[Music]
so for the past two years I’ve looked
forward to the nine golden days in
September October here in Thailand where
the J Festival takes place for those of
you who are unaware of it this is a
religious festival where people abstain
from eating all animal products namely
meat dairy and eggs as well as pungent
vegetables like onions and garlic
this is observed by those with Thai
Chinese backgrounds based on the beliefs
of Taoism to honor the nine Emperor gods
and with a Thai Chinese population of
over 26 million people these
celebrations are huge and restaurants at
the supermarket across the country offer
a plethora of plant-based foods food
stalls and markets become mine with
these yellow flags carrying the Jay
symbol and the streets of Chinatown
become filled with lights processions
and banners yet even given the size of
this festival
I never took part juicy my family’s
religious background so it was always
something that just happened every year
and I gave it little thought however I
realized that it was the first exposure
to veganism in Thailand that I ever had
and now having been vegan for two years
I’ve come to greatly appreciated with a
very small number of the Thai population
being vegan year round for secular
purposes it is not very mainstream to
walk into a restaurant and start asking
for no meat dairy eggs fish sauce oyster
sauce shrimp paste these because these
flavors are quite essential to Thai
cuisine and are in the most famous
dishes from pad Thais Dongyang to Packer
power so as you can imagine it can be
quite hard to order food sometimes
however I find that by using the word
day it instantly communicates the kind
of food I eat and people understand
exactly what I’m talking about
when relatives friends and family first
find out of my about my diet I met a lot
of surprised confused and even impressed
faces
which then turned into a lot of
questions which of course I’m happy to
answer except for this one instance
where somebody once asked me whether a
potato was vegan I believe that there
isn’t enough talk surrounding veganism
in this region and the issues of animal
agriculture are much too important to be
getting the small amount of exposure
that they do Southeast Asia is a
thriving and vibrant place and more
discussion and awareness needs to be
generated around the impacts and
implications of these foods so
supermarkets did anybody else enjoy
going to the supermarkets when they were
younger I used to love going food
shopping and food has always been one of
my biggest interests my earliest
memories were in the kitchens with my
grandmother and my mother cooking meals
for the family and baking cakes and with
my mom being half Thai half English and
my dad means high Chinese I grew up with
a mixture of Western and Asian foods so
some nights we had roast chicken and
potatoes and the next night rice and
love which is a spicy pork salad no
matter what recipe we wanted to cook
whether it be beef Wellington’s or pasta
carbonara these ingredients were always
so convenient to obtain however this
wasn’t always the case when my
grandmother first moved here from the UK
in the 1960s this is a picture of her
with my mom and my two uncles when they
were very very young which was almost 50
years ago and sorry mom for revealing
that fact back then there were very few
supermarkets and Western cuisine was
mostly only found in high-end
restaurants in hotels also dairy was
very uncommon with only one milk company
existing at the time which was the Thai
Danish milk brand established in 1962
however being an English woman
my grandmother was insistent on having
her children drink milk growing up so
she had it delivered directly from the
farm to the house the milk didn’t even
come in bottles or boxes but in small
plastic bags showing how embryonic
however Yannick the stages of this
industry was even the neighbors were
surprised asking my grandmother
questions as to why she was feeding her
children milk after infancy because they
were used to giving their children
breast milk and only that now I see
students walking in and out of school
clutching milk boxes in their hands
dairy has become such a huge industry
here and has become a part of everyday
life as if it had been for generations
all in the space of 50 years this has
been a part of the westernization of
Asian diets that has been occurring
across the continent for the past few
decades it means that science is
shifting from the traditional
predominance of rice to those higher end
meat dairy and temperate zone products
like wheat potatoes and apples the taiga
in itself the average share of rice in
the taiga in itself has decreased by 60%
in the past two decades whilst the share
of potatoes which are indeed vegan have
increased by tenfold this has been
influenced by economic growth
urbanization and of course globalization
a paper by Prabhu khinkali with the UN
Food and Agriculture Organization
categorizes this change in diet into two
main parts the first one he calls income
induced diet diversification where
higher incomes leads to the variation of
diets while straining grouse maintaining
predominantly traditional features
however urbanization and globalization
pushes this further and the diet is
described to no longer conform to
traditional local habits of course this
has also been driven by the supermarket
revolution in Asia where the
modernization of the food retail sector
has replaced traditional markets and
small family-run shops so from personal
experience and the people I grew up
around
I really have noticed that animal
products are highly sought after with
steaks cheeses and yogurts look to us
luxury
compared to their more normal status in
Western countries I have seen such a
fixation on new American brands coming
into Thailand for example in 2010 when
Krispy Kreme for us opens lines
stretched for hundreds of meters down
