Podcast Transcript
Episode 122: Vegan is a Boycott with Janet O’Shea
Hope:
Welcome to the Hope for the Animals Podcast, a project of Compassionate Living. I’m your host, Hope Bohanec, and today, we’re exploring the importance of taking individual action to change the world, and our guest is Janet O’Shea.
Before we get into our conversation, I wanted to preface this topic with a story. I want to tell you a story of something that I experienced recently that relates. So I think most of you know that I moved from Sonoma County, California, where I was most my adult life, for 30 years. And I now live in Eugene, Oregon, and I was recently asked to be on a Q and A panel here in Oregon after a showing of the film Eating Our Way to Extinction, which I would say is one of the best documentaries that we have about the environmental connection to animal issues. It was a really good movie, good film. So we’re watching this film, like 90 minutes of laying out exactly why we should be vegan, and then the Q and A comes and we go up on stage, and a host asked us on the panel to introduce ourselves and say a little something about the film, and then we’re going to take questions from the audience.
So I give my intro and say it was awesome, and then the mic gets passed to one of my fellow panelists, and he was the head of the local Eugene 350.org group. Now, 350.org is an environmental group primarily focused on climate destruction, and this guy proceeded to use his introduction time to talk about how he agreed with the science of the film, but not the ask or the action that it said to take. And he basically said that it does no good to go vegan, and that rather, everyone should be getting involved with legislative work improvements, like the Farm Bill, etc, the stuff that 350.org is doing. And this totally threw me. I had no idea that he was going to say that, and I was kind of like, who invited him? but this was not a vegan group that was showing the film. It was more broad coalition political group, and it’s great that they showed this film, but they had invited this guy who had a very different message than the film, and I felt like I had to respond. I did the best I could, countering his narrative without being prepared for it at all, trying not to argue or be confrontational to a fellow panelist. I had no idea that this is what I was stepping into or what I would be responding to, but my main point that I kept trying to come back to, even with questions that had nothing to do with it, was why not both? Why not do everything in our power to help? I kept feeling like I was trying to circle back to this point, because this guy kept countering going vegan, right? But my main point was, Why not both? We need both. Yes, we need to do the legislative work, of course. But how is encouraging vegan hurting that? I think it supports and strengthens that work. It’s all connected. We need to do everything. We need every effective tool in the toolbox. And individual personal change is effective. It empowers us to do more. It supports the systematic change by eroding the pillars to support in the marketplace and creates that foundational support, that public support, so the structural change can happen.
Anyway, I was so disheartened that this narrative was out there in Eugene, very liberal Eugene, so even more important to do the work and do the work I’m doing here locally with the Eugene VeganFest.
So this is our topic for the day, because this narrative is out there, and I’m concerned that people are hearing this more and more. It’s just another excuse, another barrier to living vegan, especially with low hanging fruit like environmentally minded people, and actually, more and more, it’s coming from within our own animal advocacy movement. The same message, and I’ve talked about this kind of a parallel train of thought with my solo episode called the Cage Free Conundrum. If you follow the money, you follow the movement’s resources, jobs and animal advocacy movement. It’s all now shifting primarily to the inside game to welfare campaigns and corporate campaigns and ballot initiatives, getting the government and the corporations to make changes and taking the resources away from direct individual, grassroots vegan outreach. And not just diverting resources, but actually spreading rhetoric that grassroots efforts are ineffective. So this is what we’re going to get into today. This is what we’re going to talk about in our upcoming interview.
So let’s jump into this really important topic. I think you’re going to really find this interesting. Okay, so today, on the podcast, we have Janet O’Shea, informally known as Jay. She’s the author of several books, book chapters and articles on veganism, animal rights and environmentalism. She’s part of the teaching team for the freshman cluster course food as a lens for the Environment and Sustainability at UCLA, and on the advisory board of climate diet, and is also a board member of New Roots Institute. Janet is a professor and chair of the department of World Arts and Cultures and Dance at UCLA. She is a regular volunteer with animal rights, broader solidarity and food justice organizations. Welcome to the podcast, Jay.
Janet:
Thank you, Hope it’s a pleasure to be here, and I’m really looking forward to our conversation.
Hope:
I am too, because, you know, I discovered you from an article that you co-wrote, and we’re going to talk more about that later, but I found that we had a lot of parallels with our interests and things that we do. So we have a lot to talk about, but we like to start by getting to know you with the question: Why and when did you go vegan?
Janet:
It’s actually a long and convoluted story, but I think it might be worth telling some of it because I think the transition to veganism often is convoluted, and I think my story might be illustrative. When I was a child, I never liked meat. I just had this implicit revulsion towards it. But I grew up in a working class Irish American household. There was not a lot of fresh produce, there was not a lot of cooking from scratch so it was kind of hard to avoid meat. I went vegetarian as a teenager, and I have to say upfront, and admittedly, I did so for fairly superficial reasons. I thought it was something alternative and counter cultural and therefore interesting. But I’ve always liked to research. And so I started to delve into some of the interconnected issues about animal exploitation, about the environment. I was reading the magazine Vegetarian Times. This is the 1980s.
Hope:
Oh yeah, I remember. I remember Vegetarian Times.
