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To appreciate how much more difficult it was to be a vegetarian forty years ago you must travel; not back through time, just abroad. Being any kind of vegetarian is now so easy and socially acceptable that we might be forgiven for forgetting that this is not universally so. As a bit of a stick-in-the-mud I hadn't really given this a lot of consideration.until I rashly accepted an invitation to work on an irrigation project in Ethiopia. In fact it wasn't until the time of our departure drew near that we began to have qualms about what we would find to eat there that hadn't walked once on four legs or even two! That's when we fell back onto the good old TVP (Textured Vegetarian Protein). In the event the sack we took with us proved invaluable, and fortunately imperishable too during our eighteen month stint. Twice a week goats for the junior engineer's mess were slaughtered within our sight and hearing, being hung by hind legs in the garden trees while their throats were cut and their blood was caught in wheelbarrows.
 Mark Fowler, Neville Fowler, Hagel Fowler with ladies from Uganda |
The idea conceived
It wasn't just the death of the goats that provoked us. It was the way they lived, eating everything that tried to grow. We tried gardening but it was impossible. They even ate the trees. Africa has a lot of people but it has even more goats. Once they created the Sahara, and now they are making it bigger. When we introduced local people to our meals with TVP they enjoyed it and found it an acceptable substitute for the meat they were accustomed to. The germ of an idea entered our heads. You could say that the idea was conceived then. Unfortunately our HIPPO had a long gestation. I suppose we thought, hoped, that someone, somewhere, must already be doing what we thought necessary and no doubt doing it better than we ever could. We fought off the growing realisation that this was not so. So far as we could ascertain nothing was being done in Africa to encourage the use of vegetable protein food as a viable and an alternative to meat, eggs and dairy products. Now we know that there are a few noble souls, like our friend Emmanuel Eyoh of the Nigerian Vegetarian Society, doing sterling work in difficult circumstances. But when it comes to the foreign aid organisations, they actually promote lifestock production and even send more cows, goats, pigs and hens to the continent - as if Africa needs more mouths to feed! They lead people to aspire to 'western' diets, and do a good job preparing the way for the eventual grand entry of MacBurgers Incorporated. Governments are no better. In Uganda for example whilst I was there they gave ten square miles of land to the Uganda Beef Producer's Association'for the development of modern commercial ranching'. The continent cannot survive such 'progress'. It will inevitably mean intensification with a vengeance: more chemical fertilisers, herbicides, insecticides, cruelty to animals, veterinary drugs for animal diseases, pharmaceutical drugs for human illnesses, genetic engineering of crops and animals; the multi-nationals will have a field day. That's what it is all about of course. Fortunately indigenous people are waking up to the threat. When people see that their environment, their health and even their lives are threatened, they fight back.
Neville Heath Fowler,
director of HIPPO
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