the streets and people paid others to
wait in line for them all for these
simple glazed doughnuts similar buzz was
also created with backgrounds like Ben &
Jerry’s and Garrett popcorn so with such
trends towards animal products veganism
has quite an interesting place and I
often feel as if I am really going
against the grain as a person raised I’m
a lot of fish chicken and pork I
previously could not fathom giving these
foods up I used to have birthday
barbecues with plates piled high with
steaks sausages and ribs and with my
mother being a flight attendant foreign
European foods were also a huge part of
my upbringing from Scottish nettle
cheese to French crepes and waffles I
always saw these foods in such a
positive light due to the media branding
advertisements and of course the
cultures I was raised in I had the
idealization of Western foods coming
from my Thai surroundings with them with
its traditional prominence in the
English foods that word cooks for me
never did I ever consider that there
were any negative impacts to my dietary
habits I used to not take vegans
seriously because I thought that it was
so radical and extreme that people
wouldn’t eat any animal products at all
however having seen what this industry
really holds I now fully understand why
they do what they do so climate change
this has always been a really big issue
in science and geography lessons and
when I was 10 I used to think that the
world was going to end in 2012 because
of it and oftentimes co2 emissions are
attributed to cars planes and factories
which is very valid given that the
sports sector alone contributes to 13%
of global co2 emissions however a study
by the UN Food and Agriculture
Organization found that the meat
industry contributes to 18% of these
global co2 emissions which is a huge
number I was really surprised to find
this out and was wondering why the meat
industry wasn’t acknowledged for being a
key contributor to global warming before
this also cow manure contributes to
two-thirds of the world’s nitrous oxide
emissions which is a gas that has 300
times the climate changing power as
carbon dioxide furthermore the meat
industry takes up a lot of land and
water with 30% of the world’s land use
being for animal agriculture also with
all the it’s also been a key cause of
deforestation with 550 million meters
squared of forests being cleared as of
2014 for the meat industry ok
interestingly enough in terms of the co2
emission intensities as you can see east
and southeast asia’s is a region with
one of the highest co2 emission
intensities
however most prominent to me is the
amount of water pollution that the
animal agriculture industry causes
earlier this year the largest ever dead
zone in the ocean was recorded in the
Gulf of Mexico the size of New Jersey
this wild wide scale death of marine
life was caused by the pouring in of
manure toxins and fertilizers from
intense factory farms of a meat supplier
in the area overall in the past decade
this one company contribute contributes
to 104 million tons of manure being
dumped into the ocean if you think about
it this is huge across the globe as this
was the effect of only one company that
supplies the licence McDonald’s and KFC
however the biggest driver in my
conversion to veganism was my love for
animals so previously I had seen
snippets of videos and slaughterhouses
but I was surprised by it but the
effects never really lasted very long
and I was back to eating meat within the
what the next day however I came to
realize that it was an entirely
hypocritical of me to be outraged by
events like the Yulin don’t need
festivals when the exact same practices
happen every day behind the closed doors
of factory farms from videos online that
I saw of farm animals interacting with
people and performing cognitive tests I
realized that they are no different to
the pets I have at home they all have
the same ability to feel pain to feel
emotion and the want to live so no way
did I want to contribute to the maiming
confinement and torture that these
animals go through anymore however
something that wasn’t obviously was the
cruelty that exists in the dairy and egg
industry because there isn’t a piece of
meat on your plate where you can’t see
the death doesn’t mean that the cruelty
doesn’t exist so the most obvious facts
of the dairy industry that I never
thought about before was that to produce
milk mother cows have to give pregnant
and give birth so these these cows go
through constant cycles of artificial
insemination and pregnancy to keep up
high yields of lactation after birth the
calf forms deep maternal bonds with his
mother but it’s immediately ripped away
causing huge amounts of stress and
trauma and if the calf is a male it is
it is of no use to milk milk industry
and it’s raised for about a week on milk
substitutes and killed for feel equally
the egg industry is just as inhumane it
is known that the eggs that we eat
haven’t been fertilized which is true
however in the egg industry egg still
needs to hatch to continue producing
laying hens however in the mail chick is
hatched they are also of no use to the
egg industry and a thrown into mass
traders to be killed and ground from
meat so to me being vegan wasn’t about
becoming a protesting activist but it
was about connecting the facts and doing
what I thought thought was right I know
that as one person my choice not to eat
meat dairy or eggs isn’t gonna have some
huge global impact but it was about me
no longer wanting to personally
contribute to the inhumanities that I
knew existed
food is at the core of Asian cultures
and as food moves the culture and habits
move with it so let’s make sure that
this is in the right direction and them
and that we become more aware of the
impacts of our foods for the health of
our world our animals and of course
ourselves thank you
[Applause]
[Music]
so for the past two years I’ve looked