Janet:
And I read about this thing called veganism. People weren’t talking about it a lot, but basically all I understood was that it was a more committed form of vegetarianism. So I was interested. And I was kind of functionally vegan. I wasn’t connected to animal rights communities at all. I was the only vegan I knew. So even though I was functionally vegan, I would say it didn’t really fully connect for me. I then had these opportunities to travel in college and graduate school. I spent time in India doing research. I hade to travel to the Philippines, and so I ended up veering out of veganism when I was in India, ate some fish when I was in the Philippines. And that came from wanting to be respectful of other people’s cultures. It was pragmatic. But the result was that for several decades, I was kind of functionally vegetarian, veering towards veganism occasionally, and I wasn’t fully happy with that position. I always knew in my heart of hearts, I always knew veganism was the goal, but I didn’t fully grasp how complexly interconnected all of the issues around animals and human rights and the environment were. I didn’t really see how fully interconnected they were until in the early 2010s when my family went to a road trip to Portland, driving through Northern California in the winter, and it was just devastating how dry the landscape was and how there was no snow in the mountains. And that just brought everything home. I was like, this is the environmental crisis. This is not an abstraction. And in Portland, I happened to go into a bookstore and find Jonathan Foer’s Eating Animals, and everything changed for me. And I went vegan right away. And that was in 2012.
Hope:
It’s interesting that you were had such aversion to meat as a child. And that’s something that Cogen and I, my husband and I, call Visceral Veganism where people are just grossed out by meat, as we should be, because it’s the flesh of an animal. So yeah, it’s super interesting.
Janet:
I think for some people, there’s this trauma of Oh no, chickens, a chicken. It was, it was more visceral than that. I think that wasn’t even like, Oh no, that’s animal, it was just like, this is gross. Yeah, Gross. Gross, yeah. I mean veins and blood and…And it’s interesting, because I think some people were like, oh, that’s squeamishness. But it was Melaine Joy who talked about how what we call squeamish is really connected to compassion. I mean natural aversion that maybe we should really think about, consider deeply.
Hope:
Thank you for telling us about your journey, and so interesting that it did take you a few decades of being vegetarian. And I think this is common, especially for people that did it long ago, and you started in the 80s with kind of dietary change and exploration. So yeah, it can be a journey, and it can take some time, and that’s okay, you know, as long as, like you said, veganism is the end goal.
Janet:
Yeah. And I think what gets called failure outside the movement may not be failure. I think that’s where it’s illustrative. I think sometimes when people look at veganism, people try and they fail. But I don’t know if it’s trying and failing, like failure, first of all, is down the road to accomplishment. But also, I think it’s people trying to land in a system that makes it really difficult to live according to core values.
Hope:
Yeah, absolutely. It’s a process and it’s a process of having to step outside what is mainstream, what is easy and accessible and all of that, so it can take time. So Jay, I invited you on the podcast because of your excellent opinion piece that you co-authored and was posted online in Newsweek. And it was called “Even One Person’s Food Choice Affects the Whole Planet.” And as soon as I read this, I knew I wanted to connect with you. And then once we started emailing, I found out that you also give a presentation about Gandhi and the Satyagraha movement and the connection to the vegan movement, connecting that to individual grassroots action. And that is just so interesting to me and I knew I had to have you on the podcast. I love all of this, and we’re going to get into Gandhi later. I do really want to talk about that, but I thought, let’s start with the critique of educational outreach to foster individual change, really vegan education, right? Trying to get people to go vegan is what we’re really talking about. So individual change versus systematic change, and of course, systematic change being more like government, legislation, ballot initiatives, corporate campaigns, corporate outreach, and corporations to change. And there seems to be this kind of conflict, right? It’s a seeming conflict in strategies for activism. And the environmental movement has this conflict, and now we’re seeing it actually in our own animal advocacy movement, this individual outreach versus systematic outreach or systematic campaigning. So let’s talk about that conflict first, that conflict of individual change versus systematic change. What is the tension there? And why did you write this piece? Why did you feel it was important to talk about the importance of individual change?
Janet:
That’s a great question. So we actually wrote this piece, the team of authors, we wrote this piece in response to another Newsweek article. Newsweek said, well, we don’t really do like repost response op eds, so write your own and we’ll publish it. The Op Ed that we were responding to was really interesting because of the flaws in its reasoning. So the headline of that op ed was, Don’t Bother Going Vegan to Save the Planet, Do This Instead. And the author, who happened to be doing, I think, an MBA in sustainable technologies, his advice was, don’t go vegan, instead you should invest money into sustainable clean energy start-ups. It was twofold. One, he started out talking about veganism, and then immediately switched to talking about recycling, because with recycling, for example, there are all these reasons why recycling is not effective. But the other thing that was really indicative was that he used meat industry studies that supposedly show why going vegan is not effective as a climate mitigation strategy. And that part is fascinating because when you look at the actual studies he’s referencing, there’s a few embedded assumptions, and to my mind, those assumptions are completely wacky. So the meat industry models assume, first of all, that we would take all the food waste that is currently fed to animals who are then raised for slaughter for food, that we would take all that food waste and we would burn it, putting all that carbon into the atmosphere.
Hope:
Like, you mean, if we all went vegan?
Janet:
Yes, what would we do with this excess food that we’re feeding animals, right? Okay, so basically, the food that is the food waste from farms that doesn’t get sent to market, and perhaps things like food scraps. So they were like, what would we do with all of that? Burn it? which is just bonkers because for a lot of things, we would not grow it in the first place, right? And all of the food-related climate mitigation models that I’ve seen, all of them do also address food waste. Even if we did have this supposed “waste”, we could just use it as compost directly. So the fact that they work that into the model, and they work in all that those carbon emissions is really disingenuous. And then the other thing that they do is they assume that because we’ve taken all that food waste and we burned it, we’re going to have to use a whole bunch of industrial fertilizers to grow vegetables for human consumption. Why exactly? Because we burned the food waste. Not using compost. So that’s really an erroneous assumption, and that’s part of a meat industry tactic, is to keep coming back to this idea that only animal manure actually functions as fertilizer, or possibly industrial fertilizer, and therefore, if your not raising animals for food and slaughtering them, you must be using industrial fertilizer. You know that that’s absolutely not true. And we know that there are such things as the veganic agriculture. We would take sanctuary animals and use their manure, but we don’t need to. So that’s erroneous. I think your question, though, was, why? Why did we write this op ed, and then what were some of the critiques of individual activism?
