Oh yeah, that’s right, I hurt poor little innocent broccoli. My violent vegan ways put an end to the happy continued existence of your average broccoli plant, denying it the warmth of sunshine, the moisture of the soil, its continued existence. I’m the Great Plant Oppressor, here to end the lives of the earth’s harvestable vegetables, fruits, and grains. I’m evil.
Or so meat-eaters would have you believe.
Some vegans that I talk to tell me that they still hear from defensive meat eaters that they’re violating the basic rights of plants to exist. Of course, this is patent absurdity. If meat eaters really feel for plants, they should quit eating meat, since meat production requires much more grain for the production of a k-calorie than does simply eating the grain yourself.
What is this about then? How can ruthless carnivores, the “mmmm I love steak” people give a shit about plants? The simple answer is that they don’t. What they’re doing is trying to kill you with a thousand tiny blows. They are perhaps uncomfortable with your choice, and in their effort to muddy the ethical terrain of ethical veganism, they try to illustrate that your choices are absurd. They’re trying to break you down, trying to dismiss your ethics, trying to support their own decision to keep on eatin’ away—the earth and its animals be damned. If they can show themselves that you’re making an absurd choice by respecting the right of animals to live, they can dismiss their own conscience about what they’re eating. The “plant rights” line is about this and absolutely nothing more.
Does anyone seriously believe that broccoli feels pain? Granted, in a real sense, we can never truly know if another entity besides ourselves feels pain (I think the professional philosophers relate this to the problem of “other minds,”) but there are indicators that are pretty clear. For example, if a hostile meat eater shoves me at a protest and I fall and hit my head, I’ll likely cry out in pain, and move away. If the hostile meat eater also shoved, say, a kale plant, there’d be few visible indicators of pain. It wouldn’t yell. It wouldn’t pull away in pain. It wouldn’t do much of anything at all—because it is kale and it has no central nervous system or pain receptors.
The point here is that this “plant rights” crap is just bluster. This is the repressive denial machinery of the meat-eater who’s trying to convince himself that there’s nothing wrong with killing sentient beings who are capable of suffering for your food, even when there’s absolutely no reason to do so. Or at least that’s what I, vegenaise, the great oppressor of the broccoli has to say on the matter.
Posted by Bob Torres 
Filed under: There always seems to be that “one thing” that prevents vegetarians from going vegan. That thing that they couldn’t live without. I have to admit that when we were vegetarian, I always thought of vegans as a bit extreme or out there. I just didn’t get it.
So for me, it was cheese and surprisingly, half and half. I thought I just couldn’t live without either. Eggs were always slightly gross to me, and I didn’t like the taste of milk on cereal. But my coffee had to be just right … and at the time soy milk tasted funny in coffee.
But at one point in our lives, something clicked. How can we say that we are concerned over animal welfare when we still eat eggs, cheese, and milk? The half and half in the coffee suddenly started to seem insignificant.
So, we ate the last egg in the refrigerator, stopped buying cheese, and started trying soymilk in our coffee. Now, it all seems so normal. How could we every enjoy eggs? They are so gross! And milk? Yuck! The thought of them now makes my stomach turn. (Btw, Silk’s enhanced soymilk is wonderful in coffee – better than their version of half and half.)
It’s amazing how your perceptions can change so quickly. Now, I find myself having little patience for vegetarians who protest “but I couldn’t live without x!”) even though I try to think back to when I was in the same position. We have a professor friend who is lacto-vegetarian and who is always telling us about how she just could not live without her daily yogurt and her mom’s sweets, even after just having watched Peaceable Kingdom, a movie about factory farming and the Farm Sanctuary. I understand the part about the sweets more than I do the yogurt; for her, the milky sweets are part of her heritage and have strong family connections, so they are harder to give up. But, I might just have to bring her a container of silk yogurt one day to try. I don’t want to be annoying and push too hard, but I guess I would like to see someone else have that moment of epiphany – that it just isn’t worth the suffering of animals to have that daily yogurt.
