Please Don’t Waste That Aioli

So I was in a cafe the other day. Hungry. Not particularly financially well endowed. I walk in, I ask for the snack menu. The “cute” dude with “nice eyes” hands me the All-day Breakfast menu, and then tells me I can order whatever I want from their cabinet. I look at the cabinet full of sugar-laden buttery flour concoctions and say “Na, I’m vegan, I can’t eat anything in there”.  I explain I wanted the snack menu and then I get it.

Looks like it’s fries again.

The scrappy bit of paper says Fries with Tomato Sauce: $5.50. He charges me $4.00; I’m thinking ‘stoked!’ I am also suddenly very conscious of the leather boots I am wearing, the leather bag I am carrying, the fact that I just ordered nature’s pseudo vegetable and some hyper-pureed maybe-tomato-but-mostly-sugar. I then think, pah! Not everyone thinks like me, he’s not judging me.

My fries appear not long after and are rather a small serving (would not have paid $5.50 for that!), and accompanied by some aioli. F*#king aioli! Half a caged-up chicken’s period mooshed up with some Chinese garlic and some canola oil from what used to be a thriving forest in South America… I point at the aioli and his face changes. He knows, bless him. He starts to take it away, and I say “I don’t want that to go to waste”. He says “We can use it again in the kitchen” and smiles “dishily” at me. I don’t believe him but I accept it anyway. My tomato sauce arrives seconds later and I demolish my meager serving in not much more time than that.

I muse while I demolish that maybe I am being a pain-in-the-arse, but then I remember -someone has to be, or nothing changes.

Part Two: The meat of the situation.

Now for the ecological reasons I choose not to eat animals and their by products: One, multiple cows burp maximum methane. Two, cow poo pollutes our rivers. Three, animal production requires high levels of energy -much of which is produced using coal. Four, animal production does not encourage biodiversity, and whole eco-systems (which we depend on to exist!) are uprooted just to change the landscape in favour of intensive dairying and meat making. Five, there is not a single breed of fish on the OK list in the Greenpeace Good Fish Guide because sea pollution and over-fishing have wiped many almost out, and set nets have buggered up too many endangered undersea species. Biodiversity is our best friend, and we had better get chummy with it or we will pay with our lives.

Now, while I have implied that I like my food local and exploitation free (whether it be exploiting animals, other humans, or our precious planet) I am not a perfect person. I love coffee. You cannot grow coffee here, it must be imported. I love lentils chickpeas rice and quinoa. Most of that is not grown here. In fact, a large proportion of my diet is not grown here, nor can it be. Arguably that makes my food politics appear on shaky ground. You could easily contend that eating even stringy old New Zealand beef once a week is better than imbibing imported fair trade organic coffee twice a day. You would not be wrong. You would not have my agreement, but these things are subjective are they not? The fact is, most vegans do rely on imported goods to get a balanced diet. Eco-vegans, like me, try to have as much of their diet local as they can, but I am not going to give up certain things while I can still get them. I have a friend who has gone 99 per cent local with her food intake. She is amazing and I applaud her, but even she has not given up coffee or, when at a cafe, imported soy.

We have to be realistic here. We are already martyrs to so many causes, most eco-vegans. We are already likely to be politically motivated by shoddy ethics in the workplace, the home, and in the rest of society to do things as well as we possibly can. So why add an extra layer of guilt and hard work by not letting ourselves have coffee, or quinoa? That is what this weblog is about. Paradoxes, waste, greed, love, anger, pain, emotion and rationale. There are so many experiences worth sharing, so it is time to channel my rants at an audience ready to relate.

Peace, love and reading, vegans. And to the rest, the same.

My blog begins! Part One. Non-eco reasons for veganity!

First of all I will clarify my choice of title for this weblog. It is designed to make staunch eco-vegans a bit huffy. “How can you be an eco-vegan and drink coffee?! In New Zealand! The cheek!” And that is exactly my point. It is almost as hard work claiming to be an eco-vegan as it is to actually be one. Your peers are your worst critics because the rest of the world is too busy being oblivious.

This is how I see my political relationship to food: If it was grown near Dunedin New Zealand, where I live, I am enamoured by it. It is not native, there are very few native vegetables in New Zealand. Arguably none. Potatoes and kumara were brought here by early Maori, and were very difficult to grow anywhere south of Christchurch, the rest followed with european “settlers”. Yet, if is currently grown here I will jump on it with great glee. Why? Because it has little to no carbon miles attached to it. It is a low emitting body fuel. Also, if it was grown here it helps local industry. We have to love local industry because without it our economy becomes a saggy sack of brightly coloured multi-national corporate strings. We need the jobs and we need the control. Only we know what we want in this country, and we ought to fight for our local industry. Local farmers’ markets are da bomb (oops, imported that saying from the States).

If it is animal product-free I also will down that fodder faster than you can grow it. This is for many reasons. I love animals. I don’t just mean cute fluffy ones, I mean all animals. I have a healthy respect for biodiversity, and this includes loving worms, and heaven forbid, flies. Each animal serves a purpose. Each animal also has some kind of brain, like us, to keep it ticking along in whatever purpose it serves. Cows sheep and pigs all feel pain, just like Mittens the cat and Barclay the dog. Why would I eat the former if I wouldn’t eat the latter? You can domesticate most animals. It is simply fashionable to domesticate cats and dogs. When I hear of people being shocked that they eat dog in some asian countries, I scoff in disgust. Not at the culinary canines, but at the ignorant humans that see a moral difference between dogs and chickens. Either way, violence, pain, blood, exploitation and a complete lack of understanding are all involved. Another reason I choose not to eat my furry friends is for health. Cholesterol is found only in animal products. It causes cancer and heart disease, it kills people. No thanks. I will kill myself with the stress involved in not being able to get decent vegan food in cafes and restaurants instead, thank you. Yet another reason I do not partake in animal eating is that all of the land used up in feeding ‘livestock’ (ugh, what a disrespectful noun) about triples land used in feeding us. There are starving people in developing countries who can’t even get access to clean water (that we take horribly for granted), let alone a steak. Are we that f*#ked up that we can’t see the no-brainer here? Let’s stop breeding so many damned beasts of burden and start using our fertile lands to feed the millions of starving people who afford us such rich lifestyles, by working themselves to the bone just to get a scrap of bread every so often. We are so fat and so ignorant and so expectant. How bloody rude.