WE HAE MEAT

Joanna Blythman’s Viewpoint article on vegetarianism and veganism [November 2019] was timely and sensible.

As a child in 1950 I spent two weeks at a vegan hotel in the Lake District. My family was friendly with the proprietors and it was with some shock that within two years they were displaying serious neurological and dietary deficiencies and were hospitalised – since this was before the days when the finer elements of human nutrition had been elucidated. One of them died as a result.

We now have a greater understanding of fundamental dietary requirements but the mistake is still being made in assuming that the nutritional requirements of the pregnant mother, her developing foetus and growing children are the same as those required for a normal human adult. Some American and French obstetricians recently observed that ‘one cannot grow a healthy foetus on a solely vegan diet’.

Even for the adult, the requirement for the vegan to increase the intake of pulses, soya (a usual crop when the forests of South America are cleared) and so on, depends upon huge importation of foodstuffs at immense energy transportation cost.

Such vegetable crops are frequently sourced from countries which do not have anything like the pesticide safety controls if the EU/ UK, not to mention the fact that those countries often urgently require those foodstuffs for themselves.

Neurotic fashion must not be allowed to obscure the realities of our medical biology. Christopher Ogilvie Badenoch, Roxburghshire