The pandemic and plant-based
Reading time: 2 minutes
I’ve been thinking about writing this post for a while now but never quite seem to have the energy. These last couple of months of self-quarantine I’ve felt particularly drained throughout the day. I guess my sedentary state has made me anxious. And the chaotic state of how the pandemic is being handled over something as simple as wearing a mask, has left me demoralized.
Then there’s this piece of information that I got from a podcast interview with Dr Micheal Greger on his book How to Survive a Pandemic: All infectious diseases come from domesticated animals. You know, like covid which came from a bat. And swine flu from pigs. Bird flu. Regular flu, also coming from birds. AIDS (from monkeys). Respiratory diseases from various animals. I haven’t read Dr Greger’s 1,000-page book, but it’s all in there (and probably the reason it’s 1,000 pages).
I’ve learned a lot about how we eat these last three years since going plant-based. How much healthier it is to our everyday habits. How most of the conditions we get when we’re older stem from eating meat and dairy. How drastically reducing factory farming can help more with climate change than basically anything else. And now that we’re familiar with what a pandemic is, it turns out it’s also about the survival of human beings.
And the worst part of it is that this probably won’t be the last pandemic we experience in our lifetimes. It won’t be another 100 years like the Spanish flu. As our population continues to increase so does the amount of animals that are farmed for food, leading to increased risks of disease spreading. We only got lucky that swine flu, bird flu, and others didn’t spread the way covid did.
The hope in all of this is that things are showing signs of change. More and more people are going plant-based. There are more options now than ever. Technology is allowing meat to be grown in a lab. We’re becoming more aware of how factory farming works allowing us to do more to prevent how diseases are caused. There’s still a lot of work to do but we're learning. Just like we're learning how to get through the pandemic. And wearing a piece of cloth to cover our mouth and nose in order to prevent the virus from spreading.