Podcast Transcript
Hope
Welcome to the Hope for the Animals Podcast, sponsored by United Poultry Concerns. I’m your host, Hope Bohanec, and you can find all our past shows by going to our website, HopeForTheAnimalsPodcast.org. You can reach me there with your thoughts and questions, I’d love to hear from you.
Today on the podcast I have a very special guest, Andy Tabar. Andy is the co-host of one of my favorite vegan podcasts, The Bearded Vegans, with his co-host, Paul. The Bearded Vegans Podcast is in its fifth year of releasing weekly episodes dedicated to discussing the ethical gray areas of living a vegan life. Andy is also the owner of a vegan business, Compassion Co, an organic, US-made vegan clothing line with awesome and fun vegan t-shirts and hoodies, and other items. Andy had so much great information to share that we’re going to jump right into the interview.
Before we do that, I wanted to thank Andy. I didn’t get to do this in the interview, I meant to. He was so kind to me when I was starting this podcast about a year ago. He was one of the only people that I knew who had a podcast, and he was so encouraging. He didn’t make me feel like I was going to be competition, he was just very, very supportive and helped me with technical questions in the beginning. I so appreciated that hand holding and back patting at the time because it was very intimidating, starting a podcast, so I appreciated his support. He is such an awesome guy and I’m really glad he agreed to be on the podcast today. He has so much amazing information to share. We’re going to jump right into the interview.
Hope: I want to bring in our guest today. Today we have Andy Tabar, and I’m so happy he is joining us today. Welcome to the podcast, Andy.
Andy: Thank you so much for having me, Hope.
Hope: Absolutely. I want to start with your story. To me, all vegan activists are superheroes and all superheroes have origin stories, and you’re really pulling double duty and triple duty with how active you are. You’ve got your podcast and speaking and your outreach, and on top of that, you have a vegan business, the Compassion Co clothing line. You are certainly a superhero to me and I would love to hear your origin story of when and why you went vegan and got into activism, whatever you’d like to share.
Andy: Sure. I wish I had a really exciting origin story. No radioactive spiders or anything.
Hope: Aw, not bit by a spider. Nothing like that? Aw.
Andy: Nope. I went vegan back in 2007, and I wish I had some amazing lightbulb moment and some video that I saw, or some interaction that I had. It really just came down to the right time, right place, and deciding that I wanted to do it. I of course had interacted with some, being in college I had received vegan outreach type leaflets and stuff like that. I kind of dabbled and experimented a little bit with vegetarianism. Nothing ever really clicked.
The thing that I was doing with my life back then, what I thought would be my big thing, was I was in a band, and we existed for many, many years. We were touring full time, and half of the band one day, before this big three month long tour, out of nowhere, we’re like, “You want to go vegetarian?” Three of us, three of the six of us were like “Sure, let’s do that!” We kind of made a plan. We were doing basically a clockwise circle around the outer rim of the US and we’re like, “Well we can’t do it in Florida because we love their gator tacos and there’s this burger place in Texas. But we’ve never toured in Northern California so we don’t know what we’re missing, so let’s just plan to go vegetarian after we leave Southern California.” It was as simple as that. I honestly don’t know why. It just felt like it was the right thing to do.
We were in California, and a friend brought us to this burrito place. It was a little earlier than scheduled or planned to go vegetarian but we went to a burrito place and the veggie burrito was the cheapest. Right then and there the three of us were like, “Okay, let’s just start right now.” And I literally never looked back. It was not a struggle or anything. A few months later, we ended up touring with a band where all of their members were vegan. Even at that point, I was like, “Oh, vegans! I don’t want any of that. I don’t need that, I don’t want to have to check for honey in my bread, and all this stuff.” They were the kindest, nicest, most amazing people. I had met vegans prior to that, that were kind of more militant, you know, that would come from like the punk hardcore scene. That kind of vibe of vegan. I never connected with them. But these people were so warm and welcoming, and I just thought I would love to be like them. They were so kind and receptive to the questions we asked. They were eating Tofutti and they let me try it, and I was like, “This tastes like glue.” But they never were like “Well, screw you, carnist!” They were so receptive to the questions. It wasn’t long after that that I bought a vegan cookbook and started making things out of it. I was secretly vegan for a couple of weeks until a friend noticed that I turned down cheese somewhere and was like, “Are you vegan now?” And I was like, “Yeah, I guess I’m vegan now.”
