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Title: Veganism: Why Not Author: Peter Gelderloos Date: 2011 Language: en Topics: veganism, religion, food
Proponents of an ideology typically fail to distinguish between those
who have not yet encountered the new ideas they offer, and those who
have absorbed these ideas and moved on. The very point of an ideology is
that you’re not meant to move on from it; however every ideology, at the
very best, has only been a resting point in an onward theoretical
journey.
Anarchism, I would argue (perhaps simply because I don’t wish to move on
from it), is more a body of thought, a legacy and tradition of revolt
aiming towards total freedom from all coercive authority. Its various
ideologies—syndicalism, primitivism—have constituted resting points,
while a few guiding principles have remained permanent, but by no means
ahistorical.
It would be a mistake to critique veganism as an ideology, or as a body
of thought and tradition of practice, because there do not even exist
any vague guiding principles that all or nearly all vegans share. A
great many vegans do not believe it is absolutely wrong to kill other
animals for food, and an increasing number do not believe in animal
liberation in any radical sense of the term.
Veganism can only be fairly critiqued as an intersectionality, a minimal
practice of abstinence that for a variety of reasons very different
people choose to identify as an important common ground. For many, the
motive is social, to signal belonging to a group or completion of a
trend, justified on the grounds of health or ethics. For others, the
motive is revolutionary, to develop that minimal practice of abstinence
into a maximal practice that might seek, among other things, animal
rights, animal liberation, or the abolition of all domination and
exploitation.
As such, this critique of veganism is not at all directed against
particular diets or lifestyles that could be described as vegan. It is
rather directed at the very intersectionality that people choose to
identify as an important common ground—based on the argument that there
actually is no common ground there—and at the motives and beliefs behind
that identification.
The rate at which veganism is being promoted by hipsters, NGOs,
and—increasingly—businesses, leaves no room for doubt that capitalism,
the perennial opponent of animal liberation, to say the least, has
become the new best friend of veganism. Of course, capitalism also
buddied up with the feminist movement, and only the stupidest anarchists
took that as a reason not to fight patriarchy. However, the fight
against patriarchy and the feminist movement are not necessarily the
same thing; there have also been intelligent critiques of particular
feminist movements as the best form of struggle against patriarchy,
which, regardless of their validity, have made for healthy debate.
Likewise, fighting the exploitation of animals and veganism are not the
same thing, and the question of whether the latter is useful for the
former is also necessary to debate.
It is vital to note that green capitalism is becoming the predominant
strategy to allow Capital to survive what may be the biggest crisis it
has ever created. Veganism plays a demonstrable role in greening
capitalism. Every vegan who has ever spouted a statistic about the
amount of water used to produce a pound of beef or the amount of methane
emitted by the world’s sheep is actively supporting capitalism by
participating in a great smoke screen which hides the true nature of how
the present economic system actually functions. All talk of efficiency
is coming out of the mouth of Capital itself. Historically, capitalism
has needed an ever growing population, although in the future it may
find a way out of this obligation. But for the meantime, capitalists
must find a way to feed a larger population on less, and in the wealthy
metropolis, veganism provides the perfect solution.
As stated in the introduction, veganism in its totality is not an
ideology or a tradition of struggle; it only exists as these things for
a minority of those who identify as vegans. In its totality, veganism is
only the identity of those who choose it. Because veganism exists as a
chosen common ground between those who struggle for animal liberation
and those who are actively working to save capitalism, not to mention to
vacate any struggle they come in contact with of its radical content, it
could only be justified if it inarguably were the only way to coherently
live and fight for anarchist ideals. This, I will argue presently, is
not the case. (One could also counterargue that veganism is potentially
useful as a common ground if it serves subversively as a sort of gateway
drug into more radical politics. Given the self-evident facts that more
people are turned away by veganism than attracted to it, and that those
who are attracted to it tend to be wealthier and hipper, veganism makes
for a simultaneously uninviting and anemic gatekeeper.)
Animal rights is a common objective for those vegans whose motivations
are ethical, and not only based in health or fashion. I don’t know why
these people hate other animals so much that they would wish rights on
them, but I imagine their malice stems from an ignorance of the meaning
of rights, of the policing of living relations in a legal framework, of
the democratic project. Because a propensity towards democracy is one of
the most common strategic and theoretical faults among anarchists at
this time, one must again skeptically question the selection of this
common ground that breeds so many vices. Because the animal rights
agenda is so naĂŻve and reformist, I will subseqently focus on the
framework of animal liberation, in an attempt to avoid creating an
easy-to-demolish strawman.
One of multiple ethical justifications for veganism argues that a vegan
lifestyle is the only coherent realization of the moral truth that it is
wrong to kill other animals. If the moral prohibition against killing is
not coming directly from pacifism or Christianity, it can only base
itself on an analogy with the fundamental anarchist prohibition against
domination: killing is a form of domination, and thus it is contrary to
anarchism, except possibly in cases of self-defense. The analogy is a
flagrantly false one. Though Authority has long flaunted its legitimate
ability to kill, annihilation of its subjects has always been a last
resort, and this last resort is always taken in order to educate the
living. Domination is only successful when the subject is kept alive so
its activity can be disciplined and exploited: there’s got to be
something to dominate.
There’s nothing un-anarchist about killing a king, because kings are not
a type of people whom anarchists wish to dominate at the end of the day.
Rather, kings and other authorities constitute a political project of
domination, and killing them is a rejection of their project, a
demonstration that their control is imperfect, and an invitation to more
acts of rebellion and disorder that will end, if successful, not with
more subjects, but with no subjects, and therefore no domination.
