A Real Tasty Burger

Well now, doesn't this look delicious?  A well-stacked, juicy bacon cheeseburger with lettuce, tomato and a nice dollop of Hellman's something-or-other sauce.  Shove this into your face hole to experience - at last! - the "real taste" of summer.  You know it's real because it says on the label of the sauce bottle that it's REAL.  

Let's take a closer look...  What's that in the middle of the picture?

Oh.  Well that doesn't sound tasty at all.  Murder?  No thanks.  Real murder?  That's not helping.  I don't like murder.  Perhaps I should eat something else.  But I'm hungry.

And it looks so tasty!  Meat is murder?  Well, yes - OK, technically...maybe that's true.  In a way.  But not really.  What is the definition of "murder"?  Let's ask google.

Oh, good.  Murder is the "the unlawful premeditated killing of one human being by another".  I feel relieved.  Meat isn't human.  Meat is animal, which is different.  Also, it's lawful to kill animals.  That's where meat comes from.  Humans are natural carnivores.  Meat isn't really murder.  This sticker is vandalism.

Search YouTube Earthlings?  Maybe later.

There's been a lot of this sort of thing around recently. It's getting harder to ignore.  If you live in the Greater Manchester area you'll almost certainly have seen some of Go Vegan World's advertising campaign, on the sides of buses, street billboards, even on the Arndale Centre itself.

It's a powerful campaign: solidifying the spirit of veganism into single, indisputable factoids: "Dairy Takes Babies From Their Mothers" (true) - "Human Milk is a Myth" (also true) - "Like Us They Feel" (also true) - "Eating Animals Contributes More To Climate Change Than Transport" (that's right: true).

True as these claims most indisputably are, they were not well received by dairy farmers.  Michael Oakes, Board Chairman of the National Farmers' Union, wrote an open letter to the Sunday Telegraph in February in which he stated that the campaign had served only to "dishearten the nation's dairy farmers, for whom the health, welfare and care of dairy calves is incredibly important".  Not "important" in the sense of actually doing anything to protect said health and welfare of the animals involved, mind, but in some other sense.  Some - you could say - non-sense.  As Mr Oakes explains, "For calves to reach their potential, they need to remain happy and healthy, whether the future is within the dairy herd or within the beef supply chain".  That's right.  He actually wrote that.  It was published in a national newspaper.

A future some cows can only dream of.  This is what potential looks like.

A more perfect expression of the cognitive dissonance that we vegans call "carnism" you could not hope to find.  We all know the facts.  Meat, despite our equivocations, really is murder.   The letter kills, but the spirit gives life.  Meat might not "really" be murder.  But what reality is that?  If you inflict pain on a living, conscious being, it suffers. If you kill a living, conscious being, it dies.  Death is bad.  Pain is bad.  It's really that simple.  "Meat", in fact, is a euphemism.  A better word is "corpse".  What's for dinner?  A tasty slab of corpse.

There's something in the air just now.  It's more than a feeling, although still something less than a fact.  A realisation of - shall we say? - potential.  Veganism is gaining an unstoppable momentum.  It's in the chalk beneath our feet, it's on the adverts all around us.  It's on social media, it's in "mainstream" media.  It's in your head now, too.

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