That was in August of 2007, and I never looked back from there. At that point, I was buying all the books that I could. I wanted to learn everything I could, cookbooks as well. I think it was The Vegan Sourcebook that I picked up that really laid out the ethical arguments and all the stuff that was happening. I was watching as many vegan documentaries as I could. So I really became immersed in that world. I started selling vegan baked goods at shows for $1 or $2 with some vegan literature. Then from there, I got into the world of vegan activism and started a vegan clothing line, all this stuff you mentioned, and that just really put me into the world of veganism.
Hope: Wow. I have to say that’s a very unique origin story. Making a pact with your band, I’ve never heard that one. And I’m sorry, you can’t just gloss over the band thing. So what did you play? What kind of music?
Andy: It’s a very acquired taste, I will say. It started as a ska punk kind of band, and ended as just a really weird heavy thing with horns. It was the type of thing where if you liked what we were doing, you were super into it, and otherwise, it was pretty inaccessible. I was the front man, I wouldn’t call it singing exactly, but it was a lot of jumping around and screaming my head off and I had a really fun time doing it.
Hope: We met when you were doing the 10,000 Lives Tour. You were driving a van around the country that had video screens on the van and you were going to events in college campuses. You came to the Santa Rosa Junior College, which is near me in the Sonoma County area. You have students watch the videos and you talk to them. I came to help that day and that’s how we met. So I know you’ve been doing this activism for quite a while.
Andy: I was doing the DIY stuff where I was getting leaflets and making my own. I actually made a little ‘zine which is a photocopied short 10 page thing of how to cook vegan food in a rice cooker as my band did on tour. We’d make chili and burritos and all this stuff in a rice cooker like at the merch table. I was selling this cheap ‘zine on teaching people how to cook vegan cheap, with no chopping or kitchen even. That specific band tour experience led into doing the 10 Million Lives Tour. They were looking for somebody to drive this vehicle around and talk to people about going vegan, and I was like, these are the two things that I love to do. For two years, I did three or four tours with them, and had, I think it was estimated over 10,000 one-on-one conversations about going vegan.
It’s been an interesting thing because I feel like I have inhabited so many different sects of this whole movement, where I have my little business and that’s brought me to veg fests. I’m friends with lots of vegan business owners, but doing that activism brought me to a lot of people in the nonprofit world and, like the Animal Rights Conference, and that world within veganism. I feel like I’ve been able to wear all these different hats and be a fly on the wall in all these different parts of the movement.
Hope: That’s great. Andy, I invited you here today to talk about big bodies, fat bodies, and veganism. I’ll admit that when I was much younger I did have a prejudice against large-bodied people. I thought that they were lazy and maybe just sat around all day and didn’t have willpower. In my 20s I worked at a natural food store and I really had my mind changed because I had two women that I befriended that were co-workers. They were big women but they were really into health and healthy living, and they didn’t eat all day. One rode her bike to work every day. They talked to me about different bodies and how you can be healthy and large. I was really lucky to know them, and they really changed my outlook. I know that you do talk about this issue, that’s why I invited you on. You’ve spoken about this at veg fests and other events. What’s your experience with this? Why do you speak about this issue?
Andy: First I want to say that I know we will be talking about specific terms and things like that, but I want to put right up front that I think it’s totally fine and acceptable to say fat. I know that it is a really scary term. We’re all taught to be scared of our bodies changing, or having a little fat or a lot of fat on our bodies, but I think a part of the work that I’m trying to do is to help to make fat a neutral descriptor. Sometimes I bristle when I hear someone describe you like that and I’m like, “Nope that’s all these mechanisms of society at work right now.” I think it’s totally fine to say we’re talking about fat bodies and veganism, or fat shaming and veganism, things like that.
The other thing that I do want to acknowledge before getting into all of this is that— maybe this doesn’t need to be said—we all have our own individual experiences with this. The experience that I have is not necessarily the universal fat experience. I have privilege in so many aspects of my life. I’m a white male, able-bodied, middle-class upbringing, all of that kind of stuff. Fatness enhances and exacerbates a lot of marginalization and oppressions people feel, so in many aspects of my life, I am very lucky. Even as a fat person, I’m on the smaller end of fat, even though I’ve experienced plenty of prejudice and all sorts of anti-fat bias. I want to acknowledge that, to say that people that are fatter than me have a much worse experience than me, and someone with a different life experience is likely to have something different. I’m speaking from just my own personal experience.