Killing need not be an act of negation, either. It can also be the
foundation of a relationship. The lion is not the king of the jungle
(nor is it even a typical member of a jungle ecosystem, to get
pedantic). The predator does not dominate the prey, nor does it negate
them. It enters into a relationship with them, and this relationship is
mutual—or in other words, of a sort that anarchists should find
interesting and potentially inspiring. Many animal liberationists have
human exceptionalism so ingrained, they actually reproduce the -ism they
are combating, (this at least they would have in common with other
identity politicians). If human morality must stand above natural
relations such as the one between predator and prey, then it is
hypocrisy to talk of speciesism; we could only talk of salvation. And if
we then shift the terrain of the argument to point out that the natural
relation of predator and prey is absent in industrial food production,
we would be dishonest to not also admit that we have no coherent moral
qualm against killing for food, merely a contextual rejection of killing
as an industry. But this would make us luddites at heart, not vegans.
Speaking from the gut for a moment, I find the moral against killing to
be utterly repulsive. I think it’s a disgusting disconnection from the
natural world and our animal selves. Killing can be a beautiful thing.
It can also be a tool in the service of domination. It is not simply and
inherently one or the other.
A prohibition against killing seems to be just the idea of rights in
disguise. The right to life is meaningless without a political authority
to enforce it and to engage in the project of engineering the very
meaning of life. A right to life could also be safeguarded by a shared
community ethos, but such a community determination would be powerless
against the realities of nature (unlike the State, which has the
capacity to reengineer nature). And nature knows no rights; once it
gives us life, it only guarantees us the certainty of death. The Western
tragic ideal, which is inextricable from the capitalist war against
nature, presents death as a bad thing, and apparently so do some vegans,
but to the rest of us, this only appears as philosophical immaturity.
One could, in counterargument, make a distinction between death by
natural causes and death by killing, but this only increases a
separation between humans and other animal species. If human ethics and
the behavior of other animals exist in completely separate spheres, then
it becomes impossible to talk about animal liberation without
“liberation” taking on an entirely Christian or colonial meaning (such
as the “liberation of Iraq”). If a human killing for food is not
natural, then we have nothing in common with other animals, in which
case the only honest vegan discourse would be one of “charity towards
defenseless animals.” Of course, “natural” is a sophistic and often
manipulated category anyways, but let’s remember that this line of
argument begins with a vegan attempt to separate “natural” and
“cultural” forms of eating.
Having thus alienated us from nature, a vegan could make the irrefutable
argument that we have the choice whether or not to kill other animals
for food, but this reasoning is circular, resting again on the
assumption that killing other animals is wrong and should be avoided if
possible. (They may tack on a multicultural, demeaning, and victimistic
exception for hunter-gatherers, poor people with limited food access,
and others who “don’t have a choice”). It would be more logically
coherent to argue, also irrefutably, that eating anything is a choice,
and given human involvement in so many world problems, we should stop
eating altogether.
Which brings up the question of eating plants. It’s unfortunate that so
many facetious jackasses, when they first hear about this weird thing
called vegetarianism, think they’re being so clever when they ask why
it’s okay to eat plants if it’s not okay to eat animals, because there
is actually an important point to be made here.
The consensus view on why it’s okay to eat plants and not animals is
because plants do not have central nervous systems (although neither do
several members of the animal kingdom) and therefore can feel no pain.
There are a number of things wrong with this argument. First of all, it
is not falsifiable and not empirical (in the best possible sense of this
term) to assert that plants do not feel. A great many cultures that have
an infinitely better track record—than the consumer culture that birthed
veganism—in living as a respectful part of their ecosystem and not
exploiting animals insist that all living things have personhood. And
within the skeptical and mechanistic confines of Western science, there
are also a number of indications, on the level of organic electrical
activity for example, that plants interact with their environment in a
way that could encompass feeling. They inarguably display rejection or
attraction to different stimuli, depending on the consequence of those
stimuli for their wellbeing.
On the other hand, if a complex central nervous system is the sole
basis, in human beings, for the capacity to feel pain, there are a great
many animals with such simple nervous systems that it would be hard to
believe they could feel anything more than attraction or repulsion to
different stimuli. Exactly why a living being should be valued based on
what comes down to its supposed similarity to human beings is something
that vegans should have to explain.
If it is domination to kill, why do we respect animals and not plants?
If it is wrong to cause pain, why do we give animals the benefit of the
doubt, and give other living things the short shrift when in neither
case is it certain if or what they feel? Is our only criterion their
similarity to us? Could the advanced ethical arguments of veganism be
little more complex than those PETA posters that always champion cute
puppies, and never crabs or cockroaches?
In any case, the downward extension of the right not to feel pain to
those creatures most similar to ourselves (but only similar to us in a
mechanical understanding of ourselves) closely mirrors the extension of
democratic rights from an elite to the majority of humankind. This
extension was not a gradual sequence of delayed charity but a violent
process that incorporated the new citizens into the rationalistic
Cartesian conception of man; rights were a trojan horse for a more
detailed domination. Vegan morality, in other words, constitutes another
alienation from nature; to prevent killing or the infliction of pain,
human society would have to remove all remnants of ecosystem relations
from our food production, producing human and natural spheres that
ideally do not touch at all.
