Hakeem is co-founder and CEO of Veggie Victory, Nigeria’s first plant-based food tech company. Hakeem and his partner, Bola Adeyanju, founded Nigeria's first vegan restaurant, V Café, and now also run the VChunks meat alternative product company - designed to help veganise Nigerian cuisine. Hakeem is also country director for ProVeg Nigeria.

In Sentientist Conversations we talk about the two most important questions: “what’s real?” & “what matters?” Sentientism is "evidence, reason & compassion for all sentient beings." The audio is on our Podcast: https://apple.co/391khQO & https://open.spotify.com/show/3c9OG5M....

00:00 Clips!
00:36 Welcome
01:59 Hakeem's Intro
- Nigerian father, German mother, growing up in Germany, now in Nigeria
- 10 years of veganism and vegan entrepreneurship
- Establishing ProVeg Nigeria
03:45 What's Real?
- Not much supernatural thinking in small-town Germany "there were more cows than humans"
- Lutheran evangelical protestant society but "we went to church twice a year... it was not a very religious background"
- Nigeria: "A completely different ballgame... the spiritual, religious world plays a much bigger role in Africa... religion is everywhere here... and I like it... In Africa I started to pray... you don't have that sense of control."
- Christianity, Islam as well as natural / traditional religions from the pre-colonial era
08:33 What Matters?
- "Every day I see these two sides", Germany (enlightenment, studying philosophy) and Nigeria (travelling as a journalist in W.Africa: "a completely different way people see the world")
- Only recently exploring the Bible (via podcasts) "just to understand historically"
- Finding references to treatment of animals in the Old and New Testaments
- Nigeria: "Religion is much more taken... by the letter" vs. the German way "it's just a parable"
- "If you're coming from a western background you just shape your belief system" vs. "people are handing over authority to another level"
- "How do we actually convince people... whether I'm in Germany or Nigeria?"
- "I walk through the streets here... it's funny... even though everybody is black and in Germany everybody is white I see features... very similar behaviours"
- "I see really the universal parts... that's where things come together... trying to change the world and not just a few enlightened people"
13:16 Who Matters?
- Step-father in Germany was a farmer "neighbours got together and bought a pig... the butcher coming to the farm"
- Hearing stories about factory farming "they were using nicotine to disinfect the chickens... there's something wrong here"... overfishing... foot and mouth disease
- "Nobody in rural Germany was talking about #sentientism or #veganism "
- University in Hamburg "there was an alternative meal in the canteen"... a vegetarian partner aware of history of US colonialist animal agriculture
- Travelling to West Africa and eating #streetfood "when I'm on a #vegetarian diet I don't get sick!" vs. getting typhoid fever from a road-side meat barbecue
- "You start learning... what's the implications... I realised... this is good... let me become vegetarian"
- "It took me almost 20 years to realise that leaving out dairy is another huge step... the #dairy industry is completely insane... even worse!"
- Animal ethics mostly came in later
- Patterns of diet. Eating animal products every day is a recent invention "the first and the last generation that eats so much meat"
- "In Africa... if you talk to elderly people... in the villages... they don't each much meat"
- But with factory farming availability "suddenly you have chicken wings for lunch"
- "If we would come back to the old days... where meat was consumed on special occasions... that would be a big step forward"
- "I live in Africa now I have to be pragmatic... because I want to see results"
- An upcoming #GreenIslam summit thinking of declaring factory farming #haram "that is much more pragmatic than saying 'eating animals'"
- "Hopefully we'll get to 100% leaving animals out... but we need to get the big wins now... if we can stop factory farming that's a big step... then we get to the last 20%"
24:35 A Better Future?
- Consumption of animal products in Nigeria is ~10% of that in the west
- "The average African is eating 6kg of chicken in a year... the American is eating 120kg"
- "The consumption of animals is actually very low on the African continent... we are very plant-forward eating... we have to acknowledge that"
48:41 Follow Hakeem
-   / hakeemjimo  
- https://veggievictory.com/ ‪@VeggievVctoryNG‬
- https://proveg.com/ng/

& much more... (sentientism.info for full notes) #sentientism

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