Posts from March 2005


I am the Great Oppressor of the Broccoli
31 March 2005

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    Permalink    Filed under: categories

Oh, but I couldn't live without….
12 March 2005

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.

  Posted by Jenna Torres    Permalink    Filed under: categories

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