Hope:
I actually didn’t realize that it was a response to another article. I didn’t know that was the case. So go ahead and what was the premise, or what, what was the response.
Janet:
Right, right. Okay, so one of my starting points was to take on this idea, really an assumption, that vegan education is like recycling, and it’s not like recycling for some pretty important reasons. So recycling is a downstream effort. It is trying to clean up the mess after the fact, and in a way, it’s a form of damage control. But veganism is an upstream effort. It’s trying to cut off the problem at the source, and it’s wiping the products of the damaging industry. So it’s trying to change a damaging system by applying economic pressure. And recycling doesn’t put any economic pressure on a system of overproduction, over consumption. It’s basically bailing water out of a boat with holes in it. So necessary, probably, but not terribly effective. So if you’re going to make a comparison, the zero waste movement might be a more apt comparison, but even that doesn’t really hold because the production of objects is an important environmental problem, but it’s not comparable in degree to the other leading drivers of environmental degradation, like animal agriculture and transportation.
So veganism is a direct intervention. It’s directly challenging one of the major drivers of environmental degradation. It’s sort of disingenuous as well to only talk about climate change, and that’s something we hear a lot from meat industry studies as well, is to turn the conversation to climate change and then to say, Oh, well, the methane isn’t actually that big of a deal because we can generate energy from it or because it will break down. And when they do that, first of all, again, they’re reading the numbers. But also they’re not talking about all the other forms of environmental degradation, in terms of land use, in terms of fresh water use, in terms of deforestation, ocean acidification. So it’s a little bit of a bait and switch there as well.
And also it’s not only methane, nitrous oxide and other greenhouse gasses are in high, high quantities from animal agriculture as well. Not only methane. The other thing they don’t talk about is land use and opportunity cost. So all of that land is being used for grazing, so much of it is deforested. And if we were really in this utopian situation where everybody in the US went vegan, we would be able to take all that land that’s now not being used for grazing and raising crops for animals, and we can actually reforest it. So any kind of legitimate model really should include that as part of it. It should include the opportunity benefit of reforestation.
Hope:
Yes, absolutely. Rewilding, reforesting, replanting. That’s so critical. I call it nature-based solutions, you know, to this crisis, we don’t need all kinds of technological solutions. Let’s just replant and rewild. We have a wonderful technology that nature gave us, green plants absorb carbon, right?
Janet:
Absolutely. And that’s where we have this nature-based, biologically based drawdown system. We have a geoengineering system that we can use that will actually help to restore the ecosystem biodiversity. So we don’t need to get ahead of ourselves and start thinking about like, what are we going to do? We need to be wary of these technological geoengineering systems that are going to cause damage in the short term but save us in the long term. We actually have this possibility, rewilding, right in front of us. Yeah. And how does veganism help? Well, we’re using tons of land to graze animals to grow the feed that goes to feed the animals. We could eliminate so much acreage and rewild it to regrow. All these acres are going to animal agriculture.
Hope:
So yeah, well, I want to pull us back into kind of the individual change versus systematic change issue that was very much part of this article you wrote. And as we go into this, something that I want to say is that, I don’t understand why some of these organizations and individual activist are saying, No, don’t do individual change. It won’t help. You know, why change yourself? We shouldn’t only focus on systematic change. Why not both? I don’t get why we can’t do both. I mean, we are in a crisis, right? We need both and grassroots tactics, individuals doing good things, whether it’s zero waste or going vegan, that helps. It supports the systematic change. And another way that it’s talked about, sometimes in systems thinking, is the inside game and the outside game, where the inside game is working with industry, the outside game is individual identity change or culture shift. And how we need both. In any movement, you need both. And you attempt systematic change without the popular Democratic support, without cultural change happening, then how successful can it be? Right? It’s possibly going to be not as resilient. And if we try to make systems change in agriculture, but people still want their cheeseburgers? Well, how’s that going to hold?
Janet:
It has to be both, absolutely. And I think we just saw that in recent US politics, this whole thing of “they’re coming for your cheeseburgers.” So if we try to make systemic change without buy in, I agree it’s bound to fail. I think the history of all this is fascinating because the environmental movement and I think now the animal rights movement both are really pushing this “individual actions don’t matter” narrative. Yeah, I think it’s really peculiar because for the longest time, the efforts were actually only focused on individual action, and environmental organizations were really focusing on individual actions, change your light bulbs, drive less. What’s interesting here is that individual actions are not all the same. They’re not all just actions that have a municipal effect. So when environmental organizations were saying, change out your light bulbs, or actually, these meat industry studies, they very often say, buy a hybrid. Well, it’s interesting that none of them say give up your car. None of them say ride a bike. So even when it comes to individual action, they’re strategically picking the things that are going to have a small impact. So I think that’s really important for us to remember that individual actions are not all the same, and this is less for the animal rights movement. The environmental movement really was urging very, very small individual change.
But I think the other thing is exactly what you’ve been saying, which is that there’s a that’s a false dichotomy. So particularly in the environmental movement, for a while there, there was individual change isn’t action, is a distraction. And the research now shows that it’s a false binary to say we can change individual character or we can change the system. We can do both. And in fact, more recent studies show that individual actions, just as you’re saying, set the conditions for social change. They prime us for societal transformation. They make it more appealing and more acceptable. So to go back to this comparison to bicycling, you can transform a city and put in a bunch of bike lanes, but if nobody’s cycling, it’s actually not going to be effective. And the effect is going to be a backlash because you have a bunch of drivers worrying about losing their parking. Whereas if you have a whole community of people who are cycling, and then you put in bike lanes, there can be a whole bunch of people more supportive.
