21 year old boricua grrrl looking for the Marceline to my Princess Bubblegum. My name is Melanie.I just saw someone suggest that the world would be an infinitely better place if everyone was vegan - even ‘Peruvian indigenous villages’ because we live in ‘a developed world’. In short the person is being purposely vague but ultimately suggesting making contact with uncontacted tribes in order to force them to become vegans; talk about turning the quest for global veganism into a genocide project.
Establishing contact with isolated tribes is a sure way to exterminate at least 50-90% of their population and if you do it in order to force a vegan lifestyle upon people who live in areas where an entirely vegan lifestyle just isn’t viable, you’d be sure to have said indigenous group entirely gone from the face of the planet in less than a year.
But at least those pesky natives wouldn’t be eating meat, am I right?
Not to mention that veganism, despite all it’s positive sides, isn’t as eco-friendly and wonderful as people would like to think; one of the reasons why the Brazilian Enawene Nawe tribe is currently being driven away from their lands is so that people can use their ancestral lands to grow soy for vegans and the meat industry alike, while simultaneously pumping out loads of pesticides into the rivers in the area, thereby making a pescaterian tribe (the Enawene Nawe don’t eat meat) lose their main source of food as the rivers are more or less killed by the poison dumped in them.
The thing that bugs me, that always bugged me, was this complete denial of the circumstances, conditions and even the moral framework of non-western people.
Nobody thinks about the destruction of healthy ecosystems for farming, rising commodity prices in production zones (like how quinoa is too expensive for Bolivians to buy it, despite growing and relying on it for centuries), or how the adoption of westernized diets has created a public health crisis.
Then there’s the moralizing. This universalist ideology that declares that in order to live at the apex of ethical humanity, we must all convert to veganism, which will in turn solve all manner of environmental issues and end the brutal factory farm system, praise God.
And sure, industrial-level agriculture is problematic, and the meat industry in particular is brutal. There is something seriously wrong with how we get our food, and there is nothing wrong with frank, serious discussions about how we feed ourselves. The way that life, labour and the environment is exploited demands serious critical examination.
But veganism is a lot more than that. It’s a code, a way of life which derives all of it’s legitimacy and authority by uncritically appealing to Western concepts of humanity and morality. In seeking to impose a universal, moral veganism, it’s adherents utterly fail to account for views and philosophies which exist outside of the dominant/normative power structure and, in point of fact, denies their legitimacy and worth completely. That’s pretty fucked up and it accounts for the very real racist undertones in arguments levelled against indigenous people who hunt to support themselves. Witness the hue and cry of the animal rights community over Newfoundland’s seal hunt, and see how many times you can pick out words like savage.
I can guarantee that I do not hunt for the reasons that these people think I hunt, and I do not approach the taking of a life in the way that these people believe I do.
And frankly, I’d rather wear real wool than something that was made with plastics. The oil industry isn’t really known for it’s environmental stewardship, and that shit is in my backyard.
(via lavenderlabia)
#vegan #militant vegan #veganism #dietary choices #food #privilege #oppression #whiteness #power #stigma #moral #ethics #animal rights #vegetarian #vegetarianism #poverty #choice
