Veganism

Politics, Practice, and Theory

Eva Haifa Giraud

• Editorial: Bloomsbury Academic
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350124943
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Categoría: Política agrícola pública

What exactly do vegans believe? Why has veganism become such a critical and criticized social movement, and how does veganism correspond to wider debates about sustainability, animal studies, and the media? Eva Haifa Giraud offers an accessible route into the debates that surround vegan politics, which feed into broader issues surrounding food activism and social justice. Giraud engages with arguments in favor of veganism, as well as the criticisms levelled at vegan politics. She interrogates debates and topics that are central to conversations around veganism, including identity, intersectional politics, and activism, with research drawn from literary animal studies, animal geographies, ecofeminism, posthumanism, critical race theory, and new materialism.
Giraud makes an original theoretical intervention into these often fraught debates, and argues that veganism holds radical political potential to act as "more than a diet" by disrupting commonplace norms and assumptions about how humans relate to animals. Drawing on a range of examples, from recipe books with punk aesthetics to social media campaigns, Giraud shows how veganism's radical potential is being complicated by its commercialization, and elucidates new conceptual frameworks for reclaiming veganism as a radical social movement.

Chapter 1

Introduction

More Than a Diet

“What if plants feel pain too?,” “what about mice killed in harvesting?,” “do you refuse to use a computer or drive a car due to the animal products involved?,” “what about all the human suffering?,” “if a neighborhood cat died of NATURAL causes, would it be vegan to wear it as a hat?” Depending on context, these questions might stem from genuine curiosity, from a desire to puncture perceived moralism, or simply be a joke. Something all of these queries have in common, however, is that anyone who has been vegan for any length of time would have been asked at least one of them. Well, perhaps not the last question— although it certainly sticks in my mind even though it happened in 2003. What also sticks in my mind is that at the time—as a new vegan—I found these discussions engaging or sometimes even amusing and was happy to talk through various ethical debates. In contrast, a friend found everything less funny due to feeling worn down by years of bad faith “gotcha” moments, which were posed as questions but really designed to highlight perceived hypocrisies. As described in recent texts about vegan practice, these experiences are not unique and “gotcha” provocations are commonplace in everyday discussions about veganism (see Hamilton, 2019: 185; Ko, 2019: 7).

This opening range of questions—the varied motivations behind them, different possible responses they can elicit, and frequency with which such debates occur—evokes something significant about veganism itself. Everyone has some sort of relationship with nonhuman animals, be it related to consumption, recreation, or everyday interactions with environments.¹ The centrality of animals to society thus means that the questions posed by veganism, with its call to rethink and contest some of the most commonplace of these relationships, are not just relevant to the small (albeit rapidly growing) number of people who identify as vegan themselves.² Instead, veganism speaks to practices, values, and relationships with animals that have integral socioeconomic or cultural roles, even as these relationships vary significantly between, and indeed within, particular national contexts.

The vastness and complexity of the issues posed by vegan practice mean that even jokingly worded provocations cannot be resolved in a straightforward way. My aim in this book is, therefore, not to offer a simplistic riposte to questions about veganism that I feel I should have addressed more thoughtfully in the past. Nor does the book launch a defense of vegan practice against imagined, or anticipated, criticism. Rather than providing any neat resolution, what I aim to do here is to offer a sense of the theoretically, politically, and ethically complex issues that veganism poses, at an important juncture in its contemporary history. I argue throughout this book that, in order to grasp veganism’s distinctiveness as a form of food culture, it is, paradoxically, necessary to understand it as more than a diet: not just due to veganism’s concern with animal ethics beyond food, but because of the broader ethical implications of its criticism of many existing human-animal relations. At the same time, in order to grasp the tensions that surround vegan practice, it needs to be situated as something that is in constant negotiation with markets, specific social formations, institutions, and particular discourses about nonhuman animals, which attempt to reduce veganism to just a diet.

The overarching aim of the book is to offer a sense of how these struggles between “more than” and “just” are negotiated, in ways that open up (and sometime shut down) the more radical political and ethical potentials associated with veganism. I approach this task by turning to a range of informative contexts, including the formation of vegan identity, vegan activism and campaigning, popular commentaries that highlight affinities and tensions with other social justice issues, and the recent popularization of “plant-based” food. Engaging with a range of examples from popular culture, debates within existing vegan scholarship, and original interview materials with long-term vegans themselves, the book develops a picture of veganism as something that is more multifaceted and complex than is often recognized either in certain academic contexts or within mainstream media depictions. Together, the examples and debates I draw upon throughout the book underline the importance of preserving the sense of veganism as something that interrogates the relationships that people have with nonhuman animals in a manner that goes beyond diet, as well as the wider political ramifications of this interrogation, in order to retain a sense of the “more than.”

