In January of this year, Alicia Silverstone went on Oprah and admitted to “slipping up” on cheese every once in a while (apologies for this being the best clip I could find of it). This upset some people on vegan message boards, but her latest confession of udder sucking to US Magazine is getting more attention. I was going to ignore the story, but then a few people sent it to me, so I realized it’s the sort of thing I’m supposed to be writing about.
I don’t see why it’s a big deal. Alicia Silverstone is hardly the first vegan advocate to not be vegan herself. Leaders are often less devout than their flock. That’s because there is nobody haranguing them to do more: they are the harangers. Alicia Silverstone has now joined the likes of Jonathan Safran Foer, Peter Singer and a lot of raw gurus. It’s better to be a self-hating omnivore than a proud one, is it not?
Veganism teaches that your only obligation to animals is to avoid consuming animal products. There is no obligation to free animals from cages, or even to convert other people to veganism, though the later is certainly encouraged. Whatever suffering reduction/rights defense impact giving up animal products on an individual basis has on the world, that’s the impact we are required to have in order to consider ourselves a decent human being doing the very least we can possibly do. Everything beyond that impossible-to-quantify impact is a moral bonus.
Technically, then, you don’t have to be vegan yourself if you can achieve that invisible impact in other ways. A cheese eater who converts two people to veganism — despite being a sick pervert who enjoys sucking down excretions robbed from sentient beings of another species — is better than a vegan who converts no one. Alicia Silverstone could go stab a cow in the eye right now and she’d still have done more for veganism than a vegan who hasn’t berated any friends or relatives into guilt and animal product abstention. In fact, perhaps she should. She’s earned it.
Now, these cheese confessions might be a poor conversion strategy for Alicia Silverstone. People who became vegan because they read The Kind Diet or saw Alicia Silverstone in a naked PETA ad might think, “Why do I have to be vegan if she doesn’t?” So she might lose some converts. Most likely, though, the people she converted to veganism will stay vegan and find a more consistent leader to hitch their animal-free wagon onto. Her converts are not going to drop to zero because of this, which means she’s still in the moral clear.
Also, it should be noted that Alicia Silverstone had a ghost writer for The Kind Diet, whom she mentions (barely) in the acknowledgements. After Silverstone thanks her dead dog Sampson, “all the animals,” her husband, Mother Nature, animal rights activists, macrobiotics advocate Mina Dobic, her grandfather and her dad, Silverstone finally thanks “my collaborator, Jessica Porter. The dream to write this book has been alive in me for well over 8 years, and I was lucky enough to find you to help me realize it with your sass, wisdom, kindness and fun. Thank you, rice and universe, for introducing us!”
Jessica Porter is the author of The Hip Chick’s Guide to Macrobiotics,which explains why The Kind Diet is written from a macro perspective, even though Silverstone isn’t macrobiotic herself. So cut Silverstone some slack. She slapped her brand onto a pro-vegan book that otherwise would have languished in obscurity. The animals are thanking her. Why can’t you?
