NOTES FROM A NATIVE SON

The ethics of eating other peoples’ landscapes

Veganism can be destructive; 
meatless meat oppressive

ALTERNATIVE DIETS ARE OFTEN 
JUST ANOTHER FORM OF PRIVILEGE

Devon G. Peña | Shoreline, WA | January 20, 2013

More than twenty years ago, when I was a professor at Colorado College, I introduced a new course (in 1991-92) on the “Sociology of Sustainable Agriculture.” We studied, among other things, the organization of the food processing industry. In my opening lecture, I compared food-processing work to the exploitation of workers on the automotive assembly lines made famous by Henry Ford. The workers in canneries and other food processing factories would, I argued, face similar conditions including assembly line speed-up, hazardous working conditions, low wages and few benefits, and higher turnover rates. I also made the argument that this would be true for any food processor including those producing “organic” or “natural” foods; the organic label as such did not exist.

About two years later – in the summer of 1994 – I received a postcard from a former student in that class. I still have it in my files and read it again the other day. It states:

You were right Professor Peña. This past summer I worked at the White Wave Tofu factory in Boulder. I thought it would be a great place to work since they are making a good food that is sustainable and healthy for you. I was wrong. They ran the assembly line faster and faster. We were really exploited and mistreated by the managers. We were treated like cogs in the machine. Workers dropped out like flies because it was so hard to keep up with the pressure. It was all about making money and really had little do with providing an alternative to meat. I am glad I took your class because it helped me identify all the problems on the assembly line.

In a situation like this, I really hate to be proven right; I mean I felt bad for this ex-student – that she had experienced brutal exploitation first hand. I found some comfort knowing that my class had taught her to read capitalist organizational forms and how to be prepared for an encounter with Fordism in its late capitalist and “New Age” iterations. My former student learned a valuable lesson: Just because something is “sustainable” does not mean it is “equitable” or “healthy” for all people and the planet as a whole.

Credit: Veganism is Nonviolence

This brings me to the problem of the politics of meat since a growing number of my colleagues in the food justice movement are insisting that we cannot have justice or sustainability unless we go back to a vegetarian or vegan diet. That’s right, back to veganism, is the way some of my friends phrase it. Only this would be difficult since humans have over the past 2-3 million years actually evolved away from vegetarianism for a reason – the protein you get from meat is the only way to grow and power as big a brain as we have now developed. Our lemur ancestors were vegetarians but they stayed in the trees for a reason.

New research on the ecology of the human body further illustrates why we have evolved to become omnivorous. In her book, The Vegetarian Myth, the radical feminist activist, Lierre Keith, notes that: “…animals have evolved in an environment dense with microbes. Just as plants do the work of producing, bacteria do most of the work of degrading…What animals have done is to figure out how to work with and around bacteria. We developed digestive tracts in which we could carry the useful ones around with us.” Keith quotes biologist Roderick I. Mackie:

Large populations of microorganisms inhabit the gastrointestinal tract of all animals and form a closely integrated ecological unit with the host. This complex mixed, microbial culture comprising bacteria, ciliate, and flagellate protozoa, anaerobic phycomycete fungi as well as bacteriophage can be considered as the most metabolically adaptable and rapidly renewable organ of the body which plays a vital role in normal nutritional, physiological, immunological, and protective functions of the host animal. (p. 96)

Our body is a complex ecosystem and evolved in an environment we adapted to by becoming omnivorous and the nature of the microorganisms co-inhabiting our gastrointestinal tract reflects this fact; it is irrefutable evidence of our ancestral and evolutionary diets, which depended on the consumption of both plants and animals.

Vegan activists will still object to the deeper view I have taken here and insist that we should instead date the matter to the past 500 years or so. Fine, but can we all really agree that the decolonial diet for, say, Mexican origin people means returning to a vegetarian diet with corn, beans, and squash at the center? This is the way our ancestors ate, so I am advised; and besides, Subcomandante Marcos said so; I am assuming the proponents of this view believe this means their assertion has unquestioned validity. Hmmm, such an assumption seems uncharacteristically Zapatista, to put it gently.

Actually, anyone insisting that the Maya were at some past more noble and peaceful time vegetarians is simply distorting the truth for the sake of a contemporary political orientation – which may or may not be a good idea, but I’ll get to that in a moment.

