Faith, Hope, Love.
G M Greene is a British graphic designer, digital creator and writer, currently based in rural central Portugal — where a ruined casa, a field of dreams, and a deep quiet have provided the perfect conditions for this book.
In the spring of 2024, I travelled to Taiwan for the first time. I had no particular expectation of what I would find there beyond the usual curiosities of a new place — the food, the landscape, the texture of daily life in a culture very different from my own. What I did not anticipate was finding something that would stay with me long after I returned home and would eventually become the seed of this book.
What I encountered in Taiwan was a culture in which the relationship between food, ethics, and the natural world had been worked out differently from anything I had experienced in the West. Vegetarian and vegan eating was not a countercultural position or a fringe commitment. It was ordinary — ubiquitous in restaurants, markets, and homes, woven into the fabric of daily life as naturally as any other practice. Buddhist temples served extraordinary plant-based meals not as an act of deprivation but as an expression of abundance. The love of nature was not an ideology people held; it was something they seemed to live in — a quality of attention to the world around them that I recognised as both ancient and urgently relevant to where we find ourselves now.
I am a vegan. I made that choice some years ago from a combination of ethical conviction, concern for the environment, and a growing awareness of what our food systems actually involve for the animals within them. But I had not, until Taiwan, seen what it looked like when that commitment was not a minority position but a cultural inheritance — when compassionate eating was simply the way things were done, grounded in a Buddhist ethic that had been refining its understanding of non-harm for more than two thousand years.
I came home with a question that became an urgency. Why does Western culture find this so difficult? We are not cruel people. We are not indifferent people. Survey after survey confirms that most people in the United Kingdom, in Europe, in North America, care genuinely about animal welfare, about the environment, about the kind of world we are leaving to the generations that follow us. And yet the gap between those stated values and the daily reality of how we eat remains enormous. Something is getting in the way — and it is not, I believe, a lack of information.
This book is my attempt to think clearly about what that something might be, and about what it would take to close the gap.
The Compassionate Table is not a book about perfection. It does not propose a programme of flawless ethical compliance, and it does not address itself to readers who have already arrived at some ideal destination. It addresses itself to people who are, like me, somewhere in the middle of a journey — who care about these questions, who find the gap between their values and their habits uncomfortable, and who are looking not for guilt but for a way forward.
I think of Taiwan often. I think of the temples, the food beautiful and nourishing that we ate, entirely free of harm. I think of what it felt like to eat without the background noise of unease that I had not, until that moment, fully recognised was there. That feeling — of alignment, of integrity, of the simple satisfaction of acting in accordance with what one actually believes — is what this book is ultimately about.
It is available to anyone. It does not require a trip to Taiwan.
It begins, as all things begin, with attention.
“The kitchen and the cushion are not separate places. Every meal is a practice, and every practice shapes the meal.”
Beyond this book, Gary runs several digital projects including AtoZ Guides — long-running Greece travel and lifestyle reference sites covering Greece with a Portugal Guide in writing — SurSearch, a Surname genealogy research platform, and AtoZ Voyager, a travel map app service platform currently in development. His home, Casa Grande renovation project is documented on Instagram and the web.
The Compassionate Table is his first book.