This alienation is most obvious in the bizarre aversion to pain
expressed by some ethical vegans. Rather than constructing a sensible
ethical framework, in which it is simply wrong to lock up another living
thing or to enforce coercive non-reciprocal relationships with other
living things, the veganism which is based on a prohibition of killing
permits the contradiction of killing plants by elaborating an immorality
of the causing of pain. (As a side note regarding non-reciprocal
relationships, it is important to recognize the centrality of coercion
in order to distinguish between non-reciprocal Authority and
non-reciprocal parasites, the latter inhabiting an important ecosystemic
niche).
I find it hard to understand someone who does not comprehend that pain
is natural, necessary, and good. When we inflict pain on others, our
faculties of sympathy provoke a conflict within us, and such conflict is
also good, because it makes us think and question what we’re doing,
whether it’s necessary, and whether there’s also an element of the
beautiful in it. Evolving to eat animals and also to feel sympathy, our
biology saddles us with a choice. Either we form an intimate
relationship with that which we eat, understand it as a privilege to
accompany the other creature in its last moments, and look forward to
the day when we will also be killed and eaten; or we avoid this
difficult process by forming an ideology so we know that what we are
doing, a priori, is right, and therefore not a cause for conflict,
sympathy, or doubt. The depersonalization and degradation of animals
that accompanies ideas of human supremacy is one such ideology that
accomplishes an end run around emotional conflict. Veganism, which
extends human supremacy downwards to include the whole of the animal
kingdom and depersonalizes the rest of the natural world, is another.
With both the loud, proud meat-eaters and the vegans, the effect is the
same: to not have to feel sympathy or respect for the living beings
which you must kill in order to survive.
A great many vegans do not believe that it is fundamentally wrong to
kill for food, but they understand the shamefulness of locking living
beings up in cages, and therefore of the meat industry. As long as the
meat industry exists, they want no part of it. Maybe they see their
veganism as a boycott of the industry, which, along with other tactics,
will bring it down, or maybe it is simply a coherent emotional response.
More likely to approve of freganism, this type of vegan will say that
they might eat meat if they lived in a healthy, ecologically sustainable
society, but within industrial society they consider it impermissible.
It is important to distinguish between these two types of radical
vegans—those who think it is absolutely wrong to eat meat and those who
think it is situationally wrong, leaving aside for now non-evangelical
vegans who see veganism as a choice befitting their particular
struggle—because the moral vegans will often respond to criticisms of
vegan ethics with arguments based on the tenets of situational vegans,
confusing the distinction between the specific context they use
rhetorically, and the absolute ethics they use it to defend. For
example, a typical response to the first version of this article
deliberately conflated the two arguments, dodging the ethical criticism
of veganism by falsely painting it as an ethical apology for the factory
system of food production. As can clearly be seen in the preceding
section, the ethical criticism is based in the possibility of a healthy,
ecological, non-industrial relationship with our food. In this section,
the struggle against industrial food production is taken as a given, and
the only criticism made against veganism in this respect regards its
efficacy in challening and undermining this industry.
While they can be counted on to be less manipulative than moral vegans,
practical vegans generally obscure the true functioning of capitalism
and thus hinder the struggle against animal exploitation and ecocide,
two phenomena which cannot be viewed entirely separately, even though
animal rights, and certain versions of animal liberation, highlight the
former at the expense of the latter.
Although it seeks to be strategic in nature, practical veganism creates
a false understanding of capitalism and a false sense of moral purity or
superiority, both of which are fatal to the struggle against domination.
In the first place, true veganism is impossible for anyone who lives
within capitalist society. Most fruits and vegetables are pollenated
with bees or wasps, many of which are commercially farmed. A substantial
proportion of fields are fertilized with manure or slurry from
industrial meat farms. The commercial alternative to this, generally, is
chemical fertilizer, which constitutes mining and the destruction of the
oceans: is veganism in this case any kind of step forward? (Or, to use
another example, when a friend asked me to hand her her jacket, which,
she self-righteously pointed out, was not made from animal skin, her
sense of superiority was quickly deflated when I said, “Here’s your
jacket made from petroleum products.”)
It goes further than this. Imagine a vegan vertical monopoly that
produces food, from start to finish, without bees, without manure, and
hell, let’s pretend they even use organic fertilizers and pesticides,
and don’t use giant tractors that crush moles, insects, and other animal
life. Only rich people would be able to afford this food, but regardless
of the final price, all profit made from the buying and selling of this
food represents a return on investment, a cash flow that a diverse web
of banks, insurance companies, and investors turn right around and put
into other industries—the weapons industry, clothing manufacture,
vivisection, adventure tourism, prosthetic devices, turkey factories,
cobalt mining, student loans, it doesn’t matter.
Let’s put this more concretely. Every single vegan restaurant in the
world, as long as they meet the minimum definition of a restaurant
(selling food) supports the meat industry, because in industrial
civilization, there is no meat industry and vegetable industry, there is
only Capital, expanding at the expense of everything else.
The vegan argument against stealing meat is indicative: if you steal
meat, the supermarket may lose money, but they will order more meat
product to replace their stock, so more meat will be consumed. However,
it is the profit made by the supermarket that is reinvested primarliy in
food distribution of all kinds, and secondarily in all other industries
imaginable. What’s good for veganism, in this case—buying vegetables and
not stealing meat—is good for capitalism, bad for the planet, bad for
animals. Ethical consumption of any kind is a mirage. All consumption
fuels Capital and hurts the planet. Stealing meat is better for animals
than buying vegetables from a supermarket, but both stealing and buying
are a dead end as long as we don’t dismantle the industrial civilization
that is destroying the Earth and exploiting or liquidating all its
inhabitants.
Not only is there no modern example of an effective boycott against an
entire product category as opposed to a single brand, the very idea of
better consumer choices represents how environmental movements of
various stripes have aided capitalism.
