Vegan chocolate mousse recipe via Hervé, Blumenthal and James

Family and friends are coming over the holidays and after a hearty vegan winter roast I wanted a dessert which is intense and stimulating but dinky – just 6-8 mouthfuls is what I’m after.

James‘ surprising Great British Bakeoff chocolate mousse recipe, Blumenthal and ultimately the molecular gastronomer Hervé reveal how to make a 2-ingredient mousse by adding hot water to melted chocolate and then cooling rapidly while whisking.

Kit

• small saucepan containing enough hot water for hot bain-marie.
• a smallish mixing bowl for melting then cooling the chocolate-water (metal quickly conducts heat and cold, pyrex may be second-best).
• larger bowl with ice and a little water for chilled bain-marie.
• hand whisk for aerating and combining chocolate-water
• spoon for getting mousse in pots
• spatula for getting mousse off spoon
• pots – tiny bowls or shot glasses (ramekins probably too big – they’d amount to eating half a large bar of chocolate)

Ingredients (serves 12 in small pots containing about 6 mouthfuls).

This is where it gets slightly pedantic. You see I have precision scales and the nice thing about this recipe is that if things don’t work out all you have to do is melt the chocolate-water again and add one or the other ingredient to it. So the following is indicative.

• 350g chocolate (in this case the 85% Ghanaian because the Cooperative have decided to contaminate their other dark chocolates with butter oil – next week on my way home I’ll go to Spitalfields organic and get some Divine – some plain, some ginger and orange). He also sells this Organica white bar I’m partial to, or the Plamil white I’m only slightly less partial to – don’t see why either of these shouldn’t work).
• 270ml boiling water according to Heston’s recipe, but for me the mixture rapidly developed a truffley rather than moussey consistency and I ended up having to re-melt it and add a total of 390ml liquid – comprising a further 80ml water and 40ml rum. I bet these amounts differ depending on the proportion of cocoa solids in the chocolate so next time I’ll start with less water and re-melt to add more as necessary.

Instructions

1. Have the pots, spoon and spatula and cold bain-marie ready close by.
2. Put the chocolate in the metal bowl melt over the saucepan of water on a low heat.
3. Whisk in the hot water.
4. Transfer the metal bowl onto the cold bain-marie.
5. Whisk vigorously, paying attention to the mixture coating the sides of the bowl, since this will solidify unless mixed in.
6. When the mixture stands in soft peaks, quickly transfer to the pots.
7. Chill.

Trouble-shooting

• If the thickening happens too quickly, remove the metal bowl from the cold bain-marie and continue to whisk.
• Or if the mixture becomes too thick, return the metal bowl to the hot bain-marie, remelt the chocolate-water and carefully add a small and determinate amount of liquid, whisk this in, then return to the cold bain-marie. Repeat as necessary until the consistency is right.
• Or if the mixture won’t thicken, return to the hot bain-marie and add a small and determinate amount of chocolate, melt, then return to the cold bain-marie. Repeat as necessary until the consistency is right.

The world has plenty of other delights

This is not by me – I am much too angry with Hugh Fearnley Witless and Marco Pierre Twat to write anything like this – but by Victoria Coren. It is quite good.

“A long time ago, I had a cat called Graham. When I was working, he used to hop on to my desk, put his little paws on my shoulder and lick my ear. God, that was annoying. No wonder I ate him.

I didn’t really. I loved that cat very much. Of course I wouldn’t eat him; I know you were revolted by that idea. Shivering with horror, you think you would never consider eating cat of any kind. (Although, if your school lunches ever had “turkey fritters” on the menu, I’m afraid that ship has sailed, my friend.)

So perhaps you were among those who slammed the celebrity chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall for suggesting that puppies could be farmed for their meat.

“In principle,” Hugh F-W told the Radio Times, “I have no objection to a high-welfare organic puppy farm.”

I love Hugh for banging the welfare drum. He has always argued that we have a moral deal with the animals we eat: a good life in return for the meat. How much better a man he is than Marco Pierre White, who argued the case for battery farming with the amazing words: “I know you have these TV programmes where members of the public get shown around huge chicken farms and start crying. Probably because the film crew squirted onion juice in their eyes. Boohoo. Come on. Grow up.”

White says that poor people can’t afford to be namby-pamby about whether animals have been squashed into fetid, windowless barns and stuffed with antibiotics. Heaven forbid he’d recommend we just eat less meat. Not while he’s got an endorsement deal with Bernard Matthews Farms, anyway.

See if you can guess what it was in this quote, from an interview Marco Pierre White did last year, that made me realise he had an endorsement deal with Bernard Matthews Farms: “I hate food snobs. When people attack modern-day farming, they attack the consumers. Why attack the weekend tradition of the normal family sitting down to a turkey?”

Genius. Worth every penny they’re paying him. Oh, that old tradition. The good old weekly Sunday turkey. I hope you’re keeping it alive in your household. That and Britain’s long-time favourite breakfast: turkey porridge.

Frankly, we should prefer to eat an organic puppy than a battery chicken, for a variety of reasons, possibly not including “the taste”. I wouldn’t know. I’ve never eaten dog. There are some animals I absolutely will not eat. Unless they’re ground up and made into a Turkish sausage, in which case: Sagliginiza! (which is Turkish for “minimum 17% mechanically retrieved meat products”).

But we all know what the problem is with cooking a puppy for dinner. That’s right: it’s too small for two people, too big for one. The answer? Freeze the leftovers, do a curry.

Oh, stop making that letter bomb. The problem with eating puppies is that they’re playful, trusting, lovable and loyal.

But then again, so are pigs. Rabbits are lovely pets yet considered edible. Why should we eat a rabbit, but not a weasel? Perhaps you think a weasel simply doesn’t look like food. And a prawn does?

Hugh’s argument (although he did admit that he personally would eat a dog only if he were “on the point of starvation”) is that we ought to be able to see all animals equally and thus, if well treated, eat them all.

But the truer conclusion to his argument is that we should not eat any of them. The better logic is not: “If you eat a sheep, you could eat a puppy”, but: “If you couldn’t eat a puppy, you shouldn’t eat a sheep.”

Come on, we know we shouldn’t. It’s a bloodbath out there. When they read about our dietary habits 200 years from now, it’ll look like a holocaust. Millions of animals mistreated, slaughtered, sliced up and delivered to our plates in such a way as to look as unlike “a chunk of corpse” as possible. It’s cruel and it’s foul. Imagining it isn’t is part of a bizarre mass self-hypnosis.

You might say it’s “natural” because Primitive Man ate meat (albeit far more rarely than we do). I say: come back to me when you’re happy to shit in a cave.

I’m not a vegetarian, by the way. I used to be. I crumbled because I love the taste of meat. But the truth is, I feel just the same way about smoking. I smoke because I “enjoy it”, yet it’s imbued with a sense of shame and I wish I didn’t.

