If It Ain’t Broke Don’t Fix It

By Averette at English Wikipedia, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4068029

Have you come across, or are you, one of those people who doesn’t want any of their foods to touch on their plates? Although I’m not, I do do something similar. I eat each item of food separately in a set order. Well I say that. In fact a lot of my meals are very mixed, but if I’m eating something like beans and chips, I’ll eat one item first, then the other. One of the things about following the kind of diet I do is that most of my food is chopped up pretty small before it reaches my plate. I often get through a whole dinner without using a knife or fork, or a knife or spoon. Apparently there’s a tradition in some cultures that all the violence takes place in the preparation of food, and once it’s at the table and you’re bonding with the other people, weapons such as knives and forks have no place, because you’re with friends. I don’t know if this is true, but it makes sense.

The next stage on from not letting your food touch on the plate would be not letting it mix in your stomach, and it is quite odd, when you think about it, that we wouldn’t dream of letting the foods in consecutive courses mix either on the plate or in our mouths but we’re happy to let it do so in our stomachs. Except sometimes we aren’t. For instance, although I’m not much of an alcohol drinker, going months or years without any kind of tipple, there is a rule I’ve never followed never to mix the grape and the grain. I’ve done it many times and never had any ill-effects, so I wonder whether it’s a custom rather than a rational measure, but maybe I’ve just got a strong stomach in that respect. However, it entirely makes sense to me that someone wouldn’t want to eat dairy while there was meat still in their stomach, particularly if it was from the same species, because it just seems to be in terrible taste to “drown” corpses in their mother’s milk. To me that doesn’t need an explanation. It just seems obvious that you wouldn’t want to do it. It’s sickening. Of course, I am in fact vegan so it goes a lot further than that for me, but it still makes sense, as it does that you just wouldn’t make a meal including both meat and dairy for the same reason. It is, of course, quite an abstract point to me since I gave up meat thirty-five years ago.

This principle is of course mentioned several times in the Bible, but is widely regarded as superceded by Christians. I’ve mentioned it several times so I’m not going to harp on about this particular issue, but don’t you think the vision of the sheet in the Book of Acts is a teeny bit suspicious? Here it is in the NIV:

About noon the following day as they were on their journey and approaching the city, Peter went up on the roof to pray. He became hungry and wanted something to eat, and while the meal was being prepared, he fell into a trance. He saw heaven opened and something like a large sheet being let down to earth by its four corners. It contained all kinds of four-footed animals, as well as reptiles and birds. Then a voice told him, “Get up, Peter. Kill and eat.”

“Surely not, Lord!” Peter replied. “I have never eaten anything impure or unclean.” The voice spoke to him a second time, “Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.” This happened three times, and immediately the sheet was taken back to heaven.

• Acts 10:9-16.

I’m prepared to accept that Peter had that dream, but it’s also clear that requiring men to be circumcised and to restrict their current diet considerably would make it harder to sell Christianity to the world. I also don’t think it constitutes progress that the distasteful practice of, for example, mixing milk and meat became acceptable in that faith community. It’s a step backward. Again, though, as a vegan it’s easy for me to say that.

Other forms of mixing are also forbidden, and one in particular is brought up quite often in connection with the criticism of perceived Biblical homophobia, in what is in fact a highly dubious argument. People objecting to the apparently homophobic “clobber” verses in the written Torah because of Christians (usually) who use them as an excuse for homophobia often also bring up the prohibition on eating shellfish and wearing mixed fibres. I would call this borderline anti-Semitic apart from anything else, as it highlights aspects of observant Judaism which the interlocutor regards as ridiculous. As a vegan, I don’t consider the prohibition on shellfish to be in any way ridiculous, although perhaps not for the same reasons. Certainly from a health point of view it isn’t the most sensible idea to eat animals who filter feed and live near sewage outlets, and nor is it a good idea to eat animals which are unusually allergenic to humans. The prohibition on mixed fibres isn’t exactly that. It’s actually a prohibition not to wear garments made of both wool and linen, at least in one place. In another it says “two types of material”:

לֹא תִלְבַּשׁ שַׁעַטְנֵז, צֶמֶר וּפִשְׁתִּים יַחְדָּו.