When the reformist environmentalists of the ’80s promoted responsible
consumerism (e.g. 101 Things You Can Do to Save the Planet), they played
their part in increasing domestic electricity efficiency in the US. This
increase in efficiency enabled a decrease in prices, which allowed an
increase in total electricity consumption, and all the accompanying
consequences for the environment. Within a market economy, a decrease in
meat consumption could lead to a decrease in meat prices, which would
lead to a net increase in meat consumption as those segments of the
population not yet won over by veganism take advantage of the drop in
prices.
Some mythical vegan movement that became large enough to cause a
collapse in the meat industry through boycotts and accompanying sabotage
would find itself in a dead end, having promoted a change in capitalism
that would allow greater efficiency in world food production, a higher
world population, and the destruction of ecosystems on a greater scale.
The alienation from nature would reach its logical conclusion: most
animals would be freed from their cages, but they’d be fucked all the
same.
Not only does veganism encourage an ignorance of market mechanisms, it
also conflates consumption with agency and thus promotes a fundamental
democratic myth. People are held responsible for what they buy and
consume, and therefore the consumer arena is portrayed as one of free
choice, rather than a violently imposed role. All the violence and
domination of the capitalist system is ingrained in the role of the
consumer, in every corner of a society based on the production, buying
and selling of commodities. Except for the most skilled of evaders, and
the inhabitants of a few remote jungle and mountain regions (all of whom
base their antiauthoritarian subsistence strategies in part on hunting),
it is impossible to opt out of capitalism. A vegan lifestyle in no way
damages capitalism, ends ecocide or animal exploitation, or severs one’s
material connections to even just the animal industry, given the
interlaced nature of industiral society. Assuming that veganism has
anything to do with animal liberation would be like calling an anarchist
a hypocrite for having a job, driving on state highways, going to a
hospital, or occasionally opting to follow the law. The exploitation of
animals and the destruction of the environment are hardwired into the
present system. What matters is that we fight this system. What we eat
and what we buy or don’t buy in the meantime are choices whose only
ramifications are personal.
The nature of industrial society is completely missed when we see agency
in consumer choices. As long as we take care of ourselves and our
comrades, how we survive the blackmails of capitalism is unimportant.
The only thing that matters are our attacks against the existing system.
Political veganism is an exercise in irrelevance.
It is no coincidence that many of those anarchists who reconquered the
ability to feed themselves—rewilding, scavenging, or setting up
farms—were among the first to abandon veganism. They had left
consumerism behind, inasmuch as they could, and were coming in contact
again with natural realities, and reciprocal relationships that don’t
fit into easy ethical frameworks.
Before I point out some common vegan health misinformation, it’s only
fair to point out the lies on the other side. The most common scientific
argument I’ve ever heard against the universal applicability of a vegan
diet states that people of certain blood types need to eat meat in order
to survive. I looked it up, and the study is thoroughly discredited, and
it was flimsy to begin with. Furthermore, to the best of my knowledge,
the dairy industry propaganda that milk is good for your bones is also
false; broccoli, in fact, is much better. But a lot of research and a
determination not to be suckered by fables from either side has led me
to the conclusion that not everyone can be healthy on a vegan diet. Most
of all, personal experience and the experiences of friends has
corroborated that conclusion.
To the best of my knowledge, the following facts are solid, and rarely
mentioned by those vegans who ply the supposed health advantages of
their diet:
iron and B12;
because they are generally produced by profit-interested companies, but
also because humans evolved to absorb their nutrients from food and not
from pills (in the case of iron, dietary pills and “iron-fortified”
foods contain the inferior non-heme iron from plant sources);
rate of between 20% and 35% whereas the non-heme iron found in plant
sources has an absorption rate of between 2% and 20%;
of non-heme iron are affected by other dietary elements (animal protein
and Vitamin C raise non-heme absorption rates, soy proteins and the
phytic acid found in leafy greens lowers the non-heme absorption rates);
tissue and causes health problems;
to manifest in health problems, but when such problems arise they can be
gravely serious;
and is also blocked by the phytic acid in leafy greens;
dangerous but it can take 5–20 years to manifest, and its symptoms are
masked by the folic acid which abounds in vegan diets;
yeast, although some people’s bodies reject the yeast, or in pills or
artificially fortified foods, which often have low absorption rates.
(For myth-busting regarding vegan foods that are supposedly high in
iron, or the argument that humans are naturally vegetarian, see the
appendix).
It follows from the above facts that some people, provided they are
extremely conscientious about their diet, can live healthily and happily
on a vegan diet. A few will feel bad on such a diet from the get go. And
a larger group, after a matter of years, will become increasingly
unhealthy and even develop anemia or other conditions. A friend of mine
who had never accepted my arguments against veganism finally ended ten
years of veganism only after her body demanded it of her. She had
developed anemia, a severe shortage of B12, and depression, and was
feeling so bad that she was becoming suicidal. The arrogant, cultish
commentary of, “if you’re not a vegan now you never were,” simply
doesn’t apply to her. She’s someone who is extremely dedicated to animal
liberation, who has put her freedom and her body on the line, who has
always been conscientious about her diet. In the first few years, she
did great with a vegan diet, but after long enough she caused herself
health problems that she could no longer ignore. Her case is more
dramatic than most, but it’s probable that a lot of the time, what
appears to be the loss of motivation to maintain a diet is related to
the general loss of motivation that accompanies anemia or a B12
shortage. Other times it’s just the case that people are listening to
their bodies without realizing that’s what they’re doing.
