Just Humans Being...

Do you trust your own instinct or prefer to rely on opinions supposedly based on facts? Over the years we have been advised against doing what we have wanted to do, we have experienced so many sharp intakes of breath by the people trained in the various areas we have disagreed with, but we have always chosen to stick to our guns and do what we feel is right. The thing is, our decisions came from within – we were never been influenced by others or knew of other people doing what we we wanted to do, we just felt something...a knowing. When we first got together in 1986, we discovered that we both felt repulsed by certain meats and we began questioning why we continued to eat it when we felt so uncomfortable. One evening Sime came over to my flat and made spicy veggie burgers from soya mince which were delicious and I then found a recipe for walnut and broccoli lasagne and we carried on learning more and more. In 1987, we bought our first house together and it just so happened that ...

We follow a thing on facebook called  Meat Free Monday , which is run by Paul McCartney (not that we are fans), but we borrowed the idea for a community cafe - which we ran with our friends, Sheila & Margaret for a few months until we all found it too tiring with everything else we do...  This is the idea behind meat free days: The UK’s Food Climate Research Network suggests that food production from farm to fork is responsible for between 20-30 percent of global green house gas emissions.  Livestock production is responsible for around half of these emissions. The more meat we produce and eat the bigger that carbon footprint will get. A sustainable future demands that we cut down - and yet between 1961 and 2007 the world population increased by a factor of 2.2, but meat consumption quadrupled, and poultry consumption increased 10-fold. As a result the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has concluded that the livestock sector is ‘one of the t...

  Oh dear, we've been vegetarian (mainly vegan) for over 20 years & our kids have been veggie all their lives, so what a shock we have had over the last couple of days - discovering that even though we buy all our organic grains & pulses from a wholefood wholesaler in bulk, not a lot of it is from the UK... All we have is: wheat grain, oat groats, oat flakes, cornflour & green split peas. The rest are all mainly from China, India & Turkey... Some months ago, we had long discussions about whether it would be possible for us to live on just Cornish produced food & we realised just how difficult that would be. We debated whether it is better to eat locally grown non-organic vegetables, instead of organic food from further afield & for us the organic food was more important, still is. There is a farm shop just a mile away from where we live, but most of it isn't organic. The farmer's market is 16 miles away in Truro, so we buy a veg box, which is d...

We have been asked many times over the years:  "Why are you vegetarian?" "Is it for moral or health reasons?" Well, it's moral... When Sime & I first got together, we discovered that we both had an aversion to eating animals (although we continued to do so for a while), but one day we stopped to watch some lambs in a field, they were playing together, jumping over each other & feeding from their mothers. We also had a newborn too (Sal) & I remember feeling very emotional about these beautiful creatures being parted from their mothers & then slaughtered in goodness knows what conditions - This was the point where we knew we could no longer carry on eating meat & there was no way we were going to force it on our child either, so we stopped. That was 1988 & we haven't eaten anything with a face since... We are real foodies - love to cook, love to eat out & are very fussy. We eat mainly a vegan diet, especially at home & try ...