• Deuteronomy 22:11 – “You shall not wear cloth combining wool and linen.” Some translations insert “such as”.

אֶת-חֻקֹּתַי, תִּשְׁמֹרוּ–בְּהֶמְתְּךָ לֹא-תַרְבִּיעַ כִּלְאַיִם, שָׂדְךָ לֹא-תִזְרַע כִּלְאָיִם; וּבֶגֶד כִּלְאַיִם שַׁעַטְנֵז, לֹא יַעֲלֶה עָלֶיךָ

Leviticus 19:19 – “You shall observe my laws. You shall not let your cattle mate with a different kind; you shall not sow your field with two kinds of seed; you shall not put on cloth from a mixture of two kinds of material.”

Again, this says “wool and linen”, not “two kinds of material”.

There is an approach called chumra, which gets its name from the mitzvah to put a fence around a roof to prevent someone from falling off it. This involves going further than the letter of the law in order that one doesn’t err. A friend of mine took a similar approach to veganism and vegetarianism, where he went vegan because erring from veganism would be into vegetarianism rather than into carnism. Chumra applies to this, I would imagine, would involve not wearing any kind of mixed fibre. I don’t know why it’s been translated as “two kinds of material” when wool and linen are explicitly mentioned both times, and I don’t know why some translations insert “such as”. In context, the prohibition seems to parallel not mixing crops or doing something which would lead to hybridisation, and it forms one of a number of prohibitions which I have yet to mention, but before I do that I want to point something else out: this actually works really well from a contemporary Green perspective.

In ereyesterday’s post I mentioned the difficulty created for recycling by producing composites. Probably all lycra, for example, is in a mix, and polycotton is another. Once this has been done it becomes remarkably difficult to separate the two for recycling, which must be done because they’re to be treated differently. The same happens when other materials are composites, such as cups containing layers of bamboo and plastic. Therefore, although I’m sure this never occurred to the Israelites at the time, it does actually make sense not to mix fibres from a sustainability perspective. I don’t know. I mean, is it possible that they would’ve recognised a need to keep fibres separate for reasons of reuse?

It seems more likely that the prohibition on mixed fibres is a way of reminding them that they are a people apart with special duties, held to a more exacting standard than other nations, and that this would’ve been extended to the other prohibitions, known as כלאים – hybrid or mixture – kil’ayim. And of course if you miss out the aleph, it sounds like a certain dessert, hence the pic at the top. The specific prohibitions are, to quote Wikipedia:

• interbreeding of animals of different species
• planting mixed seeds
• grafting of different species of trees
• sha`atnez – mixing wool and linen in garments
• planting grain or seed-crop in a vineyard
• ploughing or doing other work with two different species of animal.

For now I want to continue with the specifics of sha`atnez (שַׁעַטְנֵז). Moses Maimonides held, as I think he may have done with other apparently inexplicable mitzvot, that it was specifically to avoid Canaanite customs, where there was said to be a ritual involving animal, vegetable and mineral combination, but there is also the requirement that tzitzit, ritual tassels, be made of just such mixed fibres, so it may also be about reserving them for holy purposes. It’s also permissible to wear two separate garments, one of wool and one of linen, even though this would lead to mixing, and to me this seems “wrong”, because it’s like letting your foods touch. It also seems only to apply to wool and linen rather than to any other mixture of fibres, which is in a way a pity. The thing to note here is that there is in fact a good modern day reason not to mix fibres, whatever the reason for the initial text.

Living things are in a way made up of fibres. We have fibres of protein and nucleic acid, on which are stored our genes. All proteins start off as fibres which then fold themselves into a particular form which enables them to perform their function, and DNA is also a double fibre, which twists, coils and then coils again to pack itself into, in our case, our cell nuclei. Mitochondrial and chloroplast DNA is in the form of loops rather than strands. This means there is a remarkable parallel between sha`atnez in the case of textile fibres and the same with true hybridisation, in that the latter literally involves the mixture of fibres too. The fibres of maternal and paternal DNA mix when pollination or conception occur, and they’re from different species. This often results in non-viable offspring but not always, and if the species are closely related this is sometimes because they have different chromosome numbers. For instance, donkeys have five dozen and two chromosomes and horses five dozen and four, meaning that they rarely produce a foal able to reproduce.