forward to the nine golden days in
September October here in Thailand where
the J Festival takes place for those of
you who are unaware of it this is a
religious festival where people abstain
from eating all animal products namely
meat dairy and eggs as well as pungent
vegetables like onions and garlic
this is observed by those with Thai
Chinese backgrounds based on the beliefs
of Taoism to honor the nine Emperor gods
and with a Thai Chinese population of
over 26 million people these
celebrations are huge and restaurants at
the supermarket across the country offer
a plethora of plant-based foods food
stalls and markets become mine with
these yellow flags carrying the Jay
symbol and the streets of Chinatown
become filled with lights processions
and banners yet even given the size of
this festival
I never took part juicy my family’s
religious background so it was always
something that just happened every year
and I gave it little thought however I
realized that it was the first exposure
to veganism in Thailand that I ever had
and now having been vegan for two years
I’ve come to greatly appreciated with a
very small number of the Thai population
being vegan year round for secular
purposes it is not very mainstream to
walk into a restaurant and start asking
for no meat dairy eggs fish sauce oyster
sauce shrimp paste these because these
flavors are quite essential to Thai
cuisine and are in the most famous
dishes from pad Thais Dongyang to Packer
power so as you can imagine it can be
quite hard to order food sometimes
however I find that by using the word
day it instantly communicates the kind
of food I eat and people understand
exactly what I’m talking about
when relatives friends and family first
find out of my about my diet I met a lot
of surprised confused and even impressed
faces
which then turned into a lot of
questions which of course I’m happy to
answer except for this one instance
where somebody once asked me whether a
potato was vegan I believe that there
isn’t enough talk surrounding veganism
in this region and the issues of animal
agriculture are much too important to be
getting the small amount of exposure
that they do Southeast Asia is a
thriving and vibrant place and more
discussion and awareness needs to be
generated around the impacts and
implications of these foods so
supermarkets did anybody else enjoy
going to the supermarkets when they were
younger I used to love going food
shopping and food has always been one of
my biggest interests my earliest
memories were in the kitchens with my
grandmother and my mother cooking meals
for the family and baking cakes and with
my mom being half Thai half English and
my dad means high Chinese I grew up with
a mixture of Western and Asian foods so
some nights we had roast chicken and
potatoes and the next night rice and
love which is a spicy pork salad no
matter what recipe we wanted to cook
whether it be beef Wellington’s or pasta
carbonara these ingredients were always
so convenient to obtain however this
wasn’t always the case when my
grandmother first moved here from the UK
in the 1960s this is a picture of her
with my mom and my two uncles when they
were very very young which was almost 50
years ago and sorry mom for revealing
that fact back then there were very few
supermarkets and Western cuisine was
mostly only found in high-end
restaurants in hotels also dairy was
very uncommon with only one milk company
existing at the time which was the Thai
Danish milk brand established in 1962
however being an English woman
my grandmother was insistent on having
her children drink milk growing up so
she had it delivered directly from the
farm to the house the milk didn’t even
come in bottles or boxes but in small
plastic bags showing how embryonic
however Yannick the stages of this
industry was even the neighbors were
surprised asking my grandmother
questions as to why she was feeding her
children milk after infancy because they
were used to giving their children
breast milk and only that now I see
students walking in and out of school
clutching milk boxes in their hands
dairy has become such a huge industry
here and has become a part of everyday
life as if it had been for generations
all in the space of 50 years this has
been a part of the westernization of
Asian diets that has been occurring
across the continent for the past few
decades it means that science is
shifting from the traditional
predominance of rice to those higher end
meat dairy and temperate zone products
like wheat potatoes and apples the taiga
in itself the average share of rice in
the taiga in itself has decreased by 60%
in the past two decades whilst the share
of potatoes which are indeed vegan have
increased by tenfold this has been
influenced by economic growth
urbanization and of course globalization
a paper by Prabhu khinkali with the UN
Food and Agriculture Organization
categorizes this change in diet into two
main parts the first one he calls income
induced diet diversification where
higher incomes leads to the variation of
diets while straining grouse maintaining
predominantly traditional features
however urbanization and globalization
pushes this further and the diet is
described to no longer conform to
traditional local habits of course this
has also been driven by the supermarket
revolution in Asia where the
modernization of the food retail sector
has replaced traditional markets and
small family-run shops so from personal
experience and the people I grew up
around
I really have noticed that animal
products are highly sought after with
steaks cheeses and yogurts look to us
luxury
compared to their more normal status in
Western countries I have seen such a
fixation on new American brands coming
into Thailand for example in 2010 when
Krispy Kreme for us opens lines
stretched for hundreds of meters down
the streets and people paid others to