Perhaps, by the time you read this, I won’t. I’m planning to quit smoking this weekend. I was going to give up in July, but my summer plans went wrong. Time for a new way of thinking and an winter offensive. If I fail, I’ll try again.

What I do understand, and believe is now culturally ingrained on a wide scale, is that there’s nothing good about smoking: it brings nastiness and death and its only defence is a fleeting pleasure that may be illusory anyway.

What has failed yet to take hold, socially, is that the same applies to eating meat.

I’d hate it to be banned, but should we not find our enjoyment a little bit ruined by guilt, just like with cigarettes? That is the road to positive, voluntary rejection. I might start by imagining, every time I take a bite of steak, that it was once a terrier.

A bit joyless, I know. But we’re too old and wise to take thoughtless pleasure in what’s unhealthy and cruel. The world has plenty of other delights to offer. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: there’ll always be mushrooms on toast and PG Wodehouse.”

Hope her Observer co-writers, the grim reapers Jay Rayner and Nigel Slater, read that. Those two are carnage incarnated.

Why I won’t shop at LUSH

As I commented on Bob’s blog when he commended LUSH for their support of the No-one Is Illegal campaign,

“Lush – yep, a lot of what they sell is really weird and unnecessary and they put a hell of a lot of matter down the drain, but because so much of it is vegan and solid form and so unpackaged, and because of this kind of campaign, I’m mostly cleaned and softened by Lush products. “

Well, for some time since then I have been actively seeking alternatives to LUSH. First it was LUSH’s implicit campaign against Israel while whitewashing its aggressors and embracing Saudi Arabia. That was alienating enough, although so normal these days that I thought I might be able to get over it. Then while shopping in the Liverpool Street Station branch some weeks ago I picked up a leaflet accusing the Basildon authorities of ‘ethnic cleansing’ at Dale Farm.

I think Basildon Council’s treatment of the Dale Farm residents is wrong, even if it’s legally justifiable.  It wasn’t virgin meadow they built on, travellers have terrible difficulty getting planning permission, travellers have a terrible time in Essex – the sites they’re permitted to camp on are short term and they can’t gather in groups of more than, I think, three vehicles. Dale Farm is a close mutually supportive community of the kind you’d think a Conservative government or council would be touting as some kind of paragon. The idea that the community will be broken up horrifies me. I’m still smarting from the C18th Enclosure Acts. But to be a stickler for planning law and greenbelt law is not ethic cleansing. Ethnic cleansing is a legal term. Ethnic cleansing has aims to purify a region for one ethnic group.  Ethnic cleansers use weapons and rape. For LUSH to call Basildon Council’s activity ethnic cleansing was pernicious. I’d already written to them with unsatisfactory effect, and then no effect. Dale Farm was the final straw for me and LUSH. I began to think of them as an ideological purchase, and wonder what kind of movement I was helping to get off the ground.

In this state of disaffection I got to thinking about LUSH’s owner Mark Constantine, this purveyor of very expensive toiletries, many with confectionery fragrances and whimsical names which make me think they are aimed at the young. How do you persuade young people, who are often poor people, to part with so much cash? You’re idealistic but you’re also a for-profit company and you are chasing pounds. You know that society’s idealism resides overwhelmingly in the young. You calculate that if you give the young a little hit of feel-good, a warm feeling in their hearts that their purchase from you has helped to heal the world, then they will feel like they’ve made a selfless donation to charity with the added benefit of receiving a free luxury bath time product, and they’ll be more likely to come back and cough up again.

The other cynical thing LUSH has done for a long time is to put a little sticker with a drawing of a named worker on the back of things that come in pots. It gives you a sense of connection, as if you have done an individual a good turn. And this is kind of warm and treacley – until you remember that it was only in April 2011 that Mark Constantine finally capitulated to the demands of the LUSH workforce to be paid a living wage – and that only in London. All that time he’d been cheaply and sleazily massaging our most moral parts and he wasn’t even paying his workforce a living wage. They had to campaign.

All I want is vegan stuff, ethically made. I don’t want Mark Constantine stereotyping me as somebody with an off-the-shelf portfolio of – in my view – incompatible causes. I mean, I could deal with the causes, if I agreed with them. But I can’t go along with his. (Just a quibble – if you support an organisation which rejects immigration controls, is it coherent to also support the creation of a new state of Palestine which proposes to expel Jews living within it? It may be pragmatic for the Palestinian Authority and Israeli progressives who fear civil war unless the settler movement is defeated – but I can’t see that it’s coherent for a shampoo vendor, so why force it on your customers?).

It’s sad. LUSH creates the most wonderful fragrances on the high street – unless you work there, in which case I speculate you must be breathing in borderline unhealthy amounts of parfum. My sense of smell is so acute that I get as much pleasure as a canine from sniffing interesting scents (though never other dogs behinds). I’ll miss those. I’ll miss the sweet young women at Liverpool Street, I’ll miss swallowing the vodka grapefruit seasalt scrub in the shower. But I’ve had it with LUSH. LUSH creeps me out. They tried so hard to make me feel good than when they failed they had the opposite effect.

So I’m shopping now at Greenlands in Greenwich Market, and Spitalfields Organics on Commercial.  Same principles but they don’t treat me like an unworldly but morally self-absorbed cash cow.

See also this.

A case study in activism – a review of ‘Eating Animals’ by Jonathan Safran Foer

Just bear with me a minute before I get started on the book. One Saturday morning in 1996 I set off by bus from Rusholme in south Manchester to visit my mother’s cousin’s family in the northern suburb of Prestwich. At some stage during my journey up Oxford Road the Irish Republican Army detonated their last Manchester bomb and when the bus terminated prematurely nobody knew the reason. The city’s response was still being scrambled and I managed to duck the cordons and skirt across Market Street to the bus station where the situation became clear. From a call box I dialed my relatives but it was sabbath and they weren’t picking up. I arrived hours late and was greeted with the raised eyebrow of a mother used to keeping student time. When lunch was produced I realised with dismay that I’d forgotten to tell her I was vegetarian. Never having encountered liver before, I had to inquire about the greyish lump on my plate. I considered what to do. I hadn’t warned her; in the sabbath-related news vacuum there was consternation about the bomb; I’d been very late; I didn’t want her to worry; I was hungry; the food was nearly spoiled and if I didn’t eat it it was going in the bin. So I ate a calf’s liver without complaint. It was claggy and tasted the way bad breath smells. To this day it’s the foulest thing ever to have passed my lips.

These kinds of dilemmas, arising from “the fact that we do not eat alone”, foment inside Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals, a book I read because I received a copy gratis from his publicist to review on this blog. I usually avoid books on this subject because the suffering of the scores of billions of animals farmed and killed each year confounds me to the point of incoherence. But remembering that I read Everything is Illuminated even though the Holocaust confounds me, and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close even though September 11th confounds me, I accepted the book.

