Since getting involved in struggles for animal rights a number of years ago, I’ve noticed a curious tendency of many people to use the term “veggie,” often with the apparent intent to encompass both ovo-lacto vegetarians and vegans. I’ve also noticed a hesitancy on the part of some people and organizations to use the term “vegan,” as if it were some kind of dirty word. In one way, I get it; there’s no question that a lot of people misunderstand what veganism is. But in another way, people won’t really know what veganism is until we begin articulating a clear vision of veganism and the very important message that it communicates. On top of this, I’m troubled when vegans and ovo-lacto vegetarians are grouped together. The two choices are completely different, and ovo-lacto vegetarianism is logically incomprehensible as a response to concerns about animal rights, as I’ll discuss below.
In case you haven’t read any of my books or listened to Vegan Freak Radio, I’ll let you know up front that I’m an outspoken, radical vegan asshole, and also a co-author of what is essentially a pride manual for vegans, now going into its second edition. To me, the ideas behind veganism are beautiful in their logical and moral consistency, and I frankly don’t understand why more people don’t get it. Nevertheless, I was curious about this whole “vegan” being a dirty word thing, so I asked over on Twitter:
To my surprise, the replies came in fast. (I appreciate that so many people responded, so if you’re one of the respondents, thanks.:)) The responses were varied, but the majority of them seemed to coalesce around the idea that the term “vegan” is “radical,” “extreme,” and “scary,” and that is what scares people off, or leads to a certain hesitancy. These replies encapsulate the feelings that came across in these tweets pretty well:
As I said before, there’s no doubt that people misunderstand veganism. I’ve heard some pretty absurd shit in my years as a vegan, like people asking me if I eat potatoes(?!) and others telling me that I could not eat yeast because it is an animal — which it obviously is not. Looking at this, our job, then, is not to run from the term because people don’t get it, but instead, to embrace it positively and to put forth a positive vision of what veganism is. The strength of veganism is that it is a lived form of protest against the exploitation and oppression that animals face in this world. By living as a vegan, and by calling yourself a vegan when you are, you’re quietly reminding everyone that something is not quite right with the world as it is. This isn’t always comfortable, but taking a stand for one’s principles requires a form of minor heroism in a culture that values conformity. It isn’t easy, but at some point, if you think something is right, you have to stand up for your beliefs and be counted.
Personally, I’m proud of my veganism. I am never up in people’s faces about it (you may consider this blog being “up in people’s faces,” but remember, no one is required to read this) but I also don’t shy away from it, or call myself a “veggie,” or otherwise hide it to make people comfortable. In a culture where it is absolutely normal to gnaw on the disembodied leg of a chicken or drink a glass of milk, a world in which billions of animals are killed for absolutely no reason except the desires of humans to eat them or their products, veganism will be viewed as extreme. And so what? The whole idea is to run against the way the world operates currently. If you hide behind half-hearted terms like “veggie,” or you pretend you’re not vegan to avoid upsetting people, you’ve already given up on a significant part of what makes veganism meaningful. If done right, your veganism should make people think twice about their complicity in animal suffering. Madcupcake kind of gets at this with her tweet:
While some people will immediately feel judged and take offense even if you do nothing more than ask for a vegan meal in their company, there’s also another side to this, which is that your veganism may get the more thoughtful people in your life asking hard questions of themselves. For these reasons, we cannot run from the term “vegan.” It helps people see what we’re doing, and what it means. It provides “teachable moments” in everyday life where people may come and ask you questions. I can’t really get why we’d run from that. In fact, I think it is our duty to embrace it if we are serious about combatting animal exploitation.
Along these lines, several of the tweets seemed to really pick up on the essential, political nature of the idea of veganism — that veganism isn’t just a set of dietary choices, but is, instead, a way of imagining and living a post-speciesist world in our everyday lives. Lorenaruggero’s tweet hits on this point well:
This is pretty solid analogical thinking. The demands of the more radical Chicano movement threatened to upset some of the more conservative assimilationist tendencies within the Mexican-American community, and I sometimes have the sense that the same kind of radical-assimilationist dynamic is expressing itself in the animal rights movement. Ovo-lacto vegetarians who claim to be vegetarian for animal rights reasons often view themselves as having taken the more measured and reasonable choice, versus us vegans being “totally to THE EXTREME MAN!!!” (as phrased by amandamorrow). Thinking about the vegan/vegetarian divide, joerees wrote:
To be totally clear before I dig in here, I’m not trying to offend anyone, or hurt anyone’s feelings. I used to be an ovo-lacto vegetarian myself, and I get where many of you are coming from. Yet, being nice to you simply for the sake of being nice accomplishes nothing except protecting you from coming to terms with a set of dietary practices that still exploit and kill billions of animals annually. In other words, if I don’t say what I think, I will feel like I’m complicit in your choices, and really, the times are just too dire not to say something. So, I’m going to just be blunt, and I hope that you’ll have the patience to deal with it, and think hard about it before you blow me off, because someone being blunt with me about my so-called “animal rights” ovo-lacto vegetarianism is what got me to go vegan. It sucked in the short term, because I had a few annoying days of trying to convince myself that the logic of veganism was unsound, but I assure you, it is not.