And I think that’s the same thing with individual veganism. If your workplace adopts a default vegan policy and you’re vegan, you’re vegetarian, you’re flexitarian, you’re transitioning to one of those things that’s going to be really wonderful. If you’ve never even thought about these issues yourself, probably your response is going to be to grumble about it, like, well, why isn’t there this? Why is that being included? And clearly there is a relationship there that individual change sets us up to make larger scale change more appealing. A really interesting set of studies shows that a lot of proponents of systemic change, it turns out, actually are doing far less on a personal level than people who are not as concerned with systemic change. So there was this book by Arthur Brooks, who looked at a blood donation study. And it turns out that the people argue for systemic change only and have given blood at a rate like 30% less. So if everybody adopted that idea that only systemic change matters, like these really basic, compassionate, altruistic gestures, would actually take a dive. So I think that’s really interesting.
The other thing that’s super interesting is there was this article from University of Miami and they discovered that just at the same time that the fossil fuel industry was pushing individual action, albeit minor individual action. BP invented the idea of the carbon footprint calculator, right? And they were encouraging people to take personal responsibility. At the very same time, the animal agriculture industry was obstructing campaigns focused on individual action, so they obstructed even really minor things like Meatless Monday. The industry was getting there, and this happened from the 80s with the Diet for New America campaigns that the meat industry got in there and they obstructed. They obstructed cities that tried to adopt meatless policies. But they also really started pushing this narrative that individual dietary change is pointless, that animal agriculture isn’t contributing that much to environmental crisis. And the result of it was that these campaigns scaled back their asks over time. So I think they in the 80s it was, decrease meat consumption by 50% and then it went down to give up me one day a week. So it’s really clear from that that, yes, the idea of personal responsibility for environmental crisis comes from the industry, but the idea that individual action does nothing, that also comes from the industry. And if the industry is pushing so hard back against individual action, that suggests, and it’s actually in the employee article, if the industry is pushing back so hard, it probably means that it is effective.
Hope:
Yeah, wow, wow. Some really interesting stuff there. And I think what you were saying about the environmental industry is important, not all asks for the same. And, you know, not all actions are equal. And I think we see that in the vegan movement, in the animal advocacy movement, we’re discouraged from actually asking for people to go vegan, live vegan, that’s considered too big an ask. It’s “reducitarain” and Meat Free Monday, all those things that are softer asks, right? But to me, I feel like, well, people that are interested in helping, people that want to do something, they’re going to do what they can do. They’re going to work towards something. If our ask is vegan, then they’re going to work towards that. Then they themselves can do some reducing. They themselves can do Meat Free Monday. You know, they’re going to make those steps towards, but if we don’t have the end goal of vegan, of fully eliminating animal products, then they don’t even know that that’s where they are going or that that’s the best thing to do. People are going to have to take steps and progress, like your journey, like we talked about in the beginning. But I think that it is important, though, that our most important ask be to live vegan, because then, that’s what people will work towards. And these other asks can just be along with the recipes and things that that are supportive, right? I fully agree with what you’re saying, that animal rights organizations can’t step out and say it, if we want to change the system, first of all, say that we want to change the system. If can’t even say it, then how do you achieve it? Right? If you haven’t imagined something, how do you achieve it?
Janet:
Yeah, I think if you don’t ask, then you’re not even beginning the conversation.
Hope:
Yeah, yeah. So there’s been a lot of critiques of individual approach. One is that they claim that it would be too slow to get consumers to change, but I don’t know how on earth they think legislation is going to be faster. Everything moves so slowly in government and is so easily overturned and just flimsy, you know? So that makes no sense to me, but if you said, and I think this was an article, you said that if we reject behavior change as a tool for animal liberation, we end up having to rely on corporations and governments to sort out the problem, and these are the very entities that created the problem.
Janet:
Yes, yes, yes. Which is right, which is a huge problem with the critique of individual effort, is, yes, we need major system change. One, what do we do in the short term? And two, how do we effectively change government and industry? And three, why do we want to rely on the very entities that cause a problem?
Hope:
Yeah, and that kind of streams into something else that I wanted to talk about. Talking about shifting the perception of things from individual lifestyle choice to an explicit boycott of an unjust system, and framing veganism as a justice issue, not just a dietary choice, which I think is a very important part of the individual outreach. And in this article, you wrote, and I have a quote here, “Indeed, it is the mass movement nature of veganism that causes discomfort. Veganism reminds us that food is political.” So why is it important that we now connect, and as we should have all along, vegan issues to justice issues and to the larger social justice movement?
Janet:
That’s a great question, and a pretty complex one. First of all, I think it’s very easy to dismiss veganism because it looks like it’s all about consumption, and it looks like it’s all about consumption of food. So it can look like it’s just a lifestyle preference or as part of lifestyle activism. So I think part of the work of the animal rights movement, of the vegan movement, is to really emphasize this idea that it is a boycott of an unjust system and that it is part of the process of building a more just, environmentally sustainable food system. So I will say upfront that I think the mainstream animal rights movement has not been terribly good about positioning veganism as a multifaceted social justice issue. We’re getting better, at the grassroots we’re getting better. Sure, absolutely, and certainly, I think your listeners and your past guests, you have so many wonderful authors and thinkers and activists who are on the same page with this. So I think you know that the misperception of veganism does sort of come partially out of how the mainstream animal rights movement has handled the vision. And that’s where the environmental movement’s critique could be valid, where individual action can be a distraction, if it’s all about trying to do the individual effort perfectly, so much so that we’re not thinking about trying to change the system anymore, that we’re not talking about trying to change the system, then it might be a distraction. And I think a continual discussion of the fact that it’s a boycott, it’s an effort to use our own resources to push the needle and to bring about change.
