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?

--Tagged under: Ethics--

--Tagged under: Vegan Leaders--

--Tagged under: Purity--

Is Taste the Basest of Our Desires?

Alex: Finally, how can you use “taste”, the basest of our desires, to justify causing unnecessary harm and death?

HaRav Avraham: No, the purpose of the kid is not merely to be food for your sharp teeth, sharpened and polished by your lowliness and gluttony in eating meat; and certainly the milk is not intended to be a condiment for the satisfaction of your base desire.

Volatile: In any case, my point here is that you’re not “doing your best”, because you neglect to take even simple steps to change your behaviour, or to even accept that there is something morally problematic about eating meat. You allow base desire for taste to cloud your moral judgment. 

B.R. Myers: The pleasures of the oral cavity (though we must say ‘palate’ instead) are now widely regarded as more important, more intrinsically moral, and a more vital part of civilized tradition than any other pleasures. … Advertising has abetted the trend, while political correctness, with its horror of judging anyone’s ‘lifestyle choices,’ has done its bit to muffle dissent.

Kropotkin: Your story today on the “best” types of beef cuts would be absurd were it not so irresponsible. With livestock contributing about 18% to global warming and the environmental destruction farmers cause in their raising, you do not seek to promote the point that the biggest contribution people can make in reducing their own ecological footprint is to stop eating meat - instead you glorify it by appealing to base desire. Shame on you for your obscene capitulation to personal hedonism ahead of environmental and ethical concern.

Anna: BHealthy, you are so right and I am not doing the self flagellation. I do, however, read about the factory farms periodically so that compassion overwhelms my most base desire most of the time. How I know this is addiction is that I can actually put that stuff in my mouth knowing what I do.

Gary Lawrence Francione: What is troubling to me is the notion that our taste – the pleasure that we get from eating something, someone, from inflicting pain, suffering and death, whether it’s direct pleasure or indirect pleasure. I mean the bottom line is – this is what morality is about isn’t it Jonathan? There are things that we wish to do, there are things that may make us happy, that are wrong.

Jonathan Safran Foer: This isn’t animal experimentation, where you can imagine some proportionate good at the other end of the suffering. This is what we feel like eating. Yet taste, the crudest of our senses, has been exempted from the ethical rules that govern our other senses.

Eugene: People staying silent during the holocaust is precisely what allowed it to happen. With vegans staying silent today, it is no wonder that billions of animals are tortured to death for the most trivial desires of man.

MasterNightfall: I mean, if you put it in front of people that they don’t need something, would be healthier without it, and would reduce the strain on our planet’s resources by abstaining from it… Logic is thrumped by their base desire to consume the tender, succulent fleshes of various exotic and non-exotic beasts.

iFrog: You’re putting a base desire over the welfare and happiness of animals, ignoring compassion and ethical considerations.

Elaine: Taste is a trivial thing. Sure, we all find ourselves doing things that appeal to “base” desires, but when we sit back and get some perspective, we can prioritize and realize that the consequences of our food choices on our health, on the planet, and to animals matter more than taste. Nothing tastes as good as doing the right thing feels.

Larry: Truly the choice is not between happiness or no happiness, but one that is the fruit of such radical values as sacrifice, service, love (for others), and self-denial [versus] one that glories in self (self-indulgence, self-centeredness, and self-identity). Without the helpful voice of Christians speaking the value of the cross, we are left with nothing to sort out the basest of our desires from those which reflect nobility and virtue.

--Tagged under: Purity--

--Tagged under: Vegan Cliches--

--Tagged under: Vegan Cult--

--Tagged under: Vegan Quotes--

--Tagged under: SelfDenial--

Should Vegans Have a Blood-Drenched Wedding?

bloodybride

It’s amazing how much talk of vegan weddings Chelsea Clinton’s non-vegan wedding generated.

Since The New York Times, Gawker, Jezebel, Feministe and Vegansaurus! gave their respective takes, a lot of people have been asking me “What does Let Them Eat Meat think about vegan weddings?” Well, the blog has changed over time so I can’t speak for the entire thing, but I can tell you what it thinks now.  

Let them be vegan!

Sure, if I’m at a wedding, I’d rather the reception have meat. But if two vegans are getting married, I expect it won’t. And I can understand why it wouldn’t. 

As a young vegan with Hollywood dreams, I thought I’d force my cast and crew to eat vegan food while they were on set. Of course I expected to have a vegan wedding. Realistically I might have compromised if I’d married an omni, but it would have been a major issue for me. 

Now that I eat meat I can see the other side of it. Vegans believe “vegan food is for everyone” because few people have serious moral qualms with fruits and vegetables. To vegan thinking, then, meat is divisive while vegan food is inclusive. Vegans expect meat eaters to enjoy vegan food as much as they do, not realizing that Morningstar Farms and Daiya have aided and abetted a collapse in their culinary standards. Go to NYC’s Veggie Conquest if you want to see how easy to please vegans are. It’s more of a challenge to appreciate “yummy vegan goodness” when you’re used to animal products and have no moral hang-ups. 

