• 0 Posts
  • 22 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 29th, 2024

help-circle










  • Some perspective is important here. From the point of view of the average person, what a vegan might call the “carnist” worldview, there’s a cultural perception that being vegan is a kind of monolithic puritanical religion. As if to live a life without using animal products is comparable to the self-flagellations of the penitent Christian.

    But it has to be recognized, that perception is a stereotype perpetuated from outside perspectives looking in. Inexperience vs experience.

    In real life, there is constant disagreement and debate among vegans, so definitely not a monolith. With today’s food options (at least in western countries), there’s nothing puritanical or self-punishing about living a vegan lifestyle - to the point that “junkfood vegan” is a badge of pride from some. At the end of the day we’re just regular people, like everyone else. All we’ve done is decided that other animals should have basic universal rights, and then we try to live in accord with that.

    It’s not perfection, it’s a moral baseline.

    And it’s worth striving for that baseline, because reducetarianism doesn’t work.



  • That’s a good general direction. But all the more reason to push for those things now, and then.

    Also, saying it’s impossible under capitalism somewhat doesn’t give the animal liberation movements the credit they deserve. It’s worth looking into the history of veganism. While there have been plenty of people and groups in virtually every culture who were either vegan-adjacent or somewhere in the same direction, the vegan movement is quite recent in the grand scheme of things. Any snapshot of where we’re at might make it seem like we’re small and insignificant, but the growth of the movement has been quite rapid when looking at the big picture.

    We’re just still in the early stages. But even 10 years ago was way different. Far fewer plant-based options. Far less awareness of the horror of factory farms. A lot less visibility in general. Now it’s getting harder for people to ignore us.







  • That’s a pretty fair assessment, though it’s hard to imagine that being much less of an uphill battle. People still place a significant amount of their identity in what they eat. In the US at least, a culture of perceived personal freedoms still heavily prevails. Even though vegans are already relegated to trying to appeal to people to change their individual choices voluntarily, people still frequently accuse us of militancy and being tyrannical - even though we’ve virtually never even had real representation in government, aside from very small hard-won anti animal abuse laws that have resulted from extremely risky investigative operations.

    Any governmental system that makes any attempts to shift us all in a more vegan direction would quite easily provoke significant backlash and possibly even the threat of overthrow.