Regardless, when we hear someone tell us that a vegan diet can work for
anyone, and if we gave up on it it’s because of a personal failing, we
know in our bones and in our guts that this is just ideological
authoritarianism. When we weren’t eating meat, we experienced it the
same way when some jerk told us we had to eat animals. Eating,
ultimately, constitutes a very personal relationship. A sure way to make
an enemy is to devalue their diet. Which again raises the question of
the strategic common ground constituted by veganism. Looking at vegans
as a whole, and at anarchists as a whole, with whom do we feel more
affinity?
The supposed health benefits of veganism are not as simple as they are
often presented. Many of the studies cited by vegans to their favour do
not actually measure a strictly vegan diet, but mix vegans in with those
who eat very little in the way of animal products (i.e. the studies will
ask respondents if they eat meat “less than once a week, two or three
times a week, once a day” and so on). Once there are more vegan
capitalists, such studies will surely find their funding (it won’t be
long now), but until recently, the scientific establishment hasn’t been
so interested in reifying veganism as a category so much as comparing
relative amounts of different food groups in a diet. These studies are
also affected by the fact that vegans and vegetarians tend to be more
health conscious and wealthier, meaning that regardless of the meat
question, they’re putting higher quality food in their bodies.
The arguments about meat consumption being bad for the heart are
complicated, but vegan interventions in these arguments have tended
towards simplification. High cholesterol in the blood can be bad for the
heart, and meat is astronomically higher in cholesterol. However, the
body is not a machine you pour ingredients into. There is no strong
connection between cholesterol in the diet and cholesterol in the blood
stream. Furthermore, cholesterol is an important nutrient. Some studies
have suggested that animal fats trigger cholesterol build-up in the
bloodstream, but other studies point out that the former conflate
saturated fats from animal sources with transfats, which come from
processed vegetable oils and abound in many vegan diets. There is a
general consensus on the harmfulness of transfats, and a multiplicity of
studies that allege some health risks and some health benefits from
animal fats. What seems to be undisputable is that there are many
benefits from animal fats, and all of the health risks are neutralized
by sufficient physical exercise and enough fiber in the diet. On the
other hand, someone who does not lead an active life and has little
access to fresh food should not eat red meat, although baked, boiled, or
raw fish will generally improve their health.
An undisputed fact is that in the countries with the longest life
expectancy, and generally also those with high rates of heart health,
people tend to eat moderate to high amounts of animal fats, but very low
amounts of processed foods.
As far as the heart goes, what is most certain is that fiber is good for
it. There’s no point beating around the bush: meat has no fiber. But if
meat is not crowding plants out of one’s diet, it probably isn’t bad for
your heart, and no study I’m aware of has demonstrated that meat in
moderate quantities is bad if it is accompanied by lots of fiber and
exercise. In other words, by most accounts, a diet based on fruits,
vegetables, and meat is healthier for most people than a diet based on
fruits, vegetables, and grains.
But the heart is not the only organ in the body. What I’ve never heard a
vegan mention are the studies documenting the negative health
consequences of a diet lacking animal fats, such as higher rates of
depression, fatigue, and violent death. Nor do many vegan websites
mention that soy is toxic when unfermented (nearly all commercial tofu,
and all TVP, is unfermented). Only tempeh and authentic bean curd pass
this hurdle. As for seitan, though it is not a soy product, the gluten
it is made from is bad for a comparable percentage of the population as
the cow milk which vegans often demonize. Soy dust is also an allergen
that increases asthma rates, particularly in port cities where
rainforest soy is unloaded and sent to market.
Given the moralistic weight of the concept of the “natural,” it is no
surprise that some vegans have alleged meat consumption to be unnatural
for humans. The fossil record, the diets of the most closely related
primates, the length of our intestines, and our ability to digest raw
meat all point to an omnivorous diet going back to the beginning of the
species. The specific allegations regarding evolution are debunked in
detail in the appendix.
The almost systematic presence of misinformation in specifically vegan
circles indicates a religious quality to veganism. Many vegans
consistenly formulate their lifestyle as part of a dedicated struggle
for liberation, but those who are exempt from the critique of dogmatism
should still be asked why they choose to create common ground with those
vegans who are moralistic and manipulative.
Dogmatism is in many ways reinforced by the very construction of
veganism. Veganism creates a righteous in-group on the basis of an
illusion of purity. Many of us have had the frustrating experience of
arguing with vegans who go in circles, claiming that they do not support
the meat industry even after they are forced to acknowledge that all
industries are interconnected; we are reminded of arguing with
Christians whose every proof comes back to the bible, or more precisely,
their desire to believe in it.
The fact that the idea of purity or non-responsibility does not square
with how capitalism actually functions, and thus a vegan diet does
nothing to materially attack the structural causes of animal
exploitation cannot be accepted, because the actual meaning of veganism,
as such, is the embrace of the illusion of purity, the entering of the
in-group.
The existence of this in-group can also be seen in the place of
vegetarians on the moral hierarchy. Any well read vegan knows that,
within their own logic of responsibility, a vegetarian is just as
responsible as a meat eater for animal exploitation, because the
production of eggs or dairy is integrated with meat production, in that
morally direct way they find somehow more visible than, say, the
integration of the transport industry with meat production. However, the
vegan who is prone to judge or prosyletize (who is not every vegan, and
perhaps not even the majority, but a common enough figure) will place
the vegetarian who consumes milk daily higher up on the moral scale than
the omnivore who eats homegrown fruits and vegetables and eats meat once
a week.
