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ANIMAL WELFARE

Climate change isn’t the only reason people come to veganism. There are three main motivations that lead people towards wanting to adopt a more plant-based way of eating and living:

1 The environment

2 The treatment of animals

3 Health

Whatever the reason you started out on your vegan journey, it’s inevitable that the more you read around the subject, the more you will start to care about the other two reasons as well.

Ian started eating vegan as part of a health kick one January, but then it quickly became more about animal welfare and the environment too. Henry came at it with climate change as his main motivation, but then found a renewed love of animals, and enjoyed better health to boot.

If you are fully engaged in your vegan journey – which we encourage you to be at all times – it’s impossible not to start caring about the cruelty inflicted on animals as part of current farming practices around the world. From animals packed into small living spaces or separating mothers from their children in the dairy industry, to the catastrophic destruction of wild fish populations from commercial fishing.

We’re often asked what’s so wrong about organic, free-range, high-welfare meat sourced from herds that roam freely across acres of beautiful fields and whose farmer talks to them every day and knows them all by name. Surely that’s OK, right?

Well, aside from the debate over whether it’s ever OK to kill another creature, the main issue we have here is that it’s simply not sustainable for everyone on the planet to eat in this way. Most people don’t eat, don’t have access to or simply can’t afford to eat meat that has been raised in this way. And we simply don’t have the space on the planet to do it either. Many animal products on supermarket shelves come from animals that have been raised in poor conditions in factory farms, farmed cheaply to meet with demand. [25], [26]

We want to move towards food and lifestyle choices that work for everyone, not a select few.

HEALTH

The majority of people choosing to eat more plants are actually doing so for health reasons.[27] Although animal welfare is a very close second.

We know, first hand, how amazing eating a vegan diet can make you feel. Almost instantly we both felt lighter – we lost weight, sure, but we also felt lighter in ourselves too. We slept better, our digestion was better, our hair was thicker – and a surprising benefit was that our hangovers were easier too! Result! (Although it did take us a while to find the perfect vegan alternative to a hangover bacon sandwich … To be honest, that was one of the main motivations behind our Big Breakfast Bagel in our second book, BISH BASH BOSH!) We also found our energy levels were easier to sustain, rather than having an afternoon dip, or evening slump in front of the TV.

That’s not to say all vegan food is healthy – you can easily be unhealthy on a vegan diet, as you can on any diet. But generally, if you’re eating more veg, then you’re going to quickly see improvements in how you look and feel.

As a happy knock-on effect too, we found we became more conscious of everything we were putting into our bodies. Reading the backs of labels to see if they were vegan or not (more on this later) meant we also became more aware of other ingredients we might want to avoid – the additives and preservatives and colourings that we all know aren’t doing us any good. Of course, we sometimes choose things that we know aren’t very healthy – it’s all about balance after all, and we both have a MASSIVE sweet tooth! – but we’re now a bit more aware of our choices.

But don’t just take our word for it, there’s plenty of science to back it up too.

A diet rich in fruit and veg is higher in vitamins, nutrients and fibre. And since it’s much harder to overeat if you’re mainly eating veg, it’s harder to gain a lot of excess weight. In fact, a growing body of doctors, dieticians and athletes now say that a plant-based diet is the best way to fuel and protect our bodies. There is increasing evidence that eating a well-planned plant-based diet is linked with lower body weight,[28] lower rates of obesity,[29] diabetes[30] and heart disease.[31] For more on why you’ll feel AMAZING on a plant-based diet, see here.

SO WHAT CAN WE DO ABOUT IT?

Climate change is a complicated problem (err … understatement!) with lots of different perspectives to consider. There are so many contributing factors to climate change that there’s no one clear way out of the mess. When you’re faced with such a multitude of facts and figures, arguments and opinions, we know how easy it can be to feel analysis paralysis! We’re so overwhelmed by the complexity of the problem, we never decide how best to tackle it. Perhaps that’s why historically, as a global community, we’ve not done an awful lot about it so far.

Leading bodies say we need to embark on a World War 2 level effort to combat climate change,[32] and yet it’s definitely a more abstract problem to get to grips with – harder to picture, harder to explain, harder to solve. This can leave us frozen in indecision, right down to the smallest of everyday choices. There are so many people with different answers to the problem that it’s hard to know what to believe. We’re blocked by confusion and doubt.

Are plastic straws to blame? Should we all buy electric cars? Stop taking flights and start going on holiday by train? Where does food waste fit into the problem? Do we have to go veggie? But surely eating local meat and eggs is better than eating avocados and quinoa from South America?

On a personal level, the main barrier we think we all face is a feeling of helplessness.

What can we really achieve, as individuals? How can we change what’s being done by billions of people, if even governments and big businesses are not able to stop it? While some people are unwilling to make changes to help the greater good, surely the vast majority of humanity would want to help, if only they knew how?

Ian went through a phase of using bamboo toothbrushes and tried to live as close to zero waste as he could. But in our job – developing recipes every day – it’s almost impossible to live like this. We made a decision that we could have more impact if we concentrated on our main message of making delicious plant-based food available to everyone. We use sustainable ingredients as much as we can, but we can’t do everything all at the same time. And that’s OK – we do what we can.

We held our love for steak and roast dinners on a proverbial weighing scale and compared it with our love for the world and the future we wanted for the next generation. We loved food, had our favourite meals, and didn’t want to give them up. Henry’s obsession with fish and chips, swimming in tartare sauce, held him back for a while. But as we looked deeper into the facts, we were unable to resist the reality of the situation.

THE MAIN CAUSES OF CLIMATE CHANGE

There are two main causes of climate change which far outweigh any others: animal agriculture and transport.

Let’s start with transport. A return flight from London to New York costs the Arctic three square metres of ice per person.[33] One thing we can all do to reduce our carbon footprint is to consider flying less and avoiding air-freighted goods. Following the rule of supply and demand, if we fly less, fewer flights will take place and air travel will cause fewer carbon dioxide emissions in the future. The same goes for choosing to drive electric cars instead of standard diesel or petrol vehicles.

Animal agriculture, however, has much further reaching consequences. Cutting down your transport emissions reduces your greenhouse gas output. This is a simple equation.