Then there’s the question of genetic modification, which is where I have to get emotionally involved again. There’s plenty of opposition to genetic modification and also plenty of defences of it, but the reasons for opposing it often seem to be emotionally grounded, as do the arguments made in response. The basic argument against genetic modification is that it alters genomes in an unprecedented way which has unforseen consequences, and there’s also an argument around intellectual property in that it leads to companies claiming ownership and patents on living organisms. The arguments for them are generally along the lines that humans have been consciously altering organisms by breeding for millennia and that it “feeds the world”. The latter argument is particularly disgusting because it guilt-trips people. In fact the world can easily be fed by overthrowing capitalism, or in the absence of that by following a plant-based diet, and even without those various reforms would be able to get the food to people who need it. The chief reason this argument is made is that there’s profit to be had from GMOs.

GMOs have “mixed strands”. Some of the time I don’t consider this a problem, but when an animal gene is inserted into plant DNA it ceases to be vegan if an animal was exploited to do that. This happened, for example, when an “anti-freeze” gene from a flounder was inserted into a tomato. This means that if I eat such a food, plant or not, I’m effectively eating an animal product. Orthodox Jews have rightly made the claim that this is kil’ayim. Nor is it trivial that it’s an animal product, because it means that at some point in the past an animal has suffered or been killed to put that tomato on my plate, and profit is being made from that abuse to which I’m contributing. And although breeding is also genetic modification, and does lead to environmental problems, the end result is a somewhat balanced physiology in the offspring, although any trait preferred by a breeder will have costs for the organism concerned, and in fact breeding per se is not always a good thing. Many breeds of dog, for example, have major health problems as a result.

The debate over GMOs tends to be disingenuous because neither side presents its real reasons for its position. Therefore, just as boiling a juvenile animal in her mother’s milk has a valid and sufficient yuck factor about which we should just be honest, so has genetic modification in some cases. Not when it applies to humans though. Genetic modification of humans has separate issues and sometimes it just seems to make sense. We need to acknowledge that we have valid emotional reasons for opposition to such things without attempting to use scientific-sounding arguments to support our position.

Hence the prohibition on kil’ayim looks like “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. The idea is that the living world was created perfect already, with enough for everyone’s needs, and human attempts to improve it are just tampering needlessly with the natural order. That said, it still seems a shame that it encourages monoculture and discourages companion planting. Monoculture has negative consequences for the environment and sometimes the species itself. It’s well-known that the lack of genetic diversity among bananas risks their extinction in the near future from diseases to which none of them would have resistance. Companion planting was considerably dissed by one of my friends who tried it, so I’m not sure it’s up to much, but the principles of permaculture discourage monoculture and encourage diversity among food sources for humans, and as such make the same area more productive.

However, the requirement not to plant different species together only applies to the land of Israel, which makes me wonder about permaculture projects there. It also doesn’t apply to plants which are not edible, so some companion planting would work. It’s looking like the prohibition is also linked to the idea that it isn’t up to human beings to create and destroy species, and hybridisation with GMOs does risk doing that.

The problem with the yuck factor is that it would seem to apply equally well as an excuse for homophobia. Consequently, although we should entertain emotional reasons for rejecting kil’ayim, we can’t allow that to have free rein only where it suits us. There needs to be something else, and I don’t know what that is. Sorry to leave it like that.

Vegan vs. Plant-Based

Why is a non-vegan Lithuanian chakam supremely relevant to veganism? I’ll come to that.

The Vegan Society defines veganism thus:

“Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of animals, humans and the environment. In dietary terms it denotes the practice of dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals.”

I’ve been into this before on here, so I’m risking repeating myself: veganism is not a diet. It’s more like pacifism. Looking at the definition above, it’s important to bear in mind what an animal is. I would define an animal as a eukaryotic multicellular heterotroph without cell walls. Two important things about that definition are that it includes humans and that it doesn’t just apply to vertebrates. Because it applies to humans, the above definition can be reworded thus:

“Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, humans for any purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of humans and the environment.”

