Ellen Carter

Untitled (2022) Colour medium format film photograph

Untitled (2022) Colour medium format film photograph

Ellen Carter is a photographic artist, primarily working with medium format film. These images are part of an on going project photographing the landscapes of Chobham Common in Surrey which was started during lockdown, after looking for green spaces near her parents home. The photographs were taken a year after the Chobham Common wild fires.

Lenka A

Heating Up Poem by Lenka A

Sky used to be blue, grey, black. Sometimes lined by clouds, blue, grey, black. When, in those lovely sunny days, golden colour, so hot, almost white, shimmering heat would feel just right. This was the time for perfect picnic, food and a drink, perhaps to sink. To sink in a river, lido or a pool, have a swim, don’t be a fool! These days you have to be cautious as companies pump sewage, how nauseous... Also of lately, the sky is strange, not so lovely, that’s a shame...Peppered with grey lines when sunny, making it all a bit funny. The summers are now really hot, all those fumes and what not. Pollution in the air, not so pleasant when struggling for air! Sea levels rising and yet inland water vaporising. Either flood or drought, there is nothing normal, have no doubt. Governments will allow fracking, who cares about the Earth cracking. Wake up, wake up, before it’s too late, this really matters, there is action to take!

Over four years ago I decided to go vegan. I wonder now why I didn’t make the change sooner? I’d been a vegetarian off and on since I was a child. I’d grown up in a family where my brothers, father and uncles were all obsessive huntin’, shootin’, fishin’ men and both my brothers went to agricultural college. It was one day in the mid-summer when I went to visit one of my brothers who was on a work placement at a local pig farm, that made me go vegetarian. As it was a hot day sitting in the passenger seat of my mum’s car I had the window down and could hear unholy screaming from miles away. When we arrived in the farmyard the scene was akin to a horror film with a crowd of men including my brother around a metal apparatus that they would haul the pigs’ back legs over and then slice off their balls and slap on some hot tar to cauterize the wound. You’d think I’d never eat bacon again but, to my shame, I did, such was my indoctrination that this was the way things were and the ridicule that came my way from expressing my ‘lefty’ opinions.

But the picture in my head had been changed. I was no longer able to eat meat with impunity. I always felt bad. I even trained as a chef in a French restaurant where I’d gag as I prepped sweetbreads and calves’ liver and run from the smell of the corpulent butcher delivery man who had the hots for this young, trainee chef and would corner me ‘for a cuddle!’ This was the early 90’s, oh for a Me Too movement back then. So why did it take me another 30 years to finally take the plunge and do what I now consider to be one of the best things I’ve ever done for myself, on a par with stopping smoking and giving birth!

The more I find out about veganism and animal farming the more I understand. There’s a cognitive dissonance that’s deliberately created by the farming industry to protect the status quo that argues that humans are natural meat-eaters and that the land needs livestock on it. If, however, we were born meat eaters we’d not have to hide meat and dairy production behind closed doors and make it illegal for whistle blowers to show the public what really goes on. We’d be fine with it. Baby’s and young children, like wild puppies and kittens would think nothing of ripping the legs and heads off small prey but in reality one of the listed traits of a psychopath is ‘cruelty to animals.’ (Jon Ronson The Psychopath Test, 2011) and such behaviour is considered an aberration.

As a cooking teacher I had to teach the Eat-well Plate which has sections for meat, fish, eggs and ‘alternative protein sources’ and another section for dairy and with every source of nutrient the first on the list would be meat, fish and dairy. All secondary school children have to learn this information as it is part of the National Curriculum. Ask any school child where protein comes from and they’ll confidently shout to you that it’s meat. Then came The Game Changers 2018 documentary film about athletes including Arnold Schwarzenegger who ate a plant-based diet as it enhanced their performance and I had disengaged teenage boys sitting up and taking

Reasons to go Vegan by Rebecca Johnson

notice as they wanted some of that! Mind you I also had furious farming parents (the school I worked in is in the heart of Somerset farming community) saying how dare I teach their kids such rubbish and to keep such ‘way out’ opinions to myself!

Considering the enormous amount of research that has been in the public domain about the dire consequences of the Western diet, I find it shocking that we are still teaching every one of our children that meat and animal products are not only good for them but essential for a healthy diet. The China Study, published in 2005 by T Colin Campbell and his son Thomas M. Campbell, is the most comprehensive study of nutrition ever conducted and extols the benefits of a predominantly whole-food, vegan diet to avoid chronic illnesses such as coronary heart disease, diabetes, breast cancer, prostate cancer and bowel cancer.

In 2015 Michael Greger M.D. published How Not To Die which takes all the nutritional research published and summarizes from it, in lay-man terms, how to avoid the common degenerative diseases in the West. The over-whelming evidence he finds? ...That a wholefood, plant based diet will keep you healthiest for longest.

For me all this has been vindication, I’m not saying for one minute that I’m super-healthy or that my change of diet has solved all by problems, but it has enabled me to live a more authentic life, a life that I’m proud of as I’m doing my small bit in line with my core values. There are so many anomalies in peoples’ justifications for why they eat meat and I would not judge were it not that their choices to eat meat, fish, eggs and dairy have real-suffering and painful consequences for animals we purport, as a ‘nation of animal lovers’ to value and are, more than anything else, responsible for the destruction of our planet. I miss seeing kingfishers in my local river because the dairy farmer has twice now flushed his slurry into it and killed all the wildlife. My heart bleeds when we go camping in the early summer and you can hear the mother cows calling for their babies and we often walk through fields packed with day old calves looking so forlorn and innocent desperately huddled together for safety.

It’s easy to go vegan today. Supermarket shops are brimming with every conceivable plant-based product and You Tube and Tik Tok are full of enthusiastic vegan cooking teachers. You will not miss a thing, on the contrary you’ll feel better as you align your compassionate, loving nature with your food choices. After all we call the way we kill animals ‘humane slaughter.’ I’m not sure the animals would agree as no animal wants to lose its life and the fear is palpable whether they are gassed (pigs and chickens) or stunned and their throats slit (cows). But that speaks of a different human to what we have become. It’s time to take our power back and no longer be intimidated by big brother as I was for so long.