Vegan dreamers should wake up and seek workable solutions
Re: “Nature, or food-industry marketing”, Have Your Say, February 6.
One of the more endearing aspects of this letters column is the propensity for creative fiction, which seemingly beguiles some of the more frothy and excitable contributors.
This tendency is rarely, if ever, romantic; it largely eschews Shakespearean eulogies to amatory intrigues.
What it does do, however, is allow certain people to peddle blatantly chauvinistic falsehoods in pursuit of a specious, uninvited agenda that seeks to proselytise the unwary to worship at the altar of false Gods, and thereby bask in the reflected but tarnished glory. As a blunt Yorkshireman, conversely, I tend to be plain-speaking.
Let’s take “Diane Cornelius”, hastily firing off another knee-jerk reaction to my sober thoughts on the perfectly natural human tendency to consume meat. We are informed that humans are not “natural carnivores”. What mendacious cojones! (Or, if you prefer, prairie oysters. They’re tasty, too.) Check your teeth, Ms Cornelius, and kindly keep the formulaic boring, misleading tripe (no pun intended) to yourself, as you’re emphatically not going to change rational people and their normal appetites.
Further to this I, personally, am informed by Cornelius that the mixed grill I lovingly devoured “could” (not “will”, I see) be the death of me. That’s only to be expected. Also noting the hysterical exclamation point at the end of that outburst, of course.
Cornelius, as doppelganger of the person at whom my original missive was directed, endeavours to lecture the well-balanced here about the environmental impact of “animal food” production. This, while she conveniently overlooks the obvious perils of agrarian farming and doubtless has frequent use of some form of transportation (cars, aeroplanes, buses, for instance) that burn choking, suffocating fossil fuels – look at Bangkok recently.
The alias Cornelius is just another perennial keystroke warrior, frantically pursuing her single-agenda diatribes directed at her fellow human beings, who just happen to have different preferences. Perhaps her time would be better spent looking at workable solutions instead of trying to cross an unbridgeable fissure between the sane on this side and the impolitic on the other, and instead of chastising others she alleges lay waste to her pristine image of a perfect world that cannot exist.
Moreover not one stern – or any other – word about halal meat-eaters as I requested, I observe. Oh, the hypocrisy.
Dr Frank
Bangkok
