Not Dude Food

“Vegan Freak – Being Vegan in a Non-Vegan World,” by Bob & Jenna Torres, 2010

Veganism seems to be a logical personal response to the cruel and toxic industrial farming of animals practiced in the ‘developed’ countries, reaching its apotheoses in the U.S.  However these authors see it as the only issue.  They mostly ignore other reasons why avoiding animal products makes sense, including veganism’s philosophic connection to human labor exploitation, death and starvation, as well as health and the environment.  I call them tunnel-vision vegans. 

The book seems to be written for first-time vegans by two snarky 30-somethings.  It is full of comic stabs at macho meat-heads, wimpy vegetarians, foodies, trend-setters and ‘omnivores’ like Michael Pollan.  Or those still eating all the food they ate when they were 12. It gives therapeutic counsel on how to deal with family, co-workers, friends and lovers who don’t understand veganism or that dreaded trip to the corporate chain restaurant or greasy spoon. It has a general list of appropriate foods – grains, beans, legumes, fruits, vegetables, nuts, drinks - and meat/dairy alternatives.   They also include some vegan tips on cosmetics, cleaning supplies and clothing.  Animal by-products are plentiful and cheap, so companies use them in cosmetics or cleaning supplies even though there are plant-based alternatives. 

At the book’s heart is an animal-rights philosophy opposing ‘speciesism’ - starting with the example of the family dog. In fact the Torres’ main analysis is that veganism is mostly or only about animal rights.  I beg to differ.  There is an advantage to the Marxist process of understanding the connections between and within things against single-issue thinking like this.  This couple has created a bit of a cottage-industry out of veganism with their book (2^nd Ed.), podcasts, products and forum/website, so there is that.  This 2^nd edition was published 10 years ago, so that may be one problem.

HUMANS and ANIMALS

Most people gobbling down a burger or slices of turkey, or visiting suspiciously cheap fast food restaurants, don’t want to think about the fact that animals are sentient creatures, that they feel pain, have memories and emotions, have levels of intelligence, are variously skilled, experience fear and misery and even morn the deaths of other animals.  Given chimpanzees and bonobos have about 98.8% the same DNA as humans, this is no accident. The authors call this alienation “moral schizophrenia.” Humans are also animals, as recognized by Marx, but we refrain from cannibalism unless we have no other choice.  Humans in most parts of the world do have a choice of food, especially those in the U.S., Europe and urban areas.  Meat and dairy are not necessities. Obviously if there is no other choice, meat is necessary.

Most famously, Marx quoted Thomas Munzer approvingly when he said:

“...all creatures have been turned into property, the fishes in the water, the birds in the air, the plants on the earth; the creatures, too, must become free.” 

Marx would call these animals commodities, which is also how the authors see animals.  The authors recognize that animals are property, to be bought and sold, to be thrown away, to be killed, caged or brutalized up to a legal point.  The authors call what happens to animals slavery and exploitation.  But they never extend that analysis to what is happening to humans.  What they don’t connect to is the virtual slavery of human beings, as human ‘labor property’ is greater now than it was in 1860.  India’s debt slaves and the Middle East’s Kafala slaves are the largest present examples.  Wage slavery is also invisible to their philosophy, unlike socialist Upton Sinclair in “The Jungle.” He understood in 1906 that capital treated Chicago slaughterhouse workers and the animals they killed almost the same.  This point went right over the heads of the bourgeois public in 1906 and it seems over these author’s heads in 2010.

Human mass death from climate change, starvation, pandemic disease, war, toxic food, environmental causes and migration seem to be invisible as well, but then the book ignores the connection between human and animal rights.  