That said, let’s get on with it:
I find the above an interesting response on a number of levels, but mostly, I’m confused by it. I am completely perplexed by what good vegetarians who eat animal products are to a movement that is about trying to abolish the very use of animals for human ends. Bedeviled by a basic and stunningly obvious logical and moral inconsistency, ovo-lacto vegetarianism is a nonsensical response to the problem of animal exploitation (I explain why here.) In the most simple terms, how can anyone who consumes products that necessarily enslave and kill animals be an ally in the struggle to grant them the rights of personhood? Ovo-lacto vegetarianism for “animal rights” reasons sends a ridiculously conflicting message: it says that animals are not ours to use unless I happen to like the products they produce. Ovo-lacto vegetarianism for animal rights reasons is like being opposed to slavery, but still consuming products produced by slaves when there are plenty of alternatives.
When it comes down to it, there’s simply no justification on the grounds of animal rights for an ovo-lacto vegetarian diet, and I think we have to stop pretending that there is so we can avoid hurting people’s feelings or somehow “dividing” a movement that doesn’t have any unity to begin with. I’m not sure that vegetarians can be meaningful allies in this struggle, as they’re still part of the problem of exploitation every single day. As a result, the extremism of veganism isn’t the problem — veganism is a logical and morally consistent response to injustice. The problem is the inability of ovo-lacto vegetarians to be honest with themselves about the hypocrisy of their choice and their refusal to go vegan. We have to quit worrying about whether or not we’re going to hurt the feelings of a few “veggies,” and ask them to get serious enough about their commitment to join us as vegans in the struggle.
Veganwordnerd indicates in her response that it isn’t fear of the term “vegan” so much as strategy that drives these choices:
If it is strategy, it is poor strategy. With billions of animals dying every single year, we really don’t have the luxury of ignoring the single most important thing that could make a change: getting people to go vegan. Promoting veganism is where we must start, not in pretending that people who eat animal products are somehow helping the cause. (EDIT: Without realizing it, I took the previous tweet out of context. S. Ernst (veganwordnerd) writes that she meant regarding strategy is that “vegetarian is used on some starter kits to draw in the people who *are* afraid of vegan and then hit them with a vegan message anyway.” First, my apologies to S. Ernst. That certainly is a different strategy than what I read into the tweet, and I have fewer problems with using “vegetarian” as an all-encompassing term that way, but I still think we need to be up-front about the importance of veganism. I’ll give it some thought, though.)
All of my verbiage aside, Chris had a response that nailed it on all of these questions:
His question is a good one. Why, in a world where we do not need to eat animal products to live well, would anyone who is a vegetarian eat anything but plants? There simply is no good reason for it. We need a vegan movement, not a “veggie” movement.
Holy fuck, batman, this post is way longer than I wanted it to be, but I do want to close with two more points about the term “veggie” that generally bother me. First, the term is way too cute. Even if I agreed with using the term, I don’t think I could ever refer to myself with a word that five-year-olds use to describe the green stuff on their plates without seriously losing my shit. Second, when we generally refer to humans as “veggies,” it is in a pejorative way to talk about the particular human lacking higher brain function. Though one could be forgiven for wondering if there is sufficient higher-brain activity in some quarters of the animal rights movement — particularly where PETA are concerned — it seems clear to me that we probably don’t do ourselves any favors by calling ourselves the very things that we eat. After all, our argument for eating veggies is that they have no sentience.
Personally, I’d prefer to be a sentient vegan.
What we need to do is to grow veganism by embracing it as a valid, acceptable, and logical choice in our everyday lives. We need to put forth positive examples of veganism, and to live as proud vegans. We should not run from our choices, or mask them in cutesy terms. Instead, we should live what we are proudly, and build a genuine movement of people who demand an end to the human exploitation of animals.
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