Vegans compare snippy omnivores at a vegan wedding to gentiles complaining about the lack of pork and shellfish at a kosher wedding. That’s not a fair comparison because the kosher wedding can still have chicken, fish, lamb or beef. Going without pork for a celebratory meal is not the same as going without meat all together. Sorry tempeh, tofu, TVP and seitan, but meat is tastier and more satisfying. 

On the other hand, vegans think meat is slavery! Yet meat eaters want vegans to cater to their immoral craving for dead animal chunks? Would you expect abolitionists getting married in the pre-Civil War South to have a few slaves working the reception just to appease their demanding racist relatives? Of course it’s an outrageous comparison, but that’s how many ethical vegans see it (your eyes can open to some truly offensive comparisons once you accept anti-speciesist logic). What upset meat eating guests at vegan weddings need to understand is that vegans think meat is evil. Not all of them would put it that way, but at the very least most vegans would classify meat as “very bad.” Why should they taint their joyous occasion because you think lasagna tastes better with a layer of ground up sentient beings? 

Ethical vegans are morally opposed to contributing to the death of animals. If they have a wedding and serve meat, well, they’re as blood-drenched as Carrie on prom night. Now that I think about it, I’d feel kind of bad if I went to a wedding between two vegans and there was meat. No doubt I’d eat it, but I wouldn’t like that the bride and groom were probably feeling like they’d let the animals down on their big day.   

Vegans rightly point out that it’s only one damn meal without meat. But then that logic backfires when meat eaters choose not to have a vegetarian option at their wedding. Except for vegans it’s worse, since that means one damn meal without food at all. Granted, in both scenarios it’s the vegans causing trouble in some way (to themselves in the case of the omnivore wedding and to omnivores in the case of their vegan wedding). So in a sense it’s always the vegans’ fault. 

Plus the “only one meal” argument does downplay how dreadful weddings can be if you have nothing to look forward to at the reception. Nobody really cares that two people are promising to stay together forever. Okay, if it’s your close friends or family members you do. But for many of the guests, weddings are nothing without food and alcohol. As the wedding approaches, they’re mostly thinking about gorging themselves and getting drunk. I know there are exceptions because I am one, but come on. Bad food is much worse at wedding.

Still. When vegans are getting married, you’ve got to let their morals come first. 

The last wedding I went to was a vegan wedding. I expected this because the two people getting married were vegan. However, they never at any point said “all the food would be vegan.” There was no talk of food at all beforehand. My guess was that it would be vegan, but I couldn’t be sure that their parents hadn’t pulled a meaty coup.

I was excited about the wedding no matter what, but the slight hope that there might be meat made me look forward to it even more. It was only once I got into the buffet line that I learned corpses hadn’t made the cut. I was disappointed, but there was a decent salad and I got full enough. It was about half an hour of meatless eating and then it was time to dance. 

The worst thing about a vegan wedding for meat eaters is all the time spent anticipating a lackluster meal. So vegans, keep your weddings vegan. Just don’t tell us beforehand. 

--Tagged under: Vegan Food--

--Tagged under: Purity--

--Tagged under: Alienation--

When Veganism is Not Symbolic

A few weeks ago I wrote that veganism was nothing but a symbolic act. That inspired a retort from vegan dietitian Jack Norris, who quoted a paper called Expected Utility, Contributory Causation, and Vegetarianism. In it, Jason Gaverick Matheny (founder of New Harvest, a company developing lab-grown meat) argues in sciencey prose that a single vegetarian’s meat abstinence could lead to fewer animals being raised for food:

Since there are 20 million customers per threshold unit, and only one of these customers will actually complete the unit of which his or her purchase is a part, the probability of my completing a unit is one in 20 million. That means by buying meat I have a one-in-20 million chance of affecting the production and slaughter of one billion animals.

Hey, Kevin Costner decided a presidential election with his one vote in Swing Vote, so it could happen. It probably won’t, but Matheny believes that since you cannot be 100 percent sure you don’t make a difference, you can’t argue against vegetarianism on the grounds that it’s never effective on an individual level. So I guess I was wrong.

Here is what I said:

Plenty of meat eaters care about the ethics of food, even though vegans scoff at the idea of ethical animal killing. In my case, when I grocery shop, I buy mostly organ meats. And when I go to a restaurant, I look for the organ option the way a vegan looks for the vegan option. I do this because I think fewer animals will need to be raised and killed if more of the animal parts are used. In that sense, I am accomplishing exactly what vegans are — fewer animals are being born. (But I recognize that my consumer choices are almost totally insignificant in this regard; like veganism, this is a symbolic gesture).

