I went vegan nearly three dozen years ago. Things have changed a lot in the intervening time, as might be expected, and the popularity of plant-based diets has grown considerably. Another trend which seems to be almost a universal law of human behaviour, or perhaps society, is that as movements become more popular they also tend to get watered-down and corrupted. Maybe it’s a form of entropy. It should probably also be borne in mind that as individual organisms, we also age, and there’s a tendency for us to think things were better in the old days, when we were younger, and since then it’s all gone wrong. I wouldn’t say this was entirely true. For instance, racism is less socially acceptable, people recognise sexual harassment as a bad thing, the police get involved in domestic violence cases and homosexuality is almost generally accepted nowadays. In that particular area, which might be described as identity politics, things are usually better.
Conceptually speaking, veganism is kind of on the edge of identity politics for a couple of reasons. One is that veganism can be legally seen as a protected characteristic, in that people are not supposed to be marginalised because of their veganism, although it isn’t quite the same as an immutable property such as disability or sexual orientation. It’s closer to political affiliation or religion. Another is that veganism is an attempt to support a group, actually the largest of all by far and not in any way a minority, which doesn’t have its own voice. People just do speak on behalf of other species because it’s impossible for most of them to speak for themselves. Unlike anti-racism and feminism, veganism could be said (although it isn’t entirely true) to consist entirely of allies, and as such it’s probably worth considering what people in the other movements regard as being a good ally.
The way veganism is constructed nowadays is influenced by commodification, recuperation and capitalism more generally, and we should therefore be wary of this. There’s a strong tendency to think of veganism as simply plant-based, and this can have undesirable consequences in, for example, the production of plant-based meat substitutes which are extensively tested on non-human animals during their development, and it can turn veganism into slacktivism, because you can end up feeling that all it takes to be vegan is to change your diet, use different cosmetics and toiletries and so forth, without, for example, thinking of the perhaps very distant and unsustainably grown sources of your food or other ingredients. Another consequence of this restriction on veganism’s scope is that it can lead us to ignore the treatment of the animal most of us have the most to do with socially – human beings. There is a sense in which nothing developed or produced under capitalism is vegan because it involves capitalist exploitation, and therefore exploitation of the animal known as Homo sapiens. To be fair, I can remember so-called “vegan” groups in the 1980s CE celebrating a coach crash because it meant the death of carnists. This is not veganism, although it is consequentialist because the idea is that the meat eaters dying would result in the deaths of fewer cows, chicken, sheep, pigs and others, something which could equally be achieved by persuading the same number of people do go vegan as crash victims. Hence it doesn’t even work from a consequentialist angle. This, then, is not veganism.
It’s true that mass media tends to present veganism as primarily White, and many people’s images of a vegan will be of a White person. In fact, Afro-Americans are twice as likely to be vegan as White people in the US and RastafarIan diets tend towards veganism. It also makes sense physiologically for most of the world’s human population not to eat dairy as adults due to the fact that White people are unusual in being able to digest dairy as adults, but this has no influence on carnism.
Some manifestations of so-called “veganism” have also been overtly racist. Two White people in Los Angeles started a blog originally called ‘Thug Kitchen’ in the ‘noughties which appropriated Afrikan-American Vernacular English, and there’s also the question of the word “thug”, which apparently has a controversial history due to having become associated with Black people. I can’t tell if this is a primarily American usage or not, but I would expect it to filter over if not. My understanding of the word “thug” is that it was originally an Indian word for a member of a gang of assassins who used to garrotte their victims, then became associated with people, regardless of ethnicity, in organised crime who commit acts of violence to the end of promoting and maintaining the reputation of the organisation or to extort money from victims. This meaning seems either to have changed or to have been different in American culture. It took several years for it to become clear to the general public that the people responsible for the site, and also apparently a book, were White people in California, after which they were accused of “digital blackface”. I would, however, say that all of this went on without me every becoming aware of it, and this makes me wonder if it’s symptomatic of commodification of a relatively ineffective and diluted version of “veganism” which is based on people hopping onto a trend, which perhaps also explains the use of something else which might be perceived as “cool” without thinking much about either.