As somebody who has some public presence within veganism, it puts me in front of a lot of people, especially with the veg fests that I do. Under normal times, pre-pandemic times, I lived in my van and I traveled from veg fest to veg fest. Most weekends of the year, I’m at a veg fest and putting my fat vegan body at my merch booth with all my shirts that say “Vegan” and vegan related phrases in front of the thousands of people. Sometimes it’s one thousand, sometimes it’s 30,000 people, like at Vegan Street Fair. I’m subject to a lot of people’s gaze and a lot of people’s conversations, so I’m sort of on display, and I’m being presented to the public in so many aspects of my life. Much less so with podcasting, obviously. All of that has led to me having a lot of different observations about the way that the vegan movement interacts with fat people, with fatness, and the ways that the vegan movement in many ways is reflecting a society-wide anti-fat bias. In ways that are very specific to veganism, really magnifying and making fat shaming and anti-fat bias much worse in the vegan movement, than in society at large, in a couple of different ways in different places.
All of that said, I decided that I wanted to increase representation for fat vegans, because the ways that anti-fatness manifests itself within veganism is things like saying that veganism is a magic cure-all, it’ll be a weight loss plan, it’ll fix all of your health issues. In terms of trying to be a good activist, I kept encountering people saying, “You have to have a specific body to be a good vegan activist” and “You’re selling this ethical stance with your body.” All of those things collided to wanting to increase representation, and eventually to want to actually speak about it. The very first thing I did with my clothing line, Compassion Co, I put out a button that said, “Some vegans are fat, get over it.” It was one of those things that I had the idea for like a year. I had the design made and I just didn’t make it because I saw what happens when fat people step out of line, especially within veganism. Because the only way it’s “okay” to be fat, is to be working to not be fat. That’s the good fatty trope, and that’s the acceptable way, but for someone to say, “I’m just fine being like this and I’m happy like this,” is when people get really angry. I sat on that pin for a long time, and eventually, I put it out, I posted it, and then I just ran away from my computer. Thankfully I came back to, certainly some very mean and abusive comments, but overwhelmingly, a lot of people that said, “Thank you for saying something,” “I feel so alone in this,” “I feel like I can’t tell people I’m vegan,” “I’m a bad vegan,” and all of those things that I personally have experienced myself and I’ve heard many other people say.
That led me to do a couple other designs, mostly they say like, “Fat Happy Vegan” and things that are designed to encourage representation of fat vegans. I feel like if we’re a movement that is trying to change the world, but our representatives are only seen as being a one specific body type, that we’re really limiting our potential as well as causing harm to people by enhancing the anti-fat bias in society that causes lots of harm. We can talk about what that harm looks like later on. So that’s been my experience. Doing that has led me to speak about these things at veg fests, and being on a couple of panels, and doing some podcast episodes about it. That has been my general experience with this.
Hope: It’s interesting, you saying that you do a lot of tabling and so you’re kind of putting yourself out there. I had an experience with a volunteer and tabling that was just shocking to me. There was a woman that was helping me at a table. She had been vegan a while, for years, but was just getting into activism, and she was a big woman, she was a fat woman. I was training her and I left her alone at the table with someone else for a while. When I came back, I could tell, I could feel her energy had shifted and she asked if she could leave early. She confided in me a few days later when I checked in with her, that someone had really harassed her at the table. Someone had said to her, “Well, there’s no way you can be vegan, you’re too fat.” I was shocked, because I didn’t know these things really existed. I don’t have that experience. She said “I don’t ever want to table again. I don’t really want to do anything in person, anything anymore. I’ll help you behind the scenes, but I don’t want to ever do that again.” And I thought, “Wow, what a loss.” It’s just very sad.
Let’s talk about what this is. Let’s really define what’s going on here. “Body shaming,” “fat justice,” there are a lot of terms too that we can talk about. I’ve seen so many terms and I wrote down some of them here. Maybe you can tell us which ones that you think are good, or if there’s any that are problematic. There’s “body positive,” “fat positive,” “fat acceptance,” “fat liberation,” “fat justice,” “body diversity,” “size diversity,” “fatphobia.” What are acceptable terms to use for large bodies? I threw a lot at you, but let’s start by defining what we’re talking about here.
