in a nutshell, instead of reforming the bad parts of your society, you try to opt out of it in a way that has really no effect, and wouldn’t work at all if the majority of people weren’t still part of the industry you dislike.
there was, for a while, a real movement of people who tried to get everything out of dumpsters, as a way of opting out of capitalism. but the problem was that you couldn’t get what you need when you need it, leading to you being kind of a drain on your community, and someone had to buy that stuff in the first place for it to end up in that dumpster anyway. it was Fundamentally Silly.
going vegan to opt out of farming practices has similar problems. for instance: you (hypothetical vegan you) won’t buy honey, but the bees are being used to fertilize the vegetables and fruit you eat, they’re making the honey anyway, all you’ve done is – well, nothing, because you’re not a big enough demographic to make an impact, but even if you were, honey sales are a much smaller part of beekeepers’ income than crop pollination. and beekeeping is not a big faceless corporate interest. it’s not monsanto. it’s a bunch of single-family or partnership business with a truck or two and a couple hundred hives. the bees make honey after a pollinating run, and the beekeepers sell it for a little extra income. if you made a dent in that, you’d be achieving nothing but making joe beekeeper buy his kids’ t-shirts at k-mart instead of target.
animal farming and plant farming are deeply interconnected. plant farmers grow animal feed; animal farmers sell manure for fertilizer. most non-corporate farmers raise both plants and animals. it’s more economic and gives them more resilience.
if you were a big enough demographic to hit ‘the farming industry’ in its wallet. you would be making things MUCH harder for small farmers than for factory farms. you would be making it easier and easier for factory farms to crowd family farmers out of business. so that’s pretty much achieving the opposite of what you want, right there.
and then there’s the fact that plant farming is just as rife with gruesome factory farm conditions as animal farming, but it’s humans who are exploited in those. i’m not going to level accusations of racism here, but it really is unfortunate how little the vocal internet vegan contingent seems to know or care about the exploitation of the mostly nonwhite workers in the industry. it makes y’all look racist, whether you are or not.
look, i keep saying this, even though folks never seem to hear me: i don’t hate vegans, i’m not trying to stop you being vegan, i do not care what you eat.
my problem is with defensive internet vegans trying to promote their dietary restriction lifestyle as a solution to problems in the real world. it is not. it may create more problems than it solves, or maybe it breaks even, i don’t know. it certainly doesn’t solve anything that can’t be solved just as well without it. it can only look reasonable from a perspective of deep ignorance about where food comes from and how the farm economy works. you basically have to be young, urban, and somewhat privileged to embrace it. and it is, fundamentally, very silly.
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