Foodies at Heart

Hello again, yes, it is me again the resident old grump, serving up some more tasteful batch of social commentary. Before I begin, I would like to say no vegans were harmed during the writing of this article, right, now we have that out the way!

So, I recently read some statistics that Trueview.me (dating app) published, they surveyed 1,000 men and women around the UK to find out their thoughts on dating, love, and food. It came back that 34% of those surveyed would not date a vegan! The number may not seem like a big portion, but when you consider the number of people you would be interested in dating and the percentage of people who’d be put off by your other personality traits i.e. being vegan, it can be worrying to say the least.

Before we delve into this any further, I believe this all stems from the stigma attached to vegans. Not too long ago a friend had mentioned that they find vegans to “preachy” and “always throwing facts and stats at you” I could see the comparisons he had made which made think of the evangelical Christians you have on the high street. But are vegans really “preachy” or is it us carnivores are simply not properly educated on what it means to be vegan and how there are so many beneficial advantages to going vegan?

As humans from an early age we are breast fed milk from our mother, as part of our development, and later in life our mothers would say “milk helps build strong bones”. However, the truth may be far from it when you consider no other animal drinks the milk from another species; we no longer need milk once weaned from our own mother’s.

So why do we continue to keep drinking dairy? Big corporations and health experts say we need calcium but there are numerous vegetables that contain more calcium such as broccoli, cabbage and variety of nuts and seeds. Furthermore, pasteurised milk is not good for us, when you consider how the cow must produce this form of milk they are usually pumped full of hormones and antibiotics and when it comes down to the pasteurisation process it destroys any beneficial enzymes within the milk.

When you look at the big picture most foods have dairy in them which makes you wonder if we knew more about our food, would we really be stuffing our faces. So perhaps we are judgmental of something we don’t truly understand, vegans have done their homework and it is not just some passing phase that they have adopted to look cool. So maybe the vegans are on to something and rather than make a bigger deal about it perhaps it is time we started educating ourselves more and be less prejudice towards individual beliefs.

Hopefully you have seen the non-dairy light and you never know you might just like it!