I was a child of the Band Aid generation. We grew up to Blue Peter appeals for the people of Cambodia, where our milk bottle tops and used stamps could save a child in some faraway country, and Michael Buerke and Bob Geldof brought famine and Ethiopia to our living rooms, our classrooms and our pop magazines. And fair play to them – it’s important that people know and do what they can to help.

What we were never told, perhaps because the people telling us didn’t know or understand it, was the role we played in their starvation. We went on our sponsored fasts (I never did, actually) and bought the record in our millions and we ate our Christmas turkey unaware that it was part of the problem, part of the cause of their hunger.

Yes, I know there was civil war in Ethiopia and there was massive corruption and diversion of emergency relief supplies but more than that, more than a failure of the crops and the rains, there was what Amartya Sen called a failure of entitlement.

Ethiopia was exporting grain during the famine.

The grain was used to feed farm animals in other countries. The farm animals were used to feed people rich enough to afford to eat meat. It takes 3 lbs of grain to produce 1 lb of poultry, 10 lbs to produce a single pound of beef. Between 5-15% of the food consumed by farm animals is converted into meat or other edible animal products.

Meanwhile a third of all grain, half of all cereal grown in the world is used as animal feed and there are a billion or so starving or severely malnourished people in the world.

As for land, it’s abundantly clear that lack of access to land for food growing is a prime cause of poverty and hunger in much of the world. Picture any given chunk of land and for every one person it could support on a meat-based diet, it could support 8-12 times as many people on a cereal or plant-based diet. The IMF and World Bank, with their aggressive promotion of loans to poor countries in the past, now force the use of land in those countries for cash cropping, rather than feeding the population.

Water is perhaps the most contested commodity in the world today. I remember, while studying geography at Newcastle University, a lecturer gently delivering the frightening information that the wars of the future will be fought over clean water. He wasn’t a man given, in my experience, to hyperbole and melodrama, so I read more. Already treaties are in place and international tensions raging over access to water.

In part this results from a lack of appropriate technology: in itself another failure of entitlement because governments are receiving aid tied to military and high technology purchases – Tanzania for example - while their people die for lack of water purification equipment in their communities. But in part it’s the consequence of inequitable distribution of water resources – not in the simple sense that more water falls in certain areas than in others, but in the more complex sense that some of us are entitled, by way of greater wealth, to use more water than others.

Yet again our diets are implicated. To produce a single day’s worth of food for a meat-eater costs more than 15,000 litres of water. A vegetarian diet takes a third of this quantity and a vegan one only 1,150 – less than a tenth. Fossil fuel input per vegan per day is less than a third that for a meat eater and half that for a vegetarian.

This is not to be smug. I still eat food from tins sometime, although I know it’s not very eco, even if I do put the empties out for recycling. Not everything I eat – in fact not that much of what I eat – is organic although I know how harmful pesticides are, primarily because organic food is more expensive and my income is erratic.

But it is possible to rearrange your wanting. People say things like “I could never give up cheese” or “What about ice cream?” Firstly there are loads of good things that are vegan. If I’d just stopped eating all the meat and dairy things without replacing them with vegan good things then my life would be a lot less joyful. If you’re into pudding there are great adventures to be had.

For me it comes down to the question of whether you still want something if you know the harm it does. There are creatures called dream sprites which would have existed if I’d been in charge of creation. They cause the ripples of things to be visible in this dimension when we touch them, like an extra sense I suppose. Yes, Nestle make some of the lushest chocolate but would you still want to eat it if, when you picked it up, you could see the suffering caused by the company that made it, that profited from your shopping.

You could see the children dying as a direct result of the baby milk substitutes aggressively foisted on their mothers by Nestle, who knew there wasn’t adequate clean water to feed the babies safely on the substitute, knew the women couldn’t afford to buy the stuff after their free samples had dried up, along with their breast milk, untapped since the delivery of the powder, so they’d water it down more than they were meant to and the kids would be malnourished; knew all that but saw profit and ignored what they knew.

See http://www.babymilkaction.org for more on Nestle.

Wanting can be tempered by knowing. It applies to everything: when you weigh the wanting against the consequences of having, it becomes less a matter of “denying yourself” something and more a question of self respect. It is for me anyway.


The common misperception about vegans is that you end up weak and sickly. If all you eat is chips, then yes, you will be. The vegan society has loads of books and charts and advice about having a healthy and balanced diet. I’m not one for spending hours cooking, or even half-hours, but you can throw together a filling, healthy, vegan meal in a few minutes.

So – back to Bob and Blue Peter and Mr Buerke… I would never tell anyone NOT to give money to charity or sponsor a child, because I think even individual, ad hoc redistribution of wealth is worthwhile and solidarity and empathy between people is important.

But I would say don’t just sponsor a child. We need to redistribute entitlement as well. It’s easy to think – we’re always encouraged to think – that there’s no point, just one person doing this. What difference does it make what I eat when there are millions of people still carrying on the same?

But if I alone make a difference of 13,850 or so litres of water a day, or 5,255,250 litres a year, it’s clear that my decision makes a huge difference. Why am I vegan? Because I like my planet. Because I’m into human rights.


Enough explaining – here’s the cake recipe, with thanks to Ronny, the writer of The Cake Scoffer, published by Vegan International Cake Engineers (VICE) and distributed by Active Distribution (BM Active, London WC1N 3XX, England)

Chocolate Banana Cake

10oz plain flour
3 heaped tsp baking powder
2oz cocoa, sifted
8oz sugar
8 tbsp oil
10 fl oz water (or 8 of water and 2 of soya milk)
1 medium sized banana, mashed

Check out www.bananalink.org.uk for info on fair trade bananas

1. Mix together the dry ingredients - flour, baking powder, cocoa and sugar. Add the rest and mix thoroughly.

2. Pour it into 2 greased 8 inch round tins and bake for 40 mins in pre-heated oven on gas mark 5. Or make two halves and sandwich them together with fudge filling.

Fudge Filling (or Topping)

2oz margarine
3 tbsp water
7oz icing sugar
2oz cocoa
1 tsp vanilla essence

1. Melt marg over a very gentle heat.
2. Add other ingredients, mix thoroughly and leave to cool.
3. Beat until stiff with an electric mixer or whisk, then fill and / or top.


Also try vanilla tofutti or other vegan “ice cream” with chocolate provamel sauce over it and grated Green and Blacks chocolate over the top. Or mango / lemon sorbet with coconut milk poured on top. The coconut milk freezes and it’s gorgeous.

Check out the Animal Free Shopper for loads of vegan cakes, biscuits, puddings, chocolate and stuff, as well as other food, cosmetics and so on – available in bookshops and on Vegan Society website – www.vegansociety.com

Also Vegetarian Society – www.vegsoc.org

Veggies Catering Campaign – www.veggies.org.uk – lush vegan event catering and campaigns – I recommend the bakewell tart and the chocolate brandy cake.

Viva – campaign against factory farming of animals – www.viva.org.uk

Permaculture Association – sustainable food growing and living – www.permaculture.org.uk

Primal Seeds – info on industrial agriculture – www.primalseeds.org

Soil Association – organic food and farming – www.soilassociation.org