PETA are, unsurprisingly, another offender, appropriating the notion of slavery without having any recent heritage of that form of oppression. In an ad said to have been banned by the NFL but which was supposèdly intended for the Superbowl, various animals were shown taking the knee in an attempt to draw comparisons between speciesism and racism. Although I don’t understand why this would be considered offensive, people took issue with the idea that Black people were being compared to members of other species. Now as I said, there’s a sense in which the vegan movement consists entirely of allies, so there’s a problem with understanding the nature of that comparison. Species are equal, but there is a history of denigrating humans in general and ethnic minorities in particular with non-human animals whose connotation is extremely negative, and this is a typically hamfisted and crass attempt by PETA to make a point regarding animal liberation which is not informed by this perception, or at least comes across in this way. Alternatively, maybe PETA’s strategy is to generate publicity in a Benneton kind of way by getting people to talk about their ads without regard to how it reflects on them, and more importantly on the animal liberation movement. However, I hope we can agree that PETA is not a good ally in the animal liberation movement due to other activities, which I won’t go into here.
Then there’s the question of the likes of quinoa, chia seeds and avocados. I first heard of chia seeds about seven or eight years ago and they have never been part of my diet. I’m not aware of ever having eaten them, although I may have inadvertantly done so chez someone or in a restaurant or café. The lauding of particular plant species in this way as superfoods reminds me strongly of the distortion of value in herbal medicine where more “exotic” remedies are perceived as more effective than local or indigenous species, which like so many other things is created by the alienation of use and exchange values in capitalism. It’s extremely harmful to any community which is not rich and relies on one or more of these species as a staple, because it can inflate the price out of their financial reach.
Chia seeds are from two species of Salvia, the genus containing sage and also the psychotropic Salvia divinorum. The Lamiaceæ (grrr, Labiatæ!), their family, probably contains the majority of culinary herbs such as mint and rosemary, and it’s unusual for a species in that taxon to be used for its seeds. I would imagine therefore that the process of harvesting chia seeds is quite labour-intensive compared to cereal harvesting, for example. They’re native to Central America and southern Mexico. The concern with cultivation of plant foods novel to the market in the developed world is that they may be grown unsustainably and raise the price of the food for the people who traditionally eat them. There’s also a kind of sense of exoticism about them which is fickle and rather like cultural appropriation, or may actually be cultural appropriation.
Quinoa I did used to eat. This is in the Amaranthaceæ, along, unsurprisingly, with amaranth itself. Unsurprisingly, its price has been forced up in Bolivia as a result of its popularity in the developed world, and is now less affordable to the poorer people of that country. In Perú the price is now higher than chicken, meaning of course that it has probably increased meat consumption in that country. But in both these cases, there is an issue of it bringing money into the countries in question as well, although economic diversification is also important because the problem with trends is that they can change rapidly. However, looking into this in more detail, quinoa is not a staple in the Andes, so it isn’t necessarily as big a problem as has been thought in the past.
I could continue to list questionable plant foods, but I’ll mention just two more. One is the avocado. These are, incidentally, remarkable in having been preserved by early agriculture and used to rely on giant ground sloths for their distribution, so they’d probably be extinct were it not for us. The same price increase as seen with the other species has affected avocados for the same reason, but in their case drug cartels are also involved, meaning that there’s a fair bit of violence in their production, although perhaps similar violence occurs with the cultivation of the other two plants. They apparently are a staple.
The final, notorious, species is unsurprisingly soya. My own consumption of soya is not negligible because I eat tofu although I don’t drink soya milk. There is what I regard as an unsupported rumour that the phytoestrogens in soya reduce male fertility which I can’t accept as true because of its long history of traditional consumption in East Asia. Another issue with soya is that it is largely fed to farm animals, which offsets its environmental impact considerably because it means that carnists will sometimes be contributing to any problems more than vegans who eat a lot of soya are. However, it has a significant rôle in the deforestation of South America although there has been a soya moratorium in Brazil which banned export of soya grown on newly deforested land, which, again however, may simply have meant that cows are now grazing on newly deforested land instead while the soya is grown on the older land, and Bolsonaro will presumably have done a lot of damage in that area. This may sound vague and dismissive, but here’s my point: if you eat distantly-grown food, it introduces ethical complications which you may not have the energy or access to accurate information about.
You might also object that this is not to do with racism, but when you consider that most of the countries involved are subject to colonialism, there is a historical legacy of racism here, although since the European countries took many of their resources it could also be argued that this is partly returning the money to the people affected, assuming some kind of economic equity between ethnicities now exists there.
The trouble is, of course, that to me and many other people this is not “veganism as we know it”, but some kind of trendy convenience thing which may be about image. It feels like some other lifestyle which has been taken away from what I know as veganism, and is in fact very similar to the commercialisation of what’s been labelled as Yoga. That doesn’t seem at all similar to what I think of as Yoga either, and there are racist tendencies in how Yoga is presented commercially in the West too.