Andy: Sure. There’s a lot of terms, some that you just listed, a few that I’ll throw in that you didn’t list. I just want to say, I’m not here to police people’s language, and I don’t think any of the terms that you threw out are bad or anything, but I also think that they all have different implications, different meanings. A lot of the time, all of this stuff that you just said, just gets shrunk down into this umbrella term of “body positivity” to the point where I feel like it almost waters things down. So I relished the opportunity to discuss some of the distinctions between them.
As far as “fat shaming,” I think a lot of people probably have a pretty good idea of what that might be, but on my podcast, The Bearded Vegans, we did a whole episode on asking if guilt and shame are effective tactics for changing people’s minds about things. That sent me on this whole research tunnel about guilt and shame. Essentially, shame is about making someone feel bad about who they are as a person, whereas guilt is more about someone feeling bad about a specific act that they have done. When you’re fat shaming someone, you’re making them feel bad about who they are as an individual. We can get into this, but pretty much all the evidence says that that’s actually not a good motivator for change, whether it’s social justice or trying to get someone to exercise or whatever it is. Obviously, fat shaming is a more specific version of body shaming, and it’s much more pointed about the size of somebody’s body.
To come back to that idea of body positivity. As an umbrella term, body positivity is something that really started as a movement in the late 60s. It came out of the Fats Rights Movement, and so it is something that was designed to help those who are the most marginalized and the most affected by body shaming and fat shaming, which is the fattest among us. Over the years, it’s become a term that, as I said, is watered down. I would say it’s been really co-opted by the wellness industry, and “the wellness industry” is just new terminology for “the weight loss industry.” There’s been kind of a shift over the last ten years or so. You’re even seeing Weight Watchers has rebranded as WW now because of “weight loss,” there’s something in the air that’s like, maybe it’s not quite right. But if we rebrand it to talk about “wellness,” then all of a sudden it’s okay to talk about people’s body sizes and things like that. As a reaction to body positivity kind of getting watered down, that’s where terms like “fat liberation,” “fat justice,” etc., come out of.
There are also terms like “body neutrality.” The idea that you have to be positive about your body, to me, that’s about individualizing, that’s about stripping all of the stuff that we’re talking about from any sort of society-wide systemic bias or behaviors that are happening right now. You just have to feel good about yourself. If you feel good about yourself, then all these problems go away. Obviously, I think that we should feel good about ourselves. I think that that’s a worthy pursuit. But I also think that body neutrality is saying it’s okay if you don’t feel good about your body, and that doesn’t mean that you don’t deserve respect or justice, or to be accommodated by society or to have a place within the vegan movement, for instance. I really like that term because it makes it so it’s not so much about how you feel about yourself. Some people will never feel good about their bodies. Some people will never be able-bodied, and some people are fine with that, and some people feel down about that, and I think it’s okay to normalize feeling okay about that.
I don’t use that term that much. I’m more about the term “fat liberation,” because “fat acceptance,” to me, is kind of saying, “I just want people to have passive acceptance of me.” I want people to understand that I, as well as all fat people, are vital and worthy parts of our society. They’re vital and worthy parts of our social justice movements, of veganism, and that our presence shouldn’t be tolerated and accepted, it should be encouraged, it should be actively sought out. Because like I was saying, our movements need to represent the spectrum of human existence. That’s why I like “fat positivity” or “fat liberation” as opposed to “acceptance” or “neutrality.”
Some other terms that I’ll throw in here that might come up, there’s the term “plus-size” a lot of people are familiar with. People often say, well, if you’re not “plus-size” then you’re “normal” or something like that. But I prefer the term “straight-size” because that lets people know that you are still falling into a category, even if you feel like your body size is the default.
I’ve also said the term “anti-fat bias” a lot, and to me, that feels different than “body shaming.” I think people think of body shaming as a specific act that one bad person does to another person. Obviously, I don’t think that that is good, but I think that that really individualizes the problem. Not to say that these movements are the same, but just as an example, there can be an individual racist person saying racist things, but we also understand that white supremacy is a systemic issue as well. It’s not just about changing the hearts and minds of a handful of people that are exhibiting the most egregious of behaviors, there is systemic change needs to happen as well. That’s why I use the terms like “anti-fat bias” or maybe even “fatphobia” as opposed to just “body shaming” or “fat shaming.” I think that’s most of the terms that I mention in this kind of talk.
Hope: Okay, fascinating. Digging a little deeper, perhaps, I’ve heard you and others that talk about this say that fat oppression is another system of oppression, just like any other. Can you expand on this and how it relates to the vegan community, and perhaps how we use body image in the vegan community?
