would get the hide, the bones and gristle would be available for boiling down into glue, and so on. There weren't easy alternatives around for that kind of thing. But I live in a country where I can not only very easily choose to avoid all meat and dairy, but I can also buy myself a pair of shoes or boots made from high quality, waterproof, breatheable, plant-based materials which will mould comfortably to my feet just as leather does.

It's not morally wrong to eat meat; nonetheless, I've always been uncomfortable about killing anything I don't have to, even at second hand, and eating meat has just never seemed like a good enough reason to me (ever since I was six years old and discovered, to my horror, what meat was). The same goes for eggs and dairy; if you think no animal suffers or dies to produce those, then I'm not blaming you because so did I for years, but you might just want to go and look up what really happens. (Of course you didn't know. Egg and dairy farmers aren't at all keen to tell you. I leave it entirely up to you.) And, of course, there are other reasons quite separate from that. Livestock farming is a huge contributor to the gases that cause global warming; probably the most effective step anyone can personally take to reduce that is by switching to a vegan diet for at least some of the time (unless, of course, you own a private jet, though I doubt anyone reading this does). Not to mention the fact that vegan diets are provably healthier than omnivorous diets, and I've certainly done a great deal better personally since I kicked dairy... which I strongly suspect of having contributed to my near-fatal illness in 2016. I recently found a copy of a letter I sent two years before that in which I was already detailing my problems with it. I'm not lactose-intolerant; the problem was always the fat. I've never digested that well, and it got worse over the years.

There are people who will confidently tell you that animal lives are not valued in Scripture, and therefore we shouldn't value them. Indeed, it does look very much like that at first blush; there are animals being killed everywhere you look in the Old Testament. But, actually, that perception is wrong, and I'm going to explain why.

Animal sacrifices were common all over the ancient world, but the Old Testament makes it abundantly clear that those carried out in ancient Israel had a different motivation from those elsewhere. In most places, an animal sacrifice was more or less a sacred bribe. Meat was expensive and highly valued, and it was what you gave your esteemed guests; so to offer an animal was a way of, pretty much, treating your god to a delicious high-class meal so they'd look on you with favour.

That's not how it was in the Old Testament.

The entire drumbeat of the Old Testament is: "God really wants to be close to his people, but they are sinful. God is perfect and cannot tolerate sin, and so, in order for them to get anywhere near him without immediately perishing, that sin has to be dealt with in some way. And so, until God finally steps into the world to deal with that sin personally, the only way it can be dealt with is for an innocent victim - an animal - to be offered in place of those who have sinned. This is an imperfect solution, so it has to be repeated again and again."

Do you see what that implies? If animals' lives had no value at all, they wouldn't be good enough (even at that level) to be sacrificed in the place of guilty humans. I have no doubt at all that the new heaven and the new earth will be full of them - every animal that was ever sacrificed for human sin, from the sheep offered by Abel all the way down to whenever it was that the practice stopped. Animals' lives do have value, and that is scriptural. It doesn't mean we're not allowed to eat them (in fact, express permission is given to do so, though only after the Fall); it does mean that, if we do choose to do that, we should do so in a way that respects the species and doesn't cause unnecessary suffering.

But what do I know? I'm too pig ignorant to spell vegan with a capital V...