wait in line for them all for these
simple glazed doughnuts similar buzz was
also created with backgrounds like Ben &
Jerry’s and Garrett popcorn so with such
trends towards animal products veganism
has quite an interesting place and I
often feel as if I am really going
against the grain as a person raised I’m
a lot of fish chicken and pork I
previously could not fathom giving these
foods up I used to have birthday
barbecues with plates piled high with
steaks sausages and ribs and with my
mother being a flight attendant foreign
European foods were also a huge part of
my upbringing from Scottish nettle
cheese to French crepes and waffles I
always saw these foods in such a
positive light due to the media branding
advertisements and of course the
cultures I was raised in I had the
idealization of Western foods coming
from my Thai surroundings with them with
its traditional prominence in the
English foods that word cooks for me
never did I ever consider that there
were any negative impacts to my dietary
habits I used to not take vegans
seriously because I thought that it was
so radical and extreme that people
wouldn’t eat any animal products at all
however having seen what this industry
really holds I now fully understand why
they do what they do so climate change
this has always been a really big issue
in science and geography lessons and
when I was 10 I used to think that the
world was going to end in 2012 because
of it and oftentimes co2 emissions are
attributed to cars planes and factories
which is very valid given that the
sports sector alone contributes to 13%
of global co2 emissions however a study
by the UN Food and Agriculture
Organization found that the meat
industry contributes to 18% of these
global co2 emissions which is a huge
number I was really surprised to find
this out and was wondering why the meat
industry wasn’t acknowledged for being a
key contributor to global warming before
this also cow manure contributes to
two-thirds of the world’s nitrous oxide
emissions which is a gas that has 300
times the climate changing power as
carbon dioxide furthermore the meat
industry takes up a lot of land and
water with 30% of the world’s land use
being for animal agriculture also with
all the it’s also been a key cause of
deforestation with 550 million meters
squared of forests being cleared as of
2014 for the meat industry ok
interestingly enough in terms of the co2
emission intensities as you can see east
and southeast asia’s is a region with
one of the highest co2 emission
intensities
however most prominent to me is the
amount of water pollution that the
animal agriculture industry causes
earlier this year the largest ever dead
zone in the ocean was recorded in the
Gulf of Mexico the size of New Jersey
this wild wide scale death of marine
life was caused by the pouring in of
manure toxins and fertilizers from
intense factory farms of a meat supplier
in the area overall in the past decade
this one company contribute contributes
to 104 million tons of manure being
dumped into the ocean if you think about
it this is huge across the globe as this
was the effect of only one company that
supplies the licence McDonald’s and KFC
however the biggest driver in my
conversion to veganism was my love for
animals so previously I had seen
snippets of videos and slaughterhouses
but I was surprised by it but the
effects never really lasted very long
and I was back to eating meat within the
what the next day however I came to
realize that it was an entirely
hypocritical of me to be outraged by
events like the Yulin don’t need
festivals when the exact same practices
happen every day behind the closed doors
of factory farms from videos online that
I saw of farm animals interacting with
people and performing cognitive tests I
realized that they are no different to
the pets I have at home they all have
the same ability to feel pain to feel
emotion and the want to live so no way
did I want to contribute to the maiming
confinement and torture that these
animals go through anymore however
something that wasn’t obviously was the
cruelty that exists in the dairy and egg
industry because there isn’t a piece of
meat on your plate where you can’t see
the death doesn’t mean that the cruelty
doesn’t exist so the most obvious facts
of the dairy industry that I never
thought about before was that to produce
milk mother cows have to give pregnant
and give birth so these these cows go
through constant cycles of artificial
insemination and pregnancy to keep up
high yields of lactation after birth the
calf forms deep maternal bonds with his
mother but it’s immediately ripped away
causing huge amounts of stress and
trauma and if the calf is a male it is
it is of no use to milk milk industry
and it’s raised for about a week on milk
substitutes and killed for feel equally
the egg industry is just as inhumane it
is known that the eggs that we eat
haven’t been fertilized which is true
however in the egg industry egg still
needs to hatch to continue producing
laying hens however in the mail chick is
hatched they are also of no use to the
egg industry and a thrown into mass
traders to be killed and ground from
meat so to me being vegan wasn’t about
becoming a protesting activist but it
was about connecting the facts and doing
what I thought thought was right I know
that as one person my choice not to eat
meat dairy or eggs isn’t gonna have some
huge global impact but it was about me
no longer wanting to personally
contribute to the inhumanities that I
knew existed
food is at the core of Asian cultures
and as food moves the culture and habits
move with it so let’s make sure that
this is in the right direction and them
and that we become more aware of the
impacts of our foods for the health of
our world our animals and of course
ourselves thank you
[Applause]
[Music]
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