Deer glyphs from the Codex Tro-Cortesianus

Prior to contact with the European invaders, the Maya had a wonderfully diverse diet that included the sacred trinity (corn, bean, squash) and a wide range of wild and domesticated plants and fruits. But they ate much more than fruits and vegetables including different animal protein sources such as an exceptional range of fresh and saltwater fish, shellfish, peccary and tapir, iguana and other lizards and snakes, turtle and other amphibian species, and many different kinds of bird, deer, rabbit, and even monkey. For example, several pages (38-49) of the Codex Tro-Cortesianus are dedicated to the deer hunt. The Maya also liked grubs and insects and fungus. Many of the species the Maya customarily and routinely ate 500 years ago would today be considered candidates for the conservationist’s ark of endangered animals.

Which is to say two things: First, diets change, and not always for good reasons. Most often, especially among indigenous peoples, diets have been transformed by force as part of the structural violence and historical trauma that accompanied conquest and colonization. Second, the reason many indigenous people can no longer eat, say, tapir or monkey is that capitalist maldevelopment destroyed the habitat of these creatures, making it impossible to hunt or harvest these in any meaningfully sustainable manner.

So, if we are going to make the case for veganism or vegetarianism, let’s at least not be confused about original diets and please let us avoid historically inaccurate statements in the hopes of offering the ethical rationale we wish to ground in the presumably more “noble” behavior of indigenous peoples, past and present. Let’s face it and be honest: Indigenous people around the planet eat meat; they always have and they would continue to do so if not for the post-conquest enclosure or destruction of their homelands and habitat.

I find it truly offensive and deceptive to argue that a “decolonial” return to traditional diets justifies a political project to make modern diets vegan or vegetarian. I won’t bother to present the detailed argument about how this is refuted by the fact of the walrus, seal, and whale-meat based diets of Arctic Inuit or reindeer-based cultures of the Sámi (native Laplanders), although these are also very instructive as a palliative against the more intolerant and grossly insufferable of my many vegan activist friends.

We can choose to become vegan or vegetarian for many good reasons but the idea that the noble indigenous diet of the pre-colonial past justifies the choice is quite simply a romantic fib and historical inaccuracy. It could become the necessary diet of the indigenous future – one without the habitat for us to hunt for deer or tapir – but it is not a diet based on some glorious idyllic pre-contact past.

Danish professor with quinoa farmer in unnamed country in the Andean highlands. Credit: University Post

Which brings me to the problems posed by how our globalized industrial food system currently produces much of the food consumed by vegans and vegetarians. Writing for The Guardian, Joanna Blythman reports on the impact that the growing demand for quinoa in the U.S. and other northern countries is having on local people in the Andes, the center for the original domestication of the grain.

Blythman explains how: “Not long ago, quinoa was just an obscure Peruvian grain you could only buy in wholefood shops.” It slowly became a “novel addition to the familiar ranks of couscous and rice” and was soon being marketed and touted as a “miracle grain” because of high protein content and presence of critical amino acids. “Vegans embraced quinoa as a credibly nutritious substitute for meat,” reports Blythman. The skyrocketing popularity of the grain had led to unintended consequences:

But there is an unpalatable truth to face for those of us with a bag of quinoa in the larder. The appetite of countries such as ours for this grain has pushed up prices to such an extent that poorer people in Peru and Bolivia, for whom it was once a nourishing staple food, can no longer afford to eat it. Imported junk food is cheaper. In Lima, quinoa now costs more than chicken. Outside the cities, and fuelled by overseas demand, the pressure is on to turn land that once produced a portfolio of diverse crops into quinoa monoculture…In fact, the quinoa trade is yet another troubling example of a damaging north-south exchange, with well-intentioned health and ethics-led consumers here unwittingly driving poverty there.

This illustrates the tragic consequences associated with any consumer-driven sustainability model and the tendency for such movements to almost serve selfish, and even narcissistic, First World pleasures, food fads, and diet trends. But quinoa is not a diet trend or food fad in Bolivia or Peru; it is a staple food of the native diet that is becoming too expensive for local people.