If Matheny’s findings are correct, I should have been less definitive. It would have been more accurate to say “like veganism, this is all but a symbolic gesture.” The 1-in-20-million figure means that veganism technically isn’t pure symbolism, but with odds like that, calling yourself an animal liberator for avoiding animal products would be like someone calling themselves a millionaire for buying a lottery ticket.

Except you know when you lose the lottery. As Matheny points out, you can’t confirm whether or not you’re the one to cast the deciding vote against meat. That is what allows vegans to operate under the delusion that they are making a difference, even though they almost certainly are not.

And you can drop the “almost certainly” if a vegan’s goal is to improve life for existing animals. Unless they engage in direct action like freeing animals or arson, the most vegans can hope to do is reduce meat demand enough that farmers breed fewer animals into existence (farmers do not release animals when demand for meat goes down). This does absolutely nothing to address the problems of factory farming, which means ethical omnivores have vegans beat as far as improving animal lives.

But even if a vegan is satisfied with the goal of bringing fewer farm animals into the world, there is no perceived difference in animal numbers or the environment that a vegan can attribute to themselves. From the point of view of an individual vegan, veganism might as well be symbolic, even if 1 out of 20 million times it isn’t.

And then there are cases where veganism is overtly symbolic, like not eating animal products even when there is no possibility of stimulating demand for them. It’s not always possible to know when this is the case, but turning down meat even though it’s about to be thrown out is an obvious one. Eating grains rather than eating the small animals killed to grow and harvest grains is pointless. So is getting rid of non-vegan clothes or furniture that you had from before you were vegan, or not eating eggs from well-treated chickens (chickens aren’t aware of their property rights to those eggs, and you’re not going to bring any male chicks back to life). Of course avoiding oysters is symbolic as hell. 

But there are plenty of non-symbolic aspects to veganism too, some of which Norris and Matheny failed to note. The problem is, the good non-symbolic stuff is mostly abstract and indiscernible, whereas the bad non-symbolic stuff is what really counts.

Positive Ways Veganism is Not Symbolic (complete)

* You theoretically might be the person who leads to a decrease in the number of animals raised for food, though you will never know this.

* Avoiding the guilt of participating in what is seen as an immoral activity. 

* Stimulating a market for new kinds of processed foods. Vegans can gauge their progress by the number of packaged products with a green “V” on them.

However, the most dramatic effect that veganism has is on vegans and the people around them, not animals or the environment — and that effect is mostly negative.

Negative Ways Veganism Is Not Symbolic (abridged)

* Greater risk for nutritional imbalances. Humans are omnivores, which means that a vegan diet is not optimal for us. So unless vegans stay current on nutrient recommendations, deficiencies may creep in. Even if they do everything vegan authorities tell them to do, that might not help, since people are different and not everything is known about nutrition.

* Less delicious food. But this one is mitigated by the lowered culinary standards that vegans accept over time.

* Guilt. The main point of veganism is to avoid the guilt of intentionally participating in the suffering of animals, but vegans often discover new sources of guilt, especially if there is an environmental component to their veganism. Radically modifying your diet in response to a perceived injustice, even though it seems to accomplish nothing, opens yourself up to feeling responsible for other problems you can do nothing about (the existence of plastic, for instance). Attempting to save the world through personal consumption habits can develop into eco-neurosis.

* Encouraging obsessive tendencies. It’s not enough for vegans to avoid large chunks of meat or cheese. They have to check every label and interrogate waiters to make sure small amounts of animal products don’t slip into their food. The psychological aversion to animal products that goes along with this can make vegans feel ill if they find out something they ate had animal products in it.

* Alienation. Hunger from lack of vegan food or revulsion at the presence of non-vegan food makes it harder for vegans to enjoy social situations and special events. Sometimes the inconvenience is daunting enough to make vegans stay home.

But vegan alienation goes deeper than this. Book titles like Vegan Freak: Being Vegan in a Non-Vegan World and Living Among Meat Eaters: The Vegetarian’s Survival Handbook provide some indication of how alone vegans feel in their sanity. In his blog entry called Hoodlum Omnivores, David Horton writes:

Today, when plant-based foods are known to be so perfect for us, the whole thing of farming and killing animals seems so obviously crazy. Vegans probably feel that the worst trouble for us is in reminding ourselves we live as fearlessly as we do amongst such a big bunch of hoodlums. These ‘hoodlum’, weird-habited humans comprise around 99% of all humans on the planet.

Vegans can still be friends with that 99 percent of us, but they must do so despite our weird and murderous ways, which is rife with potential for cognitive dissonance. Veganism makes vegans judge us even if they aren’t normally judgmental people. As George Dvorsky explains in Meat Eaters Are Bad People, veganism is not just a personal decision with no implications for anyone else. If meat is wrong, that applies to everyone.