It quickly becomes clear that Eating Animals isn’t a straightforward case for vegetarianism. Instead Safran Foer, picking a path through this “slippery, frustrating and resonant subject” with discretion, ingenuity, and not a little guile, examines what it entails to eat animals – not only for the animals but also for the eaters of animals. Towards the eaters he extends only gentleness and understanding, and this is the book’s most fascinating attribute given the scale of the death, suffering, and malpractice he reveals. But Safran Foer is not diverted by hypocrisy. Instead he has done what all good activists do: made the object of his activism, the animals, his central concern, rather than the wrong-doings of the people whose behaviour he hopes to change.

My review below is divided into four parts, and as well as the book I also refer to Safran Foer’s January 2011 RSA interview, which I recommend listening to.

Suffering

As in the UK, in the USA most animals humans eat are factory-farmed. These animals have pain and illness bred into them and are disabled from enacting their instinctive behaviour. Broiler chickens whose ability to walk or mate have been sacrified to explosive growth and disabling bodily proportions are one example. Like me, Jonathan Safran Foer wouldn’t describe himself as an animal lover, nor do you need to love animals to object to their suffering.

The accounts of animal experiences in the cage, on the kill floor and being processed are present and graphic, but rather than dominating the book they form a pivot. Although he identifies that factory farm companies rely on ignorance to continue their cruel, unhealthy, and environmentally degrading business practices, when Safran Foer describes the brutal circumstances of these animals lives and deaths, there are no jeremiads and no relish, only a sense of duty to represent the actualities.

He quotes (p228) Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma:

“The meat industry understands that the more people know about what happens on the kill floor, the less meat they’re likely to eat.”

One of the book’s recurring ideas is the need for advocacy:

“It seems to me that it’s plainly wrong to eat factory-farmed pork or to feed it to one’s family. It’s probably even wrong to sit silently with friends eating factory-farmed pork, however difficult it can be to say something. Pigs clearly have rich minds and just as clearly are condemned to miserable lives on factor farms. The analogy of a dog kept in a closet it fairly accurate, if somewhat generous. The environmental case against eating factory-farmed pork is airtight and damning.

“For similar reasons, I wouldn’t eat poultry or sea animals produced by factory methods.” (p195)

…

“We can’t plead ignorance, only indifference … We are the ones of whom it will be fairly asked, What did you do when you learned the truth about eating animal?”

Reading that, I thought of Charles Patterson’s book Eternal Treblinka which researches connections between species bias and the extremes of racism, between the slaughterhouse and the industrial genocide of the Jews. 

Here in the UK, as I have mentioned before on this blog, industrial farmers campaign to avoid animal and human welfare regulations which, because they are not global, make their business less competitive. The eaters of animals are so thoroughly insulated from what animals endure between their birth and our plates that we expect our meals to cost a fraction of what they used to cost. The book doesn’t evade the arguments of the factory farmers, but represents them. Safran Foer worked hard to surface accounts from within the industry and to a great extent he considers the farmers to be victims of the system in which they are trying to earn a living. Available on BBC iPlayer, Panorama’s recent documentary on the true cost of cheap food illustrates farmers’ predicament.

Hypocrisy

From these accounts from farmers it becomes clear that a change in consumer behaviour is the best chance for human and animal welfare – but in this respect there’s much that Safran Foer leaves unsaid. His RSA interview confirmed this unwillingness to take on the individual consumer, at least directly. Instead the book is a prelude, an effort to open up a space for decision-making between the extremes of, on the one hand, either eating meat with the defiance of say, food critic Jay Rayner or restaurateur Gordon Ramsay, both of whom spent time at abattoirs in order to achieve consistence in their defence of eating animal – and, on the other hand, eating no meat at all. Safran Foer correctly identifies this behaviour as a visceral aversion to hypocrisy potent enough to overpower all other aversions. Some people in the grip of this aversion will, like Ramsay and Rayner, confront and commit themselves to the violent deaths of animals. Others would prefer to remain fully ignorant rather than confront hypocrisy in themselves. Disgust of hypocrisy becomes an enemy of compassion because the hypocritical space in between the two extremes is an uncomfortable space.

Disgust of hypocrisy is one possible explanation for why consciousness of factory farming fails to penetrate the bovine disregard of the chewing human majority. Another the book doesn’t suggest is the defensive assertion of identity when confronted with a perceived attack on that identity. The main proposition of the book – “to allow ourselves to fill a hypocritical space” – is astute in the light of this psychology. Safran Foer cautions against the moral vanity of putting undue emphasis on the behaviour of single individuals. Single individuals do not change the world but they can become insufferable in the attempt.

So, although Safran Foer makes plenty of forays into dead-pan rationalism – in his case for eating dogs, for example – these are in service of a more profound invitation to consider how what we eat tells stories about ourselves. One key story is that of his grandmother, pursued by the Nazis and on the verge of starvation (p16-17):

“The worst it got was near the end. A lot of people died right at the end and I didn’t know if I could make it another day. A Russian, a farmer, God bless him, he saw my condition and he went into his house and came out with a piece of meat for me.”

“He saved your life.”

“I didn’t eat it.”

“You didn’t eat it?”

“It was pork. I wouldn’t eat pork.”

“Why?”

“What do you mean why?”

“What, because it wasn’t kosher?”

“Of course.”

“But not even to save your life?”

“If nothing matters, there’s nothing to save.”

We make categorical decisions about what we eat – the “lines we draw in the sand, lines that if we cross them we cease to be ourselves”. It wasn’t a fear of hypocrisy which compelled her to decline the meat, but a will to lead a dignified, undegraded human existence according to her own principles. This is a key idea in the book.

Pragmatism

Safran Foer doesn’t relish the specifics of animal suffering, but given that he could have written “an encyclopedia of cruelty” with the testimonials of animal agriculture workers, and given these practices are clearly part of a conscious business model, he cannot well leave them out. I’d venture to say that unless he has an angelic temperament, he must have been horrified, sickened and angered by what he saw and read in researching the book. During his talk at the RSA he hinted as much when he told the audience that in writing the book he had sought the “most productive approach” possible – ‘productive’ contrasts here with ‘direct’. I’d say that this book is one of the most heroically un-self-indulgent pieces of campaigning literature I’ve encountered. This is why some of its strongest advocates have been farmers – who, it turns out, feel degraded by the obligation to produce according to Kentucky Fried Chicken protocols – and why when his book was published, the incendiary reaction anticipated by some of his writer associates didn’t materialise:

“It’s not a controversial book because it’s not a controversial subject. If you speak about it the right way. Is it controversial that we don’t want chickens packed body to body in cages? Is it controversial that we don’t want our air and water polluted? It only happens one way: the more you talk about it the less you want it.”

This is how farmers who want their animals to live contented lives before they die came to be some of his most significant supporters, as well as he theirs.

