...who think that being vegan is pretentious, elitist, anti-social, narrow-minded or nonsensical, the following thoughts are for you.
Myth #1: Only the middle and upper class can afford to be vegan.
Usually this is uttered with the inference that to be vegan is to act in the interests of animals rather than fellow human beings. Being vegan is understood to be a demonstration of one's social position, which reinforces economic inequality. There are some blatant misunderstandings and unfounded assumptions behind this, as will be explained below.
a) Eating vegan is not expensive. In fact, it can be much cheaper than eating the most low-quality, processed foods you can find in the grocery store. People who tend to associate veganism with expensive products assume that vegans need to replace meat and animal products with trendy meat alternatives and superfoods, which most certainly are fairly expensive as well as difficult to find if you are not living near a specialty store. This assumption is false: most vegans do not desire the taste or texture of animals or animal products, and can live very well without it. There is a whole culinary world outside of meat and simulated meat, and it is not necessary to empty your wallet buying the latest soy cheese.
The other assumption that underlies this belief in vegans being expensive is the idea that considerable money needs to be invested into dietary supplements, i.e. specialty vitamins. This assumption is false: one can get sufficient amounts of iron and calcium from plants if you take a couple of minutes to simply google up some basic nutritional information. Most nutrition websites can give you a list of very common plants that can provide you with sufficient iron and calcium. Moreover, the obsession with protein is unwarranted: the plant origins of protein have been written about by numerous articles so I will not repeat them here, but the gist of it is that animal protein is derived from plant protein in the first place, and there is no relative nutritional gain in consuming animal protein. To end up with a protein deficiency, you would have to be starving because there is a certain amount of protein in most everything that you eat.
Even with a vitamin like B12 that is derived only from animals and animal products, there is no real need for supplements. The body stores up B12 and it takes years for it to sink to low levels, let alone turn into a deficiency. Moreover, B12 supplements are not expensive and you should not be using them often anyways or else you will be overdosing (and suffering all the side effects of that!).
Anybody who regularly grocery shops knows that vegetables are cheaper than meat and animal products. That is not to say that it's impossible for a vegan to buy organic fruits and vegetables from a high-end grocery or specialty store and rack up a bill that far exceeds an omnivore's. However, shopping in such a way is not endemic to veganism, and there is a large variety of inexpensive fruits and vegetables available at low-end grocery stores.
b) In order to eat vegan, you have to have the time and energy to cook from scratch. The idea is that because lower income households do not have the money to buy sufficient personal time, they cannot cook vegan food. Admittedly, rolling out pizza dough after a double-shift is highly unlikely when you can buy a ready-made meal and pop it into the microwave. However, cooking vegetables from scratch is not really that time-consuming compared to cooking meat, for example. Salads are easy to throw together, there is less likelihood of getting sick from undercooked vegetables than meat, and vegetables cook through much quicker than meat in general.
A lot of omnivores have no conception of what a vegan meal looks like outside of specialty restaurants, and thereby assume that cooking vegan entails elaborate equipment and elevated gourmet skills. You do not need to grind your own almonds to make a vegan quiche every day. A simple pasta with vegetables is plenty quick and easy.
Vegetables can also keep well for a good while if you just put them into the fridge. Yes, meat and dairy products do last for a very long time especially in the freezer, but that does not mean that buying vegetables will entail extra, time-consuming grocery trips. Canned vegetables can be of better quality than fresh ones at times, and they will keep for a very long time.
c) Vegans are not just protesting against the maltreatment of animals, they are also protesting by proxy against the exploitation of human workers in animal factories. The food industry is not simply exploiting animals, but humans as well and there are plenty of food documentaries and literature that trace out the intertwining of economic and social inequalities that are perpetuated through the production of meat and animal products. We can't separate the production of grains, vegetables, and fruit from the production of animals, but in boycotting the meat industry we are objecting to its living and working conditions. Moreover, I am not saying that agricultural workers are less exploited than animal factory workers - on that count, I'd say that vegans and omnivores are at a tie on the "socially conscious" scoreboard. The only point I am striving to make is that vegans are not ignoring social ills in a traitorous lack of concern for the human species.
