Meat eaters think vegans are on a constant moral superiority high, but this is often a misconception. It’s true that most vegans believe they follow more rational, compassionate and consistent moral guidelines than corpse eaters; this doesn’t mean, however, that vegans are more self-satisfied than the rest of us.
For most vegans, those who are “doing it for the right reasons” anyway, veganism is the least they can possibly do. Their moral baseline has shifted. “It’s wrong to unnecessarily harm other people” no longer suffices. “It’s wrong to unnecessarily harm other sentient beings” is the motto now. Vegans must avoid animal products just to meet this new minimum level of decency. There’s nothing especially noble in this because they are avoiding a wrong, not doing a good. If they were to stop being vegan without changing their ethics, they wouldn’t then feel as good about themselves as the average omnivore does — they would feel much worse.
Ethical veganism spreads through guilt. Vegan advocates preach troubling facts about factory farming, making people feel horrible about themselves for participating in such an evil industry. But don’t worry, vegans say, there’s a solution to feeling horrible: stop eating animal products and you will no longer feel culpable for animal suffering.
If no other guilt-resolving strategies present themselves, the now distressed omnivore is likely to become vegetarian or vegan, since most people aren’t willing to hate themselves every time they eat.
Veganism, then, does not necessarily improve self-esteem. It temporarily disrupts and lowers self-esteem and then shows you how to recover it. You go from normal, to bad, back to normal again. But it’s not a neutral transaction. Veganism allows you to feel as good about yourself as you did before you watched Earthlings to impress your vegan boyfriend, but now you have to work more to achieve that earlier equilibrium. Your life is harder, yet you feel no better about yourself than does a McDonalds lover who thinks that we’re obviously meant to eat animals since God made them out of meat.
Vegans often comment on the phenomenon of the “defensive omnivore.” These are meat eaters who, when confronted with information about factory farming or other unsavory aspects of animal use, try to dismiss the vegan with ludicrous retorts. One vegan collected many of the stock omnivore replies to vegan arguments and put them on a bingo card:
There were so many that one defensive omnivore bingo card wasn’t enough:
Defensive omnivorism is an attempt to stave off guilt without making a sacrifice. Even if the substance of the arguments is often illogical, the impulse is rational. Defensive omnivores don’t want to give up more just to feel as good about themselves as they already do in their ignorance. It’s frustrating for vegans when this works. When meat eaters successfully avoid the guilt by parroting dumb clichés, belittling vegans or generally ignoring logic and reason, they deftly escape the self-esteem hit that forced vegans to overhaul their own lives. Defensive omnivores are getting everything vegans have and more, while doing less, and as vegans see it, they manage this through stupidity and indifference.
Vegans can’t hate defensive omnivores too much, because most vegans started off as them. The difference between defensive omnivores for life and those who become vegans is how willing they are to live with their silly, easily disputed rationalizations. Those who became vegans did so because they realized that “where do you get your protein?” was a self-serving question with an answer; they got the guilt and figured out that it wouldn’t go away until they stopped eating animals.
But a more appealing method of wiping out that guilt has broken veganism’s monopoly. Becoming a conscientious omnivore, someone who buys local animal products from small farms, is another way for people to resolve the guilt they may feel after learning about factory farming. Conscientious omnivores don’t have to give up as much as vegans do, and yet they don’t think any less of themselves for this fact. A lot of vegans don’t like that.
One of the reasons many vegans find Michael Pollan to be so incredibly annoying is that he is the primary public figure showing omnivores how to face factory farming and yet not succumb to vegan demands. Conscientious omnivores often know just as much as vegans do about animal use, and sometimes they know more, yet they can keep eating meat and still think of themselves as ethical.
Pollan offers a better sacrifice for self-esteem-recovery bargain than vegans do, but ethical omnivorism as a guilt-shuttling maneuver doesn’t work for everyone. Vegans can’t buy it because they interpret their guilt as “it’s always wrong to use animals for anything.” (Although, if they have health problems on a vegan diet, this can change.) Unmoved by The Omnivore’s Dilemma, vegans have to give up much more than Pollan and his ilk do to achieve the same feeling of moral satisfaction. To vegans, it seems unfair.