I’m left with the impression of somebody who has assumed the role of mediator. In response to a question at the RSA about whether he kept in touch with the flinty, uncompromising activist whom he accompanied in breaking into an industrial chicken farm:

“It’s good to surround yourself with people who keep you honest, and she – despite my barely knowing her – I wouldn’t consider her a friend and she wouldn’t consider me one – she really keeps me honest – I have her in the back on my mind when I’m getting lazy about choices”.

I find myself wondering whether evoking the idea of Jonathan Safran Foer would keep a meat eater honest, when he makes their excuses so generously, and this question opens up a contradiction, though it’s not a particularly crucial one. Safran Foer recognises that he needs to be kept honest, while he views most meat eaters as deserving of excuses. It also occurs to me that perhaps I’m looking at this the wrong way. Uncompromising activists also need to be kept honest – in the sense of grounded and sociological. Safran Foer’s book works in this direction.

At the same time, he allocates the responsibility for animal welfare to the industry’s policy-makers while simultaneously treating the industry as a force of nature responding to the stimulus of consumer preferences, so advancing his argument for consumer empowerment. It is left unsaid that if consumers can change this, then consumers have a degree of equal and various responsibility to change it. In the marketplace of ideas Safran Foer has not considered directness to be the most productive approach for animals. The most productive approach is one which massages us into the hypocritical space – the least uncomfortable and confrontational overtures to ordinary supermarket shoppers with their withered consciences. He would never put it that way. I think he’s right.

Accordingly, although he recognises veganism to be the ideal diet, Safran Foer urges his readers to focus on reducing the amount of animal eaten rather than increasing the numbers of vegetarians and vegans. The illustration he gives is powerful: one less meat meal a week in the US would bring about a reduction in emissions equivalent to taking 5 million cars off the road. “If you can’t eat one less meal a week, that begins to sound pathological”, he told the audience at the RSA.

I appreciate Safran Foer’s talent, which is to simultaneously hold ideas which scuffle – one that factory farming is a locus of atrocity and suffering, another that veganism is the ideal way to eat, and a third being an attitude of straightforward unrancorous remonstrance with factory farmers and consumers. I think this will contribute to something important – a reduction in meat meals consumed.  I also think that it will sow confusion, and in the current circumstances that can only be a good thing.

Another issue Safran Foer didn’t address is the comparative price of nourishing, convenient and delectable vegan food. In fact at the RSA he argued that vegan food was cheaper – this isn’t currently the case. Vegans are either sitting ducks trapped in a niche market, or they are given boring and uncreative alternative dishes at a cost which subsidises the hospitality industry’s meat eating clientele.

Humanity

Beginning on page 181 is a section titled ‘Our New Sadism’. It documents the perversions of violence and sexual abuse which take place in the closed environment of the industrial farm, before proceeding to talk about those which are part of the business plan.

I look at the media. Nigel Slater continues to push animal consumption despite all he has pledged to the contrary. Industrial milk producers are planning a cruel and unnatural megadairy in Nocton, Lincolnshire. One English family farmer given a tour of a U.S. megadairy for the investigative BBC programme Panorama says “This is the way that probably milk is going to have to be produced”. The World Wildlife Fund has commissioned a weekly menu intended to balance sustainability and health which I scan with growing incredulity: every single meal contains animal. There’s plenty of soya – only it’s been eaten by the animal on the menu before it gets to the human eaters. Arthur Potts Dawson of The People’s Supermarket observes the last hours of a dairy farm as it goes out of business. It turns out that most of The Guardian’s so-called ‘New Vegetarian’ Yotam Ottolenghi‘s recipes are so dependent on egg and cheese that on the whole they’re impossible to adapt for an animal-free diet. Chickens continue to have their beaks mutilated because we allow farmers to overcrowd them. The Observer has a double page spread on the premature slaughter of clapped out race horses for Europe’s meat market. In In Denial – Climate on the Couch, the movers and shakers of societal behaviour change are avoiding confronting us with bad news – rather than “Don’t”, they say “Instead”.

Jonathan Safran Foer doesn’t go in accusations. Instead he presents readers with a vision of what it is to be human, the humanising act of declining something you want because you know that it is wrong to take it. After all, “We incarcerate people who cannot restrain their instincts to have sex” and “those who eat chimpanzee look at the Western diet as sadly deficient of a great pleasure” (p196)

“I miss lots of things and I feel good missing them. I feel better missing them than I do having them.”

Good things to eat

If like Jonathan Safran Foer you agree that a vegan diet is a good idea but you’re having trouble following one, I recommend you poke around your nearest town or city, not to mention the Web. Today I ate Ethiopian lunch from a vegan place in Brick Lane’s Truman Brewery. I bought solid, therefore unpackaged, shampoo from Lush in Liverpool Street Station. From a vegetarian grocery on Commercial Road something came over me and I bought ginger and orange chocolate and rasberry chocolate from Divine, the Essential co-operative’s chocolate spread (all Fairtrade), the peerless Sojade rasberry yoghurt, Viana hazlenut tofu and Taifun Hungarian-style wieners. As I write this I’m drinking red beer from the Pitfield Brewery near Chelmsford, Essex.

Like Safran Foer, the savoury smells of scorched flesh in street markets make me salivate, and like him I feel better missing meat than having it.

The book requests that we give thought to the life before the act of slaughter which dominates the attention we pay to farmed animals – if you focus only on the slaughter, you cannot attend to the lives of suffering that would have been better unlived. Safran Foer coaxes readers away from the slough of extremes and hypotheticals – in broad and deep ways don’t we all agree? he implores. 95% of people in a survey may say it’s right to eat animals, but who would condone a farm industry which contributes global warming, or pollution, or the increasing ineffectiveness of antibiotics? Who thinks it is a good thing to keep pregnant pigs in concrete crates without bedding and too small to turn around in? On these things all but the most marginal agree, and this consensus is the most productive and promising starting point Safran Foer can identify.

Con-Dem’s got no bottle / Axe milk!

David “the pinch” Willetts was right to favour axing free milk for under-fives. It costs us £60m and is an anachronistic way of trying to get calcium into badly-tended kids, with its own undesirable health side effects. And as a universal benefit to rich and poor alike at a time of structural deficit, there’s no case for keeping it.

Except PR. Cameron decided to squander £60m on continuing this wasteful scheme because his reputation is too fragile to withstand being compared to Margaret Thatcher. I’m not confident the man will last.

Health spending is axed, milk is kept – makes no sense. Anne Milton’s ‘Healthy Start’ vouchers were a far better idea.

I am vegan, so it wouldn’t do for me to stop without making the following uncontroversial statements of fact so few people want to know about:

• Milk is for calves and its benefits for humans are overstated; what benefits there are are not particular to milk.
• Milk is a cruel food; the cows forced into supplying this cheapo milk are unlikely to see much grass, likely to be permanently on antibiotics, forced to calf each year and then have their babies taken away from them so we can have it all. And when they stop being able to calve, it’s curtains. An intelligent, feeling, social creature, used up and thrown away, needlessly.
• Milk is an environmentally degrading food – 990 litres of water for each litre of milk. The greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation for their food (the largest portion of the world’s soy crop); transporting the food round the world; cold storage for the milk; moving the milk (whose main constituent is water) from dairy farm to fridge; the packaging.

