If You Believe in Social Justice, You Believe in Veganism
Eating animal products is analogous to the oppressive and unjust actions by powerful humans upon other humans.
This article was produced by Earth • Food • Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
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Introduction[edit | edit source]
While in Delhi late one evening, on the drive back to the hotel after a terrific meal in a Kashmiri restaurant, our taxi stopped at a traffic light in the middle of a congested and major intersection. The air is less than salubrious, thick with car exhaust, dust, and humidity. A small, thin child, aged between five and eight, approaches our car. She’s selling balloons. Initially, we thought she was a little boy. We can only see a closely cropped head of hair and a sooty face and hands. We can’t see the little tattered dress she’s wearing. An adult nearby seems to be directing the selling activities, hers and a few others scattered across the large intersection.
We all fall silent at the sight. We all have the same thoughts; our hearts are shattering and throats constricting. One passenger has leftovers from dinner, and she rolls down the window and gives them to her. The little girl happily accepts. She runs off to the median strip between the lanes of traffic and sits down next to an even smaller girl with whom she shares the goodies. As the stop-light and traffic permit, we drive away.
Our fellow passengers are some of the most committed to human rights and social justice issues. They’re not vegan and don’t consider being vegan to be of fundamental importance. This isn’t a moral judgment of them. We respect and admire them for their work. We all see and understand how exploitation affects humans, and we’re all against it. We understand the arbitrary reasons for this exploitation, whether complex or straightforward. None of those reasons are acceptable to any of us on moral grounds. None of us would dream of exploiting humans in the same way.
But when we put animal products on our plates, we behave similarly. We don’t stop to think about the death and suffering we inflict on completely harmless and vulnerable animals each time we have a meal or a snack. Why? Because we’re used to it, think they taste delicious, or are convenient for our lifestyle. This is analogous to the oppressive and unjust actions by powerful humans against other humans, which we can easily read about in history books and see in daily news reports.
Lack of Justice for Sentient Beings[edit | edit source]
The primary reason we use to distinguish our own oppressive and unjust behavior towards animals is we believe they’re somehow lesser than us and, therefore, we’re better than them. Every reason for this lesser-better judgment on our part is arbitrary because we make up the rules as they’re convenient to us in a similar way any oppressor makes them up for their convenience against who they oppress.
During that trip, we had much time to reflect upon this and other similar incidents. Each time, something our friend Ben MacEllen, Australian author, playwright, and trans activist, said resonated: ‘Every serious and thoughtful social justice activist should, by default, be vegan.’
He’s right. How else are we supposed to eradicate unacceptable behavior if we behave similarly? How can we permanently make the world a more just place for humans when we give little to no justice to sentient, feeling beings as vulnerable as the little girl selling balloons in traffic? Just as we recognize her right not to be exploited and fight against social injustice, we must recognize the same fundamental right for animals and include them in seeking a fairer world for everyone.
Veganism and Poverty: Reconcilable and Intersectional[edit | edit source]
Whether it’s possible to reconcile veganism as a fundamental moral obligation with the realities of poverty requires that we reflect on the tensions between these two concepts. If these tensions do exist, they’re a matter of systemic class and economic oppression—it’s not because of any perceived impossibility of understanding the concept of veganism. When we say veganism is only for the rich, it’s important to remember three things. First, animal farming, slaughter, and processing industries rely particularly heavily upon poor communities in terms of their location and to supply a workforce.
The workforce primarily comprises ethnic minorities, people of color, migrants, refugees, those with limited educational opportunities, and others in vulnerable situations. These industries are generally located in poor communities, ostensibly to bring jobs to communities with limited political clout and long-term economic deprivation. Although they create some jobs, these industries have a direct negative impact on these communities. Animal agriculture is particularly harmful with respect to, among other things, environmental degradation and resulting ill health, increased mental health issues and domestic violence among slaughterhouse workers, and worker exploitation because of limited or no other work opportunities and dangerous working conditions.
Exploitation of workers, horrible working conditions, low pay, uncertainty, sexual harassment or violence, and the tragic mental and emotional fallout from such experiences are also present in large-scale plant agriculture. Just because we’re eating plant-based food doesn’t mean we eliminate suffering and injustice from our diet. We mitigate some of the suffering and exploitation we contribute to, but we can’t ignore the plight of farmworkers. On the contrary, eating plant-based food should make us more aware and demand equitable political change for those who plant, grow, pick, pack, and distribute our food.