This definition is not veganism, but veganism implies it. Moreover, since on a conscious level the most significant bulk of interactions we have is usually with our own species, it’s this which is the most significant part of veganism to us. Hence the statement by a certain animal liberation pressure group that they were glad about a particular coach crash on the M1 because it meant the death of thirty meat-eaters is not a vegan one. It also means that when we interact with other humans about veganism in particular, we have to do it in a respectful manner. Not doing so is in any case likely to be counterproductive.

The other side of this equation is that it applies to all animals, not just vertebrates. Vertebrates are the animals many humans find easiest to interact with, and identify most strongly with, although that drops off very fast when some of them consider fish. The supposèd red flag for a psychopath that they were cruel to “animals” as a child actually seems to mean they were cruel to other mammals and birds. It doesn’t even seem to mean fish. Generally going fishing is not seen as antisocial behaviour, and people often seem to get a free pass to do this compared to other bloodsports. Well it’s not okay. Simply because it’s a working class form of cruelty doesn’t make it better or worse than foxhunting.

Some of you will be aware that the reason this is on my mind right now is that I’ve just left the “UK Vegan” group on Facebook, because I found it so very irritating. Whereas this could be put down to a bit of irrelevant social media drama, and to some extent it is, I also believe that the group reflects the current state of veganism in the “U”K. There were actually three sources of annoyance on the group: the Dunning-Kruger Effect, which is common across human interaction generally, where uninformed people are less aware of their lack of knowledge than more informed people are of their own; reluctance or refusal to extend the circle of compassion widely; repeated conversations about meat and dairy substitutes.

I’ll just deal briefly with the Dunning-Kruger aspect. People don’t know that they don’t know things. This was actually the precipitating factor in me leaving, due to a conversation about digestive enzymes. This might sound tangential, but I consider it incumbent upon a person adopting a plant-based diet to research the nutritional aspects before going for it, and that would include the physiology of digestion. There are excuses for this – for instance, someone may have suffered from the use of anti-language in technical texts or they may be dyslexic – but the focus should always be not on finding reasons for not becoming vegan, but on finding ways around perceived obstacles in doing so. That means informing yourself. I would add that veganism is a personal decision which needs to be put in context. As I sit here, phagocytes in my colon are killing countless bacteria and fungi, who are not animals but are living organisms, and if they didn’t I would quickly die of immune deficiency. Life is violent by its very nature, and therefore from a strictly utilitarian perspective veganism is a mere gesture, but it’s about what one can personally do to avoid causing suffering and death intentionally or via negligence. Hence the focus is on the individual and nobody should be judged for not being vegan. However, if they’ve made the decision to do so, they need to be informed.

Now for the reluctance or refusal to extend the circle of compassion. This can work in two ways, bearing in mind the categories mentioned above regarding animals. One can be dismissive of or aggressive towards other humans or ignore their needs when considering the needs of other species, as with the coach crash incident. This doesn’t seem to happen much on the group, and I presume it tends not to happen more widely as much as it used to. What does happen is that people are dismissive of the needs of the likes of arthropods, annelids and molluscs other than cephalopods along with other animals they might encounter such as nematodes. Bear in mind that that is nearly all animals. There are estimated to be 4.4 × 10²⁰ nematodes on this planet, which is over fifty milliard per human. The justification given for this is that the others are not sentient. This is a baseless assertion, more or less. It does follow from the premise that a complex central nervous system is required for sentience, but there is not really any reason to suppose this to be the case because the nature of consciousness is entirely mysterious. Various solutions have been proposed to the mind-body problem by philosophers through the centuries, but they all have a tendency to be found wanting, and in the process of those proposals a notable factor is to focus on just those features which are able to suggest that the person making the argument is sentient and members of a particular out-group are not. This is where we come to the Lithuanian chakam I mentioned at the start: Emmanuel Levinas and his argument that ethics is first philosophy.

