I've managed to get this far with life and veganism without encountering JL goes Vegan, but a brief exploration of the blog suggests I might have been missing out. I found JL's blog via somebody's link roundup on weight and body image, specifically a post titled Veganism is not a crash diet. Of course I agree totally with that idea. Long-term readers of this blog may remember my feelings on the subject of Skinny Bitch - a book which equates vegan with skinny and skinny with healthy, and in my opinion verges on pro-ana in places.
JL has started a new blog called Stop Chasing Skinny, and the post that reasonates with me there (having not had much time to explore either of her sites) was this one - dealing with the flipside of the Skinny Bitch phenomenon, the person who gives up veganism because they are losing too much weight and, quite frankly, because their interpretation of the vegan diet is no fun at all and seems to be based on deliberate self-denial. Fine if you like that sort of thing, personally I don't care if you live on bread and water and put upturned nails on your chair at mealtimes, but it isn't a great representation of veganism - especially if you are suffering rather than thriving.
Veganism doesn't have to be raw or low-fat or gluten-free, and I am living evidence that it doesn't have to involve cutting out caffiene. It doesn't have to be healthy - you can live on chips and doughnuts and still avoid animal products. It just has to be vegan, and people of all shapes and sizes can do it.
Showing posts with label raw vegans. Show all posts
Showing posts with label raw vegans. Show all posts
Wednesday, 28 September 2011
Saturday, 2 August 2008
In the raw
Again, sorry, no nudie stuff in this post. One person gets to see that, and he doesn't do blogs. :)
Ahem, that aside...
This post is about what I see as a major difference between health vegans and those who are in it for animal rights reasons. (Or maybe between 'raw veganism' and any other form of veganism I can think of offhand) There has been a lot of fuss recently, sparked by a person who posted about the damage her raw vegan diet (which wasn't even vegan, but she doesn't mention *that* to the newspapers!) did to her children. (Incidentally, I made another post about this case but consigned it to my draft folder as it was based rather on personal anger and meanness - while I still agree with the overall sentiment, I felt the actual message was rather undermined by the medium of snarkiness. Suffice it to say, the resulting attention has led one of the vegan world's best-known raw-foodists to speak out about the amount of health problems in vegan children she knows.
Now, part of me thinks it was brave of this woman - a first-time parent of a child in the last stages of breastfeeding, so somebody for whom it is an issue like RIGHT NOW - to raise the issue. Because, while veganism (raw or not) is not automatically a bad diet, it is not automatically healthy either. Too many people assume that it is (and incidentally assume that a vegan with a cold or period pain or a broken bone must have been sneaking off to McDonalds, blah). And people who disagree with this will at some point be lambasted for it.
The factor that distinguishes raw, health-minded vegans from certain others among us (maybe the majority?) lies in the solution this person suggests. Now, she isn't doing so blithely or without some kind of conflict, but she is nonetheless raising the possibility of introducing raw goat milk and similar items into her daughter's diet. It is explicitly *veganism* she feels the need to compromise on, rather than *rawness*. Now, reading this as an animal-rights-minded (and so far non-breeding) vegan, this struck me as being the opposite of what I would expect. Maybe this is because my experience is of families where the children are raised vegan but not raw. (And, generally, had roughly the same or a lower level of ill-health than their classmates) Maybe because I can see a whole lot more scope for a varied diet including cooked food than I can for one involving raw animal products. (unless one goes for raw meat, but the salmonella content might be a little *too* varied there!) Or maybe because my beanburger-and-chips fed self had a perfectly normal puberty and came out of it at above average height with teeth that can crack nuts! At any rate, when avoiding animal products for reasons pertaining to the animals themselves is the key motivation for being vegan, then veganism itself is the last principle to be sacrificed, rather than the first.
Ahem, that aside...
This post is about what I see as a major difference between health vegans and those who are in it for animal rights reasons. (Or maybe between 'raw veganism' and any other form of veganism I can think of offhand) There has been a lot of fuss recently, sparked by a person who posted about the damage her raw vegan diet (which wasn't even vegan, but she doesn't mention *that* to the newspapers!) did to her children. (Incidentally, I made another post about this case but consigned it to my draft folder as it was based rather on personal anger and meanness - while I still agree with the overall sentiment, I felt the actual message was rather undermined by the medium of snarkiness. Suffice it to say, the resulting attention has led one of the vegan world's best-known raw-foodists to speak out about the amount of health problems in vegan children she knows.
Now, part of me thinks it was brave of this woman - a first-time parent of a child in the last stages of breastfeeding, so somebody for whom it is an issue like RIGHT NOW - to raise the issue. Because, while veganism (raw or not) is not automatically a bad diet, it is not automatically healthy either. Too many people assume that it is (and incidentally assume that a vegan with a cold or period pain or a broken bone must have been sneaking off to McDonalds, blah). And people who disagree with this will at some point be lambasted for it.
The factor that distinguishes raw, health-minded vegans from certain others among us (maybe the majority?) lies in the solution this person suggests. Now, she isn't doing so blithely or without some kind of conflict, but she is nonetheless raising the possibility of introducing raw goat milk and similar items into her daughter's diet. It is explicitly *veganism* she feels the need to compromise on, rather than *rawness*. Now, reading this as an animal-rights-minded (and so far non-breeding) vegan, this struck me as being the opposite of what I would expect. Maybe this is because my experience is of families where the children are raised vegan but not raw. (And, generally, had roughly the same or a lower level of ill-health than their classmates) Maybe because I can see a whole lot more scope for a varied diet including cooked food than I can for one involving raw animal products. (unless one goes for raw meat, but the salmonella content might be a little *too* varied there!) Or maybe because my beanburger-and-chips fed self had a perfectly normal puberty and came out of it at above average height with teeth that can crack nuts! At any rate, when avoiding animal products for reasons pertaining to the animals themselves is the key motivation for being vegan, then veganism itself is the last principle to be sacrificed, rather than the first.
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