Another religious feature of veganism can be found in its concept of
liberation or solidarity. The vegan model is remarkably similar to the
militant Christian charity of the abolitionists, given the fact that
they are speaking in the name of beings who do not speak for themselves,
and building solidarity with allies who will never criticize or demand
anything of them (in the case of the abolitionists, the ideal of the
mute slave was not a reality but a desired condition reinforced by the
general lack of direct communication between the abolitionists in the
North and the slaves in the South). Clearly, many animals struggle
against being locked up, and nature in general throws down walls and
erodes boundaries. But veganism, in the minority occasions when it is
accompanied by actions for animal liberation, imposes an ethical space
on the animal kingdom that other animals had no hand (paw?) in creating.
Veganism refuses the possibility of learning from other animals—for me a
precondition for real solidarity, but evidently not for them—by
rejecting the development of an ethical framework in which we all depend
on each other and sometimes eat each other, as in the animal world. On
the vegan sanctuary farms, do they put the rescued foxes in with the
rescued chickens? And if they feed the rescued dogs and cats meat
instead of tofu, is it okay because they’re just animals, but we’ve
risen above that kind of behavior? Such an attitude crosses the line
between ally and savior.
There are innumerable ways for omnivorous anarchists to live coherently
and formulate a diet that realizes their struggle for total liberation
in their daily life. Necessarily, this great diversity of diets would
have one point in common: the recognition that, because capitalism is a
coercive and totalizing imposition, purity is neither desirable nor
possible, thus what a person eats should not model an ideal but
highlight a conflict.
This could take the form of scavenging or stealing to feed oneself. Both
of these activities cultivate low intensity illegality and thus
antagonism with the dominant system. And both, if they are realized
within an expansive anarchist practice, suggest possibilities for
elevating tactics and moving towards collective action. In the former
case, one can sabotage trash compactors and other capitalist techniques
of enclosing an inadvertently created commons (the trash). In the latter
case, one can organize proletarian shopping or supermarket raids.
In places with easier access to physical space, such as rural areas or
decaying urban areas, one can seize land to create gardens and farms and
promote the self-organization of our own food supply. This tends to work
better, and enable a fuller realization of anarchist ideals, if it is
modeled on an ecosystem rather than a factory, which means gardens and
farms with animals. Depending on the scale this could include bees,
fish, chickens, goats, and more. Such projects will pose the difficult
but necessary challenge of figuring out a mutual and respectful
relationship among all the species that live off the farm; planning from
within rather than from above, learning how to listen to the other
beings that use the farm and allow them to impact the plans; and
adapting new norms for dealing with the emotional conflict we should
feel when we kill other living beings.
In places where we have contact with wilderness, we can—as many people
are doing now—relearn many important skills related to feeding
ourselves. If this is truly done not as a hobby but as the realization
of a desire for liberation, it will necessarily entail conflict with the
State and interrupt state narratives of progress and citizenship. Where
indigenous peoples continue to practice their traditional forms of food
production, they almost always find themselves in conflict with the
State.
And then there’s another take entirely, in which neither our diet nor
anything else about our lives is purported to be consistent with our
ideals. It’s a possibility that veganism seems to miss entirely, and it
goes like this: many of us are poor. We eat whatever we can get from the
dumpster, steal when the security guard isn’t looking, or buy what we
can on a shitty wage. There is no dietary option in this world that
satisfies us, not in the expensive eco-friendly supermarket, not in the
cheap bulk section of a discount store that may or may not exist in our
neighborhood, and certainly not in the permaculture farm outside of our
city where the escapist hippies spend all their time feeding themselves
while the world goes to shit.
We eat whatever food we can, sucking down the poisons of this shitty
world, just to live another day and gain another opportunity to wreak
destruction, to attack, to destroy a small piece of what degrades us.
Cannibalism is the norm in our world. We eat our fellow animals, raised
in extermination camp conditions, we wear clothes made by fellow workers
in sweatshops, we breathe air so polluted it gives us cancer, we walk
down streets paved with petroleum byproduct, and we’re forced to spend a
large part of our time exploiting and betraying ourselves. None of this
is a choice, just a reflection of the fact that we live in hell. Until
the present social order is destroyed and all of the cages and prisons
opened and razed, the only choice we acknowledge is negation. Unlike the
naïve vegan novice out to change the world, we don’t kid ourselves into
thinking we can live our ideals. That’s exactly why we’re at war.
If we seek to realize our struggle in our diet, abandoning veganism
creates more possibilities for self-organization of food, a mutual
relationship with our environment, bioregional flexibility and
sensitivity, and anticivilizational ethics. If we reject the totality of
this society or lack access to an autonomous space for maneuver, the
only thing that matters is attacking the existent and sustaining
ourselves in the meantime. In either case, an omnivorous diet makes
sense.
There is a major operative difference between the statements “I don’t
eat any animal products” and “I am vegan.” All identity, on some level,
is a political choice. The strategy behind the identity of veganism is
poorly thought out. The practice of not eating animal products, on the
other hand, may have a number of justifications.
I don’t care to convince anyone to abandon a vegan lifestyle. There are
plenty of good reasons to live that way, though the only ones I can
think of are strictly subjective: some people feel healthier on a vegan
diet; some people find it emotionally easier or more sensible to
struggle for animal liberation if nothing they eat once had a face; some
people do not want to put anything in their bodies that lived a tortured
life, and veganism serves as an effective psychological barrier against
some of the worst atrocities of capitalism, even if practically speaking
it makes no difference in ending those atrocities or one’s material
connection to them.