There’s also an old idea of animal rights as a one issue movement, but I think that hasn’t really helped position veganism as a social justice movement. And I think the more we move away from that idea of one issue, and the more we recognize that these systems of harm and oppression are interlocking, the better it’s going to be to build a healthier, more just food system, because the oppression of the workers and food oppression is intimately connected. These histories are built upon each other. So it’s not only ineffective, it’s just historically wrong to argue that animal right should be a one issue movement. And as you and your listeners are well aware, there’s just this history of very sloppy comparisons with human oppression, and comparing human oppression with animal oppression is just not helpful. These are systems of harm that are literally built upon each other. But that doesn’t mean that victims are the same. It doesn’t mean their experiences are the same, and what’s happening to the animals is horrible enough, and you can describe and relate what’s happening to the animals without making those comparisons. It’s unnecessary. I mean, no form of oppression is the same as any other form of oppression.
It has been said that “animal” is a category you put someone in when you’re willing to harm them. And so human as animals are, in fact, animalized as are marginalized humans, but because the comparison of human to non human is a vehicle of harm, to evoke it casually is just always going to generate harm. So yes, what’s happening to the animals is bad enough.
So this difficulty connecting veganism to other efforts to build a more just society, it’s not just coming from flawed tactics in the animal rights movement. It’s coming from outside the movement. And I think it’s worth thinking about that because I think it’s revealing. And what I mean by that is if you recognize that veganism is political, then you recognize that animals are, in a sense, political subjects. They are entities that matter morally, ethically and also politically. So I think there’s a defense mechanism for people who are not vegan, who are not invested in animal ethics, to treat veganism as a lifestyle and as a better choice. A set of dietary choices. And I think there’s a defense mechanism in there because as soon as you recognize that it’s a justice issue that, like, I’m a vegan, the way I am a feminist, the way I am anti imperialist, then automatically, if someone can hear that and recognize that, then they begin to recognize the validity of the vegan claim on the other level. And there’s responsibility that comes up. Then, okay, then suddenly I have to be invested in changing this or helping in some way, and where other issues, you don’t have to do a whole lot day to day, like, maybe sign petition or whatever, but Oh, huh, this issue we are absolutely fully deep in the problem by eating animals three times a day, right, exactly, it’s direct, right? Like, okay, my tax dollars are going for things that are horrific, and I can’t really take action around that. Like most issues are indirect, and I can maybe post on Facebook, and I have done my duty. Granted, we should all be doing a lot more about all these issues, but it is different when, as you say that it’s more direct, you are part of the problem daily, the choices we make hourly, hour to hour, what we’re going to eat the next time we eat. And I get that you really have to look in the mirror, you know, with this one.
Hope:
I love how you said that making the animal issue political suddenly makes it like, oh, okay, I’m invested. I have to care and do something about this. I’m responsible.
Janet:
And I think this also does come out of the history of vegetarianism. I think that’s also interesting to think about, which is that there is a long history of vegetarianism. Whenever there’s histories of oppression, there’s history of resistance. And you know, obviously vegetarianism has existed for 1000s of years, but in the absence of large scale corporate farming, and large scale, massive meat consumption, vegetarianism has been focused on individual ethics or the religious and spiritual commitments of a community, on striving, on mental clarity. And that history is so important, and also it has individualized the decision to abstain from meat or from animal products, and it’s kind of reduced it to something that happens only at the level of the individual or the community.
And the situation we’re in now is different historically than how animals have been exploited in the past. And what we’re up against is so egregious, so organized, its expansionist, and so global. It is so global, and corporations are pushing meat. But meat has made consumption and raising animals part of colonialism for hundreds of years, and now it’s probably become part of this late capitalist, globalized distribution network. And so therefore we need a different kind of resistance. We need a kind of organized resistance, a political movement. But a lot of the discourses around the abstention, for me, still hold over from that long history as things do, things hold over from the histories.
Hope:
Well, speaking of political movements, I do want to transition into talking about Gandhi. Just so people know, I do have numerous podcast episodes that are focused on social justice and anti-oppression and veganism. So if you go to our website, there’s a drop down menu of episodes, and they’re categorized, and there’s one that is labeled Anti-Oppression. So you can get more information about this. But I do want to transition, because I love that you have connected all of this to Gandhi and his Satyagraha movement and the Khadi Movement, and that is just really interesting to me. So I do want to reserve some time here at the end to talk about that. And I guess we do need to kind of just set it up first, if you can maybe just give a little background for those that aren’t familiar with the history and story of Britain’s occupation of India for about 200 years. That ended in about 1947 with the revolution and independence of India, and maybe explain what Khadi is and its significance in India and in that time of British occupation.
Janet:
Sure, I’d be glad to so. We tend to talk about colonialism now, like in the United States, in metaphorical terms, like imposition of cultural norms, or because of the history of the United States being what it is, we tend to focus on settler colonialism, and that is enormously important in the United States. Settler colonialism is really based economically on land grabbing, on appropriating land from indigenous communities, whereas metropolitan colonialism is what happened in India and a number of other places in the British Empire, which is a little bit different, because Indian colonial power is taking over the economic and political systems, but doing so from the center, as in terms of British colonialism from the UK. So creating resources, raw resources, in the colonies, bringing them back to the center for processing into products and then selling those products back at a profit.