Andy: This is a question that I have struggled a lot with, figuring out a way to have a really good succinct soundbite about this. It’s something that I am still working out in my mind, but I think that it’s worth saying that all systems of oppression don’t exist in a vacuum. Everything is not its own little individual thing, and this oppression sits over here, and this one sits over here, and this one, oh we can tackle that one, and then we move on to this one. I think that anti-fatness does not exist in a bubble. I think it’s totally fine, it’s totally acceptable, and I think it’s necessary that we all really focus and become experts in one specific thing, while also educating ourselves about all other systems of oppression. I think it’s intertwined with veganism because we are fighting for the liberation of bodies, right? We are fighting for the bodily autonomy of nonhuman animals, and I think all of these things are intertwined, and we can’t separate one from the other. There’s a fantastic book that I’d recommend, Fearing the Black Body,which is about the racist roots of anti-fat bias, fat oppression, body shaming, and all of that stuff. When you dig into these things, you’re like, Oh wow, all the roots of these things are very similar. It’s important to recognize that they’re all kind of intertwined together and that they also enhance and exacerbate each other. “Enhance” is almost like a positive word but it makes oppressions worse if you’re also fat while experiencing some other kind of marginalization.
Hope: What was the book called?
Andy: It’s called, Fearing the Black Body.
Hope: All right, we’ll put a link to that in the show notes. Switching gears just a little bit, I think that there is a sentiment in the vegan activist community, and you touched on it a little bit earlier, that’s kind of like, “Well, yeah, okay, you can have body acceptance and body positivity. That’s fine, that’s good for you, but don’t bring it into veganism.” We tend to want people to think that they’re going to lose weight. There’s a lot of health-based, health-focused, plant-based activism that is kind of the gateway into veganism as they see it, and they promise all these miracle health benefits, weight loss being one of them. I think that they want to hide fat vegans because it doesn’t fit into that narrative. What do you say about this?
Andy: You said a lot of things there that I would like to touch on and tap into. I agree that it feels like fat vegans are often hidden, and I think you need to look no further than the leaflets and literature that so many organizations put out, even ones that have made posts about “fat acceptance” and “vegans come in all shapes and sizes.” You look at the leaflets they’re handing out to try to appeal to nonvegans, and it’s pretty exclusively thin or straight-size, kind of muscular type of people. Like you said, there’s this promise of, whether it’s explicitly stated or it’s just implied, that if you go vegan, you will look like this you will have this body.
I don’t want this conversation to be misconstrued as saying that I don’t think that we should ever talk about health. People want to know that they’re not going to die if they go on a vegan diet. They want to know that they can thrive. They want to know that they can continue to perform at elite levels in their sports. I think all those things are important and a part of our activism. But when we over-promise things that we can’t deliver on because if you say, “What’s a vegan diet?” That’s like saying, “What is a meat eaters diet?” Right? There are so many different variations of that and there are so many different ways to eat as a vegan. There are people who adopt the whole foods, plant based diet, and from what we’ve seen, that can definitely offer some health benefits. But not everybody is going to be so strictly focused on that, and a lot of people don’t want to go vegan and transform into the super bodybuilder type person. They just want to continue to live their lives without harming animals.
If we over-promise things, and that leads to this whole rash of videos that, I’ve certainly seen hundreds of them at this point, of the person saying, “I’m a failed vegan,” and “I went vegan and it didn’t work for me.” What does that phrase mean, “It didn’t work for me?” Veganism always works because it’s always reducing your impact on animals, it’s always working in that regard. But if we’re saying you’re going to lose all this weight, or you’re going to reverse your cancer, and all of these promises that I’ve seen people make, I think it’s a huge detriment, one, to a lot of people because we’re lying to them, and two, because we’re losing the focus on the animals. All of that is such a detriment to this movement. Sure, a lot of people do enter into this because they’re like, “I want to eat a little bit healthier. Let me try this veganism thing.” I think there is a lot of power in that, it does kind of bring down the barriers for a lot of people to then be open to the ethical messaging of it, so I don’t want to discount that. But we do such a disservice if we’re not saying to people, you can do whatever you want on this diet. You can maintain whatever body you want on this. I always say “diet,” but within these ethical beliefs, you can eat in any specific way. There’s even vegan keto books and stuff out there right now. Anything that you want to do, you can do as a vegan. If we’re not presenting that, if we’re only like, “This is a wonderful miracle health cure,” I feel like we’re just doing such a disservice to the animals.
