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  "canonicalUrl": "https://www.jacky.wtf//essays/2024/not-vegan",
  "path": "/essays/2024/not-vegan",
  "publishedAt": "2024-10-01T00:00:00.000Z",
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  "textContent": "> This is more personal and it's a development of politics and self-identity that I've had for a few\n> years now. I'm open to disagreement and the like — you can voice it to my e-mail and with your\n> permission, I'll add to this with a reply if any are merited. I mentioned it on [the\n> Fediverse][12] and figured I'd finally hit publish on this.\n\nI've been a vegan for approximately 7 years. The exact time when I started is fuzzy because I\nfocused on a transitional diet, which was the scope of my understanding of veganism: around\nconsumption and the logics thereof until I started at Lyft, where I made a friend who's a vegan to\nthis day (and was prior to me). I also know a friend who's spoken about it for decades who grew up\nvegetarian. Over time, namely in 2019, I began looking into the politics around veganism — a\nmessy web of things ranging from an underdeveloped understanding of modern food production to a\nfull-on stance on [eco-anarchism][2]. While Twitter was still relatively hospitable, I was able\nto find other Black vegans who had political understandings of veganism that went _beyond_ just\nhaving a curated kitchen, veering away from the urban homesteading movement and understanding the\ncommunal importance of food, its impact of health, culture and the world.\n\nThe Rotting Beef\nFood, its composition, its preparation and its history is a _critical_ aspect of my identity and\nheritage. I am fortunate to have a deep understanding of how certain dishes and meals tie into my\nlife. However, I found it to be troubling that veganism does rely on a globalist aspect of\nconsumption that erases the historical and cultural underpinnings of dishes for their\nnutritional impact and never for the understanding of _how_ or _why_ a dish was designed or made.\nThis fits in well with the consumer-centric mode of veganism, which is something you'll see from\nmany people, books and ideas on the topic. I'm saying this as someone who owns and used multiple\nvegan cookbooks from people like [Rachel Ama][7], [Gaz Oakley][8] and [Bryant Terry][9].\n\nI appreciated the knowledge these people gave me when it comes to creativity and dynamism in the\nkitchen. Substitution has become (but always was) a core component of working there. But a lot of\nthis _stops_ there. I will note that my lens on this is limited as it's from my own experiences.\nVegan activism rarely try to address things that would bring more folks into the fold of understanding like:\n\n biculturalism: I use _bi_ instead of _multi_ because it tends to devolve into a \"vegan\" or\n  \"not-vegan\" situation when discussing the very evangelical nature of the movement. To disregard\n  vegans is tantamount to disregarding _all_ animal life. It's a form of erasure (or\n  self-righteousness) that mirrors that of extreme Evangelism due to its lack of introspection on\n  how it develops a monoculture around food. You _can't_ cook your traditional dishes to the T\n  because it has dead aquatic flesh. You can't wear your grandparents' heirlooms because it's made\n  with dried out bovine skin. It mirrors a neo-liberal perspective on the world that \"old is bad and\n  needs to be eradicated with the new\". There's whole stories tied into heritage whose defining\n  parts are tied to the literal composition of a dish!\n production: Layperson consumers do not - and I can't stress enough - _do not_ control the\n  means of production nor that of demand. There's an idea that if all 350 million people in the\n  United States stopped eating animal flesh completely that it'd weaken the likes of\n  [8-billion-dollars-in-profit Perdue Farms][3], Oscar Meyer, Smithfield Foods (like Nathan's and\n  Farmland Foods) from making their profits. Because of neoliberalism, _it does not matter_. If\n  profits dipped low enough, we'd see more marketing being pushed, more lax laws being passed on\n  trade and they'll send it overseas — like to my home country, Haiti, places like Mexico, to\n  weaken trades in other regions and recoup lost profits. This works to the advantage of their home\n  bases in the United States, providing a sense of \"new job opportunities\" at their farms, opening up\n  satellite locations for productions in those countries and _making_ more money. This is how\n  companies like Apple, LG, IBM, 3M, Toyota, GM and others work to expand their profits by any means\n  necessary. It's also how things like [bananas][11], [pineapples][10] and chocolate — staples\n  in dishes make it around the globe at all times of the year.\n* impact: I used to have a link on my website about how agriculture was the top source of\n  ecological delay from The Guardian. I took it down when I took into stock that it's specifically\n  _industrialized farming_ that's the issue and how that's driven in part by the modern city-state.\n  Squeezing 8 million people into one place, like in New York, produces an impossibility to grow\n  enough food to feed everyone there — even if it was all plant-based, there's not enough room\n  nor could yields be managed around the year. So we see what China's dealing with, both an\n  industrialization of farm land across of the country, either through forced-by-low-wage labor or\n  migrant labor to feed these people in these regions. The modern erection of cities is an\n  edification of the idea that cities are the capital producers of a country. In order to insure\n  that capital is produced, the workers whose value is routinely stolen from has to be fed. The book\n  [Against Urbanism][4] goes into this a bit more in Chapter 5, but this is something that's the\n  _one thing_ vegans either ignore, disagree on its impact or just straight up don't care about.