How I Equate Veganism with Health

Hey everyone!

I wanted to give you a bit of a backstory to why I tied vegan recipes into my work with beauty, and fundamentally everything is under the same umbrella of thought, but I guess it would make sense to give you a little bit of the backstory of my diet growing up and where I came from.

So my household was typically British, in the sense that my maternal grandparents, who we spent every day with + every other weekend with, were typically British cooks. I grew up with my nan who had handwritten recipe books of cakes and puddings, things that I cherish today. I wanted to give a nod to her inspiration by including many of her kitchen tools in the photos so that’s where all the older looking bits come from in the images. She basically wasn’t that adventurous, there definitely is a more rationed approach to food portions and the things that come from that generation that are so atypical to people my age, canned foods or white bread, white rice. There wasn’t a lot of exploration from that side of the family.

My mum absolutely hates to cook, she was always the breadwinner and my dad was an electroplater so was not really able to provide a massive meal for us when he got home as he worked a lot later, so my upbringing was pretty monotonous when it came to the types of foods that we got to try. All the British classics, definitely some Latin references, Carribean references, a lot of Italian food, but mainly the things you’d think of as being in an English family home, particularly the meat concoctions. So as a baby, being fed meat caused a horrendous reaction to me, I couldn’t digest it and I was absolutely enraged at the thought of being made to finish my plate of inedible texture, and I still have vague memories of it as a young child. When you feel the back of a piece of suede or leather and you touch it and it gives you shivers up your arm, that’s what chewing on a piece of meat was like to me and I would have fits of hysteria at being made to do so. If the food looked less like meat, I could eat more processed things whether a meatball or a sausage, but off the bone ribs or a piece of chicken was just impossible. It not only disgusted me but made me sick, this is not any indoctrination from a vegan lifestyle, that’s what I was like as a child.

So one thing I’d like to mention to any parents out there, telling your child that they are fussy with food is damaging. If they do not want to eat something, find something healthy that they do and make the situation a positive experience, because I endure the scars of the way in which my parents, who were doing the best they could, treated me and food. I can’t describe the unnecessary focus on eating things that physically caused me distress and to be poorly, it caused a horrendous amount of control issues with food during school and it took me probably the last ten years to get to a point where I love food. Part of this journey with Agitprop was to heal. It was to showcase joy and creativity in new areas that I could heal from, and I think the amount of fun I’ve had is definitely visible. But you’ve gotta keep it real because I was told that I didn’t like food, and I believed it.

Anyway, back to my upbringing. So I was being given an inordinate amount of milk as a kid and as a result, I had the most exaggerated reaction to animals that I had to stop horse riding, I couldn’t visit my paternal nan who had dogs. It caused me an immune response that made minor allergies bellow their presence. It made my skin show symptoms of eczema to the point where every meal I had was coated in medicated oils, again another thing that did hell to my relationship with food. I was on steroids, I had steroid creams topically applied all over my face. It was all a response to my body’s intolerance of dairy. It’s as simple as that.

I have never really understood what people think about veganism as being first and foremost an animal rights thing because I’ve gotta be totally frank, I think eating animals when we live in such an abundant culture is greedy. Cruelty aside, it’s fucking greedy. You don’t need to do it and when you see human beings unable to feed their children it’s a disgrace. That’s my position on vegan food. I don’t judge an Inuit for feeding his children seal blubber and I don’t judge a Massai chieftain for plugging cattle, any more than I judge a jaguar pulling a crocodile up a tree for dinner. It’s part of the program of nature and there are creatures that require a carnivorous diet, Western people do not. My introduction to being animal-produce free in my diet was a necessity for my health, but as an adult, I wouldn’t choose to eat meat if I wasn’t intolerant to it. I think it’s a very silly thing to do. Not only is it an extremely unregulated industry but the things they do to the poor animals to inseminate them, to maintain their production of milk and to keep the products clean, is just unhealthy.

I’m a human rights activist and being poisoned by this type of food is evil and inhumane. The cruelty involved is just the cherry on a rotten cake and I think that we have to get to a position now where we start focusing on not the abuse that goes on towards animals, but the toxicity we are feeding ourselves. We’re causing innumerate diseases. Why anyone would question children growing in bodies that’s gender is in question when you’re feeding them hormones from the time they can take milk, is again, stupid. It’s just stupid.

So I have a lot of fire in my message here because I want people to realize how foolish we have become. But in saying that, the reality is that food is a beautiful part of our lives and can be so much fun. My favourite thing to do with my sister is to cook together and we make lots of amazing memories, delicious things and happy moments when we cook. Food is a medicine in many ways and I hope my recipes are simple enough for anyone to follow but have something fab in them. They all taste okay!

Let me know in the comments below which ones you’d try and what your thoughts are.