People often think that vegans are high on moral superiority, but that’s only sometimes true. It’s not fun to think that 99 percent of the world’s humans are hoodlums… it’s depressing! Naturally this gives many vegans a dim view of humanity, and what human wants to have that?

Veganism can also compromise friendships in the other direction — omnivores don’t always want to spend time with people who think they are immoral or evil. Just as vegans prefer not to date meat eaters, sometimes the feeling is mutual.

And do you really want to accept a philosophy that will have you equating animal use with human slavery?

So no, veganism is not only symbolic. To be more precise, I should have said that the positive effects of veganism are largely symbolic. Unfortunately, the negative aspects of veganism are a lot more real. Your odds of affecting animal production with your vegan diet are slim; the odds of making your own life and the lives of those around you more difficult and unpleasant are much better.

--Tagged under: Alienation--

--Tagged under: Purity--

Meat: It’s Like Eating a Corpse… Or a Shoe

Is meat food? To you and me, perhaps so. But for many vegans it isn’t, and not just in the sense that they’re against it. They have cast animal products so far out of their realm of possibilities that they cease to see them as potentially edible material.

This is different than finding animal products repulsive, though the two often go together. In this case, though, the disgust is optional. Meat just… isn’t food. Instead, it’s either a corpse (fair enough), a representation of death itself, or something more like an inorganic material, like plastic. Temptation is no longer an issue because non-foods aren’t appetizing; would you salivate at a funeral, or while shopping for lamps at IKEA?

Like the disgust for animal products that vegans build over time, this mentality shift isn’t usually intentional, but it does make staying vegan easier. It’s yet another reason that vegans often think (mistakenly) that veganism is not a sacrifice.

Here are a couple of quotes I found on the subject:

Eleanor: I don’t see meat as food anymore and I have no idea why people even want to eat it.

The Subtle Vegetarian: I have to say that seeing meat on the table, and seeing others eat it, has definitely gotten much easier after nearly 20 years. At this point, I’m so far from eating meat that I just don’t see it the same way anymore. This may sound really weird, and maybe I’m the only one who feels this way, but meat just doesn’t look like food to me. It’s like someone is eating a shoe, or a pile of grass, or a roadkill squirrel, or a tire. I think to myself, “why are they eating that? It’s not food!”

4elise: I don’t think when I began omitting things I would have believed this, but now, about four years into total veganism, when I am in the store and pass food that is meat, or dairy, or made with eggs, it just doesn’t seem like food anymore. Does that make sense?

Simon: Animal products are simply not food to me. If someone tells me that something contains eggs, they might as well have said that it contains cyanide as far as my processing goes: it’s something other than food, and I have absolutely no desire to eat it.

stellar26: I can say that it took about a year before I came to the realization that meat no longer looked- or smelled- like food to me.

Laura: I’ve been vegan for six months now and I’ve also recently found I don’t see meat as food anymore, it just looks like rotting flesh now. And I had to put “normal” (wtf!) milk in a friend’s coffee the other day, because even though he is vegetarian he is the most critical of my veganism (guilty conscience perhaps?) and won’t drink my “weird” (again wtf!) milk - never again, it felt awful. All I could picture was the poor calf and cow who had suffered for it.

Mojie: They ordered fried crawfish for an appetizer and all of a sudden, when I looked at the plate, all I could think of was how many animals died to make that sad little pile on the plate. … I think that was the day I really stopped seeing meat as “food” and started seeing it as death, pure and simple.

thedailyenglishshow: I’ve never thought of it as “difficult” because [meat] doesn’t seem like food to me - like human flesh to a non-zombie.

cobweb: I think this might be part of what makes us seem ‘extreme’ to omnis but after a while these things just look less like food and more like a postmortem on a plate.

Hippy Dave: I’m a veggie, since the age of 4. For me eating meat is just a concept that isn’t real. Imagine eating a table - you just wouldn’t do it, it’s not a possibility - that’s what meat is like to me. So it’s no use when people say, “you don’t know what you’re missing” and try to tempt me with the smell of bacon, etc.

Flying Fladoodles: I don’t see meat as food anymore. Once you’ve learned about the pain, the suffering, the murder, all the facts, all the secrets, a pork chop will never be food again. Right now, i see pork chop as a cooked dead pig. No, it’s a cooked murdered pig. … I would never eat carcass. It’s gross, it’s dirty, it’s unhealthy, and it is immoral. When you become a vegetarian, you don’t just see a loaf of bread, you will see that it is made from milk and eggs and you realize that it’s not worth it.

The Telegraph: “Even if she were starving, she couldn’t eat fish or meat. ‘It would be like eating my finger or a stone - I just don’t see it as food anymore.’”

