Lighten up about veganism, says woman of the woods

A WOMAN from Shiplake who taught bushcraft for Ray Mears’s expedition company has published a tongue-in-cheek book about veganism and the environment.

Emma Armstrong, 37, wrote I Used To Think Vegans Were D***s after her family switched from eating meat to a mostly plant-based diet.

She hopes that by using humour her book will interest people who otherwise wouldn’t read about the environment.

Mrs Armstrong, who spent her twenties living in woods and catching game, said: “It’s a bit of a confessional, the eco-sins I’ve committed, many full in the knowledge of how bad it is.

“It’s to make people laugh and hopefully learn something because no one is reading the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, no one.”

She was inspired to write the book after her sister-in-law, who is vegan, came to her house for Christmas and forced her to confront the amount of meat that she and her husband and three children were eating.

Mrs Armstrong said: “I didn’t know anything about vegan food. I’m married to an Australian and they are big into meat. To make my husband eat fish, I used to have to wrap it in meat. That was the sort of food culture in our house.

“I couldn’t find a vegan nut roast for love nor money. I was in a right tizzy about it.

“All of a sudden my husband, who was so veggie-sceptical, said, ‘Fine, I can eat some beans, that’s fine’, so the food culture in our household suddenly changed.”

She believes that many people are put off veganism by an “all-or-nothing” approach and that a more flexible approach is much more realistic and appealing.

Mrs Armstrong said: “One of the things that veganism as a concept does wrong is it’s such a purist mentality. If something is 100 per cent one way it’s too polarising.

“If you’ve never tried something, then this is presented as a religious conversion and quite a lot of vegans do give off that vibe and it puts people off.

“We were recently on holiday in the Hebrides and we did eat some venison. They have to cull deer there for the ecosystem and I don’t feel bad about it.

“I don’t like the sanctimony and guilt around food so we eat venison and if my kids want a sausage roll at grandma and grandad’s that’s fine. I think it’s easier to not be so rigid and probably in a lot of areas in our lives if people were more flexible it would make things a bit easier and more pleasant.

“We don’t buy cow’s milk any more. If we run out we’ve got another carton of long-life oat milk in the cupboard and I’m not having to pop to Tesco every five minutes.

“I have one particularly fussy child, so I have to do serious obfuscation of vegetables. I make a ‘macaroni cheese’ out of cauliflower — I have to get really sneaky.

“He couldn’t tell the difference between a cheap pork sausage and a meat substitute one. Some of the meat-substitute products get a lot of flak but what do you think is in a cheap sausage? You’d be horrified if you read the ingredients list and would probably never eat it.”

Mrs Armstrong fell in love with the outdoors as a child when she was in a Girl Guides group and learned how to camp and make fires.

She completed her Duke of Edinburgh’s Award in the Lake District, a place she was excited to explore as she had loved reading Swallows and Amazons as a young girl.

After studying English at Sussex University and gaining a master’s degree, she realised that she didn’t want to spend her working life indoors.

She went to work with Ray Mears, the woodsman and bushcraft expert, and lived in woods in West Sussex.

Mrs Armstrong said: “I started at the bottom, as junior as you could be, but ended up after a few years leading courses.

“I feel really lucky. So many people hate their jobs. I got to do amazing work with the nicest people.

“You wake up in the morning and you’re already in the woods. You would sleep under a tarp to keep the rain off. You’d have a roll mat, then a sleeping bag, then a waterproof cover over that because the tarp is nice but you get a lot of side-swipe from the rain.

“You wriggle into your clothes, getting dressed in your sleeping bag if you’re feeling particularly modest. Then you need a wee, so you have to find somewhere.

“When I get up, I want a coffee but I have to get a fire going first and if I didn’t get any wood in last night and it’s wet then it’s harder.

Get a billy can, give it a shake, let it stew for a few minutes. Don’t drop it and spill boiling hot coffee over yourself in the process because that makes it look way less cool.

“You drink your delicious cup of coffee with a few grounds in it and then you think, ‘now for something to eat’ but there’s a good portion of labour involved.

“I showered twice a week. You boil some water and have a shower bag, winch it over the branch of a tree, make sure no one is around and stand under it. I used to wash my hair in a bowl.

“There’s a lot of first aid. Loads of people cut themselves because they learn to use knives. I had a knife, axe and a saw on me at all times. I once walked into a petrol station with them.

“We taught firelighting, botany, first aid, navigation and indigenous skills. It was mostly to outdoors enthusiasts. Lots of people did it as expedition training, like a warm-up activity, not the Bear Grylls, showy eating frog’s innards or drinking your own p*** — it was skills.”

She believes that these experiences, specifically catching, killing and cooking game, gave her a specific perspective on meat-eating.

