Abstract
In chapter 12, Nassim Nobari (US), longtime activist and co-founder of Seed the Commons, calls attention to social dynamics in the vegan food and anymal activist movements that create a rigid hierarchy within and that ultimately ally these movements with corporate capitalism. Nobari calls out the professionals of the movement for exploiting the current emphasis on identity and social justice in order to build careers and channel funds into already wealthy organizations (and businesses), at the expense of more genuine and transformative activism.
There are and will be those who think I have gone overboard. Let them rest assured that this assessment is correct, probably beyond their wildest imagination, and that I will continue to do so.
—Mary Daly
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Notes
- 1.
There is nuance that necessitates more detail than space here allows. Discussing issues of privilege, racism, representation, and discrimination within the movement is positive in its proper context, that is, when the vegan movement is the actual topic. What I am referring to is when such arguments are used to detract from the question of whether or not anymals are ours to eat.
- 2.
I’ve witnessed this more in Europe than in the United States.
- 3.
In Switzerland dumpstered food was very clean and high quality.
- 4.
I came to this in a different way which started with my work in social psychology on the globalization of dairy consumption. Eurocentrism was an answer to my inquiry into how people were convinced of the necessity of milk. This informed my later reflection on the refusal of the food movement to consider that anymal exploitation is not the only way to do sustainability.
- 5.
They have privately apologized and offered to make amends, but due to a personal difference with me, they removed the passages that were copied rather than give us credit. Seed the Commons is planning to take legal action.
- 6.
The respective founders of Whole Foods and Amazon, wealthy men who are famously anti-worker.
- 7.
Kiss the Ground is a 2020 film that promoted regenerative grazing. The original intended title for it was Kale V. Cow. This was the name that I used in my talks and writing.
- 8.
This was a summit on climate change hosted in San Francisco by the governor of California. In response, many local organizations, including Seed the Commons, organized the Rise for Climate, Jobs, and Justice march as well as other alternative events to the summit.
- 9.
The lack of pushback from regenerative grazing advocates was certainly because we were not on their radar.
- 10.
Even in the United States, with its food deserts and subsidized anymal products, white people and the wealthy favor meat, but this has been overlooked in conversations in the vegan movement around identity and food because of the normative nature of American culture and non-vegan diets.
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Nobari, N. (2023). Meet the New Vegan World. In: Oppressive Liberation. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15363-1_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15363-1_12
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