Gaz Oakley and the Appeal to Nature Fallacy

When it comes to people living ‘naturally’, why does it always seem to mean killing animals and not choosing to forgo heating, clean water and electricity?

So, Gaz Oakley has shared that he’s started eating animal products again. I wanted to post this Substack because I think Gaz has made some arguments which are important to address, especially as lots of people use nature as an excuse to hurt and kill animals.

I don’t have an assumption that Gaz will read this article, but if he does, I hope he maybe thinks differently about the way he has started approaching his new perspective on eating animal products. I know a lot of people are upset about Gaz going back to eating animal products, especially as his content has been helpful to a lot of people. I would love for Gaz to enjoy nature and his life while continuing to help people stop eating animal products.

This recent announcement started because of a podcast Gaz did where he said he was looking into eating wild animals that are often classified as invasive. To be fair, he did also say in the podcast that he still wouldn’t buy factory farmed animals or so-called ‘regeneratively’ farmed animal products, although his objection to non-factory farmed meat was because the animals are killed in the same slaughterhouses as factory farmed animals. This is a red flag, as it suggests he doesn’t see an issue with the farming itself and would eat these animals if they were slaughtered in smaller abattoirs. It also leaves the door open for animals raised in homestead environments.

This podcast caused a lot of pushback and Gaz followed up by posting a statement on his Instagram.

A portion of Gaz’s statement, which is available in full on his Instagram @gazoakley.

Gaz’s main arguments centre around living more harmoniously with nature and honouring natural cycles. In fact, except for his home, heating, clean water, toilet, kitchen, electricity, internet, phone, computer, editing software, camera, microphone, car, social media, books, etc., Gaz is committed to living just as humans did before the industrial revolution.

In all seriousness, when it comes to people living ‘naturally’, why does it always seem to mean killing animals and not choosing to forgo heating, clean water and electricity? Although, in the case of Gaz, it also means being against ‘synthetic supplements’, something which just doesn’t make sense.

Gaz references how the industrial revolution was bad as ‘we now act with impunity toward the cycles that made us human’. I’m not sure which cycles he’s referring to, but I would imagine he’s not referring to the natural cycle of higher infant mortality and shorter life expectancy. The modern day is far from perfect, but if given the choice between living before the industrial revolution or today, it’s not even close.

The reason I wanted to highlight these things first is because I do think it’s important to point out the inherent problem with appealing to nature and how many of the unnatural aspects of modern life are actually hugely beneficial to us.

That being said, it is more than reasonable to have criticisms of modern day industries, but that doesn’t mean that the time before industrialisation was great and people lived happy lives. It’s also not true that we stopped living by the laws of nature since industrialisation; after all, agriculture, which is not natural, is over 10,000 years old.

Nature is cruel and merciless. People romanticise living in accordance with the ‘natural cycles’ precisely because they don’t actually have to deal with the real consequences of what that would mean. If Gaz was to fall and break his leg, he might find that there are some limitations to homemade herbal remedies.

As part of his attempt to be more natural, Gaz has been growing a lot of the food that he eats. The problem is, he’s attached such significance to this that it represents some deep spiritual connection to nature. In his own words, ‘I also could not have had these thoughts when I wasn’t connected to the land like I am now.’

But why? Conversations about nature and animals are perfectly accessible and easy to have regardless of whether you live in London or rural Wales. This statement suggests to me that he believes he has a more complex understanding and deeper connection to nature than the people criticising him, who he probably disregards as being ‘city folk’.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that it’s bad for Gaz to grow plants for himself and I also don’t doubt that it requires time, patience and energy to do it at the level he is doing it. However, the reason this matters is because his desire for some deeper connection is also playing into his consumption of animal products, which he also now views as part of the natural cycles and quest for a deeper connection to nature.

In the podcast, Gaz spoke about rejecting the ‘label of veganism’, but calling veganism a label is making it about us. ‘Vegan’ is just a word that describes an ethical position against the exploitation of animals, in the same way that the phrase ‘anti-racist’ describes taking an ethical position against racism. Veganism is not a label for us, it’s an ethical position for the animals. So Gaz isn’t rejecting a label, he’s rejecting an ethical position which was never actually about him as a human.

I just wish Gaz wouldn’t throw the baby out with the bath water. This desire for some deep connection to nature doesn’t have to lead to killing animals, just in the same way that he can connect to nature and still use the heating in his home during winter. He can enjoy the positives of nature and also recognise that what is natural isn’t always the same as what is preferable. Fundamentally, he can still live in the countryside, grow his own plant food, and avoid polyester and synthetic leather alternatives. He can do all of these things and not kill fish… which brings me to the health claim.

In the podcast, Gaz doesn’t mention any problems with his health, but as soon as he started receiving pushback and criticism, all of a sudden he says he had an unspecified and vague health problem, which he implies got better when he started eating eggs and fish. It’s very convenient for him to say he had a health problem and then provide zero details about it. He also says he followed advice, but knowing his views on healthcare and medicine, this advice almost certainly didn’t come alongside a blood test or any actual evidence-based investigation into any health issues.

What adds to the insincerity of the claim is that he says he experienced health issues even though he was ‘supplementing appropriately’, but Gaz doesn’t believe in synthetic supplements, so what exactly does that mean? He’s trying to cover his back by saying he took supplements, but in the same statement he also talks about not wanting to take supplements because he thinks they’re bad.