I think we should find alternatives to milk for all these reasons. My hunch is that the children will thank us later.

Bonus links for those curious about the state of play (which seems to be a depressing zero sum game):

• Food Climate Research Network at the University of Surrey – seriously engaging with climate change, don’t care about animal welfare.
• Food Ethics Council – good on human welfare, but search for ‘sentience’ and you get a single hit
• Stephen Walsh’s book Plant-Based Nutrition and Health – information on vegan nourishment.
• The Vegan Society – good on cruelty, but not yet credible as a decision-making resource. It’s not acceptable to have undated web pages giving nutrition advice.

The truth about meat-eaters

My last post was about a very human tendency to discount troublesome knowledge, and so is this one, which I’d been intending to write for a while.

In The Vegan magazine (Summer 2010, p8-9) Carol Norton, alumna of the Social Psychology Unit at the London School of Economics, has written an account of her research into the contradiction between liking and eating animals. I reproduce it below without permission because I thought it deserved a wider readership.

Carol Norton, PhD

My research suggests that meat-eaters are ‘in denial’ about the life and death behind meat: that is, they keep the meat they eat separate in their minds from the animals they love. Meat eaters may genuinely believe that they like eating meat more than they love animals, but analysis of their attitudes reveals that the opposite is true, and that psychological and cultural processes maintain their illusions of consistency.

Our culture promotes meat-eating through surreptitious farming methods, renaming animals into meat (e.g. pig/pork), different media portrayals between species, and children’s socialisation. But this veil of separation does not completely obscure the former life of film-engulfed flesh on supermarket shelves; it merely enables denial, a paradoxical state in which people simultaneously seem to know, and not know, the truth. Denial is always partial; people always register enough information to trigger their denial strategies.

These include avoiding or rejecting the truth, attacking the source of information, blaming others, seeking alternative information, or forgetting. When confronted with the truth, someone in denial may experience being reminded of something unpalatable that they ‘sort-of’ already know. Their denial strategies then rush to restore the illusion. As an example, like many vegetarians, I have been asked why I don’t eat meat, only to be interrupted with: “Oh no, don’t tell me, I don’t want to know!”

In focus groups, meat-eaters agreed that they did not ordinarily connect animals to meat:

“I reckon 90% of people that go into the butcher’s shop … and order a piece of lamb don’t think of that as a sheep”

“… You don’t … it’s ‘meat’; you don’t see it as a sheep; you don’t see it as a cow”

“If they actually knew how they were killed … there’d be a lot more vegetarians”

“It’d put you off for life”
“Oh yeah true”

owever, most meat-eaters argued that they liked eatiing meat more than they loved animals: hence their views were consistent with eating meat overall. A minority argued that farmed animals are bred to be eaten and therefore eating meat is good for animals. This presupposes that farmed animals lead happy lives and that they would otherwise die out (ignoring the precedent protection of some species)”. The remaining meat-eaters were torn: feeling very uncomfortable with no sufficiently valid reason to eat meat:

“I see no justification whatsoever … I only eat meat because I don’t think about it. If I thought about it, I couldn’t possibly”

Reasons about eating meat and loving animals

To test these arguments, I experimentally measured meat-eaters’ automatic responses to images of animals, animals being slaughtered, and cooked meat. Unlike the focus group discussions, participants could not consciously control these measurements taken by computer. The results were astonishing: contrary to popular belief, meat eaters did not like animals any less than vegetarians. The difference was that, whereas for vegetarians meat was synonymous with animals’ slaughter, meat-eaters did not connect meat with the slaughter of animals. This fog of denial allowed them to eat meat guilt-free.

I also tested people’s satisfaction with their own attitudes and whether or not their attitudes changed. Meat-eaters became increasingly uncomfortable as they considered their attitudes. In the end, meat-eaters’ attitudes to animals reamined highly positive, but their attitudes towards eating meat and animals’ slaughter fell significantly.

Changes in attitudes

Yet these results contradicted the focus groups, where most meat-eaters argued that they liked eating meat more than they loved animals. The conclusion is that many meat-eaters are ‘in denial’ about their own attitudes towards meat, animals and their slaughter.

Further, although meat-eaters claimed that they enjoyed the taste of meat, statistical analysis revealed that underlying their reasons for eating meat was ‘habit’, not ‘taste’. The psychological explanation is that most of our moral arguments merely justify automatic judgements, made without conscious awareness. Such shortcuts ease our mental workload, but they mean that decisions are often less well-considered than we imagine. For most meat-eaters, ‘taste’ seems a better reason to eat meat than ‘habit’. In the same way, many focus group members justified eating meat backwards from their behaviour; reasoning which the experiments discounted. Backward justification works like this: “I eat meat; therefore I must like meat more than animals”. In fact, most meat-eaters eat meat out of habit and like farmed animals more than meat. Further, when meat-eaters honestly consider their own attitudes, they become uncomfortable and reduce their liking for meat.

Facilitating attitude change

One of the best ways to change someone’s behaviour is to draw their attention to inconsistencies between their behaviour and attitudes. In this case, the attitude change was contrary to the behaviour of eating meat. This is because meat-eaters’ attitudes towards animals were remarkably stable and because meat-eaters were in denial about animals’ slaughter. When meat-eaters were forced to reconnect meat to animals’ slaughter in their minds they became uncomfortable and, without their usual denial strategies, they changed their attitudes towards animals’ slaughter and eating meat.

In theory, then, many meat-eaters would become vegetarian if they honestly considered their own attitudes and the reality of animals’ slaughter. To encourage this, we need to grab meat-eaters’ attention without them feeling too personally judged or threatened. In many ways, denial strategies have the psychological upper hand as they maintain a safe status quo. Yet my research shows that, if used carefully, the simple truth may lead people to change their own minds.

Contact c.a.norton@alumni.lse.ac.uk for further information.

Looking for responses, I found this from Maneka Gandhi, who also refers to the work of Clive Hamilton, the subject of my previous post.

Survivalism, dissent, conspiracy beliefs

The upshots of viewing Collapse, an illustrated interview with Michael Ruppert, fall into the category of lifestyle change – see the end of this post – and an undertaking to kill myself rather than fight another human being in order to feed myself (though this may be complicated by dependants, my capacity for murderous rage etc).