Commodities From Slaughter House 5

Like many anarchists, they tip-toe around the question of capital and profit, recognizing the vast money to be made from industrial farming, but never connecting it to a bigger ‘profit system’ in the U.S. that drives all production.  Their main solutions are education and consumer power based on non-violence, while seeming to reject more radical actions like freeing minks (not in Denmark!) or taking pictures of mistreated animals.  In their attempt to avoid Whole Foods veganism they recognize consumer power is limited, but it seems their main weapon.  At this point, meat and dairy purchases in the U.S. ARE going down.  They reject PETA, the Humane Society and the ASPCA as organizations that can only go so far in supporting animal rights, which is probably true.

MISSING in ACTION

Making their argument for veganism, the authors actually ignore or diss things that would be helpful.  Firstly they make a very limited case for the personal health effects of eating outside the animal paradigm.  They know that a vegan diet will make headway against diabetes, cancer, heart disease, obesity and other health problems, as does vegetarianism.  For instance recent studies have shown that processed meat – like bacon and sausage – is toxic and cancer causing.  They could have had a whole chapter on this!  A better source on this issue is the 2017 documentary “What the Health?!” which ends up advocating veganism for health reasons, slamming fake health organizations, and revealing the dirty secrets behind eggs and cheese:  What the Health?!

The second point they ignore is ‘enviro-veganism’ which means not using or eating animal products to help the environment.  This is where it gets really weird.  They criticize:  “…going vegan for mere environmental reasons…”  The word ‘mere’ is hilarious.  It trivializes global warming and boosts the oil/gas industry, while ignoring one of the key problems with modern animal agriculture, which is that it is energy-inefficient and carbon heavy. Carbon-sink forests disappear so that animals can graze and be turned into meat.  Even the simple point about cows burping methane is never mentioned, nor the soil and water damage cows wreak in the intermountain West.  Animal grazing leads to the killing of 10s of thousands of wild animals by the U.S. government.  The connection between animal agriculture and pandemic creation is also missing.  They seem unaware of the ‘6^th Extinction’ being created by the destruction of habitats, hunting, toxic air and water or carbon-methane climate warming – killing millions of animals, birds, fish, insects and ending species.  It is another animal ‘holocaust’ that mostly does not involve eating.  Which leads to a larger point – the world-wide slaughter for food and die-off of animals are related, and is undermining our own existence.  It’s no joke when you observe that ‘the woods are empty’ while the slaughter pens are full. 

A last point that is completely invisible is the very firm evidence that animal agriculture is wasteful of land, energy and plants, and also involves large quantities of drugs, patented seeds, toxic pesticides and oil-based fertilizers for animal food.  On an efficiency scale a pound of beef is far less efficient to produce than a pound of vegetables.  Vegan diets take 90% less energy according to statistics.  Meat-production robs the productivity of the land and the quantity of food for a whole community.  This is why vegetarian and vegan diets can help solve starvation.  The solution to starvation or hunger is not just the socialist goal of de-commodification of food.  It will be easier to de-commodify food if there is so much food that it is almost free and not being sucked up by the SUV of animals - beef cattle. 

So the simple chart to promote veganism is:

1.    better for all the animals;

2.    better for the planet;

3.    better for nearly every individual's health;

4.    better for proletarian communities. 

In practice it is a cultural attack on capital.  To all my Marxist friends who think infantilism, workerism or romantic pastoralism is the response to food, think again.  The only thing useful in the U.S. in animal agriculture is manure.  Perhaps we can let certain animals wander the fields nibbling weeds, crapping as they go - instead of the toxic practice of boxing thousands of them in tiny cages leading to manure lagoons, then cutting their throats or putting a bolt through their foreheads. 

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left:  “The Jungle,” “The Sixth Extinction,” “Green is the New Red,” “When the Killing’s Done,” “The Emotional Lives of Animals,” “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes,” “Archaic Thanksgiving,” “Grocery Activism,” “Salt Sugar Fat,” “Kraft-Heinz,” “Foodopoly,” “A Foodie’s Guide to Capitalism,” “Jurassic World,” “This Land,” "Fear of an Animal Planet" or “Foster” on Marx and nature.

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

November 17, 2020