So this is important because colonialism is an oppressive system. It’s about domination, and also at its roots, it’s economic proposition. And this can be important when we talk about the economy movement. So there’s that phrase, The sun never sets on the British Empire. So it spans from the Americas, the Caribbean, Europe, Ireland, Scotland, all over the African continent, west, east and south Asia, India, China. But India was referred to as the jewel in the crown because of its potential for wealth generation and also in strategic importance. So the way colonialism worked in India was that cotton was grown in India, was sent to the UK to be made into garments in the factories, largely in industrial towns of Manchester, and then sold back to the people of India at a profit. So cotton, the cotton industry, is where we can see that idea that we were talking about before the systems of oppression literally rest upon each other and are literally built on each other. The cotton industry is a perfect example of that colonialism and the exploitation of factory workers and the creation of this exploited working class in Britain were the very same system. So the experience of the victims was not the same, the system was built on two different populations.
So another interesting part of this is that the British East India Company was established in 1600 and it was established as a multinational corporation. So intensity of globalization, economic globalization, is something that really happened, like in the 20th century, but it has a very long history, and it’s what they call trade, very unequal trade, but it was about getting products to circulate globally. The initial idea was not to meddle in native politics. Cultural colonialism really didn’t happen until the 19th century. So that idea of trying to change the native population, trying to get them to adopt English as a language, as a as a lingua franca, and having an English education system. All that happened in the 19th century. And then political colonialism really only started after the uprising of 1857, so the important thing here is that, like British colonialism had, like, a 250-year history of being economic before it became political. And Indian nationalists knew that, and particularly the Congress Party in early 20th century, in like the 1920s, 1930s really recognized that colonialism was all built on this economic exploitation, and they recognized that the people in India were propping up the very system of oppression by using their resources to buy English products. So this is really interesting in terms of looking at the role of the individual and looking at the role of consumption.
Gandhi is probably most famous for the Satyagraha movement, otherwise known as nonviolent civil disobedience. It wasn’t just a nonviolent civil disobedience movement, but boycott was very central as a key tactic, and it was especially focused on cotton. So the idea was to bring the mills of Manchester to a halt by refusing to buy the professional cloth woven professionally in the UK. And that campaigns were to get Indian people to stop buying that cloth that had been bought had been produced in Manchester in the industrial cities of the UK, and to stop buying the clothes that have been made of that cloth.
Hope:
You said it, but I just want to clarify again, for people that might not know. So they’re basically charging or hurting the Indian economy twice by first taking the resource of cotton, taking it to the UK, making garments out of it, and then selling Indian cotton garments made in Britain back to India. So it’s kind of like charging them twice, using their own resource to make a lot of money. Yeah. Okay. Just wanted to clarify.
Janet:
It’s really, I don’t know, crazy, yeah, really egregious and really central to what colonialism is like. That’s the fundamental idea taking the resources from a colony, turning them into something, and selling it back out of profit. Awful, yeah, yeah. Just unbelievably horrible. And also, like, really, not metaphorical, right? It’s really material. It was really about extracting resources and making money off of the colonized population. And so now we see the implications of this. The European colonial countries have this incredible wealth, and all these places that they colonized are still struggling with poverty. Incidentally, that happened because of very intentional policies.
So if a population could be convinced to stop buying these products that were exploiting them, it needed to be replaced by something. And what Gandhi and the other Indian nationalists decided to do was to encourage people to produce and buy homespun cotton cloth. The interesting thing is that, of course, India had its own practices of spinning, turning cotton into garments. And the khadi was kind of a dying art, and so it had to be revived, and people had to be taught how to do it. That’s actually why the spinning wheel is one of the symbols of India. And on the new Indian independent flag. It’s on the platform because people had to learn how to spin cotton. They learned how to do this in individuals and groups. And it also required widespread adoption. So the commerce party and Gandhi had to go to communities and convince people of this idea that this was going to work. To give up the finely produced British cotton and start wearing coarse cotton instead. And it required individual people, families, communities, to cease buying British cotton. And in India you can see these are really beautiful textiles. And when you think about how beautiful so many of the textiles of India are, to ask people, to ask people anywhere really, to give a beautiful attire and to start wearing these coarse clothes that are in neutral colors, it’s a major sacrifice, and particularly in a society that has a history of such gorgeous, ornamented, clothes. It’s quite a big sacrifice, yeah, and to convince people to make that sacrifice, to do that on a grassroots level, person to person, community to community, and to convince people that it was going to work, that you’re going to bring down the world’s largest empire by wearing homespun cotton. It’s amazing that they were able to convince people to do this, and particularly in India, society such as India, that was so diverse and had massive societal divisions along the lines caste and class and religion and gender and all these equality movements around all these forms of difference, and yet the nationalist movement and the khadi movement required all these groups of people to agree to come together on this issue.
And the tactic worked. It really did bring the mills of Manchester to a halt, and that did eventually bring down the British Empire. It’s aligned with other factors, the two World Wars, the rise of the US is a superpower, but nonetheless an economic tactic.
Hope:
And there was also, there was also salt. To boycott salt in the Salt March. So what can we learn from these boycott tactics?
Janet:
So I was inspired to think about this by Dr. Sailesh Rao of Climate Healers, and he had this very interesting response to mainstream environmentalist claims that you can’t get large numbers of people to take action at once. This is a common critique of individual outreach and individual actions. You cannot get people to take individual action once. And Dr. Rao’s response to that was, I’m paraphrasing here, but anyone who thinks that’s true doesn’t know the history of India because that’s exactly what it was. It was convincing people to take individual action all at once. It was grassroots, and it brought down the British Empire. I heard Dr. Rao say this, and then I got to thinking, okay, that’s a really interesting idea. What are the implications of it? What can we learn from this? Like structurally so.