And on that note, I need to also put in a word of thanks to the vegan friend of ours who showed us, with gentle reminders and through example, that life as a vegan is possible and happy. I guess for us it took meeting “a real live vegan” to understand and to start to change our perception.
...how can I make a difference?
This is the most common thing that I hear when I talk to people about being vegan, and ultimately, it is one of their main reasons for not going vegan. Even good-hearted people who understand that factory farming is horrible and who want to respect the rights of animals sometimes challenge me with this defeatist point, and frankly, it bothers me. It assumes that nothing will ever change, and it completely removes our actions from being our responsibility. A couple of things bother me about this line of thinking:
First, it ignores what veganism affirms. For me, veganism isn’t a rejection, it is an affirmation of the way I wan to live, the way I want things to be. That in and of itself makes a massive difference in my own life, in me being true to what I see as my ethical choices. This is vital if I’m going to live a life that’s ethically consistent.
Second, this defeatism seems to assume that nothing will ever change—period. The problem is that if one never does anything to change the system, yeah, it probably won’t change. But if many individuals together decide to do something, it can make a huge difference.
Third, this idea also ignores the fact that any reduction in animal suffering is significant. If I had the choice between saving zero animals a year or 100 animals a year by doing something as simple as changing my diet, I’d clearly choose to save 100 animals. Are the 100 or so animals that I save every year the end of animal agriculture? Of course not. But that’s 100 fewer animals that have suffered through the despicable conditions of factory farming. I’ve removed my support for the system, and if millions or tens of millions or even hundreds of millions more people do the same, the system of animal exploitation suddenly loses out.
In the end, no single person can accomplish everything on their own. Only through conscious social action can we ever make a difference, but that fact alone does not absolve people of the duty to do what they see as right.
Why oh why oh why do they have to put milk in bread? Bread? Isn’t bread supposed to be some sort of ground up grain, a leavening agent, water, and maybe some salt and sweetener? I spent a good five to ten minutes in the store the other day looking for a simple loaf of wheat bread. Every single one I picked up had milk or whey in it. If it didn’t have dairy, it had honey. So I ended up just picking up some random cheapy brand (the kind that’s wheat but still really soft like white bread) just so I could make a damn sandwich. Of course, I couldn’t make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with this bread, because natural peanut butter just rips it to shreds.
Plus, why is it the cheap and generic brands that don’t have milk? Like the addition of milk or milk by-products make it fancy?
I just don’t get it.
You know you’re popular in the vegan world when the #1 google search that leads to your site is “tofu farts.” I consider this a milestone.
So, once you become vegan, what the hell do you do about your favorite pair of butless leather chaps? Do you get rid of them and buy pleather ones? What about the old wool sweaters?
I personally hang on to this stuff, and I’ll wear it until it wears out. I can’t see throwing away perfectly good things, even if those things do have an objectionable ethical background. Chucking it is wasteful, feeds into more needless consumption, and creates even more waste on an already waste-heavy planet. I’d not buy anything new that contains animal products, but why throw away the old stuff when it is perfectly usable.
Well, one reason to throw it away is a question of marketing. Think about it: how much of a hypocrite do you look like if you’re making a case for animal rights and wearing leather? I suppose also that one could give such things away, which is probably a good course of action.
For the other vegans out there, what do you do? What do you do if someone gives you a non-vegan gift (a friend received a leather picture frame for Christmas….)?
My father is a “good eater.” He loves his food. He drinks heartily. He has a big belly. He also loves to talk about food, and he often waxes poetic about some meat dish that he’s recently had. The other day he was telling me about some sort of steak pie he ate at a friend’s house, and he always loves telling me about the veal dish he eats at this one restaurant. I used to just put up with it, because he’s not doing it out of malice. I figure he does it because he doesn’t make the connection between my diet and the implications for his diet – he’s perfectly happy eating what he eats, and he wants to share that good experience with his family. I understand that. I can wax poetic about aloo gobi masala or chinese broccoli.
