Our lives, at the very heart of it all, are very simple. We need food and water to live. And in the living of our lives we seek peace, happiness and contentment, doing things we love, surrounded by people and animals we love, helping those who need it, feeling like we make a difference.
Back to the food and water thing. Eating and drinking should be one of the easiest and most enjoyable things we do, but we have made it very complicated - finding a nutritious, tasty, satisfying diet which fulfills our bodily requirements and keeps us fit and healthy in mind and body has become a huge challenge for the majority of the worlds population.
I attended a vegan festival in Cumbria over the weekend. There were massive queues of people waiting to get into the festival held at the Rheged Centre in Penrith. It's not the first packed out vegan festival I've attended and highlights the curiosity and interest there is in this area now. As well as stalls offering a fantastic variety of hot and cold vegan food and drinks, toiletries and household products and clothing, a huge part of the festival is concerned with informing and educating people about the realities of the meat industry and why the shift to a plant based diet makes sense. And its not what you think it is - it's not just about the animals as I learned - the animal agriculture business is intrinsically tied into climate change and environmental depletion, as well as individual health and well-being.
Throughout the day I watched films and listened to talks and came away with the following insights:
* watching Live and Let Live, a film which follows the lives of six people who moved away from consuming and producing animal products and how it has affected their lives. One woman, Lauren Ornelas, founder of the Food Empowerment Project in USA, tells of how children are kept as slaves to harvest cocoa beans in West Africa for milk chocolate sold in the western world. She had met a child slave who had managed to escape from the farm, and asked him what would he say to western people who eat chocolate. He replied "you are eating my suffering". It had not struck me so clearly before that our current food demands do not only cause great suffering to animals;
* Listening to Sarah Asquith-Vallance tell her story. Sarah studied to be a neuro-scientist and from the age of 14 had suffered with PolyCystic Ovary Syndrome. By the age of 27 she had had 4 abdominal surgeries, one ovary removed, was advised to have a hysterectomy and told she would never have a child naturally. Her scientific background had continually led her to try and find a cure for her condition - she changed her diet to plant based food and basically cured all her ills, even conceiving naturally and giving birth to a son who is now 4 years old, healthy and vegan. Sarah's is not the first plant food based health-transformation story I have heard and her food demo was packed out, again highlighting the interest there is - this is how we can all experience a better quality of health
* Listening to Stephen Balfour talking about the ex-battery hens he has re-homed, the pictures of the hens when they arrive and how pitiful is to watch them stagger around, featherless, as they have never had the space to walk before. I did not know that even free range hens are genetically engineered to produce 2 or 3 eggs a day to meet current demands - that it is more natural for hens to produce a couple of eggs a month. It made me think about the unnatural demands we place on ourselves as well as the animal kingdom, the things people do to themselves in the bid for some unattainable external perfection, and how these unnatural demands are visited upon farm animals to meet our needs
* Listening to Ashley Cooper 'Images From A Warming Planet'. Ashely Cooper traveled for 14 years over every continent in the world photographing the impacts of climate change and the connections he made in his talk between global warming, environmental destabilisation, population migration and the impact on food production and prices were clear. In his talk, Ashley emphasised the fossil fuel connection to global warming - we are all familiar with this - and he touched on droughts and how much water is needed in agriculture, for example California can not presently sustain its almond and orange farms. This talk was supported by powerful visual images that became even more relevant when watching the final offering of the day....
* .....Cowspiracy. I had been avoiding watching Cowspiracy because I thought it was going to be another epic of animal torture down on the farm and they are just too hard to watch. But on Saturday something made me stay. And I could not believe what I was watching. The statistics and figures presented by Kip Andersen and the journey he went on to produce this film are astonishing and if you have the chance to see it (it's on Netflix!) then I recommend you do, and draw your own conclusions. After watching this film it was impossible to ignore how the animal agriculture business as currently organised is:
* inhumane for all involved,
* far and away the biggest drain on essential resources such as land, water, grain
* the largest contributor to global warming factors
* destroying the oceans with millions of tonnes of untreated animal waste running off into the sea.
After the previous information I had received throughout the day, it hit home that moving to a plant based diet is one key - a big key - to shifting the huge problems we are globally enmeshed by.
So why make the change? There are 5 massive reasons to make the shift to a plant-based diet. I think these are all of equal importance so the order here is not prioritised:
1 For the sake of your health
2 For the sake of the environment
3 For the sake of the 12.9% of the worlds population who live at starvation levels
4 For the sake of the men, women and children who are inhumanely treated in the roles they play to harvest and prepare food for delivery to other countries
5 For the sake of over 56 billion animals that are killed each year.
I am a yoga practitioner and teacher, a Reiki Master Teacher, a Shamanic Practitioner - but these labels are unnecessary - as a human being I wish to treat all beings and the earth with compassion. I believe the external world mirrors our internal nature. I can continue to make choices that create more peace and compassion within me, and as I do this I will be directly responsible for generating more peace and compassion in the world around me. When I worked for Friends of The Earth as a shy and helpless 18 year old in Liverpool I found it hard to believe that my personal actions and contribution could amount to much. Now I recognise the truth and value in personal application. Each one of us makes the difference. Make it NOW.