Just to explain what that means, it’s been popular in the past for philosophers to come up with a total theory of everything which explains the nature of reality. This is not so popular nowadays for various reasons, such as the subservience of philosophy to science and the dominance of postmodernity in certain circles. This could be seen as first philosophy. An example of it would be Descartes and his “cogito ergo sum” – I think, therefore I am. Descartes attempted to doubt everything he possibly could before proceeding to attempt to rebuild the world, which interestingly for the purposes of this discussion he did by attempting to use the ontological argument, that is, the necessary existence of a perfect Being who would not deceive him that the world was real by making him imagine it. However, on the whole such projects have always tended to be metaphysical in nature. Levinas considers the Other as subject and the demand their existence makes on one to be obliged towards them in someway – to take responsibility for the Other. I’ve previously mentioned Jean-Paul Sartre’s example of “The Look” as a solution to what he calls the scandal of other minds. Sartre imagines spying on someone through a keyhole at the end of a corridor and hearing footsteps behind him, at which point he feels shame, based on the sudden awareness of himself as an object for another subject. Levinas appears to take this shame and turn it into responsibility, and as such makes ethics first philosophy. This corresponds to the idea of the Torah being created before the Universe.

I would take this idea of ethics as first philosophy and apply it to all the decisions we make about the nature of the world, so in a sense the world is created by the Torah, i.e. the ethical underpinnings of all reality. Metaphysics should never be based on expedience. If one adopts a position where one is aware that if a particular belief about the world is highly convenient for one, one should immediately doubt that belief and test it to see if other beliefs would be in the interests of the Other. Applying this to veganism, the statement that any particular organism is not sentient should arouse our suspicion, even if it’s based on the apparently rational premise that said organism does not have a central nervous system, or a sophisticated central nervous system, or whatever other excuse one might want to make to ignore the potential pain of others. Nor should we be ashamed of adopting a moral rather than an apparently rational stance in these situations.

In fact the beliefs expressed on this group go a lot further than simply confining sentience to vertebrates and denying it to, say, insects and bivalves. Some of them actually describe rodents primarily as, and this is my word, “vermin”. I’m not in fact conscious of their use of this word but they have definitely said “health hazards”. These would be rodents sharing living space with humans and who are not companion animals. Whereas I recognise that this situation does pose health risks for humans, I take exception to the objectifying language. The word is being used as a primary description of a sentient being, and moreover a sentient being who happens to be a close relative. Humans and rodents are in the same superorder, the Euarchontoglires or Supraprimates, who began to radiate between eighty-five and ninety-five million years ago in the Turonian or Coniacian Age. They’re more closely related to us than even-toed ungulates or fissipedal carnivores such as pigs or dogs, animals who generally tend to encourage sentiment in us. I’m not going to say there isn’t a problem cohabiting with certain rodents, but various measures need to be taken to prevent that from happening, which may of course not be fruitful, such as blocking holes to the outside, keeping undergrowth down and so forth. Likewise, the issue with parasites such as headlice or Oxyuris nematodes is that their arrival needs to be prevented, because we may like to imagine that they don’t suffer when we kill them but that’s just convenient denial. Likewise, farm animals suffer but the response to that is to avoid situations where they’re born in the first place. This is what we should be doing with animals other than our own: prevent their existence rather than have to confront them after they have come to be.

Having said all that, although the precipitating event was Dunning-Kruger and I object to the restriction of care to certain birds and mammals as opposed to all organisms, the stem of my reason for leaving is actually quite different and based on an event which didn’t even happen on the group. As a celebration of some kind a few weeks ago, I ordered a vegan takeaway pizza online. Unfortunately I misread the pictures on the website and ended up getting a pizza which was vegan, or at least said it was on the box, but had a pepperoni-like topping on it. I found this very off-putting because it resembled meat, and although I could intellectually accept that it was nothing of the kind, I strongly regretted buying it, or rather, wished I hadn’t made that mistake. There is a problem here. Meat, and other substitutes, such as for egg and cheese, are being made increasingly like their animal-based counterparts. Now I should explain my position here because it seems to be unusual. I always found meat disgusting but considered it my duty to eat it in order that the animals it came from existed in the first place, and one of my major shifts in perspective was that, as I mentioned above, it would’ve been better for them not to have been born, so I gave up meat as a transitional stage towards veganism, becoming vegan about a year and a half later. Consequently I find the recent plethora of meat mimicry personally nauseating. One of the problems I encountered with the group is that it seemed to consist largely of a stream of status updates about products found in supermarkets which were vegan, or at least plant-based and the distinction here is important for reasons I’ll go into, and often attempted to replace dairy or meat. This is not, to my mind, what veganism is about at all.

