Oprah Gives Away Free Chicken; We Yawn and Say We Told You So

It hurts us more than it hurts you to say it, but hell, we have to say it anyway: we were right.

Last May when Oprah went on her 21-day vegan “cleanse,” the vegan blogosphere was awash in a feckless giddiness. To some vegan bloggers and podcasters, Oprah was the seeming deus ex machina who could transform veganism from a marginal consumer movement into a massive cultural powerhouse. At the time, we mentioned that many of you were acting like this was the “second coming of Jesus Oprah Christ.” And thinking back to those days about a year ago, I remember Jenna and I feeling very much like we were the only ones in a suicidal millenarian UFO cult who didn’t believe that the spaceship was coming to take us all back to the home planet.¹

Well, we said it was bullshit then, and now we know it is. Oprah is doing the very un-vegan thing of giving away free chicken from KFC:

Look how much those vegan principles mean to her now...

That Oprah isn’t the great vegan savior that we all hoped for comes as little surprise to me for the two following reasons:

1. Oprah’s main reason for going vegan was not about ethics; instead, Oprah went on a “cleanse,” during which time she gave up foods that can certainly be vegan like sugar and alcohol. To be blunt about it, Oprah went vegan to shit more often, and while I’d never look askance at the gastrointestinal benefits of veganism, I’m vegan because I believe that there is a moral imperative to stop treating animals as instruments for human ends. Oprah may have had a few teary-eyed moments with her guru of the week on national TV where she pretended to care about the plight of animals, but now in light of her being a pimp for KFC you either have to assume that she doesn’t understand that eating animals harms them, or that she’s so crassly commercial in working this promotion with KFC that she doesn’t care. Either way, it says little good about her.

2. While it was obviously good to have a public figure like Oprah talking about veganism, it was also clear that she didn’t really even get it except as a temporary “diet.” Veganism is obviously about what you do and don’t put in your mouth, but limiting veganism to a mere “diet” impoverishes what it is that we as ethical vegans do. Veganism is a lived form of protest directed at the way the world around us is organized, and each of us who is an ethical vegan takes aim at how that organization exploits and oppresses animals by marginalizing their interests. That veganism is fantastic for your colon is really a second order of business for most of us; contrary to the portrait painted by Oprah, we don’t all get up everyday and do wheatgrass enemas. Nor do we all have teams of professional chefs to prepare vegan meals for us, as Oprah did. Point is, Oprah was actually pretty crap for veganism when you get down to it. She seemed to do a fantastic job of sending most people the message that veganism is about some kind of ascetic purity, and that in order to make the food even remotely palatable, one has to have an army of talented chefs and bestselling gurus on hand.

We get the butt hurt. After all, lots of you put a lot of stock into Oprah, and the higher you hold someone up, the farther they have to fall. It is nice to imagine or to deeply hope that one person can come along and make a huge difference in an issue you care deeply about, and the desire at the heart of that longing is admirable. But in truth, it is also naive, because building movements that change the world requires hard and inglorious work, and it means that no single individual can ever be our lone savior, especially someone whose fame and vast fortunes separate them from the daily crap that most of us slug through each day. We need to each do the hard work of educating people around us about why we are vegan and what it means, and in time, we can become the kinds of organic intellectuals who can shift social perception in powerful ways. The idols aren’t worth our time; we have only ourselves, and each of us, you and I alike, are the ones who not only are capable of making the change we need to see, we’re the ones who are obligated to do so because we know that doing nothing is inexcusable.

In the end, the best thing to do about Oprah is to ignore her. As far as I can tell, she’s deeply confused about a great many things, and it looks to me like her show is her working out her own internal demons on a global stage. One week, Oprah believes in the Law of Attraction; the next, she’s a buddhist; the week after that, she’s on a vegan “cleanse.” Then, she’s off giving away KFC and cars and who the hell knows what else. Whatever she’s up to, I hope she channels some positive earth energies or some shit soon, or gets whacked upside the head with a gigantic clue-by-four. Regardless of what happens, this serves as an example of why we can’t put too much stock in Oprah or any other celebrity being vegan. Instead, this whole incident should serve as a reminder that we’re all there is when it comes to this struggle, and that there are no magic shortcuts and no great strokes of providence to suddenly make everyone go vegan. We can’t count on Oprah; we can only count on ourselves to make the change we want in the world.