Second, and this may surprise some, many people feed themselves primarily with plant-based foods because they are the cheapest and most accessible food sources. The predominantly, but not exclusively, Western cultural idea of an adequate diet renders consuming large quantities of animal products as something to aspire to. For some, eating animal foods signals status and wealth. Replacing traditional, often plant-based foods with animal products may be considered superior or fashionable.
Changes in traditional diets, whether in Europe or elsewhere, to more so-called Western diets come with environmental degradation and lifestyle or food-related diseases, such as heart disease, hypertension, Type II diabetes, cancer, and stroke, which are now prevalent in many parts of the world.
Third, some poor communities, particularly in the West and often of color, suffer a much more significant proportion of lifestyle or food-related illnesses than rich, usually white communities, as a result of limited food choices, lack of access to affordable and healthy food or limited availability of information about healthy eating.
In some rich Western countries, poverty can limit access to plant-based foods, fresh or otherwise, which is an outrageous injustice. Put simply, McDonald’s can be cheaper than fruits and vegetables. Places where it’s difficult or impossible to obtain affordable, nutritious plant-based food are sometimes called food deserts. However, some activists prefer the term “food apartheid,” which seems a more apt description.
The issues that gave rise to food apartheid are serious and related to class and race. Therefore, when considering the tensions between poverty and veganism, the question becomes whether anyone can be vegan. The answer is yes. There’s nothing stopping someone from understanding the concepts and making the decision to go vegan.
Whether someone goes vegan or their efforts to do so are thwarted or hindered because of food apartheid, deprivation, hostile conditions, or practical reality is a separate matter for everyone to understand, dismantle, and remedy. If systemic oppression forces people to make moral choices they don’t want to make, then we need to dismantle the system creating the overarching oppression and provide access to information and solutions inspiring different moral choices—including the option to go vegan.
Speciesism: The Current Cultural Norm[edit | edit source]
Using a human-context analogy, we can substitute the word speciesism and test how another type of bigotry would be reconciled with poverty. In this case, let’s use sexism.
- Is sexism always wrong? Yes.
- Do we have an obligation to others not to be sexist? Yes.
- Is it okay for a poor person to be sexist? No.
- Are those subjected to sexism still harmed, whether at the hands of a rich or poor person? Yes.
- Is there something else to explain the sexism other than poverty? Yes, for example, asymmetry of power, traditions, systemic sexism and misogyny, or lack of education and opportunities.
- Do any of these reasons give a sexist person a pass to continue being sexist? No, why should they? They can explain the person’s mindset. They can help us understand where they’re coming from and what, if anything, might be changeable, who might be influenced positively to change, or what might be done.
- Is it easy to discuss or address sexism with a person, whether rich or poor? It may or may not be. We won’t know until we do it. For the most part, discussing fundamental rights issues can be difficult or, at the very least, delicate. It will require creativity and sensitivity to begin to effect change. Sometimes, the only thing we can do is say nothing, which is a powerful tool.
- Are we judging the person who is being sexist by engaging in a conversation and questioning their behavior? No, we’re not. Although we’re not judging them as individuals, that doesn’t mean we have to like or condone the sexist behavior or encourage it to continue.
The same logic applies to speciesism. There are myriad reasons to be speciesist, simply because speciesism is the current cultural norm. It doesn’t have to be. If anyone can be poor and not sexist, then anyone can be poor and not speciesist. If we have enough respect for women to discuss not being sexist, then we must afford the same respect for nonhuman animals. We need to discuss speciesism and veganism with people in the same manner.
The reality is appalling and ghoulish. In vulnerable and exploited segments of our global communities, there is a disproportionately high reliance upon or access to food, which will ultimately harm the health of community members and the environment surrounding them. In the same way, these communities are vulnerable and exploited, and so are the animals who embody that limited food supply. The communities’ food physically represents their vulnerability regarding human and animal concerns.
Poverty underpins and compounds oppression. Poverty makes everything more difficult, with very little energy left for anything other than how to survive each day. Poverty robs people of reaching their full potential; it is a tremendous drain on their mental and emotional resources.
We must dismantle the oppressive structures keeping people poor and making it so easy for animal food to be the only available choice, the only affordable choice thanks to subsidies and the power of big business, the only choice because there’s no viable transportation system to a market with plant-based food options, the only choice because people are afraid to leave their neighborhood because of violence stemming from systemic racism and poverty, or the only choice because there’s no knowledge of a better choice. We can simultaneously tackle class struggle and poverty and encourage veganism as a moral baseline.
These already intersect in many ways. Asserting they can’t coexist betrays the animals and belittles people’s intellectual abilities.
