Dropping the 'Vegan' Label from my Political Banner

This is more personal and it's a development of politics and self-identity that I've had for a few years now. I'm open to disagreement and the like — you can voice it to my e-mail and with your permission, I'll add to this with a reply if any are merited. I mentioned it on the Fediverse and figured I'd finally hit publish on this.

I've been a vegan for approximately 7 years. The exact time when I started is fuzzy because I focused on a transitional diet, which was the scope of my understanding of veganism: around consumption and the logics thereof until I started at Lyft, where I made a friend who's a vegan to this day (and was prior to me). I also know a friend who's spoken about it for decades who grew up vegetarian. Over time, namely in 2019, I began looking into the politics around veganism — a messy web of things ranging from an underdeveloped understanding of modern food production to a full-on stance on eco-anarchism. While Twitter was still relatively hospitable, I was able to find other Black vegans who had political understandings of veganism that went beyond just having a curated kitchen, veering away from the urban homesteading movement and understanding the communal importance of food, its impact of health, culture and the world.

The Rotting Beef Food, its composition, its preparation and its history is a critical aspect of my identity and heritage. I am fortunate to have a deep understanding of how certain dishes and meals tie into my life. However, I found it to be troubling that veganism does rely on a globalist aspect of consumption that erases the historical and cultural underpinnings of dishes for their nutritional impact and never for the understanding of how or why a dish was designed or made. This fits in well with the consumer-centric mode of veganism, which is something you'll see from many people, books and ideas on the topic. I'm saying this as someone who owns and used multiple vegan cookbooks from people like Rachel Ama, Gaz Oakley and Bryant Terry.

I appreciated the knowledge these people gave me when it comes to creativity and dynamism in the kitchen. Substitution has become (but always was) a core component of working there. But a lot of this stops there. I will note that my lens on this is limited as it's from my own experiences. Vegan activism rarely try to address things that would bring more folks into the fold of understanding like:

biculturalism: I use bi instead of multi because it tends to devolve into a "vegan" or "not-vegan" situation when discussing the very evangelical nature of the movement. To disregard vegans is tantamount to disregarding all animal life. It's a form of erasure (or self-righteousness) that mirrors that of extreme Evangelism due to its lack of introspection on how it develops a monoculture around food. You can't cook your traditional dishes to the T because it has dead aquatic flesh. You can't wear your grandparents' heirlooms because it's made with dried out bovine skin. It mirrors a neo-liberal perspective on the world that "old is bad and needs to be eradicated with the new". There's whole stories tied into heritage whose defining parts are tied to the literal composition of a dish! production: Layperson consumers do not - and I can't stress enough - do not control the means of production nor that of demand. There's an idea that if all 350 million people in the United States stopped eating animal flesh completely that it'd weaken the likes of 8-billion-dollars-in-profit Perdue Farms, Oscar Meyer, Smithfield Foods (like Nathan's and Farmland Foods) from making their profits. Because of neoliberalism, it does not matter. If profits dipped low enough, we'd see more marketing being pushed, more lax laws being passed on trade and they'll send it overseas — like to my home country, Haiti, places like Mexico, to weaken trades in other regions and recoup lost profits. This works to the advantage of their home bases in the United States, providing a sense of "new job opportunities" at their farms, opening up satellite locations for productions in those countries and making more money. This is how companies like Apple, LG, IBM, 3M, Toyota, GM and others work to expand their profits by any means necessary. It's also how things like bananas, pineapples and chocolate — staples in dishes make it around the globe at all times of the year.

• impact: I used to have a link on my website about how agriculture was the top source of ecological delay from The Guardian. I took it down when I took into stock that it's specifically industrialized farming that's the issue and how that's driven in part by the modern city-state. Squeezing 8 million people into one place, like in New York, produces an impossibility to grow enough food to feed everyone there — even if it was all plant-based, there's not enough room nor could yields be managed around the year. So we see what China's dealing with, both an industrialization of farm land across of the country, either through forced-by-low-wage labor or migrant labor to feed these people in these regions. The modern erection of cities is an edification of the idea that cities are the capital producers of a country. In order to insure that capital is produced, the workers whose value is routinely stolen from has to be fed. The book Against Urbanism goes into this a bit more in Chapter 5, but this is something that's the one thing vegans either ignore, disagree on its impact or just straight up don't care about.