3littlebirds: I don’t let my food touch meat products because I don’t want that stuff to be in my system. … I just don’t see meat as food. It’s dead animal. It disgusts me. It would be like if people ate poop and the knife that sliced the poop was used on your food. Wouldn’t that be gross to you? … I’m really not a big fan of eating out because of this.

Molokoplus: I just look at meat as something other people eat for some reason. I still cook it for my boyfriend sometimes, but it really is like frying up a shoe or something. It’s not something I want to eat, and I feel a bit confused about why he would want to eat it.

Anonymous: I find the smell of cooking flesh to be repulsive. The thought of animal fat dripping down ones chin makes me gag. I don’t see meat as food anymore — I only see and smell death!

Jolinda: Every time someone on my screen whined about the E. coli in hamburgers, “in our food,” I really just wanted to look them in the eye and scream, “IT’S NOT FOOD! It’s a ground up dead cow, not food!”

Kotegaeshi: I just don’t see [meat] as food anymore. I don’t know if there’s a “yuck” factor about it. It’s as if someone was eating a candle, or a balloon, or a pile of mud, or a seat cushion. Yeah I mean theoretically I could chew and swallow it, it’s just not something that’s an option when thinking of something I’d want to eat.

Gear Shifter: She told me to clean, prepare, and cook [salmon] for her. As soon as I picked it up, I truly felt like I was holding a dead being, rather than food, and I started crying. I grew up omni, but now I know I could never go back. Nor do I want to.

John: Sonic commercials for chocolate nut-covered ice cream don’t tempt me anymore. I don’t see it as food now — only as a poison for the unenlightened.

NYCVeg: I’ve been a vegetarian for so long (14 years; less than a year vegan, though) that, mentally, meat is simply no longer food to me. Asking me to have a bite of a hamburger would be like asking me to take a bite of my dinner plate or my shoe—it’s just not something that I think of as “consumable.”

Almeria: Within a couple of weeks I was completely repulsed at the sight of seeing pork ribs. I just didn’t see food anymore. I saw the ribs of an animal that had been born into a life of suffering only to die a horrible death. And that’s what I pretty much see now anytime I look at any meat, or any kind of product that contains animal ingredients.

Anonymous Reviewer: [Skinny Bitch] made me not even WANT meat. I had no interest in it. It became an item that just wasn’t an edible option, the same way eating a shoe or something like grass isn’t an option, this made meat not an option.

TangerineDream: Lately I’ve been wanting barbecue. I am a newbie vegetarian though so hopefully after awhile I’ll get the whole “meat doesn’t seem like food anymore” thing that some people get.

Jack Norris: [I]t’s hard for me to imagine eating animal flesh at this point as it doesn’t even seem like food to me – I think eggs, fish, and other meat normally (though not always) smells nauseating, and drinking cow’s milk is a bit bizarre.

This redefining of food into non-food can extend even to vegan dishes when vegans embrace greater restrictions, like raw foodism:

The 30 Bananas A Day Team: In an attempt to keep the community focused in succeeding on a low fat raw vegan lifestyle, we do not support the following photos posted on the forum: vinegar; oils; garlic (neurotoxin); honey; salt; agave; animal products; nutritional yeast; sauerkraut. We believe these substances are not food, therefore we do not recommend the consumption of them…

--Tagged under: Vegan Quotes--

--Tagged under: Purity--

A Clockwork Vegan

On Sunday, Melissa McEwen at Hunt.Gather.Love offered advice to someone whose vegetarian girlfriend wants to eat meat but is afraid she doesn’t like the taste anymore. (Coincidentally, Richard Nikoley at Free The Animal did a post on the same subject.) The man who emailed Melissa also contacted me, saying “I’ve never not eaten meat, so the idea of not having a taste for it is just completely alien to me.”

I was vegetarian when I first encountered the psychosomatic power of ethical beliefs. At a buffet I bit into a harmless looking slice of pizza that tasted a little strange. As soon as I saw that there was meat hidden beneath the cheese, I felt physically ill and left. I thought my body couldn’t handle meat anymore.

Less than a year later, I was vegan and that cheese would have been just as sickening to me.

I liked meat, dairy and eggs before I became vegetarian and then vegan. Most vegans don’t quit animal products because they hate the taste. They just hate the cruelty. But this moral opposition to animal use can make animal products indefensible and inedible.

This change was so severe in me that trace amounts of animal products were enough to gross me out. This was before the Daiya Fake Cheese Revolution and as much as I wanted to be able to eat a rice-, almond- or soy-based cheese, the casein in those products was a complete turnoff. Even if I’d been willing to bend my ethics, I wouldn’t have wanted to. I visualized that dairy derivative lurking in there and it revolted me.

