Does going vegan really cleanse your soul?
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The 10-day Vegetarian Festival may be drawing to a close, but has anybody given thought to the cries of vegetables as they were being slaughtered?
People think that temporarily abstaining from eating meat or fish is good, that it cleanses their hearts and souls but have they wondered about the lives of the poor vegetables? Perhaps this is because plants look different from us and can’t be heard, unlike some members of the animal kingdom, whose faces have sometimes been replicated in the human race. (Think of a piggy or guppy-faced person.)
Since plants look different, we don’t think twice when chopping cabbages, mushrooms, carrots and even onions. After all, in this world of human domination, not all lives are created or valued equally.
This lack of empathy for the plant kingdom is similar to the lack of empathy we have for people from a different class, culture, ideology, gender or background. Since they are “too different” or speak a different tongue, we tend not to care too much about what’s happening on the other side of the globe.
This lack of empathy is visible among people of different political colours. Why should a person in a different coloured shirt with a different ideology have camaraderie with someone from the opposite camp?
Similarly, many people support capital punishment because the person put to death is “evil” – very different from the rest of us.
People at the grassroots level are also often seen by the educated middle-class and the elite as people who are “destined” to spend their lives in servitude, waiting to be exploited to serve the prevailing socio-economic and political structure.
In a society dominated by a few, not all lives are created or valued equally. Also, the mainstream media tends to conveniently marginalise the voices of the poor and ultimately, we start feeling less for those far away, different or voiceless individuals.
It does help to remember that rubrics like abstaining from animal products for “spiritual cleansing” are in reality totally man-made. It is humans who have come up with rules and regulations of what is ethical and moral, down to what is put on one’s plate.
The homocentric morality that is attached to the annual Vegetarian Festival makes this writer wonder if there is such a thing as an absolute morality in a world, that is after all, dominated by homocentric discourse.
Realising that morality and empathy are two emotions that were socially constructed puts the understanding of life in a different dimension. However, it also throws this writer into an uncertain world, where what is familiarly moral is no longer as valid as it used to be.
Perhaps, if vegetables could be heard crying when put under the knife, people might start looking at this yearly Vegetarian Festival from a completely different point of view.