Mrs Armstrong said: “I have direct experience of killing and butchering my own meat. I used to teach people how to do that. I’ve always felt I was quite an ethical meat-eater as I was prepared to get my hands dirty.

“A lot of my former students, all men, were like, ‘I eat meat, meat, meat’ and then I’d say: ‘Can you help me skin this rabbit?’ and they’d retch.

“Something I’m not fabulously proud of is that I used to teach people how to make snares. The worst thing I had to do with a team was dispatch a deer that had been shot by a poacher. It had been shot in the jaw, the poor thing.

“I get it, people want to take game but you have to be responsible. If you’re going to take a shot you have to be sure of it or sort it out afterwards.

“I used to teach people how to parnasse salmon, which we didn’t find in the woods, it used to be delivered from Waitrose. It was gritty — you open it out, fillet it and butterfly it on a stick over a fire. When you can’t wash your hands in the way you might do indoors that smell really clings for quite some time.

“With meat, there was a pragmatism. If we had a day off and there were some wood pigeon we would shoot them and eat them. We wouldn’t shoot 20 pigeons and eat one. It feels much more ethical to just take what you need.

“It’s not nice to take something’s life, and I don’t want my life taken, but at least a rabbit is running around then boom, it’s done, rather than spending its life in a cage and being transported to an abattoir.

“So I feel that it’s a kinder way to eat meat if you’re going to eat meat.”

Mrs Armstrong left Mears’s company when she was 27 and starting dating Tom, who is now her husband and taught English at a boys’ school.

Her experiences taught her that humour is a useful way of reaching people.

“I’m 5ft 3½in, a small woman,” she said. “I’ve always had to fight this ‘little woman’ trope.

“The easiest way I’ve got to get people’s attention and respect is humour. I’d have people say to me, ‘Are you Ray’s secretary?’ and I’d say, ‘No, I’m in charge of your food supplies for the next seven days so it’s unfortunate that you made that comment’.

“Laughing disarms people and it interrupts whatever preconceived idea they’ve got that means that they’re not listening.

“It’s an engagement tool. If you can make people laugh, their shoulders relax. It doesn’t work on my children but otherwise it’s relatively effective.

“For my undergrad degree I studied stand-up comedy. I studied the comedy of the black stand-up comics of the Seventies and Eighties, like Richard Prior and Eddie Murphy, when what they were doing was revolutionary. They had halls of white people laughing at the pernicious racism they were perpetrating. That obviously sowed a seed.

“The vegan community can seem so serious. Even now I can be like, ‘eurgh’, when I hear the word and unfortunately that’s the public
perception.

“But equally I’m really boring and I love reading data, data which tells us that fewer animal products will help the environment, particularly with methane emissions. That means a change to the food culture, so you’ve got to get people on side.

“My very erudite and highbrow way of doing it was, let’s put d*** in the title of the book. My mother would be so proud — no, she’s very supportive, if a little bit mortified.”

Mrs Armstrong says she can’t tell her children the title of her book because she is careful not to swear around them.

Having stopped teaching when her first child was born, she now home-schools them and wrote her book while they were sleeping. She wrote it in 41 nights having already done a lot of the research.

She spends a lot of time outdoors with her children, teaching them about nature, and says that she has seen for herself the impact that the climate crisis is having on the world about her.

“I can feel the changes, the changes in the weather, those I’ve observed in the trees. I lie awake at night and worry about it.

“I worry for my children. I have three children — what a terrible thing to do when you care about the environment. I had three western, rich kids that are going to trash the planet, way worse than kids around the world.

“The thing I get frustrated about with the generation above me is that they get to enjoy the spoils but they’re not willing to make — for me — enough concessions. You want to fly all the time but your grandkids are sucking up that aviation fuel you’re spaffing all over the stratosphere.”

Mrs Armstrong hopes her book will inspire conversations about the environment.

She said: “I adore nature and the natural world but I don’t believe it’s this sublime, sacred experience — again, that puts people off. Ecology has this saintly hue to it.

“No one’s perfect and people have got to stop making it this a well-to-do, middle class white people issue. They need to involve everyone in the conversation. The outdoor industry is almost exclusively white dudes. It’s so undiverse, it’s embarrassing. Farming is the same. We need to get everyone involved and start with Westminster. It would also benefit from a bit of diversification.

“I’m a bit chippy and a bit gobby. I have views on more things than I have a right to. I hope people take the book in the spirit in which it was intended, which is that everyone needs to stop taking themselves so seriously, you’ve got to laugh about things.

“It makes it more relatable. I love scientists but a lot of them don’t speak human and that limits their message being received quite dramatically.”

• I Used To Think Vegans Were D***s (£9.99), which is published by Vulpine Press is available at the Bell Bookshop in Henley.