And here's a note for the vegetarians: even if you think you're not eating meat, you're implicated in the wonton destruction of animal life. Not only are the living conditions of egg-bearing chickens and milk-producing cows horrifying, egg-producing farms continually destroy male chicks to maximize their profits. The production process of an egg entails a number of animal deaths as a byproduct.
d) Being vegan does not necessarily exacerbate class stratifications, but can offer a way to bridge between the embodied effects of socioeconomic status (SES). I have yet to hear a cogently articulated connection between veganism's intensification of class stratification, but there is a clear connection between a low SES and poor eating. The general association of veganism with health and omnivorism with poor health may be how the class association is being drawn, and people with low SES do tend to be omnivores rather than vegans. This just goes to suggest that we should educate low SES households about veganism to improve their health (and obviate hefty medical bills in later life that will further lower their finances), rather than staying away from veganism because it's a sign of class difference.
In fact, veganism is a symptom of class difference, not just a sign. The kind of food knowledge, and the time and energy a vegan invests in is more accessible to the "leisurely" classes, but that is not to say that by eliminating the symptom of class difference, one has eliminated class difference altogether. If anything, by adopting veganism, perhaps low SES households can gain the benefits of a high SES status through health and lower living costs (cheaper grocery bill, no future medical bills, etc.).
Myth #2: Vegans/vegetarians are not "greener" than omnivores.
I'm responding to a misguided comment by somebody who thought that their education equipped them with brilliant insight into this, so let me relate what this person's argument was: raising animals does not contribute to rising CO2 levels because all the plants that need to be grown to feed the animals offset the CO2. This person then concluded that vegetarians/vegans are not improving the planet by not eating animals. Then, somebody else chimed in that they read somewhere it would not be sustainable to grow enough plants to support a vegetarian world population. There are some very strange logics (or lack thereof) at work here, so let me break these claims down.
a) Just because the CO2 produced by raising animals is offset by the simultaneous raising of plants, it does not mean that vegetarians/vegans are not improving overall CO2 levels. I'm not familiar with CO2 footprints for animal production (and I'm talking here about tracing the entire cycle, which I don't believe has been done satisfactorily yet because it's an infinite regression that is fairly impossible to do), but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt: let's say that the animal industry achieves a zero CO2 balance. Does that mean that omnivores are thereby a benign influence upon overall CO2 levels? Not if we look at relative CO2 contributions between omnivores and vegetarians/vegans. If we were to believe that vegetarians/vegans compel more plants to be grown and less animals, then we can assume that they are creating an O2 surplus (this is based on the belief that right now the CO2 is at a zero balance). In sum: vegetarian/vegan O2 production > omnivore O2 production. Vegetarians/vegans have a positive effect on the environment, whereas omnivores have no effect on the environment. In absolute terms, omnivores are benign to the environment. But in relative terms, they are detracting from the positive influence that vegetarians/vegans have on the environment and obstructing the production of surplus O2 needed to offset, say, petrol use. Just because omnivores may not be sending CO2 levels skyrocketing does not mean that their influence is equivalent to or better than that of vegetarians/vegans.
b) The last time I checked, the research said that it is environmentally unsustainable for us to continue increasing meat consumption. If we compare the amount of plants a human consumes to the amount of plants that, say, a cow consumes, and the number of cows a human consumes, the energy footprint of an omnivore far exceeds that of a vegetarian/vegan. The reason is fairly simple: omnivores are not getting their energy from food directly, and require an extra step that is itself a really complex, energy-consuming production system. The price of a steak does not just reflect the amount of energy required to produce the cow. It reflects all the equipment, processing, and transportation needed to produce cow feed in addition to all the equipment, processing, and transportation needed to get turn the cow into a steak. Somehow omnivores like to think that meat production entails only animals. They forget that an entire plant industry needs to be created to feed these animals, and that this plant industry is not the same as the one that feeds vegetarians/vegans.
Animal feed is a separate industry, and it is incredibly energy-consuming. While I don't know if replacing this industry with the kind of vegetable industry that is intended for direct human consumption would be "greener", I do know that the amount of energy it takes to grow a cow far exceeds the amount of energy it takes to grow a salad. I also believe that the most environmentally damaging agricultural practices are used in cultivating plants for animal feed: corn and soy are some of the most heavily genetically-modified and chemically treated crops and they for the most part are used to feed animals. These vast tracts of monocrops are not usually used for direct human consumption. If we were to replace them with more varied vegetables and fruits, I think it would be much more environmentally sustainable.
And I just need to insert a final disclaimer here: I am not in any way a proponent of "greenness" because I don't believe that we can even conceive of what it means or measure it in any meaningful way. The only reason I'm arguing that vegetarianism/veganism is "greener" is because the flawed logic behind what makes them "not greener" irks me (and I'm a militant vegan).
Steph snoozed @ 29.4.12 |
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