How To Argue With A Meat Eater (And Win Every Time)

On the back of its publication, Ed Winters – also known as Earthling Ed – is setting out on a five-date Waterstones book tour around the UK including Brighton on January 11 where his Waterstones event, after quickly selling out, has been upgraded to Wagner Hall.

“Vegan Jesus is not my choice of name but it is very, very sweet,” Ed admits. “Most of it probably is my hair and I suspect if I had it cut, then I would lose that title. But it's a very nice title even it is not necessarily helpful and as I say it's not my choice.”

It’s the Earthling Ed nickname that more accurately reflects his journey: “One of the main reasons I went vegan was because of a documentary called Earthlings that I watched on YouTube. It looks at all the different ways that we treat animals for food and for entertainment and for clothing. It's available on YouTube and it's an hour and 40 minutes of deeply upsetting visceral undercover footage. It is very confronting. I'd been vegetarian already for about eight months and a lot of the talk around veganism is generally around diet and food, and food is obviously biggest reason that we harm animals but watching this documentary made me realise that it was just so much about mentality as well, the fact that we deem certain animals as being so unworthy that it really doesn't matter what we do to them – fish and chicken and pigs and cows and lambs.

“I had a hamster at the time called Rupert and after I had watched the documentary I went and sat with Rupert and gave him some broccoli which he loved.

"And I just remember thinking about this tiny little animal who just loved to potter around and to do his own thing and who just had so much personality. And you realise you're talking about a sentient creature who experiences what is going on and then we think about all the violence that is happening to other animals.”

Veganism was the obvious next step: “The change was pretty simple for me, and I think you need to think of it as making things a lot easier in fact. It's all about simplifying things down. We're not reinventing the wheel. We're just adding some shiny new alloys and I think that's just part of the challenge.”

But if you come under fire for your veganism, then Ed has all the answers in his new book: “I have been advocating veganism for eight years and I've spoken to people of all walks of life and I think the problem that vegans have is that they just might not have the arguments that they need, the rebuttals. The idea behind the book is to give people the arguments that they need, to give them the responses that might be useful at a dinner table.”

In the book, Ed breaks down every argument used against veganism and provides readers with powerful facts and impressive rebuttals, with topics including the environment, ethics, health and nutrition, alongside advice on how to remain cool and calm even in the most heated debate.