Such are the limits of my engagement with Michael Ruppert’s views and plans. I’ve seen enough of his patterns of reasoning and argument not to feel that I would gain much from investigating him any further. I feel very compassionate towards him – his experiences with the LAPD (which should have been unimpeachable) refusing to respond to illegal activities within the CIA (ditto) would probably severely damage anybody’s ability to trust authority. Cultural theorists like Mark Fenster talk about conspiracy beliefs as disaffection, a deep and painful concern about the state of the world, feelings of political estrangemement from the power bloc and at the same time, responsibility and a desire to be involved. Coming at things from a different direction, psychologists like Karen Douglas say of unfounded conspiracy beliefs that if you hold one you probably hold many, and you probably also hold machiavellian views of the world, believing in conspiracy because it makes sense to you. So, I draw certain conclusions when I find that Michael Ruppert has written in an earlier book that Dick Cheney actively colluded with the perpetrators of 9/11. From a subsequent interview (source http://www.energybulletin.net/node/48990):

“Few have done more detailed investigation of the 9-11 attacks than I have. Even though Rubicon is in the Harvard Business Library and has sold around 100,000 copies in two countries, it has never even been acknowledged by my government. 9-11 was a predictable event and it was motivated precisely and solely by Peak Oil and nothing else. I believe I proved that conclusively in Rubicon which has never been challenged; only ignored. It is absolutely too late to go back and seek justice for the crimes of Richard Cheney and George W. Bush. I believe they were counting on that. It would be literally a waste of energy. Oil and natural gas can only be burned or consumed once. The present crisis is so severe that we cannot waste oil, natural gas and the limited energies of human consciousness to go back there.”

Formerly a self-employed investigative journalist, Michael Ruppert is now a survivalist  primarily concerned with (he says this) his own survival during the decline of oil production. Early in the documentary we are informed that he used to be an insider – his father was an aviator in the USA, other family were in the CIA and he himself grew up to become an exemplary LAPD narcotics officer. To summarise the story he told of his life, his career foundered when he tried to use official channels of the LAPD to expose a drugs ring within the CIA. Confronted by the reluctance of those official channels to disrupt the criminal activities of power-holders, he resigned in 1978 and adopted a more troublesome approach to the authorities which attracted the attention he is positive led to his targeting by assassins. When he received news that a whistleblower in not dissimilar circumstances to his own had been “suicided”, he began a newsletter probing political cover-ups which rapidly gained readership. Realising that he had a talent for writing, he subsequently authored a large number of texts, including the book he promoted during the video link-up after the film was shown.

One of the things I wasn’t so clear about (from the documentary) was how he made the transition from outrage at the corruption of the LAPD and derelict closing of ranks against its whistleblowers, to his apocalyptic predictions around the demise of humanity after peak oil.

I thought he was particularly strong on illustrating the extent of humanity’s reliance on oil and the relationship between oil and the population spike which has led to the often-quoted observation that for the current population of planet earth to live as Americans live would require two further planets. However, I dispute that Michael Ruppert has said much that hasn’t been widely accepted in policy-making circles for many years. For example – peak oil is self-evident knowledge. Oil comes from former forests, and nobody says there have been infinite forests. It’s an inconvenient truth which continues to be confronted with a holding pattern by lobbying oil companies. The blockage – illustrated by Iain Stewart in the BBC documentary series Earth: the Climate Wars – is the stalemate of power and economic interests which has left this knowledge un-acted upon. Humanity is indeed vulnerable to power interests.

While my hunch is that Michael Ruppert is right about the threat, at the same time I don’t find him qualified or credible. It’s as if I, with my English literature degree and multidisciplinary practical doctorate, had become frantic, angry and extremely motivated to research a subject, grow a following, write some books and commission a documentary in which I wove together a narrative about a lot of things I have no authority to speak on glued together by a theory of peak oil, to which I attributed overarching explanatory power. Who would find me credible? People who wanted to believe me, or who already held the same views. In order to earn credibility, I should pursue the society – preferably in a professional capacity – of academics at a university which excels in energy studies and subject my thinking to their and their international peers’ scrutiny. If they ignored my work, I should assume this was a matter of rigour rather than politics.

Instead Michael Ruppert cites Cynthia McKinney and George Galloway, both of whom I consider analytically poor and ethically compromised. By way of asserting his authority, he tells us that one of his books is in the Harvard Business School library, and that many government officials and elected representatives read his newsletter. But why should we suppose they consider him an influence, rather than an example of an important but ultimately misguided social movement? He also exaggerates – I don’t think that troubled and bankrupt Greece is having a revolution and nor does my Greek friend who was watching next to me.

Other observations.

One question I’d have asked is what he left out of his presentation in order to avoid alienating his audience. Some of the things he avoided mentioning were the 11th of September and Afghanistan (although he rapidly dispatched his case that Iraq was an oil war) and the role that animal farming plays in the depletion of resources. One of the most interesting things about this film and his responses afterwards (and I don’t know his earlier work, perhaps he has adapted recently) was that he didn’t appear to be scapegoating. So, trade unions must stop behaving as if there were a national pie to divide equitably; left and right would become irrelevant; all religions would be judged according to their relevance to the dire reality in which people existed. And the enmity he predicted between humans was behavioural or bestial (and well-worth considering in the light of Rodney Barker’s 2008 discussion of enmity at Gresham College) rather than anything targeted at a culprit. For him, peak oil has sufficient explanatory power, in itself. Most, if not all, of what he believes now can be hung from that – or you get this impression from the film.

Another question I’d have asked is how many weapons he owns. He predicts that people who leave their plans for survival too late will be the victims of those who have not, and he is surely one of the early ones. On more than one occasion he explicitly and implicitly reveals his anger with people who are “like deer in the headlights” or “zombies”, as well as the oil companies and those who collude with them for personal gain. This reminded me of a (beery) conversation with some survivalists among the technical people where I work, the upshot of which was that I could join the group as long as I could demonstrate my contribution. No contribution, then they would defend themselves against any attempt I might make to penetrate their fortifications. It was a lifeboat situation they anticipated – unless you have something which improves the buoyancy of the lifeboat then you jeopardise the existence of the people already on the lifeboat. This is bloody stuff he predicts, and I found one of his strategies of coping with his burden of knowledge – to take his dog out and count the number of smiles they could create – very hard to reconcile. As somebody with a lot of cognitive dissonance myself I was very interested in this.

Other examples of cognitive dissonance. He is an almost iconographic smoker. He has a very smart-looking barbeque and a guitar which are almost certainly painted with an oil-based lacquer. He addressed us live via a video web-link showing what would have looked like the pinnacle of material well-being to most people on the planet, being much worse-off. His physical stature suggests he consumes a surplus of energy. He keeps a dog. Although all these things depend on oil, from this I’m guessing that he doesn’t find them profligate. And yet he has identified them as part of the drain, things we have to change our mind about – things which can form no part of the world he envisages when oil is unobtainable. He emphasises the urgency of change; we are to take our cues from him. I don’t dispute his sincerity, but his lifestyle undermines his predictions. He permitted himself to be filmed with a barbeque and hasn’t managed to quit smoking – sympathetic as I am to self-medicators, this doesn’t fit.