Blythman reports that soya is another casualty of the growing influence of veganism. There is ample evidence that our efforts to eat more healthy foods in the U.S. – completely misguided as these are given the evolution of our bodies and gastrointestinal micro-biomes – results in nothing less than the export of environmental violence. First world consumers are literally feasting on other peoples’ landscapes, while we pretend to be reviving heritage cuisines and indigenous foods. This is a whole new form of culture vulture behavior:

Soya, a foodstuff beloved of the vegan lobby as an alternative to dairy products, is another problematic import, one that drives environmental destruction.[i] Embarrassingly, for those who portray it as a progressive alternative to planet-destroying meat, soya production is now one of the two main causes of deforestation in South America, along with cattle ranching, where vast expanses of forest and grassland have been felled to make way for huge plantations.

The exploitation of other peoples’ landscapes is an especially high price to pay so we can feel good about our privileged vegan diets. Imagine the destruction that accompanies not just the soya monoculture plantations but the wasteful consumption of water, energy, and other inputs to manufacture “textured vegetable protein” that goes into making pseudo-burgers, -bacon, -cheese and all the rest. Look, if you like these foods so much go ahead and eat them from local sources in moderation. Enjoy your once a year guilty pleasure of a bacon cheeseburger prepared with meat and bacon from a locally-sourced free range livestock rancher. It is a better bet for sustainability, social justice and your health than to rely on the globally sourced soya or quinoa that vegans have stubbornly and selfishly made into fetish high-prized commodities.

This is not just a matter of counting up the food miles – although such an exercise will reveal that vegan and vegetarian diets, especially if they involve processed ingredients, by far surpass the food miles of a diet that makes use of local meats, dairy products, and other seasonal and regional produce.

The real issues for me pivot around the obscuring of environmental violence against other peoples’ territories – acts too easily obfuscated by the rhetoric that political vegans unleash about their progressive respect for and critical political action on behalf of animal rights. No amount of rhetoric about animals rights will change that fact that the Global North vegan lifestyle – as currently fed by global commodity chains and increasingly monoculture-styled crop plantations – is wrecking ecological and cultural havoc on the Global South and contributing directly to the extinction of both biological and cultural diversity.

Ubehebe 1 by Frank Sheehan

Carey Wolfe draws me to a fascinating proposal in his recent book, Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame.  He grants that if we follow Peter Singer’s utilitarian argument for animal rights, which seeks to avoid causing them suffering, then there is no problem with our consumption of synthetic meat. Likewise, if we assume the standpoint of Martha Nussbaum and wish not just to avoid suffering but to guarantee the “flourishing” of animals, then that too allows us to avoid an ethical quandary with respect to synthetic meat. Eating synthetic meat would avoid animal suffering and presumably allow animals to flourish – although where that might be the case if they are no longer grown as food is not made clear.

Following this insightful and pithy discussion of the bioethics of synthetic meat, Wolfe makes a fascinating argument:

[W]ithin the framework of Biopolitics – particularly with an emphasis on its constitutive dispositifs such as we find in Foucault – the ethical and even political issues around synthetic meat take on a different cast. From this vantage, synthetic meat might no even appear to be an “animal” issue per se, and would instead be seen utterly continuous with the technologies and dispositifs that are exercising a more finely tuned control over life and “making live” at the most capillary levels of social existence. Indeed, it would seem continuous with the practices of domestication, manipulation, and control of life that characterizes the factory farms to which, from an animal rights point of view, it seems opposed. (pp. 96-7)

Of course, I would here add that humans are animals and so this always remains an animal rights issue. Human rights areanimal rights. That aside, a more banal contradiction is impossible! While vegans proudly declare themselves against violence to animals, they seem blind to the environmental violence associated with the global sourcing of their preferential foodstuffs. Substitute monoculture quinoa or soya for synthetic meat and we have essentially the exact same problematic. It is not surprising then that some of the harshest critiques and opponents of synthetic meat or the importation of quinoa and other indigenous grains from the Global South are the sustainable agriculture advocates themselves, and especially farmers in the Global North and South.

All this points toward a problem I have been trying to teach about since the 1990s: We have to always strive to join the social and ecological sides of sustainability. The struggles for environmental and food justice demand that we engage not just in the politics of eating well, but that in doing so we are making sure others can also live well. This just might mean that we need to respect our omnivorous heritage; and we might do well by others to give up the privilege of a vegan lifestyle by adapting to our local food ways, which often demand a balance of vegetable, fruit, grain, and meat depending on the season.

Sources cited

Keith, Lierre 2009. The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability. Oakland: PM Press.

Wolfe, Carey 2013. Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.