One of the difficulties of conceptualizing veganism as more than a way of eating or fashionable diet, in the present forum, is that this book series is dedicated to contemporary food studies. Due to the book’s necessary emphasis on food, therefore, there is a risk of falling back onto the sense that veganism is solely about eating. Yet what I illustrate across the book’s eight chapters is something that perhaps sounds paradoxical: even when discussing food itself, the discussion always ends up moving decisively beyond it. Chapter 3’s discussion of high-profile criticisms leveled at vegan food, due to environmental and labor politics that are masked by labeling these products “cruelty free” (see Harper, 2010a), for instance, is generative of wider debates about purity politics, lifestyle activism, and identity. Furthering this sense of complexity, Chapter 5’s initial discussion of big-budget campaigns designed to promote vegan diets leads to wide-ranging discussions about animal subjectivity. Elsewhere in the book, such as Chapter 2’s overview of vegan scholarship or Chapter 4’s analysis of grassroots activism, I discuss a range of academic and political initiatives that have sought to articulate connections between veganism and other social justice movements. The final chapters pick up on these discussions, drawing out the limitations of certain iterations of contemporary vegan practice in ways that speak to broader c oncerns about the classed and racialized inequalities associated with alternative lifestyle politics and limitations of market-based popular veganisms. Before sketching out more in-depth overview of the book, however, it is important to set the stage for its overarching arguments by developing a clearer sense of what it means to describe veganism as more than a diet and how recent developments have begun to complicate this claim.

The Difficulty of Defining and Situating Veganism

Veganism is more difficult to define than it might seem. Recent years have seen a number of events that speak to shifting definitions of what veganism is and means. Depictions of elite vegan athletes in popular cultural texts such as The Game Changers (2018) and related celebrations of health-food veganism (Braun and Carruthers, 2020; Scott, 2020) offer a marked contrast from dominant media discourse even just ten years ago, with its focus on restriction and asceticism (Cole, 2008; Cole and Morgan, 2011). Though holding very different implications, the rise of “junk food veganism” and increased accessibility of vegan food in chain restaurants such as Subway and even McDonald’s, or campaigns like Veganuary and Meat Free Mondays, also stand in stark contrast to earlier cultural understandings of veganism as something rigid, marginal, and extreme. These developments have seen a corresponding ascendancy of terms including “plant-based food” and “flexitarianism” that associate veganism with a food politics emphasizing flexibility and individual choice, which seems to herald a departure from its association with more radical forms of activism (cf Cherry, 2010). Recent shifts in vegan practice thus hold a complicated, and often uneasy, position in relation to its longer political histories. What makes things more complex still are a number of tensions that are generated by any attempt to pin down a normative definition of veganism against which these recent events can be contrasted.

A useful starting point for establishing a working definition of veganism, for example, could be the UK Vegan Society. The society themselves were founded in 1944 and played an important role in supporting individuals who wanted to eliminate the consumption of animal products. Perhaps best known for a founding member, Donald Watson, coining the term “vegan,” the Vegan Society’s early activities also included providing nutritional information for new vegans, publishing early recipe books, and supporting the emergence of vegan societies in other national contexts such as the American Vegan Society in 1960 (Batt, 1964).³ Later, the society developed an international trademark to designate vegan products (a V evolving into a leaf and sunflower motif) which has become one of the most iconic signifiers of veganism.

The society’s own, much-cited, definition of veganism is that it marks “a way of living which seeks to exclude, as far as is possible and practicable, all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose” (Vegan Society, 2020a). Yet even this apparently straightforward definition expands rather than resolves discussion of veganism’s meanings: opening up a can of worms related to everything from the meaning of terms such as “exploitation” and “cruelty” to how the caveat “possible and practicable” should be understood. In addition, care must be taken not to treat a history of veganism as the definitive history of animal product elimination, as this framing excludes spiritual, religious, and ethical movements with different cultural or geographical origins (Harper, 2012). Indeed, while particular dietary and spiritual practices might be described as “vegan” today in the wake of the uptake of the Vegan Society’s terminology, they have far longer histories than this institution itself and complicate any neat sense of veganism “beginning” with a particular organization (a point that was emphasized by the society themselves in their original definition of the term [Cole, 2014]). This is not to say there isn’t considerable value in unpacking particular, influential, institutional definitions of veganism, more that it is important to resist using these histories in a manner that shuts down rather than opens up more complex discussions about vegan ethics.