This may be related to his unconcern for social (as distinct from criminal or political) justice. He doesn’t seem to be giving any consideration to protecting the rights of vulnerable groups – women, people with impairments, for example. Most of us have seen or read enough apocalypsia to understand the nature of social breakdown when resources are scarce. Those who understand the impending collapse should be working on a framework of law and distribution to maintain cohesion and cooperation, and to keep the ground we have gained in civil and human rights. Michael Ruppert seems willing to surrender all this as yet another illusory oil-gain. He says that religions, political parties, trade unions are all part of an obsolete paradigm which should be abandoned.

He says he hates money, considers it the root of all evil. At the same time, he recommends we buy up gold and consider alternative currencies (such as organic seeds). Money is clearly a means of material security here, and not the root of all evil. I wish he hadn’t dealt so rapidly with money, but had given some attention to how extortion could be avoided in the circumstances of social meltdown. But sadly I don’t think it would be out of character for him to suppose that extorting from those of us who stupidly failed to take his advice would be justifiable.

So, what are Matt and I doing? We’re collecting our piss in the receptacle we use at festivals and pouring it onto the compost heap and soil (and frantic spiders). This makes us feel quite eccentric but what the hey. We’ll attempt to temper our thoughtless (though, scarily, much less thoughtless than most people I know) relationship with oil-based plastics with more sustainable substitutes. (What I am going to do about my second favourite food, crisps, I have no idea – perhaps substitute with more of my first favourite food, pastry? Anyway, as Richard Herring would say – or did of people who leave their TV on standby, in his peerlessly revolting and excellent stand-up show, Menage a Un – “it’s a small price to pay”). The last thing is that we’ll investigate permaculture for the garden. None of these are new ideas for us – they are mainstream thinking in the columns I read about the environment – but they’re ones we, our government, and our vendors have allowed to stall.

We ape humans

Humans are enormously sophisticated animals. We have enacted redistributive tax systems, social security and international law. It’s not that I’m uncomfortable with the distinction between human and animal. It’s not that I don’t love humans best.

But our behaviour towards animals is a profoundly bestial throwback, our own darkest animal tendency. It’s no coincidence that when we savage each other in genocide or ethnic cleansing, we call each other animals to legitimise the act. We treat non-human life so appallingly that calling a group of humans ‘untermensch’ or vermin is groundwork for driving them out or killing them. Our treatment of animals is a wide-open loophole in our ethical system. It is inhumane; it retards our pursuit of humanity.

Human treatment of animals bestialises human society. How can we be coherent about human rights while those of us who are already well-fed consume steak, latte, cheddar and fish filet, while we break the backs of mice, kill badgers in the interests of dairy farmers and (if the Conservatives gain power) hound foxes to death? On what do we base our protections? A sheep is more worked-out, capable of forming relationships and capable of suffering than a human infant. Until we have a system of justice which extends to all species, justice for our own species will languish, dependent on mental contortions and the turning of blind eyes – most of all to the hideous suffering congealed in the meat, cheese and egg on our plates.

Either suffering, slaughter, enslavement and physical coercion matter, or they don’t. Justice in our dealings with animals is necessary (though not necessarily sufficient) to justice for humanity.

Until then we’re savages with coiffures, more like the primates-in-drag in the PG Tips adverts than our idea of ourselves.

This post has been brought to you by my weekly recoil from the BBC’s deathly cookery show, Saturday Kitchen. As I watched the phenomenally wasteful art-chef Heston Blumenthal lavish more tender care and emotional investment on the corpse of a chicken than most chickens receive in their lifetimes, I began to feel quite unreal. Matt says we’ll look back on Saturday Kitchen the way we look back on the Black and White Minstrel Show today. Meanwhile it helps to keep in mind Manna’s transition to veganism and Intellectual Blackout’s participation in VeganMofo.

For the picture, hat-tip, Daniels Counter.

“The belly which has no ears”: Saturday Kitchen, sex, and institutionalised violence

As Matt and I lumpenly watched Saturday Kitchen on the BBC this morning, I felt the familiar feeling of living in ill times.

The Hairy Bakers served up confectionery-studded portions of rich chocolate cake as big as your head to tiny eager children and amused themselves by breaking eggs into a wheelbarrow of wedding cake-mix. Rick Stein boiled up some corpse on the bone and garnished it with bird’s egg. Some wild food man competed at the Women’s Institute with an under-collagened jelly. James Martin, the host, served up an egg and butter pie with two sorts of cow cream. And eight male finalists cooked for the homecoming British troops at the Imperial War Museum with contorted animal parts or derived substances in every course of every menu. Basically, the programme was a piece of institutionalised violence against animals (and in the background, between the troops and their adversaries) in the almost total absence of women.

The mixture of sexist slight and revolting display of death and dismemberment had me mentally reeling and a memory came of a vegan academic friend of mine talking about the ecofeminist Carol Adams – here she is through the eyes of a Harvard student who attended one of her lectures. Carol Adams authored The Sexual Politics of Meat. I went to look at it on Google Books to see if I could get a little insight. In common with my friend, I am wary of the views of Carol Adams because I don’t think her vegetarianism hangs together with her feminism to my satisfaction. Also I don’t want to “negate the dominant world” as such, and I don’t think her premises are borne out in actuality. For example, “eat rice, have faith in women” is not going to cut it, and the current woman-free vogue for baking on Saturday kitchen spoils the virility=meat argument (p16), notwithstanding our collective male-hunter / female-gatherer past. And I’m not convinced that it is inherently patriarchal to believe that the end justifies the means (p23). Yes, people with power have always eaten meat – and the first thing poor people do when their circumstances improve is improve their diets, usually with meat, and to ascribe this to status-seeking is missing out a hell of a lot. And I don’t think you can tell all that much about contemporary society from cherry-picked Greek myths, and have never understood why so many critical theorists attempt this. And though I have a very womanly lack of self-belief which I think resides in poor gender role-models who themselves had poor role-models, in combination with neglect by the men who have professional and political power over me whose decisions circumscribe a lot of mine, I have law on my side and am not inclined to consider myself as oppressed by men.

And while I’d shun the comparison which does most of the work in the following from Isaac Bashevis Singer, maybe I shouldn’t if I accept the implications of his point, and I think I do.

“As often as Herman had witnessed the slaughter of animals and fish, he had always had the same thought: in their behaviour towards creatures, all men were Nazis. The smugness with which man could do with other species as he pleased exemplified the most extreme of racist theories, the principle that might is right.”

Which leaves me where? Humans are a menace? Is that what I think? I don’t think I think that. So is the comparison wrong? It feels right… It’s not the same as comparing George Bush to Hitler. Perhaps I think of humans as sophisticated animals with tendencies we recognise as needing to be restrained – by each self, preferably, with the law as a protection against that failing. Would somebody care to respond? Besides my friend, who is in the throes of her thesis and can’t talk much, Norm and Eve Garrard (I should read that book) are the only people I’m aware of with my kind of politics who care much about this.