There haven’t been studies on this phenomenon (shame on you, science), so I can only theorize why this is. But I think it’s pretty obvious that it’s conditioning.

Veganism has only one rule: don’t use animal products. You can slip now and then, but make a habit of it and you’re not vegan anymore –- in fact, you’ve become the thing all vegans hate. So for vegans, it’s pretty damn important not to eat animal products.

This philosophy affects you at every meal. Vegans are constantly thrust into scenarios that test their ethics. Imagine if a horny young Christian had to turn down premarital sex three times a day. Learning to hate animal foods viscerally is the most practical way to stay on the straight and narrow. This is one reason that freeganism is often discouraged. Eating meat that will otherwise be wasted doesn’t increase the demand for it, and that’s the main thing, but vegans worry that by not taming their taste for animal products, freegans are at greater risk of making exceptions and then giving up all together.

Some vegans never develop this aversion either. For them, it can be enough to associate animal products with suffering. Reading about the philosophy and finding support through a message board can keep these meat-loving vegans on the side of good.

But for most vegans, a meat aversion just happens. It’s a byproduct of constantly turning down immoral food. Eventually your subconscious catches on that there’s something wrong with these things. That can be true for diets in general. But veganism is even more dramatic because it goes beyond “That makes me gain weight” to “That food is torture and murder and eating it would make me less of a person.”

Jonathan Safran Foer writes in Eating Animals that being vegetarian is a daily workout of your “compassion muscle”:

[T]he decision to eat with such deliberateness would itself be a force with enormous potential. What kind of world would we create if three times a day we activated our compassion and reason as we sat down to eat, if we had the moral imagination and the pragmatic will to change our most fundamental act of consumption? … [C]ompassion is a muscle that gets stronger with use, and the regular exercise of choosing kindness over cruelty would change us. (257 - 258)

No wonder my vegan brain was so tired!

One of the things that annoys me about Eating Animals is that Foer often discusses vegetarianism as if it’s never been tried before. What would our sons and daughters be like if we raised them vegetarian?! What would Thanksgiving be like without a turkey?! What would happen to someone who chooses to be vegetarian and then sticks with it… would they become hyper-compassionate mutants?!

Why speculate? Foer could have researched Donald Watson, the man who coined “Vegan” and identified as one for the last 60+ years of his life. Did Watson become a hyper-compassionate mutant? Yes! In fact, doctors believe Watson could have lived even longer than the 95 years he pulled off, but his over-stimulated compassion muscle finally outgrew his skull just as his chest burst open from all the love in his heart.

Not really. Like other long-term decisions, once you get used to being vegan, it ceases to be much of a choice. Vegans do not internally debate and renew their pledge against eating animal products at every meal. They open the menu and find the one meat-free entry that can hopefully be made vegan. It’s automatic. Nothing is being exercised other than the reinforcing power of routine.

What is different about veganism is that it doesn’t just take non-vegan options off the table. It makes them repellent. Married people know it would be wrong to cheat, but they don’t consequently find everyone other than their spouse to be completely disgusting. But for a lot of vegans, that is what happens with non-vegan food.

A better analogy than a compassion muscle, then, is the Ludovico treatment in A Clockwork Orange. Vegans make the initial decision to give up animal products, but the conditioning assures they stick with it. Except nobody has to strap vegans to a chair and give them sickness inducing drugs as they stare at photos of meat trays. They do it to themselves.

Figuratively, of course.

veganconditioning

I don’t mean watching slaughterhouse footage, which most vegans don’t do very often. As a vegan, I thought that one of the advantages of giving up animal products was that I didn’t have to watch these things because I wasn’t contributing to them.

It’s the way that vegans think about animal products that turns them into nauseating untouchables. Vegans research where food comes from, which is good, but they tend to focus on the least appealing aspects, at least regarding animal foods. Some vegans, especially the more activist sort, believe that terms like “tortured animal corpses pumped full of antibiotics” “blood- and pus-filled secretions” and “chicken periods” better convey the reality of non-vegan foods than less graphic terms like “meat,” “milk” and “eggs.”

Plants can be disgusting too, if you think about them the way vegans would have us think about animal parts. I had a roommate in college who refused to eat fruit because they were the sexual organs of plants. But you’ll never see PETA referring to fruit as “rotting plant ovary corpses.” Probably because fruit is what PETA wants you to eat. 

Vegans’ vivid, bloody literalizing of animal product terminology is blatantly intended to promote unpleasant connotations. Here is PETA’s take on the odd human tradition of eating “periods” plucked from the ass of a bird:

Besides the fact that each egg eaten represents 34 hours of suffering for chickens (who, as it turns out, score higher than dogs and cats on cognitive tests), when you eat an egg, you’re putting a bird’s period directly into your mouth. Tasty, huh? If you’re going to eat an omelet, you might as well suck on a used tampon.