Governments worldwide heavily subsidize animal food production. Big businesses, such as international fast-food chains, benefit from subsidies for animal feed crops such as soybeans, corporate tax breaks, and preferential tax treatment. Their businesses are designed to produce, manufacture, distribute, and sell their products as cheaply as possible.
Exploitation and the Patriarchy[edit | edit source]
How do we expect a society based, at least in part, on the power of patriarchy to shift the paradigm concerning the exploitation and objectification of bodies capable of procreation when we can’t change the paradigm in our own daily lives concerning our exploitation and objectification of non-human animals?
The arguments we give for continuing to use, exploit, and kill female animals are very similar to those perpetuated to use, exploit, and perpetrate all manner of unspeakable violence towards women. ‘Such as?’ you ask: We need it. We have always done it this way. Tradition. Religion. Culture. They’re not intelligent. They’re inferior to us. We have the power, and they don’t. I don’t care. I want what I want. I make my living this way. It’s the natural order.
When we discuss feminism, equality, and fairness with all our most vulnerable sisters, we must also include our non-human animal counterparts. Like us, they are vulnerable and sentient.
Dairy and eggs are exploitative bodily products produced exclusively by bodies capable of procreation, and both males and females suffer. In the case of dairy, cows are subjected to continuous cycles of impregnation, gestation, birth, and mechanized lactation. To obtain milk, cows must be forcibly artificially inseminated before giving birth.
After birth, their babies are taken away either immediately or within a very short time. Mother cows mourn for their babies vocally and emit long lowing sounds for extended periods. There’s no reason to assume other animals don’t feel similar levels of pain when we separate them from their children. This is something even Maimonides recognized over 800 years ago.
A female calf may follow in her mother’s fate. Male calves are slaughtered for their meat. Either way, the calves will never see their mothers again. For herd animals, such loss and separation is a permanent source of mental and emotional anguish.
Although the vast majority of male cows are slaughtered at a very young age for veal or at a slightly older age for beef, the few bulls who survive are forced
into unimaginably exploitative, frustrating, and painful lives of forced ejaculation. And once they can no longer produce good quality semen, they’re slaughtered.
In terms of maternal health, the mother cows suffer from mastitis, a painful condition from which lactating people can also suffer. It’s possible for pus from the condition and other infections to pass into dairy milk. Dairy cows don’t get to die of old age on a lush green pasture, as the advertisements would have us believe. Once the dairy cows can no longer produce high volumes of milk, they’re slaughtered in the same slaughterhouses where cattle bred for beef are also killed.
The average lifespan of a dairy cow is four to six years, while their natural lifespan is between fifteen and twenty years. And before we think, “At least the cows had a life,” we need to consider both the continuous pain in their life and the fact we bred the cows into existence in the first place just to exploit them.
What’s the reason for these conditions? Simply so humans can drink the milk meant to nourish and grow a baby cow. We’re the only species feeding on another species’ mother’s milk and the only species continuing to consume milk after weaning when there’s no longer any nutritional need.
In the case of eggs, the cycle of exploitation is similar. Egg-laying chickens are selectively bred to lay many eggs well beyond the capacity and cycles of their fowl cousins in the wild. Once the eggs hatch, we gas or grind up male chicks alive, in a process called maceration, because they’re worthless to human use, as they can’t lay eggs.
For meat consumption, we selectively breed broiler chickens, creating monster-sized beasts so there is more meat to sell and an increase in profit margins. Chickens are slaughtered at mere months when their natural lifespan is between seven and eight years.
That nonhuman animals perceive the world differently than we do. They look different from us. They possess a different kind of intelligence than us. But these are irrelevant considerations. They have a fundamental right to live free from being a commodity.
They share this same fundamental right with all humans, just as people deserve the same fundamental human rights as one another, regardless of their color, ethnicity, ability, disability, sexual orientation, size, religion, or gender identification.
The dairy and egg industries exploit bodies capable of procreation. They’re exploited because of their reproductive systems. This has to resonate with all of us. Furthermore, in these industries, it is immaterial whether they’re industrial or small family farms because only the magnitude of scale changes. The dairy and egg industries are just as deadly and awful as the meat industry.
We need to choose veganism for our non-human counterparts so our words of inclusion for all people have full meaning. If we can’t reject the daily, gruesome exploitation and death of nonhuman animals, and if we can’t imagine going vegan because we can’t give up a tasty dish, then how do we imagine the patriarchy is ever going to give up their tasty status quo? Why should they?
