My other favorite is that veganism is for white people.
People love to call veganism ‘privileged,’ while conveniently ignoring the fact that the only reason animal products are even close to being accessible for the average consumer is because they’re factory farmed, slaughtered and packed by grossly underpaid labourers working in dangerous conditions, and then massively subsidised by all of our taxes.
I think in a developed nation, "veganism" almost always connotes some amount of health consciousness, which can be expensive. Different, I imagine, in rice-and-lentils developing parts of the world.
AFAIK Oreos, sour patch kids, taco bell bean burritos, and McD's French fries are vegan...but they're not associated with "vegan culture."
Quick correction: McD’s fries are vegan everywhere except the US. They use some sort of milk and “natural beef flavoring” in the breading here for some dumb ass reason. In Europe they’re vegan though.
That’s just ridiculous to me. Why? I have had fries plenty of times which were way better than McDonald fries and all they were made of was potatoes, oil, and salt. The perfect French fry doesn’t need anything other than that. It’s all about choosing the right potato variety and then it all comes down to cooking technique.
The fact that McDonald puts anything else in their fries just makes me shake my head.
Edit: after confirming online, there are multiple reports saying that McD's stopped using animal-based fats for cooking some 5-30 years ago depending on the market (e.g. US, Canada, etc.). The big push to move away from beef tallow in the US was in the '90s, and now McDonald's confirms that there is beef flavoring in their fries.
Edit 2: and I guess McDonald's uses mostly a canola-based oil blend, but beef flavoring still goes into the blend.
Edit 3: And looking at the ingredients of the vegetable oil itself, the beef flavorants come from hydrolyzed milk derivatives, so not vegan. Apparently McDonald's uses different oils for different things, so I wonder if in the future people could ask for the oil without the flavoring.
Are you vegan, because all of those second paragraph things are associated with veganism.
Well idk about taco bell cause I'm not a seppo but literally when I told me sister I was going vegan and asked if she had advice she said "Sour patch kids and oreos are vegan"
I've lived in my car and definitely taco-bell was a go-to option on rainy days. I usually order a few bean burritos. Substitute black beans because its mor calories and the same price.
I guess my experience has been that those things are mentioned more as novelties, as in, "hey crazy thing but instead of kale chips you can eat sour patch kids!" But that's just my experience.
I’m all for veganism, but that exact same criticism can be made of fruit. No way any of us could afford strawberries or blueberries etc without exploitation of migrant workers and subsidized water.
My point is just that people of all diets currently benefit from perverse subsidies, and it is wrong to think that vegetarians are insulated from the horrors of land misuse and labor exploitation.
We really need to drop the expensive ass meat replacements as the main meatless option. There are countless delicious meals you can make without meat, and are much cheaper because of it.
Perfectly understandable. I'm also quite reluctant to eat anything above 10 bucks. Over here we luckily have two restaurants near my work that serve meatless food WITHOUT expensive ass vegan imitation meat. Just using regular ingredients like nuts or beans or even soya strips/chunks which are DIRT cheap, and no surprise, the meals are usually no more than 5 bucks. One of em also serves drinks/salad/desert for and additional buck each, that one's my favorite :)
I think that calling veganism privileged is a response to the more militant vegans who don't realize that economic hardship and food scarcity can make their version of veganism unsustainable for some people.
When you're in desperate levels of food scarcity, you don't have room to be picky. When you are relying on borrowed/stolen/passed down or thrifted clothing, you're going to wear what you can get.
Veganism is an ethical choice, but it's a choice some people aren't in a position to make.
I don't eat this stuff, but I assume they mean vegan cheese, tofu, tempeh, store bought seitan sausages/deli meats, fancy ice cream, almond milk, and whatever weird stuff I see in some rich comrade fridges
If you care about animals, you don't move to a "desert" where you don't have a supply of non-animal-based food. That's the cost of trying to give a shit. You don't get to be an opportunistic predator, you don't practice it only when it's convenient with your business/career plan.
For most people this isn't even an issue, but carnists love to glom onto the exceptions as if most humans are living on a space station surrounded by asteroid cattle.
Some people can't afford the cost of giving a shit, and expecting everyone to have the same levels of economic freedom and access to food and clothing needs as you do is a position coming from ignorance and privilege. Even thinking of moving as a voluntary thing is from that same position.
If you can be vegan and can afford to live that lifestyle, great, that's a moral thing to do.
If you're starving on the street you don't have the option.
The fact veganism is an option some people can choose and others can't makes it a privilege.
I've lived in a dessert, and there's no shortage of fruit, dates, olives, bread, carrots, onions, beans, rice, cabbage, beets, and all the veggies you need at the local market
Hell, israel has the highest number of vegans per capita than any country, and most of the diet is Whole Foods.
I'd imagine many people who call veganism "white" are taking a more global perspective. While factory farmed/processed food is the norm in the U.S. et. al., it's not that way around the world. There are other parts of the world where people attempting veganism would suffer ill effects and even death due to B12 deficiency as not everyone has a wide variety of food to choose from, can go to the store and get B12 supplements, or buy fortified processed foods.
Then, the whole reason the average, modern (U.S.) citizen (or people from similarly set up countries) consumes factory foods in the first place at all is because we're born into grossly overpopulated capitalist societies that can only be supplied by factory farmed foods made possible by fossil energy.
This tweet then uses the unfortunate consequences of human overpopulation + capitalism and it's reliance on factory farms to feed such massive numbers to imply that eating meat is the problem.
Eating meat is not wrong, it is what our species has evolved to do, it's what many other animals do. What's wrong is the way modern humans live, exploiting nature for profit and growing to massive numbers to facilitate capitalism's extraction of natural resources.
Factory farming is very much a global problem that's not limited to the US
We estimate that over 90% of farmed animals globally are living in factory farms at present. This includes an estimated 74% of farmed land animals (vertebrates only) and virtually all farmed fish.[1]
It's not just more people that's caused factory farming. It's increase per capita consumption. The rates of per capita consumption are enormously different. If everyone ate like Americans, we would need 137% of the world's habitable land which includes forests, urban areas, arable and non-arable land, etc. Cutting down every forest wouldn't even be enough
There's a reggae album out of Jamaica by Romain Virgo with a song called "I'm doin good"
In that song is the line, "may not be able to buy what vegetarians cook but I'm doin good"
The album is from 2010. The first time I heard that song was my first realization that vegetarianism can be difficult as I'd recently been to Jamaica, and they do love them some vegetarianism. It hadn't occurred to me that maybe some of them wanted to be vegetarian but weren't able.
This shit is insane. While it's not just overall more expensive to be vegan. But some vegan substitutes are expensive as hell, while the carnivor alternative is super cheap because substitution is a joke. There is a local little factory that makes oat milk. Great, right? No long routes, and no gross tiddy milk. One liter is 4 bucks, while random milk is like 1 buck. There is a dry meat alternative that is made of smoked beets, it's pretty much twice as expensive as just dry meat. It's a clown world.
Crazy how people wanting to live in luxury has brought down the prices of all these products once deemed too expensive. Vanilla was only for the rich and now it's in every cheap product. It became so normal that the word "vanilla" is now synonymous with "normal" or "basic".
Cattle farming predates taxes and subsidies. Animals have been traditionally grown to provide additional food while feeding on crop remains. Where do you think hay or corn stalks go or why there's no widespread use of carnivore meat?