What I intend with this article is to indignantly reject the
much-tossed-around argument that it is incoherent for anarchists to eat
meat, and morally superior for them to be vegans. I want to reach people
who are dedicated to the principles behind veganism but whose bodies are
suffering from the diet, to emphasize that it doesn’t work for
everybody. I want to attack an ethical framework I find immature and
overly civilized. And most of all I want to contribute to an end to the
days when veganism is the norm in collective anarchist spaces, and
anyone who does not follow this lifestyle is marginalized in every
social center, at every conference. There are a great many reasons
against generalized veganism. There is no reason why those of us who
have already passed through veganism and out the other side should be
closeted in common anarchist spaces, or treated as less dedicated in the
struggle for the end of all forms of domination.
Against consumer society, against civilization, until no one has to live
in a cage!
ideology
http://www.vegsource.com/news/2009/11/the-comparative-anatomy-of-eating.html
According to a report published on vegsource.com, “we can look at
mammalian carnivores, herbivores (plant-eaters) and omnivores to see
which anatomical and physiological features are associated with each
kind of diet. Then we can look at human anatomy and physiology to see in
which group we belong.” Subsequently, they compare and contrast
physiological features common to carnivorous and herbivorous mammals,
using the following headings: “Oral Cavity,” “Stomach and Small
Intestine” and “Colon.”
Framing the bulk of the article as a comparison between carnivores and
herbivores, they make descriptions of these two classes of mammals that
clearly show more similarities between humans and herbivores. For
example, they describe the oral cavity of carnivores as a“wide mouth
opening in relation to their head size. This confers obvious advantages
in developing the forces used in seizing, killing and dismembering
prey”, as though non-vegans had ever argued that humans are
evolutionarily predisposed to catching and dismembering prey with our
mouths.
After setting the stage and predisposing the reader to see similarities
between humans and herbivores, they include a section heading, “What
About Omnivores,” as though this were an afterthought, when in fact the
dominant theory is that humans are omnivores, and there is no credible
countertheory that humans evolved as carnivores (notwithstanding early
anthropologists’ overemphasis on hunting vis-a-vis gathering).
But rather than discussing omnivores as a class, as they do with
carnivores, the study authors arbitrarily pick bears as a stand-in for
all omnivores, despite the great evolutionary distance between hominids
and bears, and despite, in their own admission, the fact that “Bears are
classified as carnivores” and “bears exhibit anatomical features
consistent with a carnivorous diet”. If they were interested in honestly
assessing the facts and establishing arguments that approached the
truth, they would have used one of the many omnivorous primates as a
comparison. But if they had compared humans with an omnivorous primate,
they would have undermined their own ideological necessities and
disproven their thesis. By ignoring the many omnivores that capture prey
with their hands, or in the case of hominids and some other primates,
with tools, the vegan ideologues behind this study can carry out a
number of falsifications. Still talking about bears, now in reference to
their stronger but less mobile carnivorous jaws (very different from the
hominid jaw), they say: “A given species cannot adopt the weaker but
more mobile and efficient herbivore-style [jaw] joint until it has
committed to an essentially plant-food diet lest it risk jaw
dislocation, death and ultimately, extinction.” What they hope the
reader is too dull-witted or ideologically blinded to consider is the
possibility of a species that evolved to catch prey with fore-limbs and
tools, and thus could also sport the weaker but more adaptable jaw-type
without risk of dislocation.
They accomplish this crass manipulation with an excessively simplified,
edited version of “evolutionary theory”, according to which, they claim,
“carnivore gut structure is more primitive than herbivorous adaptations.
Thus, an omnivore might be expected to be a carnivore which shows some
gastrointestinal tract adaptations to an herbivorous diet.” This assumes
a very simple, unilineal evolutionary pathway, which flies in the face
of all credible evolutionary theory and finds a home instead with only
the most dogmatic Social Darwinism. They’re hoping to hoodwink us into
considering omnivores as a middle ground in the evolution towards
herbivores (who can then be presented as the most advanced, the most
progressive). The only fact this presentation rests on is the theory
that the first mammalian herbivores evolved from carnivores, with a pass
through omnivorism.
But evolution is much more complex than a single, unilineal pathway; it
is closer to an infinite lace of loops moving constantly into new
niches, in which “forward” and “backward” lose all their meaning. A
species in an animal family that has evolved towards herbivorism could
just as easily evolve back to omnivorism as stay herbivorous. This is
probably what happened in the case of many primates, including hominids.
By not including a description of primate omnivores, the article can
portray many omnivorous features of the human stomach, intestinal tract,
and colon as being fundamentally herbivorous. But the key fact regarding
the relative length of the small intestine in humans has to be
manipulated outright in order to square with their theory. Among
omnivores, the small intestine is between 6 and 8 times the length of
the body, whereas in herbivores it is between 12 and 20 times the length
of the body. With humans, this ratio measures out at 8, fully within the
omnivorous range. Yet the dogmatic vegans claim a ratio of 10 to 11,
(which is still closer to most omnivores than to most herbivores). How
do they get this figure? In the article we read that “Our small
intestine averages 22 to 30 feet in length. Human body size is measured
from the top of the head to end of the spine and averages between two to
three feet in length in normal-sized individuals.”