It’s the same problem that vegans have with lacto-ovo-vegetarians, pescetarians, and everyone else who obliterates guilt with milder restrictions. It’s not right — everyone should have to give up as much as vegans do in order to feel okay about themselves.
This is why vegans like to disillusion their ethical competition, inflicting moral insecurity on everyone who gives up less. Vegetarians shouldn’t get to feel happy with themselves when they still get to eat eggs and cheese. They must hear that baby male chickens are ground into a mushy red pulp because roosters can’t lay eggs, that dairy cows are tortured, that there is more suffering (and pus) in a glass of milk than in a steak, that male calves of dairy cows are turned into veal and that all dairy cows become meat eventually. Pescetarians must learn that fish feel pain and that the world’s fish stock is on the verge of collapse. Ethical omnivores must be told that animals have a right to life, that the best humane farms can’t avoid causing animals pain and anxiety, that even pasture-raised meat is inherently inefficient and that ethical omnivores are inconsistent about only eating animal products from small farms anyway. And your run-of-the-mill defensive omnivores need to be mocked for their stupidity.
Vegans must stamp out the moral free riders.
The good news for the defensive compromisers of the world is that not even vegans are doing as much as they possibly could. As the site Freegan.info explains:
The word freegan is compounded from “free” and “vegan”. Vegans are people who avoid products from animal sources or products tested on animals in an effort to avoid harming animals. Freegans take this a step further by recognizing that in a complex, industrial, mass-production economy driven by profit, abuses of humans, animals, and the earth abound at all levels of production (from acquisition to raw materials to production to transportation) and in just about every product we buy. Sweatshop labor, rainforest destruction, global warming, displacement of indigenous communities, air and water pollution, eradication of wildlife on farmland as “pests”, the violent overthrow of popularly elected governments to maintain puppet dictators compliant to big business interests, open-pit strip mining, oil drilling in environmentally sensitive areas, union busting, child slavery, and payoffs to repressive regimes are just some of the many impacts of the seemingly innocuous consumer products we consume every day.
The creator of Freegan.info, Adam Weissman, elaborated on consumer veganism’s comparative shortfalls in an interview with Satya magazine:
The word freegan was chosen largely to satirize an attitude prevalent among many vegans who seem unconcerned about the social and ecological impacts of the goods they purchase—so long as they are vegan. Sweatshop-made Nike shoes are fine, as long as they aren’t leather. Chocolate soymilk is great, despite the destruction of rainforests, exploitation of child slaves in the African chocolate trade and use of GMO plants.
The term freegan was created to express the notion that to live the “cruelty-free” lifestyle vegans advocate, we need to remove ourselves as much as possible from the capitalist economy, rather than taking the tunnel-vision perspective that we should only be concerned about animal flesh and secretions.
To many vegans, freeganism may seem marginal or extreme. Yet many vegans fail to recognize that the organized vegan community reflects bourgeoisie, white, liberal cultural norms, and to people outside of this demographic, eating tofu instead of hamburger can seem far weirder than getting good food that a store has needlessly thrown away.
Organic farmers will shoot, trap and poison mammals, birds and insects as readily as non-organic farmers—they simply won’t do it with petroleum-based pesticides. And of course, many organic farmers subsidize animal agriculture by using factory farm manure to fertilize their crops. Even agriculture practices not intended to harm animals cause massive numbers of deaths—machine threshers chop animals to bits, animals on land or in dens are crushed under agricultural machinery, small animals are shredded as soil is tilled.
I came to realize that for an animal liberationist, an organic, vegan diet was a lot like buying meat at the supermarket—being complicit in animal oppression, but letting someone else do the dirty work, so we don’t have to think about it.
If you want to turn the tables on vegans and see what they look like in defensive stammering mode, ask them why they aren’t freegans. Suddenly they sound exactly like the people they enjoy mocking with bingo cards.