Just to be clear, in relation what we said earlier, about not making sloppy comparisons, I’m not saying that animal exploitation is the same as colonialism, or that the victims of these systems of harm are the same, but it’s looking at structural similarities in the movements. And so, here’s some of the things I’ve been thinking about. Veganism, I think, in the current context, appears to be unique as a social movement because it’s about what we buy. And so, as we talked about, it can be easy to dismiss, partially because animals are trivialized but also because it looks like what people sometimes called Lifestyle Activism.
And as we also talked about, for people having come through their cognitive dissonance, they might not even see the economic component. It might not even be apparent that when we choose what to eat, we’re choosing what to buy, whether for ourselves, or whether somebody else, is making choices that have an economic impact. And so it’s easy to look at say, Oh, well, that’s just about what people consume. It’s not really that political. But in fact, veganism is not unique because boycotts have a very long history. In fact, the term boycott goes back to the British colonization of Ireland and a representative of the English, I think, government or military, whose name was Boycott, and the focus was on rejecting and refusing to buy products as a response to that colonial occupation. Boycotts have a very long history. They have very long history of being effective and definitely political. So saying veganism is just about what you eat, you know, would be a little bit like saying the Khadi movement was about choice of fashion. The flaw in that logic, is, of course, that the decision to refuse is an effort to put a kind of pressure on a system of oppression. And the system of oppressions, again, are unique, but the tactic can work in different contexts.
Another similarity is this intentional sacrifice. That’s one of the points of resistance to veganism is, oh, you have to give something up. But boycott, that’s what they do. You do have to give something up. And with the khadi movement, it was even more of a sacrifice because khadi, it had to be revived. And the process of spinning cotton from hand is incredibly labor intensive, whereas with veganism, nutritional diets have historically been plant based, or plant rich cuisines to draw from. There’s so much abundance, and it’s less, far less of a sacrifice than khadi. I mean, if vegan required people to grow their food by hand, the perceived expense is another similarity.
There’s some research now that suggests that plant-based diets are actually less expensive than meat-based diets, but khadi really was more expensive. In fact, Gandhi talked about that, and he said that the true cost of khadi is in the revolution of one’s taste. Which I think is really illuminating for other social movements, that even if something appears to be more expensive, the effort, the goal, is to revolutionize one’s taste. And I think what he meant by that isn’t just adjust to a more humble way of living, which I think that was probably part of it, but the other part of it was to adjust to something that is different, and to understand that there’s pleasure and enjoyment to be found in that. And I think that’s certainly something that we can learn from the vegan movement.
I can see people maybe saying, well, the Indian population had more of an investment to do this boycott because they were directly affected by British occupation, and they, you know, wanted their freedom and their independence, whereas we’re asking people to do something that has to do with something outside of themselves, with animals. So it’s not as connected, or, you know, immediate to their lives. I can understand that critique. But I think this is where, when we connect social justice to the industry, where we say, No, it is connected to so much. It’s connected to the workers. It’s connected to food deserts in various locations, connected to the environment and climate change and all of that. So when we make those connections, then suddenly it does become more personal to people to want to make those changes.
I think we shouldn’t separate the issues, because veganism, animal ethics, these are movements of allies. They are fundamentally different from other justice issues because animals don’t have political power, and so we can’t do what other justice movements do, which is amplify the efforts of those who are directly on the line. And so I think it’s okay to acknowledge that. I think in thinking about the Satyagraha movement, it is important just to recognize that, yes, people were being directly affected, and this was their self-interest. This was about self-determination. This was about their dignity. This was about economic survival, absolutely.
And yet, India is an incredibly diverse, politically complicated, socially complicated society, and the stakeholders had very different stakes. The post-colonial theorists (??) release this anecdote- she was a child growing up in Bengal. She heard these two women, these two farm workers, talking, and one of them said, Who does this river belong to this under British colonialism? And the other one said, it belongs to the company. And the first woman said, people are coming around saying it doesn’t belong to the company, it belongs to us. And then the second one said, it’s still always belonged to the company. It might be a different company, but it will always belong to them. So that kind of shows that was that residence around the nationalist movement of people, marginalized caste, marginalized communities, people working, economically struggling. Saying, why should I throw my lot in with the nationalists when you don’t really represent us? And the nationalists did a very good job of coalition building and saying, Yes, we care about economic issues. We care about caste issues. Granted, there’s a lot more work to be done there. We care about feminist issues, again, more work to be done. But they did make that active attempt to build coalition across different communities with different concerns. And so I think that relates to your point that framing veganism, animal ethics as about the animals, but not only about the animals, and recognizing that human interests are very much at stake, we are facing existential threat of environmental degradation and the animal agriculture industry is a huge part of that your threat. We’re facing the threat of zoonotic disease. We just got out of one pandemic, and now we are seeing the threat of H1N1 of bird flu. We are seeing the demise of the effectiveness of antibiotics, one of the major health discoveries, one of the things that allowed people to survive infection, to be able to undergo surgery. So these kinds of things, there is self-interest there, and let alone concerns like environmental injustice, the fact that the waste from agricultural is being dumped on frontline communities, on impoverished communities, communities of color, the fact that the subsidy system directly creates systems of food oppression, where what people have access to are animal foods because they’re subsidized. The fact that workers are being exploited, yes, they’re being exploited in the fields, and this is where the vegan movement needs to be better about solidarity building, but they’re also undergoing horrific experiencing horrific conditions. So I think that’s where the connections need to be built, not just around self-interest, but to build coalition and to act in solidarity is incredibly important, because the exploitation of animals, it undergirds all these other systems of harm
Hope:
Well, Jay, I feel like I could talk to you all day. There are some guests that come on that I just feel like I just want to talk to you all day about this stuff because we have such parallel views, and also you have such a wealth of knowledge that that is exciting. And I feel like everybody needs to hear this stuff, so I’m so grateful to have this podcast, to be able to share your thoughts, your brain with everyone.
