Plant based diet

Please don't think that there is anything sentimental about my veganism, such as not acknowledging the violence that exists in parts of the natural world, or not being able to cope with death, nor to see that 'nature' is 'red in tooth and claw' (Tennyson). Not at all. Of course many animals are carnivores and that's part of the natural order. I have no problem with the hunting and killing that carnivores need to do. But the whole of the animal kingdom is not red in tooth and claw, and there are many more herbivorous animals than there are carnivores – how could it be otherwise when, if it were not so, the herbivores would very soon become extinct. Co-operation, not killing, is what has built the natural world and also human civilisations. Not to mention that humans are basically primates and it seems to me that when early humans turned to eating meat, way back in prehistory, that was the first step in a very long story which now sees us living in a violent society, riddled with degenerative lifestyle diseases.

Vegans have many other solid reasons for their choice of diet. It's not just a lifestyle choice. For a start, there's the fact that many more people can be fed from the same amount of land using plant protein, than can be fed with meat from the same land. That's the reason I became a vegetarian almost as soon as I became responsible for buying and preparing my own food. This is even more crucial now that the plight of the environment has become a world crisis. My veganism came in the 1970s a few years later than my vegetarianism. It is not a restriction - it is a liberation! It's not a question of what I can't eat, but what I choose not to eat.

There's also the issue of pollution and the carbon footprint of animal products.
"A kilogramme of beef protein reared on a British hill farm can generate the equivalent of 643 kg of carbon dioxide. A kilogramme of lamb protein produced in the same place can generate 749 kg. One kilo of protein from either source, in other words, causes more greenhouse gas emissions than a passenger flying from London to New York" -  click here for an article on this subject, with references (the carbon footprint of lamb meat from hill farms is approximately 300 times greater than that of soy protein).

A fundamental reason for being vegan, speaking just for myself, is that the whole of society is affected by diet, and the social framework of meat leads to violence as well as to illness. An army marches on meat (and alcohol). This is mentioned occasionally in vegetarian literature and you may have seen the quotation 'as long as there are slaughterhouses there will be battlefields' (attributed to Leo Tolstoy). We also know in our hearts that vegetarians and vegetarian populations are the least violent, and indeed that meat is often avoided by monastics and holy men and women in all the religious traditions. 

We know all this in our hearts, but recently we are beginning to have proof! In the USA, many slaughterhouses were located in the city of Chicago. The cattle were fattened on corn in stockyards around the city, and 'corned beef' was the product. Chicago was a slaughter city and was also noted for its high crime rate and 'gangster' culture. The two went together. However in more recent years the American meat industry has intensified and the process has now been taken away from the cities and concentrated in huge units that have been placed outside small towns near to where the animals are fattened up, and miles from the city. Many hundreds of animals can now be slaughtered and turned into shrink wrapped pieces in one building in one day.  

Sociologists and others have been able to investigate crime rates in those small towns and it seems that the incidence of violent crime is higher in towns where a slaughter and meat processing plant is situated than in similar small towns in the same region, where equally large new industries other than meat packaging have been relocated and where a similar increase in crime might be expected.

Counties with growth in meat packing also experienced faster growth in violent crime rates over the decade relative to counties without packing plants” (Artz, Orazem, and Otto 2007)
The authors find that slaughterhouse employment is related to increased total arrest rates, arrests for violent crimes, rape, and other sex offenses. They also find that these relationships are unique when compared to other manufacturing industries. (Fitzgerald, Kalof, and Dietz 2009). 

Full citations for these and other interesting findings may be found online in an article A social history of the slaughterhouse: from inception to contemporary implicaitons in the Human Ecology Review Vol 17 no 1, 2010
http://www.humanecologyreview.org/pastissues/her171/Fitzgerald.pdf

Just one more thing. I've heard it said that 'veganism can't be natural because there's one essential vitamin that's not provided in a plant diet, therefore vegans have to take supplements, so how can it be a natural diet?' This is a reference to vitamin B12 which has to be supplemented except for people who are able to eat a diet of fresh, organic, poorly washed fruit and veg. This vitamin comes from metabolic processes of animals, but not plants. It is needed only in tiny tiny amounts – 0.0015mg per day (NHS) – and that's because in the diet of our ancestors it came from unwashed plant foods, from the accidental swallowing of insects and from the general lack of 'hygiene' surrounding eating. I've even read that in the traditional diet of the poor in India, the source of B12 was rat droppings in the rice. That does not appeal, and therefore many but not all vegans take the vitamin as a supplement, or they make sure they eat fortified foods such as yeast extract and some cereals etc.  

