altonzm:

problackgirl:

There’s a vegan debate on my Twitter timeline so here’s a question for tumblr. What do you think of vegans, veganism and the meat industry?

while I believe that there is a lot of vegan rhetoric which is irritating and ham-fisted at best and racist/misogynistic at worst (i.e. evoking slavery/the holocaust when talking about factory farming and so on, equating human women with cows, assuming that vegan diets are universally accessible or medically wise etc. etc.), I also think there are a lot of people who use the figure of the Annoying Vegan as a way of eliding the imo correct arguments that meat and dairy industries are 1) unnecessarily cruel to animals and 2) are an unbelievably disproportionate contributor to net CO2 emissions

I think it is honestly laughable to suggest that the level of meat and dairy consumption per capita in the wealthiest countries of the world can be sustained/ is good for public health/ should be aspired to, and I think a lot of people’s knee-jerk hostility towards veganism has more to do with their own moral discomfort than it does with genuine principle

I am not a vegan but my personal perspective on animal rights and meat-eating comes from a rural economic rights perspective; I believe that industrialised meat and dairy industries are catastrophic for independent farmers wherever they entrench themselves, and I believe that it’s dangerous for food sources to become more and more beholden to corporate ownership in fewer hands, bc I believe it leads to commercially-driven artificial famine (i.e. at the moment we’re in a massive global food surplus but famine still occurs, which means we have no issue with productivity but a major issue with profit-driven distribution)

I think that vegans in the wealthiest countries of the world by and large have terrible priorities, understand veganism in terms of individualist moral righteousness rather than in the context of the history of agricultural capitalism, and are largely useless for organising vs what I see as the biggest issues w/ corporate agriculture having grown up relatively rurally and seen its impact first hand (albeit in a wealthy country where independent farmers have myriad more options than others do)

I have no foundational moral objection to the basic process of animal rearing and slaughter for food