Not very convincing, but the very existence of such comparisons makes it that much harder to leave veganism.

The health argument for veganism contributes too. According to conventional wisdom, cholesterol and saturated fat are nutritional anti-christs, and vegans have good reason to buy into this — they don’t eat much saturated fat and they eat no cholesterol.

As Billy Thogersen pointed out in my interview with him, vegans sometimes rationalize the existence of healthy looking meat eaters by imagining that their insides are coated with plaque, their veins about to snap shut. Even when vegans have decided meat is healthy and morally okay, and are ready to re-introduce cholesterol and more saturated fat into their diets, this imagery can be hard to shake.

And then there are stories vegans tell each other about ex-vegans who started eating animal products again and felt sick. These are mostly myths but they add to the perception that animal products are something to fear, and not just for ethics.

This is a great way to think if you want to keep yourself vegan. “Meat is gross and wrong!” is easier to stick to than “Meat is delicious and nutritious and I want it but unfortunately that would be unethical.”

It becomes a problem, though, when a vegan wants to take the next logical step into ex-veganism.

As Melissa and some of her commenters pointed out, eating little bits of meat at a time helps. Sushi is a good start because it’s surrounded by a protective coating of veggies and grains. Small portions of meat overwhelmed by vegetables was my route.

Many vegeterians and vegans weren’t exposed to a wide variety of animal products before they gave them up. Raw fish and duck, two things I’d never had before my vegan years, are probably my favorite foods now. So aspiring ex-vegans should also try small doses of animal products that they’ve never tasted. If pork chops weren’t enough to keep you out of veganism, they may not be the best way out.

Like a lot of ex-vegans, you might eventually find yourself eating the organs, tendons and bones that terrify many lifelong omnivores. I wonder if these ex-vegans develop a love for the “nasty bits” as a final triumph over the period of their lives when they thought every part of the animal was a nasty bit.

--Tagged under: Purity--

--Tagged under: SelfDenial--

Now here’s something that will be good for vegans but bad for veganism: an iPhone app called Vegetarian Scanner that determines whether any of the big, chemical-sounding words on an ingredients label are non-vegan additives.

As this video shows, cautious vegans take a photo of the ingredients list with their iPhone, click on the questionable words and then see whether they are animal-derived or not. Maybe it will eventually include an alarm that sounds if there are animal ingredients and you go ahead and try to buy the product anyway.

Apparently this doesn’t work on all labels yet, but if the idea spreads, it has the potential to make shopping safe again for vegans determined to keep their bodies free from non-vegan taint. 

For veganism as a movement, however, Vegetarian Scanner is a major setback.

In this video, soothing music plays as the iPhone determines whether Tocopherol-Rich Extract, Calcium Phosphates, Magnesium Carbonates and Fatty Acid Esters of Ascorbic Acid (i) Ascorbyl Palmitate are animal-derived. But the real sound vegans are likely to hear as they re-take photos until they get the ingredients label perfectly in focus is the laughing of their bemused friends. Especially if the vegan had just been bragging about how natural vegan food is.

Even if you’re alone at the grocery store while you scan ingredients labels, it won’t be long before someone asks what you’re up to. And if you say the truth, “I’m vegan and I’m checking to make sure there are no trace amounts of animal product in this,” you’ve just made veganism look like a religion to them.

“Oh those crazy vegans,” they’ll think as they shake their heads and walk away, “It sure is foolish to care about animals.”

--Tagged under: Purity--

--Tagged under: Vegan Cult--

Pepperoni, Oysters and Vegan Purity

After witnessing a vegetarian friend pick off all the meat from a pepperoni pizza she received instead of the cheese pizza she ordered, Julia Galef at Rationally Speaking considered the issue of vegetarian purity:

People adopt a general behavioral rule, or “heuristic,” that works for most cases, but then they stick to it even in those particular cases where it doesn’t apply. … Valuing the label “vegetarian” rather than the logic behind the label makes your vegetarianism seem more like a matter of remaining pure than of avoiding harm. …
One of the interesting features of evolution is that it often produces “good enough” solutions, rules that are imperfect but that work well enough for us to get by. … They’re “good enough” to give us the right outcome most of the time. But that doesn’t mean we can’t do better.

But today Elaine from Vegan Soapbox argued just the opposite. In her Open Letter to Christopher Cox — the man who put vegan purity on trial last week by proposing an oysters for vegans scheme — Elaine maintained that doing better is too complex and confusing, so let’s stick with purity:

It’s more rational to choose vegan over ethical flexitarian. It’s essentially choosing simplicity over complexity, with the same end result. This point is well made in Jonathan Safran Foer’s book “Eating Animals,” towards the end where he explains why he’s betting on vegetarian over “humane meat.” A vegan diet is simply simpler. …
Mr. Cox, I ask that you please stop trying to change the definition of “vegan.” … I help run a vegan potluck group full of mostly nonvegans who like to experiment with vegan food. Because of you, I had to remind them that oysters are not vegan. … Vegan means NO ANIMAL PRODUCTS. By implying that vegans should eat oysters, you are confusing people. Please stop.