However, the following points are worth thinking on:

“Justice should not be so fragile a commodity that it cannot be extended beyond the species barrier of Homo sapiens” (p22).

“When one lacks power in the dominant culture, such disempowerment may make one more alert to other forms of disempowerment” (p22).

Apparently 80% of the animal advocacy movement is women (p21).

True, I lack power – but it’s because I don’t find it right to seek it in a hierarchical system, knowing that I’d only be climbing it to flatten it takes a lot of character, brain and energy. Still, maybe this sheds some light about why I often wonder about how it happened that Al Gore could make a seminal film about climate change which passed over the huge climactic problem of farmed cows, his family’s business. And why I also often wonder about the time a single-issue campaigner, who thought so hard and argued so eloquently for the rights of one social group, smacked his lips over my Guardian supplement on the ill treatment of pigs, the cover splash of which was a large close-up image of fried bacon. And, not to let him off the hook, after my cold wordless anger had subsided I acknowledged that I consider more social ills to be connected than most people do, and that this makes me vulnerable to totalitarianism which I so far recognise and avoid, but maybe over-aggressively and to the detriment of making arguments for change. And maybe it’s part of the reason why I spend so much time troubled by how it came to be that so many of the most prominent totalitarian socialists are unrelatedly a) men and b) eat animal parts and substances.

And that’s as far as I’ve got.

“It is a difficult matter to argue with the belly since it has no ears” is attributed to the Roman statesman Marcus Porcius Cato.

Weekend tales: Tom Paine, Stalin, why God loves vegans, gin, Breville joy, and birds

Last night was magic. Matt and I went to The Globe to catch the last night of A New World, Trevor Griffith’s play about Thomas Paine in America and in France. Paine, who suffered beatings and pariahdom for his beliefs and who, imprisoned without charge by fellow revolutionaries in France during The Terror, authored of The Rights of Man, the is one of my heroes. His pamphet of 1776, Common Sense, was instrumental in building support among ordinary Americans for the revolution which gained their independence from Britain. He was a man who fought for freedom when revolution lost its way, and for clemency – the life of the last Louis – against vengefulness. If he had lived today, he might well have been making common cause with Peter Tatchell, with cultural commons campaigners, and with the AWL.

It had rained quite hard all afternoon and I was going from work in rubber wellies with my ridiculous rubberised soldier’s poncho in my bag – but then it stopped. This was exceedingly fortunate because I’d got tickets for the Yard where you stand in the open to watch the play. The best seats in the house are in the Yard; the cast are in among you interacting with you – all the more incredible that tickets are £5 only. I stood looking up at slaves for sale on the platform next to where Matt and I were for most of the production, and stood at the feet – literally within spitting distance – of the man himself as he addressed the assembled crowd in favour of pensions and child allowance. Once a revolutionary whispered to be to be careful seconds before he and fellow cast members pushed the platform to the other side of the The Yard. The Yard was warm and full – in fact the whole theatre was full. This is the cult of the Last Night. Special things happen at Last Nights, as they did last night – the playwright was in the audience and there were speeches (I love speeches).

It was an excellent production – I’ll leave you to read the many positive reviews. One thing’s worth mentioning though. Watching, in this now-established English institution of The Globe, the Union Jack shot through by French Revolutionaries, defiant colonials railing against their English rulers, and the low evaluation of the English national character by Edmund Burke – watching all that, the morning’s news about Russia came to mind, where the Russian authorities have permitted a man called Yevgeny Dzhugashvili to sue the Novaya Gazeta, a Russian newspaper, for libel against his murderous dead dictator grandfather, one Josef Stalin, for “calling into question his honour and dignity“. As historian Orlando Figes (whom I will hear speak later this month) observed on the Today Programme, it is valid to remember Stalin as a murderous dictator, and the Putin-Medvedev government of Russia is perpetrating revisionist historiography in the face of the law marks a turn for the worse. And I thought about what, by comparison, a solid, honest country I live in, and how good it is if your country’s national self-confidence doesn’t flinch from historical truth.

Meeting missionaries. I was out the front cutting the dead lavender to make lavender bags and talking to my neighbours, when two women walked by and exclaimed about the scent. I passed them some flowerheads and they took a few steps away before turning back. Because I had given them a present, said the more talkative of the two, she would give me a present. Out of her bag came a copy of Watchtower, the organ of the Jehovah’s Witnesses. I declined, citing environmental reasons – non-bait to most missionary minds, in my experience. Besides, my neighbours (still beside me) are Catholic and I don’t want to talk about God with them – for me God is a wedge which makes me feel far from believers. For example, my closest Catholic friends believe in flying monks which, to my mind, is entirely consistent with believing in God. But the missionaries wanted to talk more, so when my meat-eating neighbours had departed and I’d had enough, I swung the conversation round to an agenda of my own: veganism. This yielded a lesson in scripture – I hadn’t realised that we were vegans before the flood – and a fairly quick conclusion as I turned back to the lavender in silent frustration: how can you believe you are following God’s enjoinder to be kind to animals, and at the same time slaughter them for no reason? If there is a God, it wants those of us who can to be vegans.

Sloe gin. Pick and wash your ripe sloes. Get a large jar with a water-tight lid. Prick the sloes with a special technique so it doesn’t take you a year. Weigh them. Put them in the jar. Add half as much sugar. Pour in gin to the top. Agitate daily for a week and then occasionally after that. Drink no earlier than 3 months (and in my case make it three months before New Year).

Breville joy. Did I mention that my cousin mended my broken kettle, helping me keep faith with my 10:10 pledges? But that’s not what this is about. Since Redwood began to produce vegan melting mozzarella, I’ve been able to occasionally open the old Breville sandwich toaster. You have no idea how happy this makes me – I thought I’d never have a toasted sandwich again. So, I margarined one slice of the bread I’d made overnight in the breadmaker, then layered on thin slices of cheese, then tomatoes out of the garden, then shallot, then smeared egg-free Plamil mayo (which is blindingly good stuff) over the other slice to waterproof it, placed it on top, margarined it, then made another the same, then battened down the lid. It was so lovely. So, so, so lovely. Then you must scrupulously clean your Breville, not leave the fat to go rancid for next time.

Birds. My RSPB-approved cat deterrent/repellent (ha, Weggis, you must live in a district of hard-of-hearing cats) appears to work but I scan the rooftops in vain – not a birdy. Today Matt bought, from B&Q, one of those metal bird feeding stands with hooks for different types of feeder. I put it to the lee of the cat deterrent, between that and the house, in the middle of the lawn. There’s a grub tray which I’m reluctant to use, but when I searched for “vegan alternatives to grubs” that was kiboshed by the double meaning of ‘grub’, and when I searched for “vegan alternatives to maggots” I got a load of medical information. Do you think young blackbirds might make a go of Redwood melting mozzarella, perhaps grated?