The Root of it Is Capitalism Again, I know that there's going to be a class of vegans who think that the same socioeconomic system that brought us factory farming, industrialized and environmentally devastating warfare, multiple forms of neocolonialism in parts of India, Africa and throughout the Global South will save the pigs. It's (and these are my words) selfish and extremely navel gazing. These are people who are comfortable copying recipes (poorly, might I add) from regions of the world that they'll have no immediate issue with when they're now 40 feet underwater because your oatmeal had to be shipped across the globe using fossil fuels that we need to stop using.

The performance of concern is isolated on the animals and allows them to disengage the people around them. It allows them to ignore whole regions like the South, which is notorious for having food deserts — a manufacturing of capital's need to control peoples' lives to how and what they eat. Instead of working with people to build community gardens, to open peoples' kitchens, to redistribute resources so people can exist; we will chide them for getting a 2-for-1 special on chicken despite its ability to feed more people than a can of beans.

There's also no interventional education. It following a puritanical stand, it falls on levels of phobia that can be made into a concrete point of concern (and rallying) if it doesn't address things like how the FDA and USDA leans more in favor of corporations when it comes to regulations around food. A prime example of people rising up together to find is documented in Dopesick around how (poor!) people impacted by industrial greed fought for accountability. Nary is there a concrete case of vegans focusing on institutional issues and aplenty will you find the finger pointing at the people you'd want to be on your side.

With my proximity to working with AI — which for most workers in tech is inevitable for the same reasons you seeing a place selling animal-based foods near you is — I have to also consider the parallels of this. Capital is what drives animal murder en-masse. We can have conversation about guns, something that drove up the development of capital, as noted by Walter Rodney in his seminal book, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. At the time, it wasn't capitalism as we saw it; not necessarily "proto-capitalism" but one of the core tenants of capitalism; the need to expand and control led white settlers to commit horrific acts to animals like buffalo and it's sustained through cultural violence that we see today with the mass murder of birds like the mourning dove yearly — if not by direct gunshots then through lead poisoning from the used up bullets left behind. This lack of concern on a wild level mirrors that of the current "race" to put AI into everything and for it to consume anything and the erasure of the process and heritage needed to curate information, something highlighted in a visual essay of supa dupa skies by Logic.

It's fucking capitalism that's the problem. And at this point, PETA is in on it; y'all are suspect.

My Journey I'm not a vegan but for the most part, I am plant-based. At home, I'll mainly continue the array of dishes that I've made and adapted. I will be practicing my cultural dishes. I'll say that I have a bit more of a radar for what I have in my plates because of being vegan and for my own personal goals around my body image. I'll be very curious to see how much of a shift I notice; if any. I don't know how soon I'll reincorporate other things into my life. It was only in July that I had salmon for the first time and I didn't have any adverse reactions. I know that I will never consume dairy again. I'm extremely comfortable with that and I don't miss it; it is not worth the reactions. I don't plan to eat things like chicken or pork in the United States due to their increased chances of contamination and the lax nature of curbing that.

But when I do travel aboard, especially if it's out of the way, I'll eat what's presented to me; with concerns on management of the source of it, of course. Food is something people make, especially in non-industrial contexts, to share — that's how I was raised to understand it. It's also beyond food. The clothing one can make is something Taino people has done for centuries prior to the near-total decimation of their culture by European definitions of "civilization". I refuse to erase parts of my past — my heritage — on a faulty stance that does very little to address the issues at hand.

I should note that this critique is of mainstream veganism: which is focused largely on consumption and the maintaining of capital as it stands. There's more militant forms that both put teeth to action and that's what kept me holding to the label for so long. However, I have little faith in it because my focus is on systems and creating (or expanding the) cracks in them; not policing my community (or myself).