--Tagged under: Purity--

--Tagged under: Ethics--

Did Oysters Just Kill Veganism?

“Cox makes some worthy arguments. I’m sure eating local oysters is (in an immediate, direct sense) more environmentally friendly than, say, eating vegan fake meat shipped from a factory halfway around the world. But that’s neither here nor there in regards to veganism.”

— SuperVegan

Vegan Retreat

Is it just me, or is April 7, 2010 the day that veganism died? I’m pretty sure I’m not imagining this, and actually I’m a little pissed off about it. I wanted to kill veganism! Oh well. I’m just impressed that someone pulled it off. Here’s what did the trick:

Consider the Oyster, by Christopher Cox

Donald Watson, the inventor of the word “vegan,” once said that he and his Vegan Society cohorts had released veganism like a genie from the bottle and that it could never be put back in. But yesterday Christopher Cox accomplished exactly that. All it took was one little shell-bound technicality of an animal that is healthy to eat, doesn’t suffer, and isn’t bad for the environment — satisfying all the major supposed goals of veganism. Why the hell didn’t I think of that?

First, let me be clear. It is not compassion and caring for animals that is dead. Nor is someone following a diet that is almost free or even totally free of animal products completely out of the question. It is purity veganism — the strict avoidance of all animal products no matter what without exception, coupled with the belief that it is wrong for anyone else not to follow the exact same restrictions — that has been rudely shown the door.

If I’m caught snickering at the funeral of an ideology that many automatically conflate with compassion and caring, it is not because I believe people should be heartless. It’s because veganism was nutritionally self-destructive, psychologically alienating and not even necessarily in the best interest of animals. That being vegan was motivated by positive intentions and compassion only made it more depressing. Good riddance.

Caring about where your food comes from and attempting to make better choices, however, is great. People can and should concern themselves with what they’re eating and how it got to their plates. But it is now clear that it makes no sense to attempt to do this by being vegan.

I smiled a lot yesterday as I read the vegan reactions to Cox’s article, but these were not smirks of malice. I wasn’t happy to see vegans questioning the premises their ideology because I failed at veganism, and I feel guilty, and I want others to fall short of their noble ideals as I did. I was smiling because dogmatic veganism is in its death throes and we’ll all be better off without it.

Of course not every vegan agreed with Cox. But the nature of the vegan disagreement was more damaging to purity veganism than the substantive number of vegans who did agree. The vegans who shunned veganism plus oysters (“oystro-veganism” as one commenter put it) did so at the cost of making their lifestyle seem like a hypocritical, consistency-obsessed identity label that is more concerned with its own definition than the impact being vegan actually has on the world. VeganOutreach really has their work cut out for them now.

I haven’t yet been deluged with emails from ex-vegans ready for their close-ups, but give it time to sink in. Pretty soon I’ll be so swamped with hateful, bitter ex-vegans besmirching their old beliefs that I’ll only have time to ask one question: “You used to be vegan right?”

So what did vegans say, exactly?

Read More

--Tagged under: Ethics--

--Tagged under: Purity--

Christopher Cox on Bivalve Curious Veganism

I’ve heard of many vegans who are philosophically okay with eating bivalves, yet most of them don’t anyway. It’s odd because vegans get so excited about a new vegan cheese or meat substitute. How can they contain themselves from sucking down a plate of delicious oysters once they decide it is ethically permissible to do so?

My guess is vegan purity, habit, or wanting to avoid label confusion. Christopher Cox, for instance, has trouble defining exactly what he is. But if your real concerns are animal suffering or the environment, Cox persuasively argues that you should get over yourself and make oysters your protein of choice.

At the very least, veganism plus oysters beats lacto-ovo vegetarianism on every count. Jonathan Safran Foer forgot to point this out in Eating Animals, but there is undoubtably more suffering in an egg or a glass of milk than in a plate of oysters.

There’s more nutrition too. Conveniently, the most ethical meat on the planet is among the healthiest. If a vegan were to replace their beans and grains with oysters, odds are that vitality, alertness, strength and joy would join in perfect harmony with their soothed conscience.

One problem with veganism, however, is that it makes the prospect of eating any animal product seem disgusting. It would be easier for Cox to convince those who haven’t yet taken the plunge into morally disciplined eating. Still, if vegans can learn to love tofu and TVP, surely they can train themselves to tolerate oysters.

And don’t worry. If the lifestyle catches on, the label will follow.

--Tagged under: Ethics--

--Tagged under: Purity--

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