To start with, two feet from the top of the head to the bottom of the
spine is not a dimension most people would consider “normal,” unless we
were talking about children, and it’s surprising that they can get away
with making such claims to a vegan audience. More obscure is the
assertion of an average length of 30 feet for the small intenstine. In a
broad range of medical publications and popular educational materials,
the average I found was 6–7 meters, or 19–22 feet. Where did the authors
of this study get their figure, which allows them to allege a statistic
that props up their theory? One can only guess; however, on Wikipedia I
encountered the factoid that the small intestine sometimes measures 50%
longer in autopsy. Perhaps they found the measurement that would give
them the statistic they so desperately needed by substituting in the
length of the intestine of a cadaver. By getting a high end average of
30 feet for the intestine, and rounding down the female average height
by a few inches to get two feet for body length, they could manufacture
the statistic of a ratio of 10 or 11, which would appear to be closer to
the herbivore range than the omnivore range. But given the source for
this statistical manipulation, the only “natural” vegetarian would be a
dead one.
Clearly, the authors of the article cited are more interested in
miseducating people, and the many vegans and vegetarians who have cited
it are evidently more interested in justifying their own a priori dogmas
than in doing the minimum of research and critical thinking necessary to
evaluate their factual foundations. In the face of conflicting facts,
they simply pick the ones they like the best.
Vegan websites arguing the health benefits of their diet often proclaim
lentils, for example, to be high in iron; however a serving of lentils
only contains 6.6 milligrams of iron whereas a serving of chicken liver
contains 12.8 milligrams of iron, and the iron in the lentils has an
absorption rate as much as ten times lower—in other words the lentils
will provide your body with only 30% to 5% as much absorbable iron as
the chicken. Any honest assessment would describe lentils as at best a
mediocre source of iron. Soybeans are also named as being especially
high in iron, which they are, for a plant source, but I haven’t read any
vegan propaganda that mentions how soy proteins inhibit plant iron
absorption.
The website “Vegetarian Research Group” (in a report published on many
other vegan and vegetarian websites as well) manipulatively compares the
best vegan sources of iron with the mediocre or poor omnivorous sources
of iron (e.g. hamburger, milk), and their comparison is milligrams of
iron/calories, another manipulation considering that an omnivorous meal
is much higher in calories than a vegan one. A hundred calories of
chicken is just a few bites, whereas a hundred calories of spinach is
enough to choke on (about a pound, or a heaping plate full). They
include vegan foods that are artificially iron-fortified without
mentioning that artificial dietary iron has a low absorption rate. The
former website also claims that vegan diets have the added advantage of
being high in Vitamin C, which increases iron absorption. This claim is
dishonest on two points. Omnivorous diets can also be just as high in
Vitamin C. Secondly, vitamin C only boosts the absorption of non-heme
iron. Heme iron always has superior absorption rates: the iron from
animal sources will be absorbed by your body just as well without
vitamin C. Even with vitamin C, non-heme iron absorption rates are still
inferior. And because animal protein also increases the absorption rate
of non-heme iron, health conscious omnivores will make better use of
their plant-source iron than vegans will.
To get a sense of how widespread this vegan misinformation is, over the
last months I asked about a dozen acquaintances to name a vegan food
source that is high in iron. Every single one named spinach. The only
way to portray spinach as an iron-rich food is to use the completely
misleading statistic of milligrams per calorie rather than milligrams
per serving, and to suppress all the information regarding absorption
rates. On the one hand, vegan websites are unanimous in proclaiming that
it is easy to get enough iron on a vegan diet, and on the other hand
they are suppressing or manipulating the information that their
followers need in order to get enough iron.
These websites also fail to mention that, at least according to the
American Dietic Association, iron needs for vegetarians are 1.8 times
higher than for non-vegetarians. The only site where I found this
statistic was one dedicated to athletic trainers who now have increasing
amounts of vegetarian clients. In other words, the further away from
political veganism one gets, the more accurate the information.
[American Dietetic Association (ADA). 2003. Position of the American
Dietetic Association and Dietitians of Canada: Vegetarian diets. Journal
of the American Dietetic Association, 103 (6), 748–65. ] It’s also
interesting to note that according to the ADA study, “most” vegetarians
can meet their iron needs. On a political vegan website, the fact that a
minority of people cannot would be covered up.
Speaking of minorities, I recently spoke with a vegetarian friend who
told me she overcame her anemia by following her gut, ignoring her
doctor, and switching to a vegetarian diet. Quickly, her iron levels
rose to healthy amounts. Interestingly, she told me of a friend of hers
who had to eat a largely carnivorous diet because she was allergic to
most plant-based proteins. What these two stories reflect is that the
language of averages conveyed by the statistics do not contain human
realities. Every body is different, and every body has different needs.
Most people will get more iron with an omnivorous diet, whereas a few
people will have the opposite experience. Any kind of dietary absolutism
based on the needs of the majority constitutes a form of oppression.
Many vegan websites hail spinach and other leafy greens as great sources
of iron, without mentioning that the phytic acid contained therein
inhibits iron absorption. Hilariously, a website for people with a blood
disorder that leads to a dangerous overabsorption of iron recommends
exactly these foods to help people keep their iron down: “Spinach, kale,
romaine lettuce and other leafy green vegetables should make up a major
part of a low-iron diet. Many of these vegetables contain chemicals that
inhibit the absorption of iron.”
http://www.ehow.com/info_8418917_ironfree-diets.html
This kind of dishonest, ideological sleight of hand would only be
annoying if they weren’t playing with people’s health. If they have
solid ethical arguments for veganism, why would they even need to make
health-based arguments, especially when doing so seems to require
dishonesty? If people are considering veganism for ethical reasons,
other vegans should encourage them while being honest about the health
risks as well as the health benefits. An honest evaluation of strengths
as well as weaknesses is one of the principal distinctions between a
struggle and an ideology or religion. The most dogmatic of vegans do not
pass this test.