Beyond the Battle of Brightlingsea; Meat and Guns
We can be convinced to change our attitudes and behaviour. Twenty–three years ago the protests against live animal shipments from Britain to Europe pushed me over the edge to stop eating meat. It’s known as the Battle of Brightlingsea. It raged for several months.
Animals were being transported without food or water for up to 24 hours. They were considered agricultural commodities. Britain’s major ports had begun banning this practice forcing operators to use a small port.
The demographics for this battle — that pitched mostly local residents against a behemoth industry — is startling:
82% of the protestors were women.
81% had never protested before.
73% were aged between 41-70.
Chew on that for a moment, or two. Those are the people who turned a young man’s mind. They stopped the exports from their town. The following year they would be stopped altogether from the UK, albeit due to mad cow disease.
I loved eating meat as much as some love their guns. The heart knew something else. The mind suppressed it. Transportation was only one issue with modern, industrial animal husbandry. By the middle of the year I knew I couldn’t have anything to do with the meat industry.
In a stroke of good fortune there was a small vegan grocery store near my workplace. Across the road from the Old Street roundabout, it was an odd location. While only half a mile from the bankers of the City, it was surrounded by the working class housing estates of inner London and bleak streets, where pubs proudly displayed photos of men fucking women on stage. Stags, birthdays, strippers.
The store proved to be a cornucopia of weird vegan food. As someone yet to understand cooking, their cottage pies were a godsend. They had vegan shepherd pies too. They were nuked at work where I was young and underpaid. Taxis cabs were unaffordable. The pies were eaten for dinner and polished off with a sugary drink by a company called Bottle Green. It was the high life. I tried seitan and tempeh and hated both.
In regular supermarkets there were Linda McCartney’s country pies and something called Quorn. Created in a lab from fungi (mould), Quorn was food of the future. It did a decent impression of a chicken breast without the quacking. If you ate it, you were the quack.
The Guardian recently ran an article about Quorn. It received over three thousand comments in 24 hours. Not even WTF is Trump doing now articles receive so much attention. Oh to be the White House staffer who gets to say, Mr. President, a mould is more popular than you.
The article received so many comments because it’s deliberately laced with triggers, perpetuating myth about attitudes and missing some critical points. It’s sad it had to frame an otherwise fair question about the health of eating processed vegan/vegetarian foods as one of class and moral purity, where vegetarians and vegans are elites and holier than thou.
It missed a point; meat substitutes are the gateway to embracing veganism or vegetarianism, they support the lifestyle decision by making processed products we’ve been trained to recognize as food. It took me several years to get beyond Quorn, veggie ground, and dogs, but they were a boon when in need.
I wonder about gun advocates and the support for them to change their lifestyle. I wish I could offer them a lifetime’s supply of chocolate guns made from Quorn and be done. Increasing gun clubs/firing ranges where gun lovers can do their thing seems a reasonable solution to me. Hunters and farmers can make their case, too, but neither of those groups need AR-15’s.
However, if you believe it’s your right to own guns so you can start a militia to protect your free state, it doesn’t wash. If you believe you have the right to own guns, period, you now embody the idea of a free state as an individual.
An anti-government narrative embellishes it, and it’s one that needs to be deconstructed and busted. A few days before the Parkland killings, I read gun sales had dropped during the first year of Trump’s presidency because gun owners no longer feared the government would take away their weapons. The fear of government becomes rational if you watch, read, and listen to the media outlets that are the central proponents of this narrative. My advice?
Turn them off.
That said, I don’t under estimate emotional attachment and how people self-identify. Take meat as an example.
Eating meat, and in the quantities we do, is unhealthy for our bodies. Consuming animal protein is linked to cancer, heart disease, obesity, high blood pressure, osteoporosis, dementia, and strokes; the diseases of affluence. Meat kills, albeit in a different way to guns, but in both cases it’s related to human behaviour. And crikey, never mind the meat industry wreaks environmental destruction and is the leading contributor to GHG emissions!
There are so many reasons to stop eating meat, or drastically reduce consumption (I recommend 100g/week of ostrich biltong, the far superior South African version of jerky, should you need the nibbles), but we don’t, and we know why; it tastes too damn good! No one is going to get in the way of that. Not even an early cremation. I swear, if I ever become vegan, my first act will be ordering a salad at a paleo restaurant and demanding why I can’t get a bowl of chickpeas on the side as my protein!
So how do you stop the addiction to guns? We’re seeing it unfold in the protests, but these are early days, and America is America, the gun lobby is shifty, and they will propose a weak compromise, dress it up as a great concession, and the politicians will save some votes and hope the protests fade away while praying the next massacre is later rather than sooner.
If you truly want change, then protests have to continue at the same intensity as they are now. Take heart from the protestors of Brightlingsea, they started in January and kept going until September, when finally, the animal shipments stopped. Remember the demographics:
82% of the protestors were women.
81% had never protested before.
73% were aged between 41-70.
Take heart.