As I mentioned above, Afrikan-Americans are more likely to be vegan than White Americans. I think it’s twice as likely. They’re also a lot more likely that White Americans to have reduced their meat consumption recently. Plant-based diets reduce the incidence of chronic conditions that disproportionately affect Black Americans such as hypertension, obesity, type II diabetes, heart disease and certain forms of cancer. However, they may not call themselves vegan, and I’m wondering if this is because the label is often associated with a White face. It is true that they may not be motivated by animal liberation, but there are many Whites with plant-based diets who do call themselves vegan when this is not what that is. On the other hand, they’re also more likely to live in food deserts. Since I lived for most of my life in a city with a particularly good open-air market, I don’t have experience of food deserts and am not commenting from an informed position, but I’m also in the process of writing a book entitled ‘Corner Shop Herbalism’, which is about using easily available and identifiable plants from, for example, corner shops, to improve and maintain well-being, and it would be interesting to know how applicable this is to the food desert problem. But food deserts are a much bigger problem for non-Whites. In the US, White majority neighbourhoods have four times as many grocery shops, and they also stock a wider variety of food. In order to make it easier for ethnic minorities to pursue veganism, this problem must be solved.
There is a claim that the word “speciesism” appropriates the term “racism” in a similar way to phrases like “the rape of the wild” do for rape. I find it difficult to accept this idea because of words like “sexism” and “ableism”. It doesn’t seem to me that the word “racism” stands out as something which can be owned as a reference to marginalised ethnicities. If a newly-recognised form of prejudice came to the fore, it would seem to make sense to add the suffix “-ism” to the end, and this also feels Quixotic in the wider context of how language change works. So, maybe I am speaking from a position of privilege, but it seems to me that not using the word “speciesism” fails to name the prejudice which dwarfs all others in our societies in its seriousness.
There is another, similar linguistic phenomenon I’ve already alluded to. Humans are of course hominids. Consequently, there is a sense in which we are apes. Cladistically we’re also monkeys, more specifically terrestrial Old World monkeys. However, the words “ape” and “monkey” have been used as racist epithets, and are therefore likely to trigger some Black people. It’s also important to erode the false distinction between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom, and this particular distinction is particularly instrumental in maintaining this false superiority. However, long before I went vegan, I used to consider great apes as human rather than the other way round, and this may go some way towards remedying that problem. However, we are then left with the problem of how to refer to our own species, and we do need to do this in the same way as we need to use the term “whiteness”. But there is a possible solution to this along the following lines. There is a plant popularly known as “Mother-In-Law’s Tongue”, which I always call Sanseviera because the Latin name comes across as more neutral. The same could be done with hominids and simians.
Another aspect of carnism in ex-patriate Afrikan communities and their descendants is that they may use meat of particular kinds and prepared in particular ways as part of their cultural identities. If a plant-based diet is perceived as substantially White, adopting it could feel like giving up part of that identity. Consequently, it’s important that we do what we can to ensure that such diets are not perceived as White. And in fact they really aren’t, for the reason stated above and also because of I-Tal, although not every Black person would want to identify with RastafarIanism. Interpretations of I-Tal diet vary. It isn’t compulsory in all mansions and it often includes fish, but the tendency is towards veganism and many people do interpret it as veganism. However, it doesn’t seem to be mentioned much in vegan circles for some reason.
There are also some areas I simply don’t know how to address, and these primarily involve indigenous people. It’s for this reason that I have in the past said that if veganism is racist, so be it. The issue is that there are some groups of hunter-gatherers whose lives intrinsically involve the killing, eating and other use of animals. It is often true that the people involved treat these animals with reverence, that they are not farmed but live in the wild for all their lives, and that their bodies are used efficiently once they’ve been killed, and also that if the communities concerned didn’t do this it would completely alter their lifestyles beyond recognition. It’s also known that these kinds of disturbances in the lives of indigenous peoples lead to major social and mental health problems including an epidemic in decisions to end their own lives. To be honest, I don’t know what to do about this. I am aware, though, that applying veganism to my own life benefits others and the biosphere, and the same applies to the lives of most or all people living in industrial societies.
To conclude, the takeaway from this is that the kind of “veganism” criticised as racist is actually heavily commodified and recuperated by capitalism. It focusses very much on the plant-based issue rather than the fact that veganism entails compassion for all and is therefore necessarily anti-racist. That is, if your version of “veganism” is racist, it isn’t pure veganism, although environmental, structural and institutional aspects of racism mean that real veganism is therefore very difficult. At the same time, even focussing entirely on other species, an attempt to look at veganism in an anti-racist way also reveals how there is not only structural racism but also structural speciesism, a word I make no apologies for using, for instance in the form of food deserts and the lie, yes, the LIE, that plant-based diets are expensive compared to carnist ones.
A Box Of Chocolates 