My amatxu She really enjoyed having children, she liked parenting and, when she was older, she used to dream about having a baby to breastfeed again. She woke up very happy and told me: “I dreamed that I was breastfeeding again.” On one occasion, a few days before Christmas, at the butcher shop in our neighborhood the saleswoman commented that she had suckling lamb, a creature that had only fed on its mother’s milk before being taken to the slaughterhouse. Mine came home shocked. I had never thought about it! Of course, I had heard the expression “lechal,” but I had never made the connection before. The anecdote used to come up at family meals and she never bought lamb again.
Queer?
Vegans are the “weird ones”, the fanatics, the extremists. But eating fruits, vegetables and legumes is nothing strange. The strange thing is that you can’t watch a video of how your food is produced, because you can’t stand it, and that social networks hide it as “explicit content.”
There is nothing strange about looking for animal-friendly alternatives. The strange thing is to continue being attached to the udders of cows, mammals that produce milk for their calves because they are precisely that, mothers.
There is nothing strange about consuming vegetable protein, which is much more sustainable. The strange thing is to sacrifice the Amazon and huge territories of our planet for a livestock industry that devastates, not only the millions of animals it raises as products, but all biodiversity.
There is nothing strange about eating chickpea cream. The strange thing is to put a tube up a duck’s esophagus so that its liver gets sick and celebrate the holidays by consuming it as if it were a delicacy.
The Veganuary campaign for 2025 invites us to recover strangeness, to stop normalizing practices in our food system that are not only aberrant for animals, but also suicidal for our species. Sausages, the NGO reminds us, are literally pieces of an animal stuffed in its own intestines. A little strange, isn’t it?
It is not uncommon to know how to cook tofu in all its variants and enjoy it in both sweet and savory foods. It is strange to keep a mother pig locked in a cage where she cannot even turn around for months, where she goes crazy and where she is not able to interact with her babies.
It is not strange to enjoy the various vegetable drinks at our disposal, what is strange is to affirm without blushing that cows “give milk”.
It is not unusual to consume legumes both in winter and summer, in salads and cooked, the strange thing is that millions of male chicks are crushed alive within minutes of being born.
Veganuary has been helping people around the world try veganism during the month of January and beyond for a decade now. The NGO, which this year celebrates its second campaign in our country, encourages us to look at the practices of the food industry from the perplexity that they should cause us.
It’s not about blaming anyone, because the industry invests billions in normalizing the unacceptable, and we have enough with the one that is falling, right? But perhaps one of the keys to having more just and peaceful societies is to include all animals in our scope of respect. Wanting to live in line with those values is not unusual.
In January 2024, around 25 million people stopped consuming animal products and more than 1.8 million relied on Veganuary resources such as newsletters and social media. Participating in Veganuary is free and anyone can join in.
#Veganuary #strangeness