\n\nThe Root of it Is Capitalism\nAgain, I know that there's going to be a class of vegans who think that the same socioeconomic\nsystem that brought us factory farming, industrialized and environmentally devastating warfare,\nmultiple forms of neocolonialism in parts of India, Africa and throughout the Global South will save\nthe pigs. It's (and these are my words) selfish and extremely navel gazing. These are people who are\ncomfortable copying recipes (poorly, might I add) from regions of the world that they'll have no\nimmediate issue with when they're now 40 feet underwater because your oatmeal had to be shipped\nacross the globe using fossil fuels that _we need to stop using_.\n\nThe performance of concern is isolated on the animals and allows them to disengage the people around\nthem. It allows them to ignore whole regions like the South, which is notorious for having food\ndeserts — a manufacturing of capital's need to control peoples' lives to how and what they\neat. Instead of working with people to build community gardens, to open peoples' kitchens, to\n_redistribute resources_ so people can exist; we will chide them for getting a 2-for-1 special on\nchicken despite its ability to feed more people than a can of beans.\n\nThere's also no interventional education. It following a puritanical stand, it falls on levels of\nphobia that can be made into a concrete point of concern (and rallying) if it doesn't address things\nlike how the FDA and USDA leans more in favor of corporations when it comes to regulations around\nfood. A prime example of people rising up together to find is documented in [Dopesick][5] around how\n(poor!) people impacted by industrial greed fought for accountability. Nary is there a concrete case\nof vegans focusing on institutional issues and aplenty will you find the finger pointing at the\npeople you'd _want to be_ on your side.\n\nWith my proximity to working with AI — which for most\nworkers in tech is inevitable for the same reasons you seeing a place selling animal-based foods\nnear you is — I have to also consider the parallels of this. Capital is what drives animal\nmurder en-masse. We can have conversation about guns, something that drove up the development of\ncapital, as noted by [Walter Rodney][13] in his seminal book, [How Europe Underdeveloped\nAfrica][14]. At the time, it wasn't capitalism as we saw it; not necessarily \"proto-capitalism\" but\none of the core tenants of capitalism; [the need to expand and control][15] led white settlers to\ncommit horrific acts to animals like buffalo and it's sustained through cultural violence that we see today\nwith the mass murder of birds like the mourning dove yearly — if not by direct gunshots\nthen through lead poisoning from the used up bullets _left_ behind. This lack of concern on a wild\nlevel mirrors that of the current \"race\" to put AI into everything and for it to consume _anything_\nand the erasure of the process and heritage needed to curate information, something highlighted in\na [visual essay of supa dupa skies by Logic][16].\n\nIt's _fucking_ capitalism that's the problem. And at this point, PETA is in on it; y'all are\nsuspect.\n\nMy Journey\nI'm not a vegan but for the most part, I am plant-based. At home, I'll mainly continue the array of\ndishes that I've made and adapted. I will be practicing my cultural dishes. I'll say that I have a\nbit more of a radar for what I have in my plates because of being vegan and for my own personal\ngoals around my body image. I'll be very curious to see how much of a shift I notice; if any. I\ndon't know how soon I'll reincorporate other things into my life. It was only in July that I had\nsalmon for the first time and I didn't have any adverse reactions. I know that I will _never_\nconsume dairy again. I'm extremely comfortable with that and I don't miss it; it is _not_ worth the\nreactions. I don't plan to eat things like chicken or pork in the United States due to their\nincreased chances of contamination and the lax nature of curbing that.\n\nBut when I do travel aboard, especially if it's out of the way, I'll eat what's presented to me;\nwith concerns on management of the source of it, of course. Food is something people make,\nespecially in non-industrial contexts, to share — that's how I was raised to understand it.\nIt's also beyond _food_. The clothing one can make is something Taino people has done for centuries\nprior to the near-total decimation of their culture by European definitions of \"civilization\". I\nrefuse to erase parts of my past — my heritage — on a faulty stance that does very\nlittle to address the issues at hand.\n\nI should note that this critique is of _mainstream_ veganism: which is focused largely on\nconsumption and the maintaining of capital as it stands. There's more militant forms that both put\nteeth to action and that's what kept me holding to the label for so long. However, I have little\nfaith in it because my focus is on systems and creating (or expanding the) cracks in them; not\npolicing my community (or myself).\n\n[1]: https://rebellion.global/\n[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_anarchism\n[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perdue_Farms\n[4]: https://www.pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=829\n[5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dopesick_(book)\n[6]: https://dashaunharrison.com/shop/belly-of-the-beast/\n[7]: https://www.rachelama.com/about\n[8]: https://www.gazoakleychef.com/\n[9]: https://www.bryant-terry.com/\n[10]: https://www.leighday.co.uk/news/news/2023-news/del-monte-kenya-pineapple-plantation-at-centre-of-human-rights-abuse-allegations/\n[11]: https://www.hrw.org/news/2002/04/24/ecuador-widespread-labor-abuse-banana-plantations\n[12]: https://todon.eu/@jalcine/113233769845035284\n[13]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Rodney\n[14]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Europe_Underdeveloped_Africa\n[15]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expansionism\n[16]: https://logicmag.io/supa-dupa-skies/the-origin-of-clouds/",
  "title": "Dropping the 'Vegan' Label from my Political Banner"
}