But over time, I have become more and more physically disgusted with just the thought of meat. It’s getting harder to listen to his stories without a horrible grimace on my face. I haven’t figured out the best way to say that it’s disgusting without hurting his feelings. If it were some random person, I wouldn’t feel so bad but it’s always harder with family.
If you ever sit down to eat with omnivores, even polite ones, the question of why you’re not eating what they’re eating inevitably comes up. Even good-hearted omnis sometimes want to know why you’re vegan, what you eat1, and how long you’ve been at this for.
In her excellent book Living Among Meat Eaters, Carol Adams says that the dinner table is never the place to discuss veganism, and I sort-of agree. The dinnertable isn’t the place to have the vegan conversation without looking preachy, which I try to avoid at all costs. But sometimes, people can be demanding. They don’t let up. They keep pushing. And they really want to know why you aren’t eating this lovely chicken, or wonderful beef, or expensive endangered fish that everyone else is into. So, sometimes I begin to tell them. I tell them that I think animals are tortured. I tell them that we don’t need meat to live. I tell them that even if they don’t care about animal rights that they’re likely consuming meat that was drenched in deadly bacteria at one point or another. Having been pushed, I say the real reasons that I’m a vegan. And they inevitably say, after just a minute of this,
“wait. Don’t tell me. I don’t really want to know. I might want to stop eating meat.”
And here we hit the wall of blissful ignorance yet again. It is clearly better for these folks not to know, to imagine that the cow that they’re eating spent its life frolicking in some lovely meadow rather than understanding the true conditions that led to their meat.
Blissful ignorance: if it weren’t for you, the world might actually be a better place….
1 they also worry inordinately about me having enough protein, which is kind-hearted, but absurd.
“Ok, so how do we know that plants can’t feel pain?”
They have no pain receptiors. No central nervous system.
“Ok, but what if we discover that plants can feel pain in 10 years? Will you stop eating them?”
No. I need to eat something to live, and in any case, if they do find that plants feel pain—which I doubt—it seems completely unlikely to me that they’ll ever discover that, say, broccoli is sentient. In that case, I’ll keep eating plants anyway.
“Right, but if plants can feel pain and animals can feel pain, why not just eat animals?”
Well, even if we do accept that in some crazy future plants can be found to feel pain, I’m only committing one murder, while you’re committing two everytime you eat meat.
“Why so?”
Well, think about it: most animals that are killed for meat eat plants. If plants are sentient, or feel pain, or whatever and the animal that you’re consuming eats them, and then you kill the animal and eat it, that’s two deaths.
“Yeah, but…”
Look, are you really going to sit here and tell me that you’re concerned with plant rights, or are you just looking for a convoluted excuse to keep eating whatever the hell you want?
No answer.
For what it is worth, I try to be patient with this kind of thing. We all didn’t start out as vegetarians, you know. It can take a very long time to come to consciousness about suffering and other beings. I’m cool with that (though I wish it’d happen faster).
I don’t eat veal and I don’t do bacon
...
I’ve got a non-dairy creamer
in my jeans
and I’m happy to see ya
if you know what I mean
“Soft Machine” by By Divine Right
I wonder if the lead singer’s a vegan?
MakingA Killing: The Political Economy of Animal Rights explores the intersections between human and animal oppressions and their relation to the exploitative dynamics of capitalism. Combining nuts and bolts Marxist political economy, a pluralistic anarchist critique, as well as a searing assessment of the animal rights movement, Bob Torres challenges conventional anti-capitalist thinking and convincingly advocates for the abolition of animals in industry — and on the dinner plate.
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we don't eat nothin' that farts. or anything with a face. or anything from anything that farts or has a face. Basically, vegans avoid animal products to the greatest extent possible, with the overall goal of abolishing animal exploitation. No eggs, meat, dairy, honey, wool, leather, etc. This sounds onerous, but trust us, it isn't. Why kill to eat when you don't have to?
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