Like our prehistoric ancestors we are still basically primates and our digestion closely resembles theirs. Our nearest relatives are chimps and gorillas (with whom we are 99.4% identical in functionally important DNA). I hear you say that chimps are known to hunt and eat meat and I too have seen that on film. It happens when territory is threatened, and possibly in other stressful situations (such as nearby film crews). Sadly, then, chimps may be going the way of early humans. But all the other primates are still 'vegan' and a diet of roots, shoots, leaves, nuts and fruits is what we are basically 'designed' for.  (Oh and perhaps I should mention - in case you were going to mention it - that nearly all mammals have canine teeth, including the strict herbivores like the gorilla,the hippopotamus and the camel!)

Yarndale

This was the experience that inspired me to make this website. Yarndale is a yarn festival held in Skipton, North Yorkshire. The first one was held in September 2013 and I was there. I had been tempted to go because the knitting and crochet blogs had been buzzing about it for ages, and makers from near and far had sent crochet bunting and other items to decorate the venue. The weekend was a huge success and no wonder because every yarn festival I have attended (er, just two now, actually) has been bursting at the seams with visitors, past the point of discomfort, so there's obviously room for more events of this kind (but why does everything have to be so big? I would be happy with a church hall size event with a couple of dozen makers and sellers and somewhere to sit for a while with tea and cake. Now there's an idea.)

The Saturday of the weekend was a glorious day and I enjoyed my bus-train-train journey. In keeping with the theme, I took some knitting to do on the train, which was a first for me. I felt a bit self conscious at first, but really it was no big deal. It helped to get me in the mood for Yarndale.

Some other ladies got off the train at the same time as me in Skipton and we hung together for a while as we set off to walk to the venue. The walk from the station crosses the Leeds and Liverpool canal and then proceeds along a very nice public park. This was a pleasant walk in itself on a crisp sunny morning but after the park had been yarnbombed with crochet and knitted bunting, blankets, scarves and other colourful works of art it was a real treat. At the end of the path there's an incline from where you start to get the feel of the stockmart. Now this is partly what had intrigued me. A yarn festival in a stockmart?

Surely it would be held in an adjacent conference centre, or similar. Think what a stock market really is. You've seen the TV footage of hundreds of animals being herded into pens whenever farming is in the news, or maybe in 'countryside' programmes. Would you really want to hang out in a place like that, let alone buy some yarn there? As the stockmart hoved into view with its vast acreage of sheds and yards, a fellow traveller asked me the way to the stockmart. Evidently the penny hadn't dropped for her, for there it was in clear sight (in my photo, the rooves of the sheds, with trees around, actually look a bit like fields.)

By now lots of people were heading the same way, many from the direction of the shuttle bus or car park. We funnelled into the building past an ominous sign on the door which greeted us at eye level:

After being herded into the small entrance (modern security!) there came an immediate shocking reminder of its purpose – this was the smell. I am not exaggerating, and I know this venue is also used for other exhibitions not related to farming. But there was an all pervading unmistakable and rather strong stink of animal excrement. No getting away from it. It would take weeks to properly flush out and freshen the air in the place. I am not squeamish. I have changed many thousands of nappies (not disposables) and cleaned up quite a bit of vomit in my time. I like all animals and I have done my share of cleaning up after them too. 

It's not that. It's what the smell represents for me – frightened and uncomprehending animals in cramped conditions, between nightmare lorry journeys, on their way to who knows what. That is the reality of wool. Didn't anyone else at Yarndale realise this? 

The effect was more horrible because the space was quite poorly lit, with overhead windows only, and we were proceeding very slowly, part crowd, part queue, shoulder to shoulder. Could they really be having a yarn festival amongst this horrible stink? There certainly was no adjacent 'conference centre'! (as if!) and there we were, in the thick of it. I wondered why nobody said anything. We were obviously too polite, being English knitting ladies (and some gents). And what would have been the point since there we were already? Also some of us probably thought 'this is it, this is the authentic smell of the countryside' (which it is, seeing that much of the countryside is given over to animal concentration camps) and maybe those people were glad to have a taste of 'reality', assuming it was 'natural' and a proper 'countryside smell', perhaps even a privilege to be granted this insider taste of Country File.... Also of course they probably became inured to it, though I couldn't at the time see how. After leaving the first area which was the cafe (above) I snuck around an unoccupied section of animal pens (left) before facing the fray.

