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Becoming Vegan
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by Deborah Taylor
Vegetarianism is a great lifestyle choice, but then you start thinking about what cow-milk does to you - and what happens to the cows once they've stopped producing it. Mooky Debs makes her first journey into the Land of Vegan...
Wai Kikka Mu Kow
I shouldn't read books. Or surf the internet. Or listen to my friends. It's possibly good for my health and that can lead to all sorts of problems.
The most recent case in point involves cows. More specifically milk. And by extension cream, butter, ice cream, cheese, chocolate... The list could go on, but I'll cry if I think about it too much. But back to these troublesome cows and their even more troublesome milk.
We drink milk because we think it's good for us. Well, we also drink it because it tastes nice and is much better to pour over your cereal than salad cream. But mainly because it's good for us. It must be, it's full of calcium.
And then I was shown a book. Which I only half-read, and I'm almost certainly misquoting here, though that's not something that's stopped me in the past, but it said we drink milk as babies to grow into big and healthy kids. Which is fine, if we're drinking our mother's milk.
Now baby cows, or calves to give them their scientific name, also drink their mother's milk, to grow into big strong cows. And the calf grows much faster and much bigger than we do. And that's because cows' milk is full of fat and proteins to make them grow faster. More fat than we actually need. And the calf will stop drinking milk when it doesn't need it. We don't... we keep drinking.
We're the only species around that drinks milk from other animals. I mean, you don't often see an otter suckling on a stoat, though that is a very, very sweet image.
A cow will only be good for producing milk for around two, maybe three years. It would be nice to think that all those cows, and there's an awful lot of them to keep us all in milk, are retired into nice green fields, casually swatting flies off their sun-baked backs. But, unfortunately, that's not their fate. They go to the slaughterhouse and move from the milk industry into the beef industry.
Now for the important bit... how does this affect me? Well, I've decided to start down the vegan path. And it's a lot easier, at first, than I thought it would be. I admit, I'm only starting by cutting out dairy products, drinking soy milk, eating soy yogurts and using olive oil spread. I also seem to have cut down on wheat or gluten products, but that's another story.
Eggs are difficult to cut out, as they're used in a lot of vegetarian substitutes, but I'll get rid of them eventually too. As long as I can subsist on a diet of nuts, berries and seeds...
The only question I need answering now is... is rum vegan?
About the author
Deborah Taylor is a band manager, events organiser and the uber-glorious Features Editor of Mookychick.co.uk. She also writes short stories that will twist your head and a regular mooky opinion column. You may send her roses, top hats and fair-trade rum.
