Mar 24 2008
A Veganism Rant (again)
Ethics and reasoning often find it hard to coincide. I see this reflected in discussions about religion, politics, and since beginning to sort out my feelings about it, in diet.
I read vegan and vegetarian food blogs. I do this because Michael and I eat mostly vegan and vegetarian. It’s a choice we made from a health standpoint, a budget standpoint, and partly, an ethical standpoint. But sorting out your priorities with ethics is important, too.
Isa, vegan cookbook author, activist, etc, posted a journal entry a while back where she made a snide comment about Mollie Katzen (vegetarian cookbook author). From the entry: “Let the turncoats like Mollie Katzen… dismiss vegetarianism and promote their fictitious happy meat and animals that want to die for us. We don’t need ‘em.”
Well, I went looking for Mollie Katzen’s comments, and they’re actually quite reasonable, but they come from a different system of ethically evaluating food choices. Here are a couple links to peruse for Mollie Katzen’s comments: Food and Wine article, Interview.
I’ll come right out and say - I don’t agree entirely with Mollie Katzen, but I really don’t agree with activist vegans, either. I come somewhere in the middle of everything. I’m attempting to solidify some beliefs here, so let me ennumerate.
I believe that there is a sanctity to animal life similar to human life. I believe making a delineation between different animal forms is tricky. I believe that if I am not willing to kill an animal, skin it, etc - I probably shouldn’t be eating it. I also believe that humans have, as a species, always eaten meat, and likely always will.
I think there are morally better ways to kill and eat animals. I have respect for butchers, for local farmers, for hunters. I have respect for people who live close to the animals, care for them throughout their life and face them as they kill them, skin them and dress them. I will always respect those people more than people who buy their hamburger from Sam’s club or McDonald’s.
I am not sure that killing an animal is ever entirely moral. But I’m not sure we have any entirely moral choices.
If killing an animal is entirely immoral, why? Is it the act of death or the depraved living situation the current meat industry espouses? Or is it because the animal has been submitted to human needs?
If it’s the very last issue - then what is moral? Certainly not zoos, aquariums, pets, wool, seeing-eye dogs or police dogs.
Mollie Katzen isn’t a turn-coat. She was never an activist. She has made her decisions based on her own answers to the moral question of eating animals.
Veganism isn’t the answer and it never will be. I don’t believe eating meat is the answer, either, though. I just take offense with anyone who thinks Mollie Katzen’s comments are giving bad press to vegans. They give themselves bad press. Any person with more than half a brain knows that no moral disagreement will be black and white. Heaven forbid Mollie Katzen come forward with a different system of moral beliefs and speak reasonably about making choices about our diets. I, for one, welcome her discourse - even though I don’t agree with it.
Veganism is stupid. In the hands of people like Isa, it’s not about animal rights or whatever; it’s about being conspicuously different to inflate your own self-image.
What if I stop eating meat or dairy, buy free-range eggs from a local farm, eat gelatin and wear leather shoes? In pragmatic terms, I have eliminated all animal cruelty from my lifestyle, because no animals have suffered on my behalf. No animal was ever slaughtered just to make Jell-O or leather shoes — it’s not cost-effective. So I am merely making use of the byproducts of that animal’s suffering. Better that than throw those byproducts away, I should think.
But that’s not good enough. If I call myself a vegan, I can’t eat peanut butter that contains an infinitesimal amount of diglycerides that may or may not have been produced from animal fat (again, a byproduct). I can’t eat sugar because it may or may not have been filtered through charred animal bones.
That last one pisses me off especially, because even though there are multiple national brands of sugar that are now known not to ever use bone char, vegans insist on sweetening everything with maple syrup or agave nectar or whatever. That isn’t moral righteousness, it’s conspicuous consumption of expensive goods.
Or the blog post I saw recently where someone proclaimed happily that Wonder Bread was vegan, and someone enthusiastically responded, without apparent sarcasm: “Wonder Bread, Vegannaise, & some of the new varieties of Tofurkey lunch meat: now *that* sounds like a good sandwich.” Hurray! It’s basically junk food, but I can eat it!
Mollie Katzen has a point about “ism”s. They’re just as stupid as any other ideological nonsense, and they attract the same feeble-minded crowd.