People are so mad at this post for calling militant veganism “a vestige of colonialism” but it’s totally correct
Settler colonialism is literally the idea that you can come into a place and totally destroy all the indigenous knowledges about the land and how to live there, and replace it with your lofty intellectual ideal of What Everyone Everywhere Should Eat.
The point of the post is that what kind of food local farmers produce should be informed by the land they live on and what makes sense to grow there. Farmers should make decisions based on what is environmentally sustainable and ecologically sound.
So if you’re farming land that is naturally suited to producing rich, lush vegetation, by all means! Grow plants! Grow fruits and vegetables!
But if you’re somewhere that is hilly, arid, with scant, rocky, or saline soil, it makes more sense to farm livestock. In those places, producing meat is the ecologically sound choice.
Oddly enough, a farmer’s choice of what to grow, much like a person’s choice of what to eat, is incredibly complex and idiosyncratic and informed by so many variables that NO one-size-fits-all solution could possibly work!
But militant vegans take agricultural analyses that work in California and nowhere else, and ignore the role of water and irrigation to boot, and then claim they know what EVERYONE IN THE ENTIRE WORLD should eat.
Veganism is a vestige of colonialism? Prominent black liberation activist, communist, feminist and anti-imperialist Angela Davis disagrees.
Love how well you missed the point.
I don’t understand. There are very specific situations where killing animals is a more viable source of food, such as in the arctic and in deserts, but the situation given here doesn’t make sense. This isn’t hunter-gatherer in a harsh environment, this is livestock farming? Like, cows and pigs?
You need lush vegetation and a LOT of water to farm livestock. Like, a lot.
“It takes more than 2,400 gallons of water to produce just 1 pound of meat. 25 gallons of water are required to grow 1 pound of wheat. It takes 12 pounds of wheat to produce one pound of meat.”
It is never the ecologically sound choice to farm livestock. Hunt? Yes. When all your environment has is ice and seals, you eat seals. When nothing will grow in your desert, but there are jackrabbits and bugs, you eat jackrabbits and bugs.
Speaking of bugs, it’s actually almost always the best option to go the bug route. We don’t like that, but it’s true. Insects can survive most conditions, reproduce quickly and require very little to flourish. They’re also very nutritionally dense, and as primates, humans have the evolutionary traits to thrive on bugs and plants.
Also, as a general logic rule, if plants can grow there, you can farm native plants. If plants cannot grow there, animals are likely to be scarce anyway and cannot thrive enough to support a human populaces nutritional needs because…..there’s not enough vegetation. And we don’t typically eat carnivores. I think seals are a rare exception to this, and you cannot farm them. because theyre carnivores.
*pinches bridge of nose*
The 2,400 figure comes from PETA. That’s equivalent to 20,555 L per kg. I’m gonna cite actual scientific research.
The global average of water usage per kg of beef thirty years ago was actually closer to 15,500 L. PETA’s average is inflated above and beyond the biggest estimate of beef produced in an ecologically sustainable fashion AND beef farmed in the most unsustainable way you can imagine averaged together.
Meanwhile, beef production in the USA 25 years ago yielded a number of 3,682 L/kg, and that includes water occurring naturally from rivers, lakes, and rainfall, as well as artificial irrigation. That’s 20% of PETA’s estimate.
And by 2007 that number had dropped to 1,763 L/kg–almost half. That’s more like 211 gallons per pound. The source you’re quoting is literally off by an order of magnitude.
This concept of “but what about extreme climates” IS NOT ACADEMIC. You can’t just go “Oh, I suppose there are some edge cases but what I’m saying doesn’t apply to them” because the point of militant veganism is that it doesn’t just go, “Veganism is the right choice for me right here right now”, it says, “Veganism is the ONLY right choice”.
I’m Canadian; our extreme Northern communities (which are HUGELY populated by Indigenous POC) are struggling deeply with food insecurity, especially since environmentalists have spent decades attacking their ability to hunt traditional sources of food like seal and whale, which just turned into another way colonialism worked to destroy knowledge of their traditional ways of feeding themselves. And now the ice is going. So you can’t just say “Oh, they’re allowed to hunt” when hunting isn’t accessible to most people anymore. These days? It’s gonna have to be farming livestock.
So when vegans come in and say “MEAT IS NEVER SUSTAINABLE, MEAT IS NEVER THE ANSWER” and these Northern communities are trying to decide where to put their time and money? Those arguments affect them too. And so people in Inuvik and
Tuktoyaktuk and Iqaluit pour tons of time, money, and resources into creating tiny greenhouses that provide a couple dozen pounds of vegetables per family per year, max–and those help supplement peoples’ diets with vitamins and minerals! But they’re not enough to live off of. You need something with actual calories. North of the Arctic Circle the growing season is too short for traditional crops like wheat, but it’s long enough for grass and hay. The most calorie-rich thing you can farm in the Arctic? Is fucking livestock. But if you convince the people who live there that beef is ALWAYS EVIL, you’re going to affect their ability to feed themselves.
OF COURSE factory farms and endless fields of monocropped corn and cows on land not suited for them are fucking awful ways to farm. But the people I know who fight those things the most? Are actual fucking farmers and meat producers who are fighting for a more ecologically sustainable way to farm and ranch. They actually know about what would be legally and economically necessary to break the power of the environmentally destructive profit-driven factory farm industry, and get us back onto a saner track. Listening to them would be a good idea. But from PETA’s perspective? They’re just as evil as Monsanto. There’s no nuance. There’s no listening to local knowledge. There’s just dogma.
So like… take your “general logic rule” and shove it, honestly. Because sitting at a comfortable remove from where people are actually working the land, and comfortably theorizing about what “ought” to grow there, is exactly the bullshit I’m talking about. How about you actually sit down and listen to THE PEOPLE WHO ACTUALLY WORK THE LAND.
Oh my god it’s amazing how every response to a post that’s about “nuance is important, farming systems should be adapted to their environment, veganism that doesn’t acknowledge this is a problem” just…keeps proving the point.
Also I’m offended on behalf of like half of Mali by the idea that people in deserts just eat “jackrabbits and bugs.” You know what desert peoples in Mali do for a living? They herd cattle. Or, where it’s too dry for that, camels. Around rivers they’ll farm a little, but when you get less than 250 mm of rainfall a year, you can’t grow most things. A cow can range over a huge area of sparse desert vegetation and survive. A human can’t–because we can’t digest grass.
And this whole bit?
Also, as a general logic rule, if plants can grow there, you can farm
native plants. If plants cannot grow there, animals are likely to be
scarce anyway and cannot thrive enough to support a human populaces
nutritional needs because…..there’s not enough vegetation.
Is just…not even remotely close to being true. Just for example, all the areas labeled “pastoral”(#12) on this map (x) are predominantly livestock farming systems. Those labeled “agro-pastoral” (#11) depend on both crops and livestock. That’s not a small area–pretty much the entire country of Niger, most of Mali, Somalia, and Senegal, big chunks of Sudan, Chad, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Kenya, Ethiopia, Namibia, and Botswana.
That’s not an “edge case” or an “exception to the rule.” That’s millions of people.
And before you start thinking that livestock were introduced there by colonialism or capitalism, no: the cattle raised in those parts of Africa are not even closely related to the cattle raised in Europe and the US. Those were domesticatedin Africa. People who live in some of those areas developed the ability to process lactose independently of Europeans, because of long histories of cattle raising.
So yeah, claiming that vegetarianism should be practiced everywhere? That is taking your idea of how people should farm and should eat…taking YOUR “general logic rule” and applying it to places you clearly don’t know much about.
ugh 