Bearing these tensions in mind, the Vegan Society’s definition remains useful, in part, due to what it does open up. Something that the society’s early work underlines is how some of the most high-profile conceptions of contemporary veganism have understood and enacted it as more than a diet. Veganism, here, is not just about eating and encompasses any relationship with animals where they are used for the primary benefit of humans. Vegan practice, in other words, has historically not just focused on rejecting particular animal products but has also posed a series of more fundamental questions about the way particular humans relate to other beings. This definition of veganism not only unsettles classifications such as “livestock” or “food animals” (see Arcari, 2020) but also the principles underlying many other institutions and practices, from zoos and recreational hunting, to horse racing and uses of animals in laboratory research.

To put things more precisely: what makes this conception of vegan ethics significant is that in societies marked by “anthroparchy”—“a complex and relatively stable set of hierarchical relationships in which ‘nature’ is dominated through formations of social organization which privilege the human” (Cudworth, 2011: 67)—a vegan way of living has historically sought to unsettle the inevitability of these formations and the institutions that support them. This book is written from one such context whose social relations are informed by anthroparchy, the UK, though it touches on a number of theories, debates, and controversies that resonate with other national settings in which contemporary veganism has become popularized and commercialized.

Veganism’s Complex Relationship with Human Inequalities

Even when focusing on the situated lineage of veganism that is evoked when beginning with the Vegan Society’s definition, vegan practice throws up a multiplicity of ethical concerns that have wide-reaching implications beyond food. What becomes explicit when turning to vegan scholarship and debate in more depth, is that this form of veganism is also understood as acting as more than a diet in a second sense. While nonhuman animals have historically assumed a central role in vegan praxis, so too have attempts to draw connections between the treatment of nonhuman animals and social justice issues related to human suffering (Cole, 2014). As Corey Lee Wrenn puts it, from its emergence “the Vegan Society presented plant-based consumption as a solution to famine, war, environmental devastation, health, and especially Nonhuman Animal suffering” (Wrenn, 2019: 191). While, Wrenn (2020) argues, these linkages have waned over time in more formal, professionalized institutions, in its radical activist iterations there is a rich history of vegan activism that has (and continues to) identify, interrogate, and contest sites in which specific human and nonhuman animal oppressions overlap (a point discussed in further depth shortly; see also Cherry, 2006; White and Cudworth, 2014; White, 2015; White and Springer, 2018; Giraud, 2019: 69–97). These activist histories cut against more recent understandings of veganism as an individualistic, single-issue form of politics.

However, while it is useful to turn to longer histories in order to debunk stereotypes about veganism that portray it as something monolithic or single-issue, it is also important to resist constructing uncritically positive narratives. To situate my own perspective: I am vegan myself and my stance throughout this book is broadly sympathetic toward veganism or, more specifically, the hopeful potentials of grassroots vegan practice. Yet, as also traced throughout the book, vegan politics is heterogeneous, and sometimes overly generalizing and problematic claims are made both in vegan campaigning and some strands of scholarship. Productive existing directions in research and activism, which further more complex analyses, have carefully situated the entanglement of human and animal exploitation in broader critical analyses of capitalist social relations (e.g., Cudworth, 2011; Wadiwel, 2015). What entanglement means here is, in part, a practical point, referring to the sort of violent intersections between human inequalities and animal suffering that occur in sites such as slaughterhouse kill-floors. As detailed in visceral long-form journalism and ethnographic research about meat-processing plants, racialized class hierarchies tend to determine who gets the dirtiest, most socially undesirable work, and economic precarity—often intensified by workers’ insecure immigration status—is frequently leveraged to undermine attempts to improve working conditions (LeDuff, 2003; Pachirat, 2011). Recently, for instance, much has been made of the role of meat processing as hotspots for Covid-19 in the United States (Specht, 2020), in a manner that has been replicated across Europe: with new virus outbreaks emerging within German meat factories as well as mink fur farms in the Netherlands and Denmark (Maron, 2020). These analyses illustrate how institutions that violently transform animals into capital (Shukin, 2009) are also reliant on the transformation of particular groups of people into expendable resources (cf Moore, 2017).

Awareness of the entanglement of human and nonhuman animal oppressions is not new. In activist settings there have been long histories of groups articulating the relationship between different forms of oppression: from overlaps between Victorian suffragist and anti-vivisection movements (Kean, 1998), to incisive anti-capitalist pamphlets that incorporate animals into Marxist analy...

Índice

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1 Introduction: More Than a Diet
• Chapter 2 Vegan Debates: Tracing Vegan Scholarship
• Chapter 3 Vegan Identities: Purity and Imperfection
• Chapter 4 Learning from Vegan Activism
• Chapter 5 Animal Subjectivity and Anthropomorphism
• Chapter 6 Intersectional Veganism(s)
• Chapter 7 Post-Vegan?: The Rise of Plant-based Capitalism
• Chapter 8 Conclusion: Maintaining the “More-Than”
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Copyright