Just as a bit of a contrary note, I’m aware that there are people out there who like eating meat but who recognise veganism as a good thing, who might be encouraged to go vegan if they are able to access things which look, feel, taste and smell like meat or dairy, so there is a rôle for such products. If it’s a question of someone being vegan but eating this stuff or just not being vegan at all, then clearly this is what they should do. However, it should also be recognised that being plant-based doesn’t mean something is vegan. For instance, the recent meat-imitating burger manufactured using the hæm found in the roots of Leguminosæ was tested on animals before being released to the public. Moreover, the fact that an industrial process, packaging, transport and the like is involved in bringing these to the consumer at least runs the risk of introducing processes which are harmful to animals, not least the labour conditions of the human workers involved. This may of course not be the case, but the problem is that it introduces another headache because the responsible approach to these things would involve investigating all of this path, unless some kind of ethical certification scheme is involved, which would of course need to match one’s own values. It’s far simpler just to acquire some fruit and veg and make your own meals from them.

But is that feasible for everyone? What about food deserts, time poverty and ableism? We are given to understand that there are densely-populated areas where healthy food is unavailable, and this would of course mean that foraging had been ruled out although that is in any case likely to be adversely affected by pollution and not be sufficient to support the human and non-human population. However, the question then arises of whether plant-based composite and processed products such as these would even be available in such places. It seems more likely to me that one could get hold of a cauliflower and a tin of baked beans in such an area than a meat-free burger of the kind mentioned. Time poverty is another concern. It isn’t always possible for someone to find the time to prepare a meal and I can also see a rôle there. Finally, there’s the issue of disabilities, which means that it may make sense for someone to get their food in this form. Therefore there is an argument for such things.

What worries me, though, is that it seems to be a form of recuperation. Recuperation is the commodification of radical ideals by capitalism. The term “vegan” seems to be appropriated and turned into something which is highly profitable, and therefore unaffordable to many, and this gives people the idea that a plant-based diet is a luxury available only to the rich. This is not so, and various foods spring to mind such as rice, lentils, cabbage, potatoes, baked beans, bananas, peanuts . . . the list goes on and on. The existence and promotion of these products creates the illusion that it’s expensive to be vegan when it really isn’t.

Is this merely semantic drift though? Am I like one of those people who bemoan the use of the word “gay” to mean “homosexual” because they claim to have used it themselves to mean “happy” (but probably didn’t)? Words do change their meaning over time and nobody can control it. I would say not, because in fact the history of the word “vegan” where it means something close to pacifism rather than something associated with the star at the top of this post, starts in 1944 with the foundation of the British Vegan Society, and the definition it formulated itself has been in use since 1988. It’s almost a proprietary term, although I don’t think the Vegan Society claims any property rights over it. It has a fairly precise definition, and that definition includes but is not restricted to diet. It’s also a more politicised use, because if one temporarily disregards the exploitation of other species the word refers to a lifestyle where one cares about and fights against the exploitation of any human being and “promotes the development of” non-exploitative alternatives, for example to multinationals or companies using slave labour. I can’t overemphasise the fact that this includes all humans.

To conclude, then, I don’t like the drift towards veganism being merely about buying the right stuff in supermarkets. Some people may feel the need to do that or have a genuine requirement for such action, but that isn’t what veganism is about. Veganism is about fighting against exploitation and abuse wherever you see it, whether it’s in a slaughterhouse, a lab, a workplace or one’s own home. It has nothing to do with buying stuff, and to the extent that we are tempted to think it is, we’re distracted from capitalist exploitation and the need to defeat that.

Animal Sacrifice

Photo by Kat Jayne on Pexels.com

I’m sure the Talmud contains absolute screeds on the concept and value of sacrifice, and I will at some point be looking at that, but right now I’m confronted with the concept of killing other species one is deemed to own in one’s culture in order to atone or give thanks, and how alien it is to my mindset. Of course the days of animal sacrifice are more or less long gone now in Judaism, and it never got introduced to Christianity.