Plus, the eggs he gets come from selectively bred animals who only produce the quantity of eggs they do because they’re not natural. In fact, they are a product of technology, science and the hijacking of natural cycles. The hens he gets eggs from are a product of humanity going against nature, the very thing that Gaz is against. Ironically, he is saying that something that goes against his worldview and philosophy is what made him better.

Continuing on this point, one thing that caught my eye in his statement was that Gaz mentioned using honey and beeswax medicinally; however, honey bees are one species out of 270 bee species in the UK and one out of tens of thousands globally. When honey bees are introduced they disrupt wild pollination by monopolising floral resources, meaning there’s not enough to go round for wild pollinators.

As experts at the Department of Zoology at Cambridge University put it:

‘The crisis in global pollinator decline has been associated with one species above all, the western honeybee. Honeybees are artificially-bred agricultural animals similar to livestock such as pigs and cows. But this livestock can roam beyond any enclosures to disrupt local ecosystems through competition and disease. Keeping honeybees is an extractive activity. It removes pollen and nectar from the environment, which are natural resources needed by many wild species of bees and other pollinators.’

Honey bees are massively disruptive to the natural environment and cycles. In fact, you could say that they are an invasive species. Plus, by taking their honey you are further disrupting the natural cycle, as the honey was made by the bees for themselves. The natural cycle doesn’t include humans at the end of it.

I always think you can tell a lot about a person’s approach to food systems by how myopically they view the subject. Gaz’s desire to only eat local food is a perfect example of this, as the local food argument is one of the most common misunderstandings about sustainable food. The bottom line is, what you eat matters more than if that food was local. The idea of eating local doesn’t even necessarily hold up when talking about the same food.

For example, research has shown that it is more sustainable for people living in Sweden to buy tomatoes grown in southern Europe than homegrown ones. The reason being that tomatoes are grown in greenhouses in Sweden, which means that ten times as much energy is used producing them there than it is importing them from southern Europe, where the climate is more suited to their growth. Lettuce consumption in the UK is a similar story, where importing lettuce from Spain can result in three to eight times fewer emissions than buying locally produced lettuce.

When we’re talking about the most sustainable and ethical food choices, it can’t just be boiled down to buying a house in the countryside and spending time growing your own plants so that you can be partially self-sufficient. It’s wonderful that some people can grow some of their own food, but there’s 70 million people in the UK and over 8 billion people globally. Thinking that local is always better is wrong, and advocating for that can lead to people actually making more harmful choices. This is especially relevant in the case of fish, which Gaz justifies eating by calling them ‘local’ fish, as if that makes killing them somehow magically ethical.

So, what exactly does Gaz think we should we be eating?

As well as fish and eggs, which come from hens that are being fed some form of feed, Gaz references eating invasive species. Interestingly, one animal that’s never mentioned in the invasive species conversation is cats, yet stray and feral cats can have a huge impact on wildlife, killing millions of birds, rodents and small animals every single year. Perhaps we should cull and eat cats too? In fact, two of the most sustainable meats you could eat would be homeless dogs and cats.

But what about deer, the animals most commonly thought of when it comes to culling wild animals? In the UK, if we killed every single deer, we would only have enough deer flesh to supply us with three days’ of our current meat consumption. So, even if we reduced our meat consumption by 99%, we would still have wiped out all the deer, invasive and non-invasive, within a year. In other words, it would be catastrophic if we ate wild animals.

One could argue that a person going from eating farmed animals to wild animals is making a ‘better’ choice, but that’s only because the farming of animals is so harmful and because the overwhelming majority of people wouldn’t have also swapped. However, it doesn’t make sense, even from the logic Gaz is using, for someone eating a plant-based diet to start eating deer, especially as 12% of UK consumers reportedly already eat venison and there are constant pushes to encourage meat eaters to eat more. Is Gaz’s position that all vegans should start eating deer, and if not, why is it something he should do?

That’s without even considering the ethics of killing wild animals, although, like I mentioned before, it would arguably make more ethical sense to eat feral and stray cats, if the justification for eating these animals is about their impact on wildlife.

This is what really frustrates me about these musings on being connected to nature and food, because what exactly is being advocated for? What is Gaz telling people they should eat? He’s a food influencer, so what message does he want his followers to take away from his content?

In Gaz’s statement, he says: ‘I am just a normal person, I was never meant to have a following, or an audience, it happened by accident.’ But it didn’t happen by accident, he set up his accounts and then posted to them to build up an audience. You can’t build an online presence, benefit from that presence and then claim that you have no responsibility.

This idea of responsibility is especially important as I would also imagine that many of his followers are not vegan but would have made his plant-based recipes. Is he going to advocate for them to now eat wild animals and tell them that eating tofu is bad and they should prioritise only local foods? Is he now going to start posting recipes using animal products and use animal products in his next book?

Clearly there are issues with forms of plant agriculture, but that doesn’t mean that plant-based diets are no longer the right choice. It is also absolutely true that the way we grow plants can be improved and I think every vegan would like to see those improvements too. However, when Gaz’s arguments centre around local food, avoiding synthetic supplements and wanting to exist within nature’s natural cycles, it becomes pretty clear that his current worldview is being driven more by whimsy than by any actual connection to the realities of food systems and how to feed populations of people.

I truly hope that Gaz has a happy life with his family and that he finds it rewarding and fulfilling growing vegetables and other plants while living in the countryside. I hope he feels connected to his loved ones and enjoys being in nature. All of those things are lovely, but it is possible to do those things and still not fall for the appeal to nature fallacy. You can have one foot in nature and one foot in the reality of the modern world, and importantly, you can live connected to nature and also leave animals alone.