Hope: It’s true. Veganism is a justice movement for animals, it’s not a health movement. That would be more “plant based.” I get these emails from talks that are happening and it’s “Lose weight, feel great,” “Be your best self,” and all of that, and “Go vegan.” If we don’t fulfill those promises in some certain amount of time and people don’t get those results, then it’s possible they are just going to say forget it. Like you said, there are all these people that say “Oh well, it didn’t work for me.” If that’s the main message, and I agree with you, it can bring people in, that’s fine, but we’ve got to keep the focus on the animals.
Andy: Yeah. Obviously, there’s a diversity of opinions on how much we should focus on health. I feel like it’s a tool in the toolbox, it’s a way to answer someone’s question about “If I decide to adopt this ethical framework, am I going to get enough protein? Am I going to get enough B12?” and all of those things. I don’t think that it should be the specific selling point. It’s fine if there’s a panel on that at a veg fest. I go to so many veg fests where literally five out of six of the speakers are people over-promising the benefits of a plant based diet, and telling people to adopt these highly restrictive diets that are free of all sorts of things that would be considered to be a part of an average plant based diet. This is another thing that leads to a lot of people abandoning it, because they think to be vegan, they have to get rid of salt and oil and sugar. If that’s your thing and it works for you, that’s great, but people think that that’s an inherent, intrinsic part of this. It’s a shame that there’s this overlap between the fact that vegans don’t eat animals, and people that want to promise all these health benefits also typically are not eating animals. There’s this overlap but really they’re almost two bizarrely different worlds at the same time. Actually, I do want to say— because you mentioned how a lot of people are saying, that’s fine if you want to have this “body acceptance” or whatever movement, but don’t bring veganism into it— my response to that, as I mentioned, is that all these things are intertwined.
But I don’t just want a vegan world. I am not fighting for a world where animals are free but we can still be horrible to human beings and where human beings are still horribly oppressed. I don’t know why anybody would want that. I get that we might feel like we need to put our time and effort into certain things, and again, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. But let’s ask ourselves, what are we actually fighting for? I rarely use the phrase “vegan world” anymore. I am fighting for a just world. I’m fighting for an equitable world. That means a world in which we don’t treat fat people horribly, and a world in which fat people are not subjected to all the systemic biases that they currently are. I don’t think that we need to be overwhelmed by all of this because trying to be fully involved in every social justice movement is, in my opinion, a recipe for burnout. But I think that it only enhances our activism when we work to be aware of other social justice issues. If you just want to focus on veganism, that’s fine, but put people into your Instagram feed or whatever that are educating you on racism, sexism, transphobia, fatphobia, all of these things. Make that a part of your feed. It doesn’t mean you have to go to every single march and get super involved in everything, but learning how you can conduct your activism in a way that isn’t bolstering up other systems of oppression or stepping on the necks of other social justice movements at the same time. I promise, it can be done. I think that that enhances our movement and I also think that we should be striving to be allies to other social justice movements, one, because it strengthens our movement, and two, just because it’s the right thing to do.
Hope: Yeah, absolutely. I want to talk about something that I think is really interesting that’s been happening. We’re seeing now larger bodies in mainstream commercials on TV and magazines, and in the last three to five years, I’ll be watching TV, and suddenly there is a big girl in her undies. And you’re like “Whoa!” I mean, to me it’s shocking, but in a good way. I’m like, “Yeah! Right on! That’s awesome.” I’m so glad to see that, and to see people that are more diverse and more differing bodies. I don’t see large men very much, though, it’s only women, it’s interesting to note. I’m not really sure why that is, but I think the shift is really fascinating in mainstream culture. What do you think about this shift that’s happening?
Andy: I think that increased representation for any marginalized group is always a good thing. It is interesting that you mentioned that you’re seeing a lack of fat male representation. I feel like fat men have always been more represented, but we have a different way of being represented. You think about so many classic sitcom tropes, which is usually the fat slovenly husband with the smokin’ hot wife, it’s something that you see repeated over and over again. Fat bodies, and often fat men, in media are depicted as sexless and without desire, or perpetually struggling with weight. To start to see the representation of people that just happen to be fat, I think is great. Also to see representations of people that are fine and happy with their bodies, I think all of that is great.
