Animism, Corporate Veganism, & Disability
I made an off-the-cuff post on Cohost a while ago that, to my surprise, opened up a small conversation/vent session on ways industrial agriculture has impacted how we understand agrarian goods and production, and how veganism has been weaponized by capital. I felt it was worth preserving, so here it is!
July 9th, 2024, 17:51
Post by me:
I think using animal products is good and eating meat is fine. Industrialized livestock farming must be utterly done away with, for sure, and I see little ethical or moral dilemma in using hides, fur, organs, or meat for human needs or wants outside of the way they're harvested. All-or-nothing critique of the consumer instead of action against an exploitative, violent, and polluting economic system doesn't help anyone and dabbles too much with moralistic posturing. Animal products largely last much longer than their "vegan" stand-ins, which may be upwards of 95% plastic. Animal products can be much more sustainable and useful to a degrowth future, and can teach generations of youth the importance of respect for goods and life. Just because capitalism has exploited and perverted the resources of the Earth does not mean we must discount and forgo those resources completely.
From an anarchist(-animist) perspective, I think the liberation of animals is something to fight for and can be done with a symbiotic herd-herder-consumer relationship, where the livestock is respected as an equal and raised and tended to, bred to be healthy instead of profitable. Indigenous and naturalized folkways can teach us so much about how to use the whole animal and respectfully tend livestock, and I believe it is hugely important that those lifeways and methods be carried on into the future alongside dietary alternatives and more conscientious consumption of food and goods.
"The ultimate goal of farming is not the growing of crops, but the cultivation and perfection of human beings."
July 11th, 2024, 01:50
Rechost from Grim:
Thinking about this too —
Connected to the above points is that more and more often, I see veganism employed in a way that is disconnected from its motivations of ethics, sustainability, etc. A sort of corpo-veganism, corrupted from consumerism etc, often acting in violation of the beliefs of vegans who see it for what it is: greenwashing.
this is not about veganism, but about how companies use the term to get away with stuff that should be in violation of vegan motivations.
Disconnected from the why, veganism becomes an incredibly easy term for greenwashing. Industrialised plant farming is implicated in widespread environmental destruction, human rights abuses, and profound degradation and destruction of the rights of living beings and the environment. Bananas (Fyffes, Chiquita, others), pineapple (Dole, Del Monte, Fyffes/Chiquita), chocolate (Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland, Barry Callebaut), palm oil, and soybean, all of these are plants implicated in ecological destruction, indigenous displacement, local famine, and so on. In the case of soya, much of this is animal feed, but if the problem is the animal food part and not the farming practices... then I wouldn't be surprised if the farming practices here do not change at all if the soy is instead being used for tofu.
This "corpo-vegan" push by companies is why I see vegan nutella replacements which hand-wave the source of their cacao and rely heavily on (also mystery-source) palm oil. It is also easier for people to cosplay actually-caring, because you can just read a label on a product without considering what else is going on. As you mention, petroleum products are totally vegan, and so are other extracted materials. At the time of writing, there are multiple genocides occurring that are motivated in part by desire for oil, cobalt, and other mined materials. As no animal products are present, these things can be labelled as "cruelty-free".
Moreover, indigenous communities consuming animal products are routinely held under more scrutiny than international companies bulldozing forests and using slave labour, child labour, etc.
There are a lot more points to dig into here, but the topic is massive and is worth splitting over a long discussion. Thank you for the original post, @pansytram it was a nice thing to see on the timeline today.
July 11th, 2024, 03:41
Rechost from Kitty:
Absolutely love the term corpo-vegan used here, and I'm very sorry if this is derailing but I want to bring up the treatment of disabled people in all this too.
An unfortunate amount of people who view the ideals behind veganism only as "not killing/using animals" will completely disregard disabled people and view us as lower than the animals they're protecting.
When we try to say "actually I need meat / animal products to live because of my disability", it's become not uncommon for them to tell us that we should just die to spare the animals. Explicitly to our faces telling us that we, as human beings, should kill ourselves instead of drinking milk.
I think this is very much tied up in the fact that the people doing this do not care about the broader impact of things and reducing harm, they just get sad when animals die.
Because they don't have the same care for the environment & Earth, they don't have the same care for Indigenous people, they don't have the same care for the workers being exploited regardless of the presence of animal products, and they don't have the same care for disabled people.