Once upon a time people felt sorry for vegans… Now lentil burgers are something of a badge of honour.
1. Go Vegan/Vegetarian (ish)
Veggies, or veggo’s – as I like to refer to myself – were traditionally viewed as a skinny, pale, weak, probably bespectacled (wearing the little round John Lennon ones), probably Marxist individuals who were bad at sport, and probably hadn’t been laid in a while. We were viewed with a combination of suspicion, bewilderment and pity by guffawing, red-blooded lads, and by the French. But there is good evidence to suggest vegetarians and vegans are choking the planet to death significantly less than their cattle, pig, sheep, chicken, duck, goose, venison or horse-guzzling buddies. As in, 1 ton less carbon emitted per year. One ton!
Surfing has a proud history of avant garde veggo’s: Jim Banks, Nat Young, etc etc. Rasta is a vegan. Possibly a fairly sanctimonious one, but hey, show me a non-sanctimonious vegan. As the saying goes, “How do you know someone is a vegan? Oh don’t worry, they’ll fucking tell you…”
Vegetarians don’t eat fish. Fact. Fish is an animal. Fact. Look up the biological classification of any fish, first thing it says: ‘Kingdom: Animalia.’ An animal, that you eat, is meat. Vegetarians do not eat chickens, either. If anyone tries to claim to be a veg and then says, ‘Well, I eat chicken…’ Punch them square on the nose. If they say ‘I’ve been vegetarian about 7 years…’ then order the sashimi, poke them in the eye then karate chop them in the voice box. Violence is the only way.
Maybe you can’t turn veg, it doesn’t always work out. Some folk kind of tend to waste away, as if they are terminally ill. Why not just try eating less meat, doing veggo-ness part-time, say during the week? (You can still shovel your horse lasagne down your throat on Sat and Sundays…lucky!). Humans who go veggo during the week will save 0.7 tons of carbon/year! That’s a lot… and your poo will smell better!
Win win.
“If they say ‘I’ve been vegetarian about 7 years…’ then order the sashimi, poke them in the eye then karate chop them in the voice box. Violence is the only way”
2. Just Say No to Palm Oil
This palm oil stuff is evil. I’m not sure if this is relevant, or even sound ethics, but bad stuff happening to the Indo jungle seems worse than other surf-less jungles. As wrong-headed as that might sound, if we can care a bit about environments we have some kind of relationship with, or handle on, well that’s a good thing, isn’t it?
85% of all palm oil globally comes from Indo, Malaysia and Borneo. In Indonesia, vast palm oil plantations are cut from ancient rainforest, home to rare animals like the Sumatran elephant, Sumatran tigers and Orang Utangs. The Indonesian government has set aside a whopping 18 million hectares of rainforest to palm oil production by 2020 (source: Rainforest Action network). Deforestation is responsible for 80% of Indonesia’s CO2, making it the 3rd largest Greenhouse gas emitter in the world (after USA and China).
Whether you’ve been to Indo, or not, whether you’ve had the Greenbush bush as backdrop, or not, you should have some kind of appreciation for keeping the jungle jungle. If you’ve been on Facebook and seen those pics of the dead, burnt orangutang covering its face and felt physically sick, well, haven’t we all?
What to do: Read the ingredients, boycott palm oil products. e.g Nutella.
It might only say ‘vegetable oil’. If it does and it comes from Asia, it’s palm oil.
If saturated fat is 40% of total fat, it’s palm oil.
Watch out! Just because it says ‘organic’ it might still contain palm oil. Many organic products contain it, read the label… and then scrutinise the fuck out of it.