We probably have a super long way to go, but I also don’t want us to get distracted with cosmetic diversity. I also want to make sure that we are keeping our eye on the prize. You might have films with increased representation of women, but has the gender pay gap been addressed? Right? You have all of this focus on racial justice over the last year, and it’s cool that people are painting “Black Lives Matter” in the street, but are they actually addressing the material needs of black Americans right now? Again, not to equate all of these movements, but you start to see sort of a similar pattern. It’s cool that there are more fat people being represented in media and even in advertising, although I’m a little more cynical about that, but I’m also like, that’s great. But does that mean that we’re going to reduce the fact that fat people can be fired for being fat in 49 of the 50 US states right now? Does it address the fact that there’s actually a pay gap for fat people, that fat people are likely to be paid less? Fat people are likely to get worse medical care, and there are all these studies about anti-fat bias within medical providers and stories about people that went to the doctor for something really serious and the doctor said, “Well you need to lose weight, that’ll solve your problem.” Later, you find out they actually had cancer or some tumor or something like that. Those just a few small examples of the ways that anti-fat biases are built into the fabric of our society. I hope that increased representation can help to normalize seeing fat people and hopefully help those things, but it’s only one piece of the puzzle.
Hope: Wow, some of that stuff was really shocking. I knew some of it, but wow. I too hope that it helps and is helping. At least seeing people of different sizes makes it more normalized in a way, and hopefully, it translates into helping with all those issues. I really want people to understand and realize that not all fat people are unhealthy. I think that there’s a real misconception that just because you’re above your BMI or whatever, that you’re unhealthy, and that’s not the case. I’ve learned that. And skinny people, of course, can be unhealthy, so it goes both ways. I would love you to address this, that we don’t necessarily have to be super thin to be healthy.
Andy: Sure. The first thing that I want to say is that BMI is something that gets brought up in a lot of these conversations and I think a lot of us-
Hope: And what is BMI? I should have- It’s body mass index.
Andy: Body mass index, so essentially, it boils down to a height-to-weight ratio and that gives you a number which puts you in a category. They’re “obese”, “super obese”, etc. I don’t use the term “obese,” and I think that that sort of really pathologizes body size, and I think that-
Hope: That’s interesting. You’re okay with “fat” but not “obese.” Explain that, because I would think “obese” is a little lighter or softer.
Andy: “Fat” to me is just a neutral descriptor where “obese” is this medical term, or a scientific term, that’s been applied to different body sizes, and the end result of that is this really big stigmatization of certain body sizes. The history of BMI is it was not initially meant to be an indicator of a specific one individual’s health, and it was created using only white European men’s bodies. It is considered to be wildly racist and sexist because it doesn’t account for a wide diversity of body types. Just like— this is something I learned from Carol Adams— that crash tests are only done with dummies that were, at least to a certain point in our history, only with bodies designed to be like male bodies. The placement of your seatbelt wasn’t designed for breasts, for instance. When you take a bunch of white men and then use their specific measurements to determine what the ideal body size is, there’s a lot of problems with that. It’s a measurement tool that’s super outdated at this point.
As far as everything else that you said, certainly you cannot tell the health of somebody by looking at them. That is absolutely true. But for me, the most important thing is that regardless of somebody’s level of health, regardless of their fitness or chronic diseases, all of that stuff, I think that even if somebody is unhealthy, they’re deserving of love, respect, a place in the movement, and not to be subject to the systemic issues that come along with anti-fat bias. I’m not interested in proving that I can be healthy as a fat person because I don’t think that that should be, I want to use the term moral baseline, I don’t think that that should be the moral measuring stick by which we determine someone is welcomed in our society and deserving of respect and justice. There’s a lot of people that do great workaround disproving those things. To me, it’s kind of it’s a distraction from the overall point of the fact that we all deserve love and respect, and care and justice in the society.
Hope: Wow. Yeah, really well put and beautifully said. I hadn’t thought about it that way, and you’re absolutely right. What advice do you have for people out there that want to help? I guess we can call them allies, maybe, let me know if you think that word applies, but for people who want to stand up for fat vegans and want to help?
Andy: I don’t personally have any problem with the term “allies.” I know a lot of people prefer “accomplices.” I think the intent of the word-
Hope: I do not like “accomplices.” I’ve been hearing that. It sounds like an accomplice to a crime. We’ve got to find a better word than that.
