Well, season’s greetings to you. And may this publication be a little manger of comfort to you, because this is a special time of the year. The time when you are most likely to be known as ‘The Vegan’. It’s highly likely you’ll find yourself spending the holidays with your nice-but-not-quite-there-yet relatives as they waggle a drumstick (such a coy term, ‘drumstick’; it’s SOMEONE’S THIGH) at you and tell you how conscientiously they procure their meat, from their dear farmer friend, who weeps softly as he waves goodbye to each herd of cows he tenderly raises. Each cow in the herd, your extremely concerned uncle tells you, actually hand-writes (hoof-writes) a note to their farmer, reassuring them that even if they weren’t taken to the abattoir, they’d probably have died of sheer happiness before the week was out.
Your relative, let’s call him (because it’s probably going to be a ‘him’) Uncle Louie, will tell you how he has literally never eaten a biscuit with skimmed milk in it, and how actually, most weeks he only eats one sliver of beef that is so small, and so thin you could actually have used it as a contact lens. And you won’t be able to escape him. Uncle Louie will keep returning to you for the duration of the festivities. Why? Because new things will have occurred to him. Have you, ponders Uncle Louie, have you stopped to think about, if we all went vegan, wait for it, the rafts of unemployed abattoir workers and farmers? People first, yeah? An argument akin to making the case for keeping Abu Ghraib open because if you close it the torturers will find it hard to retrain.