Why are vegans so vilified?

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Newspapers reporting that parents of 'vegan girl' may face police questions are scaremongering

June 10, 2008 3:47 PM

 

The Peta 'child abuse' campaign.

The advertising campaign with the abrasive slogan "Feeding kids meat is child abuse", by the animal rights group Peta, may have been bordering on the absurd, but it seems we are perfectly willing to label as abusers parents who don't feed their kids meat or milk. A number of Sunday newspapers ran the story of a 12-year-old vegan girl in Scotland admitted to hospital with a degenerative bone condition under the headline "Parents of ill vegan girl may face police".

Although there is no indication that the police really are set to speak to the parents, both the Times and Telegraph found plenty of people who felt that perhaps they should, from social workers to "a leading nutritionist, who asked not to be named".

Nobody has divulged the specifics of the case, other than to say the girl was being brought up on a vegan diet, and the council has confirmed that the case is not being referred to its social work department, so we can safely surmise that the reporting of this girl's illness is a piece of scaremongering on a par with the Peta advert - although slightly less factually accurate (the Peta ad was cleared by the Advertising Standards Authority after the inevitable complaints). The Times even managed to link the story to two unconnected cases of vegan parents who starved their children to death.

The truth is that if being brought up on a vegan diet led to degenerative bone conditions, it wouldn't be news because hospitals up and down the country would be full - there are thousands of kids being brought up on a vegan diet in Britain, and I'm sure it won't take long for the comments section of this blog to fill up with tales of super-fit and healthy children who have been.

And, of course, it wouldn't take long to find literally hundreds (thousands, millions?) of cases of sick meat-eating children. Will all their parents face the police? Peta would feel, perhaps, that they should.

The benefits of drinking milk have long been over-trumpeted. Calcium is the great bone-growing mineral associated with milk; without milk, children would have brittle bones, or even worse, degenerative bone conditions. This was why milk was once upon a time given out free at school, and why there was such an outcry when Maggie restricted free school milk in the early 1970s.

But any rudimentary knowledge of nutrition will tell you that there are many plant-based foods just as rich in calcium. OK, I'll name some: green leafy vegetables, dried figs, sesame seeds and nuts (especially almonds), and even tap water.

The argument also exists, backed by rigorous scientific research, that most of us cannot digest milk properly after infancy. And even in infancy, nobody would argue that cow's milk is even close to being as beneficial as breast milk - which is technically vegan, by the way.

I could go on, but the facts are out there. The only thing missing in a vegan diet is vitamin B12, but that exists in many fortified cereals, soya milks, margarines etc and is not responsible for degenerative bone conditions. I'm sure the standard burger and chips diet is missing a lot more.

Bringing up children healthily requires a balanced and well-thought out diet, for vegans, vegetarians, pescatarians and meat-eaters alike. Perhaps the 12-year-old girl in question didn't get enough calcium. That, however, is not because she was vegan.

But vegans, it seems, with their self-righteous ways, still warrant the collective scorn of the people, so vilifying them in this way makes a good story. Now that environmentalism is a mainstream issue, and we're all accepting vegetarianism as good for the planet, at least we can still stick it to those weirdo vegans who won't even eat honey. Sick bastards.

 

Peter vv

 

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