Andy: For me, I’m more interested in what do people think the intent of the word is. As long as people don’t say “I’m an ally, that’s a badge I wear, and I have nothing else to do,” as long as people understand that allyship is a continual process of learning, unlearning, and standing up and doing the right thing. It’s not just saying “I believe that this is a good thing” and then that’s all you have to do. For people that really want to become better allies, like I mentioned, diversifying your feed is such an important thing to do. Within the vegan world, Chelsey Lincoln, who can be found at Fat Vegan Voice on Instagram, and I think FatVeganVoice.com, is seriously the best person. She is such a wealth of knowledge and has been doing this work for such a long time. Because of the fraught nature of the health promises and a lot of this vegan movement being, I want to say infiltrated, but infiltrated by people selling health promises, there’s definitely a really strong tension between those that are working for body liberation and vegans, and so it’s nice to find. I think that’s understandable, even though it’s frustrating for me, wanting to exist in both places, but Chelsea is such a great person to follow if you’re looking for somebody that’s not going to compromise on the animal ethics of it.
As far as books, I already mentioned Fearing the Black Body, which is by Sabrina Strings. Also an invaluable resource that I think literally every human should read is called What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat, which is by Aubrey Gordon. Aubrey goes by Your Fat Friend, which is YR Fat Friend on Instagram.com. For the longest time she was an anonymous writer until this book came out. Aubrey also has a podcast called Maintenance Phase which deconstructs and ruins everything from Weight Watchers, to Fen-Phen, to the Presidential Fitness Test, breaks down the histories of all of those. Those are resources that are great. If you’re more interested in learning about the systemic things, like if you heard me say that fat people can legally be fired for being fat and you’re like, “What? Tell me more,” definitely go read What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat because it’s a mind blowing read, if you’re not familiar with this stuff, and even if you are, it puts it together in such a nice package.
The last thing I’ll add is learn. Diversify your feed. That’ll help you identify these things when they are happening. Then we need allies. We need straight-size folks that are not affected by this to also speak up when they see it, if you see a post by an organization or a friend. It doesn’t mean you have to cancel everybody or anything like that, but it does mean that it’s good to lend a supportive comment in the comment section, or send a message to the organization to discuss why you think what they’re doing is detrimental. Lending that sort of public support once you start to educate yourself a little bit more on these things is a really important thing to do as well.
Hope: Great. I’ll add all that you mentioned in the show notes so if anybody’s interested, be sure to go to the show notes so you can link to all of those resources. Andy, I ask all of my guests this, so I’m going to ask you as well. What gives you hope for the future?
Andy: Oh, Hope, that’s such a tough one. I am known for being the eternal pessimist. I mean, just by the fact that I’m here talking to you right now, and the fact that I have dedicated so much of my life over the last however-many years to trying to create change, says to me that I must have a kernel of hope somewhere within me. Hope is absolutely necessary to believe that we can change the world. I have hope just as a necessary function of doing activism, which is that I have to have it in order to believe that the world can be changed. I honestly feel like we have to overcome an extraordinary amount of pessimism to believe that, and I think that those of us who are actually actively working to change things, we must all have hope. I don’t have any specific things, or acts or laws or any of that kind of stuff, but I just have it because I have to have it.
Hope: Hope is my middle name, literally. And I agree, I think that my mom named me that because she knew I was gonna need it. To be an activist, you’re right, we have to have hope, we know that this isn’t gonna happen in our lifetime even. It’s generational work, so we have to have hope for a better future, or we wouldn’t do what we do. Right?
Andy: Absolutely.
Hope: Andy, it’s been a really, really enlightening conversation. I really hope that people dig into this more and learn more, and I really appreciate you being on and being honest and open and talking to us about this. Thank you.
Andy: Thank you so much for having me.
Thank you for listening to the Hope for the Animals Podcast. I’ve interviewed numerous guests now for the podcast and a lot of the time, I’m already basically familiar with the information, but with some, I learn so much. I not only learn something, but I feel like my perspective shifts, and this was one of those interviews. I feel like I now have a much deeper understanding of this issue, and of anti-fat biases that even I still had. I want to thank Andy for his insights, it was really informative. If you found this episode important, please share it with your friends or on your social media platforms. Add us to your listening library, and maybe give us a five-star rating or write a review, wherever you listen to your podcasts. That will really help us to grow and reach even more ears with this kind of critical and meaningful programming. Always have hope for a better day for nonhuman animals, and for humans, human animals of all shapes and sizes, and live vegan.