The difficulty, morally speaking, with the idea of sacrificing a lamb, for example, is that it presumes that the animal concerned has no say in the matter and is merely property. It goes beyond even the heinous institution of slavery to do so and firmly entrenches the idea that lives do not have value in themselves. The sacrifice of a lamb is supposed to be a loss for the farmer, and her life is irrelevant as something which is of intrinsic worth. There are similarities with the idea that men should have a break from labour, more specifically melachot, on the Sabbath because you are really only doing it for your own benefit and it cannot be a spiritual activity, when in fact labour should ideally be undertaken for the benefit of all, including oneself, but sometimes as an actual sacrifice. There seems to be an assumption, in spite of the absence of a concept of original sin in Judaism, that human beings are bent to doing wrong.

Spelling this out formally, you “own” a farm animal who is of some value to you because you can eat their flesh, drink their milk, wear their wool or sell any of that, and could also be bred to produce future generations of livestock, and there’s that word which really has no right to exist. At no point do the interests of the animal come into consideration. You care for them, but that’s an investment which will increase their value to you or in economic terms. Therefore when you give up that animal to the priests, you are losing that value and investment. This is brutal. But is it also true that in the circumstances there was no choice but to abuse other species in this way? Were there any other options? Is it the case that a pasture only has potential for goats, sheep and bovines to feed on it rather than being farmed or foraged for human food? Was human life at that point so tough and short that we had no choice but to blunt our empathy for what we regarded as our cattle? Did it become that way because of something which had happened in the past?

Regarding the Sabbath, if we really are talking about Bronze Age shepherds then their lives were devoted to the exploitation of sheep and therefore in a sense it’s only right that they spend one day a week not engaging in labour to bring them to market, prepare them for eating or shearing their wool, all of which is doubtless under one of the thirty-nine types of melachot. However, melachot are creative deeds. All the creative work that goes into caring for sheep is ultimately for human benefit, and is in a sense destructive.

I can’t pretend, though, that shepherds don’t genuinely care for sheep. For instance, if a gap appears in an enclosure for a flock and they begin to wander out of that gap, they could fall prey to wolves on the other side, and the shepherds don’t want that to happen. I think in fact this is not merely concern for loss or damage to property, but partly focus on the welfare of the sheep. This raises the issue of what happens to the sheep when they’re not being cared for on the Sabbath, and this question has in fact been addressed. There’s a story of a shepherd who noticed there was a gap in the wall on that day, and restrained himself from creating a new section of wall, as ’twere. The next day, a tree had sprung up. Literally true or not, this seems to form part of a theme where G-d will provide, as happened in the wilderness when enough manna would fall during the week to allow the Israelites to feed themselves on the Sabbath without extra work, and by extension during the Jubilee enough food would be available to tide them over for a whole year. This is about trusting in the Lord or Providence.

A little oddly to contemporary understanding perhaps, sacrifice is not always “to” someone. In the Zoroastrian-allied religion of Zurvanism, the primordial being Zurvan makes a sacrifice in order to create a new being, if I remember correctly Ahura-Mazda and Ahriman. Since at that point Zurvan is the only person in the Universe, the sacrifice is more like a magical ritual that leads to a new deity being created, and the act of giving up something is almost karmic, in that it’s compensated for by a possibly positive consequence, although in this case it seems to be the existence of balanced good and evil entities. I find all of this rather inscrutable.

Actual animal sacrifice is, on the whole, a thing of the past in Judaism. However, there is a sense in which the Paschal Lamb is a sacrifice of this nature, where the Zeroa symbolises the goat or lamb sacrificed for Passover in the Seder. But it is a night different from all other nights, so it’s the exception rather than the rule.

In fact I would say the seeds of veganism exist in the written Torah. Thrice it forbids the practice of boiling a goat kid in his mother’s milk, in Exodus 23:19, Exodus 34:26 and Deuteronomy 14:21. Although this can look inexplicable to some, and there have been attempts to account for it in terms of forbidding a Canaanite ritual, an emotional approach to this makes things pretty clear. It’s simply in appalling taste to take a baby and instead of using the milk that sustains her life to do that, use this precious fluid to cook the corpse. I think you’d have to be very cold and separated from your feelings not to recognise the shocking essence of such a practice. Rabbinical Judaism then extended this prohibition to the mixing of any dairy and animal body parts in food, and millennia later this proved to be extremely useful to us vegans, because it means, for example, that Jacob’s products are often vegan. I don’t think this is a coincidence. It arises from an ancient recognition of the immorality of how we treat other species. Another advantage of kosher food for vegans is that it must not contain bits of insects, which otherwise it often does.

