I was 18 when I sat in the Elizabeth Sneddon Theatre at what was then called the University of Natal watching a film that was being screened as part of the Durban International Film Festival. 

The documentary, The Animals Film, had been made by Victor Schonfeld and Myriam Alaux in 1981 and was narrated by Julie Christie, who later described it as the one film that she had been in that “really changed people’s lives”. 

The film’s exposé footage of factory farming, animal testing, hunting and fashion, interspersed with cartoons and vox pops, left me dazed and distressed. As I walked up the steep incline from the theatre to the main campus, the world looked different, meaner. I knew my life had been changed.

Moving away from meat — red meat, chicken and fish —was easy in a home operated by my teacher mom. We four children had learned early on that lentils could make a meal, that salad was an integral part of any dinner and pawpaw picked from our own tree and run over with a squeeze of lemon was a respectable and even delicious pudding. 

When I moved out of home in my third year of university and was living on the money I made working at a restaurant (in the week) and a chemist (on Saturday mornings), I lived off a lot of macaroni cheese, butternut soup and cooked vegetables. On the rare occasions I went out for dinner, I would scan the menu before settling for the sole item for people like me: the boldly named vegetarian platter which unfailingly consisted of a baked potato with mushroom sauce, creamed spinach and mashed pumpkin on an oblong plate.

A flicker of light came in the form of Durban’s Hungry Hermit which served a variety of vegetarian fare with a side helping of the folk music that I’d long loved (my dad Owen ran, for a time, the Durban Folk Club). And the year I worked at the then Post Natal newspaper had moments of still memorable culinary deliciousness. I would eat hot but delicately flavoured vegetable and lentil curries and fresh, perfectly thick rotis that my colleagues would bring in on occasion, always with some spares for me to take home and freeze. 

Living in Durban also meant eating hearty bean roti at Johnny’s Roti Sunrise Chip ’n Ranch late at night and mustard seed speckled potato samoosas bought at the Victoria Street Market — and it was at a Durban Pick n Pay that I bought my first ever vegetarian sausages. A humble precursor to the spread of options currently manufactured by homegrown success story The Fry Family Food Company, they extended my range of homecooked meals and were a conduit into having more on my plate at a braai than potato salad and garlic bread (but still broadcast “outsider” to those gathered around the fire).

The food I ate stayed that way for years, with some small forays into eating fish when I was pregnant and breastfeeding my four children. In truth, I didn’t give much thought to dairy for more than 30 years, confident that being a vegetarian and seeking out products not tested on animals was sufficient to live a life as free from cruelty to animals as possible. But around seven years ago, for no obvious reason, I woke up one day and decided it was time to stop eating dairy and eggs. Overnight I became a vegan. 

In the years since, I’ve spent — like all vegans — a great deal of time defending this choice. 

Why do you do it? I’m asked. For the animals, I say, just for starters citing the cruelty of factory farming, which includes — and in some ways is the cruellest — the dairy industry. In an almost incomprehensible figure, approximately 80 billion land animals are farmed every year, with more than 80%of the world’s soy crop fed to them. For the planet, I also say, as study after study emerges showing the impact on the environment of animal agriculture and the deforestation that accompanies it. 

Sometimes I talk about living aligned with my lifelong values of causing as little suffering and harm to all sentient beings on this planet; I also talk about my own health; I am also often told that being vegan is elitist and anti-African. Who better to counter this argument than Zimbabwe’s inspiring Nicola Kagoro, aka Chef Cola, a pioneering award-winning vegan chef at the helm of African Vegan on a Budget  — or you can delve into the work being done by food justice organisations on the impact of working in animal agriculture on poor and working-class communities (the link focuses on the animal agriculture workers in the US). It’s too expensive, is another accusation I hear: possibly, if you choose to eat the many processed food options on the market, but not if you eat a whole-foods, plant-based diet. Again, Chef Cola leads the way in countering this argument (along with many others). 

It was a film that prompted the journey to where I find myself in 2022, so I always suggest watching documentaries as a starting point for conversations with people I encounter who are on the scale from vehemently opposed to and somewhat interested in veganism. The Invisible Vegan, The End of Medicine, Cowspiracy, What The Health, Milked, and many others are available for streaming without afterwards navigating a steep hill. 

Prompted by thinking about the beginnings of my own journey to being a vegan I have gone back and watched the trailer for The Animals Film. I had forgotten about how much great music is in it: Robert Wyatt composed an original score which — along with the moving Pigs … (In There) — you can find on his 1999 release Eps, while the film’s soundtrack featured songs by Talking Heads. On watching the trailer a few times over these past weeks, I was deeply struck by a vox pop with a fur-wearing woman who stated: “I would take a dim view of making a purchase of a fur coat if I gave it any thought. I eliminate it from my mind.” 

That’s what most of us do, in a world of rising meat consumption (the 15 September Business Maverick newsletter tells us that the figure — measured in carcass weight equivalent — comes in at 361 million tonnes this year, compared to 71 million tonnes in 1961): eliminate from our minds all thought about where what we eat comes from and its impact on our world and all who live in it, humans and animals alike.

But what I would love to do here is to share the joy that being a vegan brings to me — and millions like me. 

I’ll start by saying this: although The Animals Film was the opposite of funny and left me shocked and saddened, even documentaries that aim to change your mind about eating animals can have you laughing out loud. Watch British comedian and director Simon Amstell’s mockumentary Carnage to see how. DM/ML

In case you missed it, also read Eating less red meat while getting all the nutrients you need

Eating less red meat while getting all the nutrients you need

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