2023
At the film festival
We saw two films this year: A brighter tomorrow, of Nanni Moretti, and Banel & Adama, of Ramata-Toulaye Sy.
Both are very good. It was the festival’s 40th year, and I guess we have been going to it for most of those years, and usually seeing more films. I used to pick them really carefully, but nowadays we just choose a couple according to whim or time that we are available.
There’s still a festival atmosphere, despite the huge demonstrations. Thousands of people had also walked up to Jerusalem earlier, in the heat of the day in the hope of preserving a semblance of democracy in this deeply divided country.
After the film, we passed through a contingent of demonstrators outside the PM’s house, on our way to Pizzeria Flora, where they have what must be the world’s finest vegan pizza.
The demonstration there passed peacefully. Just in case, a little out of sight on a side street there was a group of mounted cops, so that sitting there at the restaurant, with the demo going on and the men on horses in waiting, I felt like I was in that scene from Dr. Zhivago.
Veganism
In the early 2000s, when I first visited Plum Village, the mindfulness practice community near Bordeaux, it was vegetarian. In some of the meals they would include eggs and dairy products, then, as a response to climate change, Thich Nhat Hanh and the community members decided that Plum Village would observe a vegan diet. That was how the retreat I just attended was also conducted. As someone at the end of the retreat calculated, that was 360 delicious meals prepared without the use of animal products.
I learn from Greta Thunberg’s new book (“The Climate Book” that “shifting towards a plant-based diet could save us up to 8 billion tonnes of CO2 every year. The land requirements of meat and dairy production are equivalent to an area the size of North and South America combined.”
Thich Nhat Hanh was a little ahead of the mainstream in his understanding and adaptation to the climate emergency, but actually, the book that first turned me on to vegetarianism, after leaving my parents’ home in the ’70s, was “Diet for a Small Planet”, which was written in 1971 by Frances Moore Lappé. That was really far ahead in its promotion of a vegetarian diet for the good of the planet.