Vegan stranded on a desert island

There are many things that can happen unexpectedly in our daily lives – lottery win, car crash, puncture, TV going wrong – but we vegans have an extra peril to face every day – we might end up alone on a desert island!

To be fair, sending vegans to desert islands isn’t merely a social media phenomenon; people in pubs, work mates and even family members all suddenly become curious about our survival options should we be stranded on one of the few uninhabited desert islands left in the world. Not only that, but there will be no phone signal, no 3 or 4G and no radar tracking the area in which we vanished.

I really was totally unaware of how dangerous being a vegan could be when I ditched the dairy. If you’re not vegan, never get on a plane or boat with us, it will sink or crash and everybody else will die leaving the sole vegan stranded in the middle of nowhere. It happens all the time.

But a vegan can’t be stranded on just any remote, unpopulated desert island, oh no! In order to be a vegan stranding-friendly desert island, it can have no edible plants or vegetables and be populated only by animals – edible animals of course, or the scenario won’t work.

You see, if there is the option of eating vegetation, then we can’t be forced to hunt animals in order to survive on said desert island. The fact that there needs to be some kind of food chain in place so that carnivores survive goes out of the boat window when it comes to random vegan strandings. You see, carnivores have to prey on animals that are, in general herbivores and herbivores need vegetation to survive, so the whole desert island eco system needs to be totally messed up in order to accommodate vegan strandings.

There will be fresh water on the island of course – the carnivorous beasts need it to survive too, and there will be trees – there has to be something with which to make fire, so said carnivores’ flesh is edible. However, this trees cannot be the type of trees that produce fruit, oh no, or else stranded vegan will become fruitarian and mess up the whole hypothetical stranding horror.

Another issue for the stranded vegan is that, generally humans don’t eat carnivores. Why this is so is down to speculation really – the smell, evolution meaning we haven’t developed a taste for them and that they are harder to catch. Also, said carnivores are often dangerous, so our poor stranded vegan would probably die while trying to break his or her moral code. Don’t forget, most people are stranded without a gun (especially if they’re vegan), so they will probably be hunting with a home-made bow and arrow.

I used to make bows and arrows as a kid, and I wasn’t very good at hitting my brother with them, so I’m sure I’d be useless when it came down to trying to kill a mountain lion.

But, fish are carnivores. So it seems, the desolated desert island would have to be surrounded by an abundance of sea life – no edible seaweed though – to give our hapless, soon to be lapsed vegan any chance of survival. Of course there will be a tree (without edible fruit) to provide the necessary weapon for catching the poor fish which will provide 100 per cent of your balanced diet.

The message to all vegans is, unless you want to become a seal, avoid getting stranded on desert islands at all costs. When going to work, to the pub, to a vegan fair, or down the shops, take a route that avoids any desert islands on which you can become accidentally stranded.