Janet:
Thank you. I think it’s really interesting how there are some commonalities and the things we’ve been thinking about, the things that we’ve experienced and the ways in which we’re approaching these issues. I found it really generative to talk to you.
Hope:
Wonderful, well, we do need to wrap up, I have a feeling this is going to be a long one and I’m not going to want to cut anything. Let’s wrap up with the last question, Jay, what gives you hope for the future?
Janet:
So I’m writing a book chapter about hope right now. I’m so excited about this question. I’ve just learned all this stuff about the thinking around hope so I’m really excited to share it. That’s awesome. I think it’s a great question. I think it overlaps with your name. I think it’s a really great question, what gives you hope? As opposed to, what are you optimistic about? Because hope and optimism are different things. Optimism is kind of assuming everything’s about hope. For the people who have written about and theorized about hope, hope is having a goal. It means to be turned towards something, it sometimes includes the idea of having a goal and how to reach that goal, which I think is super interesting.
And so the people who write about hope have these different categories. Critical hope is where it’s actually just like recognizing the problem, you’re signaling that things need to be different. There’s Transformative hope, like having an idea of what something better could look like. And then there’s Radical hope, which is kind of a plan for getting there. So if we take up that idea that there are these different kinds of hope, then we can have hope even as we acknowledge that conditions are terrible, and in many ways they are, in terms of animal exploitation, the environment, humans, we’re facing violence, horrible economic exploitation, whose dignity is being degraded. But Critical hope allows us to recognize all that and then say, just the fact that I’m recognizing it shows that things can be different.
And so I think it might be interesting to actually end where we started with thinking about the mainstream environmental critique of when you ignore individual change. So recognizing that there’s something really wrong with the system that would actually destroy our life support that is the planet. And I think that’s important. We’ve been talking about individual effort. I don’t want to undercut the importance of systemic efforts, but the mainstream environmentalist movement, when they say that we need system change, I don’t really get a lot of critical or transformative hope. In other words, we hear about a critique or economic system, but there’s this deep sense that something is wrong, and I think veganism, and particularly veganism that’s built on social justice, human social justice, oriented animal ethics, what it shows us is that we have a system built on normative violence. So it’s not surprising that we were harming our planet, that we have this ecocidal mindset when we have a whole system built on normative violence. So recognizing that is a form of Critical hope, and being able to do something about it can be Radical hope.
In terms of what gives me hope personally is that I really see this process happening like when I look at how many brilliant minds are working on animal ethics, or writing on animal ethics, particularly the writing that engages with human justice issues, so intelligent, so thoughtful, the kind of social justice veganism work that’s being done now in terms of black veganism, in terms of workers’ rights organizations like Food Empowerment Project, things like the Unity Food Bank, there’s people who are such brilliant thinkers and activists there doing this work, and despite its reputation as an elite practice, a lot of vegan advocacy is actually coming from the margins. The rates of veganism in communities of color are higher, and they’re rising faster than in white communities. We’ve seen a long history of women being involved in animal ethics and veganism. There was this really wonderful project, people in Ukraine, people who have themselves experienced war, providing vegan food relief, and they were talking about how well received it was because these were people who had directly experienced violence, and they recognized the need to avoid imposing violence on other people. So right there, all wrapped up in that we have Critical hope. We have Transformative hope, and we have Radical hope in action.
Hope:
Wow. I love all that! Radical Hope. That’s me, yeah, but I love that you brought it back to what we’re talking about the very beginning, individual vs. system change. And it’s true. I feel that individual piece, that grassroots piece, is hopeful. It’s empowering, right? It gives us the hope that there can be a better future when we are able to make change in our own life and how our own actions reflect the ethics that we hold dear. So yeah, I agree the individual action is very hopeful. Nice, wonderful. Well, Jay, thank you so so much for all your work, for all your deep thinking on these important issues and I am really glad to connect with you, and I hope we can talk more. Thank you so much for being on the podcast.
Janet:
Thank you for having me. It’s been a real pleasure.
Hope:
Thank you for listening to the Hope for the Animals Podcast, a project of Compassionate Living. I think this is one of those podcasts that really needs to go out far and wide. We need to get this information out to the broader vegan and animal advocacy community. So please share this episode however you can whether it’s on social media or you can go to our Facebook or Instagram pages and share it from there. You can go directly to our website, hope for the animals podcast.org, and share the episode from there.
And if you’re listening on a podcast app, please scroll down, find the ratings and give this one a five-star rating. That would be awesome. Maybe write a review, letting others know what kind of important topics this podcast takes on. This is such a critical issue, this dichotomy of individual action vs. systematic change. And just to be clear, I do feel we need both. I hope that that was clear, and I think Jay would agree with me, we need both. We’re not saying that individual change is all we need or the only thing that’s going to get us there. No, we need lots of different tools, lots of different campaigns and efforts, but we can’t ignore that individual personal change.
We have to change who we are, what we care about, what are our personal values. That is so critical to be able to make any kind of external changes, and remember that in the end, it is a boycott. It is a boycott of a cruel, unsustainable, horrible industry. This industry is unreformable. We can’t reform our way out of this problem. These reforms may be steps towards this goal, but we can’t lose sight of the end goal of no exploitation of any sentient being on this planet, no commodification, no killing, no exploitation of any animal, any human, anyone on this planet. So we have to have veganism, the political veganism, the ethical veganism in our hearts as our end goal.
Thank you for listening. Please share this episode and live vegan.
