Good food and little money
You can’t expect and don’t need to expect the poor person who lives far away from civilization and owns three chickens and two goats to go vegan. He’s not ruining the environment and he has no economic alternatives.
Also, people who barely (or not) get by are exempt from expensive food alternatives – but not from being activists demanding subsidies on whole-wheat bread instead of on white bread.
It must be made as clear as that smoking tobacco ruins your health, that eating animal produce ruins your health and is way more expensive than healthy, tasty alternatives. Your meals will be better for your health, your ‘wealth’ and the planet if you switch (more) to plant-based foods. You only need to add different supplements. Vit. D, that everyone needs very much but is lacking in all foods, is steadily added to milk products. we must buy this separately and demand that it is added to whole-wheat bread instead. If you also eat lots of veggies, you only need to add Vit. B12 and you’re set.
Also, we can’t just criticize overburdened poor people for drinking alcohol, smoking cigarettes or watching TV. At first, we need to empathize with them before advocating to do sports and be activists instead.
In a country like the Netherlands, the situation is radically different. Its hidden coffers are still overflowing from its rich colonial past (robbery). It is a rich country, though a sizeable part of the population never saw a penny of that. As one Indonesian nurse in Amsterdam told me: ‘In the Dutch Indies, so much was stolen and so little we could keep but I always thought: At least, the people in Holland are enjoying this.’ Now I work in this old-age home where pensioners are stacked together with six in a room and I hear that they never knew money all their lives. That hurts.
In this rich country, medical fraud promoted the consumption of milk. ‘Melk moet‘ (milk is a must) went so far that the US health advice of the four-layer food pyramid, in the Netherlands since 1953 was ‘translated’ into de schijf van vijf (the disk of five) with as number 1: milk and milk products (cheese!). Decades later, the efficient farmers produced more and consumers already ate less of it, creating a virtual milk lake and butter mountain, and the propaganda was only intensified. (Supplemented by ‘eenmaal per etmaal een eimaal‘ — an egg a day keeps the doctor away.)
The moral of the above is, there are better alternatives for most people.
A tree is known by its fruit. Only this tree has quite a variety of produce, so please don't judge the trunk after one helping. View more posts