So once inside, there we were, edging shoulder to shoulder meekly up and down the railed pens where sheep and cattle are herded almost daily and where now the exhibitors had set up their stalls (interesting that the word 'stall' can mean a section of a stable or shed, as well as meaning a stand where merchandise is displayed – our vocabulary is our history). Because of the press of the crowd, it was quite difficult to get a look in at the stalls and much time was spent shuffling along the central isle. 

Yes it was that crowded! And of course the noise was tumultuous, which meant that everyone needed to shout...
The craft workshops were actually held in the central marketing area, the amphitheatre / area where the farmers sit along semi-circular rows of stepped seating and make those strange bidding noises whilst the frightened animals are displayed before them with much prodding and shoving. This room was in the central part of the building where the smell was just as bad. It really was most bizarre. Talk about an elephant in the room! But I managed to say a very quick hello to one or two knitters whose work I had seen online. Not surprisingly, despite strategically placed extra lighting, the poor light in the place did not do justice to the lovely creations on display, many of which I'd already seen online. 

Another feature of this spectacularly successful event was that at least three of the pens actually did contain animals. Heaven knows what the creatures felt in this concentration camp atmosphere, given their extra sensitivity in interpreting smells (e.g. the residual smell of fear) not to mention the overbearingly obvious residual smell of the day.  A main attraction was the pen which contained three alpacas. How gentle and sweet they were. How we 'aaah'd. In another pen, several angora rabbits could be seen huddled together in a hutch and in yet another, a huge rabbit spent his or her day immobile in the hutch alongside the proud owner. Apparently the owner keeps 'over a hundred' more at home. All the rabbits looked just about catatonic, as rabbits do when they've had the joie de vivre stamped out of them, or when they are paralysed with fear. The alpacas on the other hand were at least moving about in their tiny pen, and drinking some of their water, whilst around them was the thrusting of small hands and the uproar of the multitude.

I left the auction mart soon after 2pm, having bought the two small items which in anticipation I had avoided buying previously (do you do that?) and a pair of second hand bright yellow plastic knitting needles. I found the ladies' loo but predictably there was a long gridlocked queue outside it and possibly a minimal number of cubicles inside, considering the normal usage of the building. The whole event seemed not so much a festival but a massive queue – just as on other days the animals have to huddle and queue for each section of their experience inside there. The stockmart is after all a transit station for animals on their way either to insemination or to fattening, or to slaughter. Sheep can be transported several times throughout their lives.  

That's the reality of the thing, which for me contrasts so starkly with the cuddly, homely, cozy and comfortable world of knitting blogs which I used to enjoy dipping into. I chatted briefly with a few nice women during the day, and had a longer chat with a woman whilst eating our packed lunches (the first and last time I will sit in a farmers bidding area, I would think!) I knew it would spoil their fun if I told them what the place really meant to me.

What a relief it was to get out of the building and breathe the fresh air! The sun was shining its socks off for my walk back through the park, enjoying the yarn trail again. Instead of going straight back to the railway station I walked along the canal towpath into town. Skipton was packed with people, as befits a picturesque market town on the tourist trail, with a busy street market and lots of independent shops. Oxfam had a Yarndale window display as well as a stall at the event, and I heard in the shop that they'd had an outstandingly good day. The hospice shop too had a basket of yarn and a notice 'we support Yarndale' in the window.

It was quite hard to write about my reactions to Yarndale – a worthy event in a ghastly setting – a massive crowd of knitters, a whole representative bunch of humanity, and probably none of them concerned about the issues I'm concerned about. I felt the camaraderie of knitting and crochet at the same time as heavy alienation from the crowd. Apart from issues behind the wool industry, didn't anybody mind being shut up in this massive but crowded and cramped shed, with all its noise and repugnant smell, on such a beautiful day?  

So there it is. The day I decided to make this website. A 'reality check' and one small step along the way, I hope.

Footnote: These days, livestock markets seem to be on the decline (70 have closed since 1995, according to the Livestock Auctioneers Association - BBC Farming Today 30/03/17) - partly as a result of Foot and Mouth disease and partly because sheep, like anything else, can be bought and sold online. Hasten the day when they are all closed down and when animals are no longer bought and sold.