- How many children have vegans killed in Gaza?
Are there many vegans in the Israeli army? One in eighteen. That’s even a bit more than average, because one in twenty Israelis is vegan. There’s no data on where vegans serve or how many of them took part or are taking part in the genocide in Gaza, but assuming veganism isn’t a factor that determines your posting, Israeli vegans have killed over 1000 Palestinian children in Gaza. And not just children. The most vegans are in the Nahal Brigade, very active in Gaza and responsible for the attack on World Central Kitchen, the one that killed the Polish Chef Damian Soból. Maybe it was a vegan who killed him. And not even for cooking meat. That I’d understand. But for cooking for Palestinians. So the IDF isn’t just “the most moral army in the world”, it’s also “the most vegan”, which as you can see goes together with genocide without much bother Of all the developed countries Israel has the highest share of vegans and vegetarians. It’s also, thanks to a food culture built around kosher rules, the most vegan- and vegetarian-friendly, because if something’s veggie, kosher comes easier. You drop the whole business of ritual slaughter and separate meat and dairy dishes (no mixing meat and milk in one dish) Kosher cooking doesn’t explain the phenomenon of how popular vegetarianism and veganism are in Israel though 5% vegans is the highest rate in the world. And second in the world if you add up the vegetarians. First place goes to India, where a lot of religions have had a ban on eating meat “since forever”, or at least cut out beef or pork, so it’s got long religious and cultural backing. But Israel is a phenomenon. Actually, if you think about it for a minute, Israel is the utopia of the progress crowd, delivered, and a model to follow. We rescue the doggies and the kitties and feel sorry for them, we give gays full rights, but not Arab children, because they’d only grow up into terrorists anyway (I remember that justification for what Israel’s doing in the Gaza Strip being delivered completely straight-faced, in all seriousness.) Just like the stereotype of the vegan as a skinny weakling is false, so is the image of the vegan as someone who loves and looks after everyone and everything. Doggies, kitties, earthworms, scarabs, tapeworms, but not Palestinians, Ukrainians, workers, the poor, the rabble, the untermenschen I got exactly the same mechanism back in Poland from the vegan-promoting owners of the joints I worked in. Animal rights Yes! Workers’ rights NO! - Are vegans better at killing?
As the Combat Feeding Division of the Army’s Combat Capabilities Development Command Soldier Center put it, the US Army “is exploring how the emerging alternative-protein sector can help meet several objectives, including enhancing food supply chain resilience, enabling biomanufacturing of foodstuffs in combat-forward environments, and providing tailored, high-quality nutrition to the warfighter.” What do soldiers in combat-forward environments need high-quality food for? So they kill the ones on the other side more efficiently. It makes sense. From the point of view of modern nutrition science, a balanced plant-based diet beats burgers hands down for soldiers’ health and fitness. The development of novel foods opens up huge scope for making an army work better by feeding its soldiers properly. Isn’t it the case that noble mugs giving up meat and animal products have created a new food sector that’s going to help with killing more efficiently? So maybe the Israeli vegans murdering children in Gaza have got a point? And it’s all completely natural and obvious. - Terrible bourgeois “looking – they see everything s e p a r a t e l y/That a house… that Stasiek… that a horse… that a tree.. “.
But just as every one of us exists only as a social being (even living in the woods, well, apart from the “wolf children”, but wolves are social animals too), through globalisation we’re part of a global society. Through our consumer choices, for instance when buying oranges — vegan, being fruit. Israeli ones. Are oranges that support a genocide vegan? But some people see that separately too. And enjoy their Israeli oranges with a Palestinian flag on their profile pic. But that’s more your left-wing bourgeois, the ones who keep repeating, with a stubbornness that deserves a better cause, “systemic solutions, not individual choices” (why not both?). Ever since Nader we’ve known that scale works a treat when it comes to consumer boycotts. In Poland the right used a consumer boycott, and used it successfully, against the Demon Energy Drink, launched in 2012 and pulled in 2014 under a Catholic consumer boycott of every product made by the company that makes fruit and veg preserves and juices. Our actions and our choices have consequences that stretch very far and very wide, and individual choices are one of the things that shape systemic solutions. Systemic solutions don’t exist separately either, they exist inside a certain socio-economic framework, but that framework can be pushed and stretched, whether by particular solutions or by the sum of individual decisions. At the till or at the ballot box And sometimes, quite often actually, action aimed against a given system gets swallowed by it and used to make it stronger. Capitalism is a perfect example. It monetises brilliantly every movement and every revolt, even the most anti-capitalist one. And bends it to its own logic. And looked at that way, veganism in the service of genocide and imperialism is perfectly logical. Lately there’s been a wave of intelligentsia outrage about books being destroyed to train artificial intelligence. AI companies are buying up books wholesale, especially ones from before digitisation, and training artificial intelligence on them Which happens by scanning them. And for the scan to be fast and as error-free as possible, you have to cut off the spine and scan the pages one by one. It’s funny watching people who are doing far better out of capitalism than I am pull the surprised Pikachu face because capitalism is capitalism. And a book is a commodity like any other. That’s how it works, my dears. The metaphor of cutting off the spine, the backbone that is, is a pretty good one anyway, when it comes to veganism in the Israeli army, or working for an army at all. Not just by vegans. And of course this sort of thing is worth naming and shaming, and saying out loud. Trying to push the boundary of this system, but the best and the only real solution would be to torch the system, plough it under and salt the earth so the evil never comes back. But we’re not up to that, because as one Classic said, “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Because no ideology exists apart from the ideology of the ruling class. Not in the sense of what the ruling class believes, but in the sense of a tool of class rule, working through what society believes and what it considers possible. Through ideology the ruling class imposes not its own picture of the world, but the picture of the world that best suits its class interest. And it eagerly uses every sign of revolt from us to do it. The ballot or the bullet? as another Classic said ps. one question won’t leave me alone: do the Israeli vegans murdering children in Gaza rescue their doggies and kitties? ps.2 just as I was writing this piece I heard on the news that in Israel the case over the attack on World Central Kitchen has been dropped
The kitchen is my space for lifestyle medicine.
I'm not a dietitian or a doctor – I'm a chef, and a member of the Polish Society of Lifestyle Medicine. Nutrition is essential to a modern kitchen, and that's nothing new: working from Hippocratic dietetic principles was part of a cook's craft centuries ago. At Rude Kitchen I tie that tradition to modern science — and to lifestyle. Read more about how I bring cooking and lifestyle medicine together on the About page.
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