There are certain items the sense of whose names is distorted by the fact that we live in a carnist culture. For instance, the word “livestock” refers to farm animals, but also makes it sound like they’re merely items to be exploited with no interests of their own, and also the property of humans, which they clearly cannot be. Apart from anything else, the concept of property seems to be largely human. Some other species probably do have something like property in the form of territory, kinship relationships and food items, and may feel their personal space is invaded, although it’s all too easy to anthropomorphise. The high concept of property, however, seems unique to humans and as such is merely our custom imposed on an indifferent world. A similar word is “cattle”, obviously cognate with “chattel”. One of the oddities of the English language is that it has no everyday word for a bovine which is not somehow marked in another way. There is no simple concept of “bovine”, even though other Germanic languages often have this. Instead we have “cow”, “bull”, “calf”, “ox” and “cattle”, plus a few rather more technical terms such as “heifer” and “bullock”. This seems to be because we’re too “close” to this species in our quotidian experience to have this word, although this doesn’t explain why other European languages do have this word.

It’s also notable that our words for farm animals are often not regular, or have only been regularised in the past few centuries. The plural of “ox” is “oxen”, the historical plural of “cow” is “kine”, and the plurals of “calf” and “lamb” have been “calveren” and “lambren” in some situations. This seems to have been more durable when the item referred to is more part of daily life, and it’s our association with these species which has led to this irregularity. We have irregular plurals for body parts more often than of most other items, such as “eyen”, “teeth” and “feet”, and also of items which are “closer” to us such as “lice” and “mice”. This is potentially benign, but it’s notable that we still have “cats” and “dogs” rather than maintaining what might’ve been mutation or weak plurals, although they were never in that category. There’s also a zero plural, as with “sheep” and “fish”. Notably, the treyf “pig” has an S plural. This appears to be significant, and may reflect the species we used to share our living space with.

Then there are the inanimate items obtained from other species: milk, eggs and wool. These all have more general meanings, but the usual sense of these words refers to things taken from other species. Milk usually means cow’s milk, eggs come from chicken (another zero plural, although I’m never clear if this is dialectal for me or general) and wool is generally from sheep, although it is also a mammalian body covering. The question arises, however, of what other textures of mammalian fur or hair we lack words for because we don’t encounter them as often. For instance, primate hair is not a mixture of long and short fibres in the same area as it is for other mammalian fur and hair, but we don’t call it something else. Other than even-toed ungulates, all other mammalian hair is generally referred to as hair or fur, even on our own bodies, so far as I can remember. Consequently I feel uneasy talking about wool, because it feels like it’s for human use.

After the Norman Conquest, the English language took to internalising the class structure of the society in which it was spoken by using French words for a higher register and English ones for a lower one. This notably extends to meat. In fact we use a Germanic word whose scope has narrowed to refer to meat as opposed to “flesh”, another Germanic word, but the principle was established by this initial division. Thus we have “beef”, “ham”, “mutton” and so forth, as well as the words for the species. I’ve sometimes wondered if this is to do with disguising what they are conceptually, and it could also be that the more Germanic-speaking peasants were involved in rearing, slaughtering and butchering the animals, who would then appear on the plates of the French-speaking nobles. This is probably the cause, but it seems rather convenient as a way of shielding ourselves from the reality, or rather one reality.

Nothing I’m saying here is meant to be judgemental. I am aware that the ecosystem runs on carnage, and since I consider plants conscious I’m not immune from rationalising my own behaviour. It should be borne in mind that since innumerable organisms are killed as a matter of course for sheer reasons of survival, even by our own immune systems, the impact our own species can make on that is small in terms of the number of deaths and the amount of suffering we inflict compared to the unintentional pain and killing which has to exist for a functioning ecosystem. Nonetheless we have strong signs of distortion in our language resulting from our carnism, and we should be aware of these things. This is particularly evident in the concept of animal sacrifice, which simply has no consideration for the animal concerned as an end, but merely as a means. We need to get beyond this brutal and callous way of thinking, and maybe think about retiring words such as “cattle” and “livestock”. Aren’t we better than that?