Eric Adams Uses His Plant-Based Diet as Political Greenwash, and It Seems to be Working
By Sarahjane Blum & Ryan Fletcher
Recent excitement around Eric Adams, the newly inaugurated mayor of New York City, among prominent voices and groups within the animal rights and vegan movement gives us pause. As the term vegan or its respectability counterpart ‘plant-based’ gains prominence and adherents, many activists are quick to add high-profile figures to an ever-changing list of prominent vegans and plant-based eaters, hopeful that the existence of people who society already finds exciting or credible gives our movement itself credibility. It’s part of the underlying, often unexamined belief that visibility and respectability equate to advancement, progress, and social power. But the enthusiasm around Adams — who ran on a platform of anti-progressive, “conservative on crime” policies deeply misaligned with any movement for liberation — provides a case study in the challenges that come from championing celebrity vegans for their diets alone.
Many who are touting Adams’ rise as a victory for the vegan and food justice cause are progressive and are eager to see animal rights become a more inclusive movement. However, to social justice activists on the outside, support for Adams looks like doubling down on one of the most frequent criticisms of vegans and food activists generally: that we comprise a single-issue movement made up of individuals with otherwise inconsistent, status quo, and often conservative politics.
Adams himself clearly understands the movement as a single-issue cause divorced from broader movements for social justice. In the summer of 2020, Adams was a guest on the podcast of a former professional animal rights advocate who left the movement amid an accountability campaign asking him to answer to allegations of sexual misconduct. Adams returned to that same show to celebrate his mayoral win. Presumably, this is who Adams thinks of as his community when he talks about his veganism.
Prominent vegan and food justice activists who have aligned with racial justice and the Green New Deal also applaud Adams as though his veganism gives credibility to our movement. The same social media feeds that mourn bell hooks enthusiastically share stories about the new Black vegan mayor of NYC. Some of these accolades come from people learning of Adams only though his own hype. Adams’ veganism is sincere, but he uses his public persona as a bicycle riding vegan to soften, greenwash, and modernize his image. In turn, people offhandedly repost an article about “the first vegan mayor of NYC” without getting much of a sense of what sort of mayor he intends to be. But there are also those who are aware of his politics and agenda and choose to celebrate him anyway, incorrectly suggesting that prominent vegans in and of themselves are a bridge that will help our movement grow in inclusivity, influence, and scale.
This calculation is puzzling — the conversation around inclusivity became urgent to many vegans now promoting Adams in the aftermath of the police murder of George Floyd, and Adams, a former Republican, ran on a platform that explicitly opposed and rejected the value of the Movement for Black Lives. He readily dismisses the misgivings Black activists in NYC have about his plans for increased policing and regurgitates right wing language about antifa and professional rioters when talking about the possibility of protests.
A police officer for 22 years, Adams named a proponent of broken windows policing to head the NYPD. He wants to bring back Stop and Frisk, increase reliance on cash bail, and reverse the move to end solitary confinement within the city’s jails despite solitary confinement being recognized as a human rights abuse. When pressed on these positions, he has said that he is not interested in the opinion of anyone who did not go to work every day with a bullet proof vest on questions of policing or mass incarceration.
This authoritarian demeanor and disregard for Black and Brown communities who suffer the effects of racist policing policies like Stop and Frisk and face solitary confinement while awaiting arraignment because they can’t afford bail is troubling. It is also glossed over when he is covered in the vegan press as history making for his plant-based lifestyle, though Adams’s reactionary politics are core to the history he will make as mayor of NYC.
Adams isn’t just another famous person lending spotlight to veganism. The NYPD is effectively a standing army, one of the largest in the world — bigger than that of many countries, with a budget of over 6 billion dollars annually and he is racing to make it ever more reckless and harmful. He cannot be held to the standards of any other celebrity with a vegan cookbook. Even if he does successfully champion plant-based initiatives throughout the city to help Black communities reverse and prevent diabetes and other chronic health illnesses, his approach to policing creates its own public health crisis.
Adams intends to use his mayorship to make NYC friendlier to big business and the real estate interests which already have pushed through rezoning efforts that have carved out entire neighborhoods filled with half vacant luxury high rises. During his tenure as Brooklyn Borough President, he heavily courted Amazon, hoping to bring a fulfillment center to the city, and is likely to reopen that conversation as mayor. The environmental and social costs of these plans will be heavy. There is no number of photo ops of Adams eating vegan food that can balance the scale.
The point here is not a takedown of Eric Adams for its own sake. Nor is it to shame or callout those championing Adams’s rise as a win for vegans. Rather there is a lesson here for vegan and animal rights activists to think more carefully about who we celebrate as prominent allies to our cause, and what it says about us and our movement when we do. As two long time vegans, we have — over the last two decades — witnessed what was a niche movement become increasingly mainstream.
As with any idea that rises in popularity, important context, nuance, core values, and historic legacy gets lost within the discourse. Vegans are often misunderstood, an easy punchline in American culture. We don’t talk enough about how activists ourselves play into the misunderstanding and even feed it through our tactics and the assumptions we make about what is going to compel others to our cause. Sometimes it feels as if we are so desperate to be taken seriously as a movement, we will align with anyone with prominence who eats vegan. This is something to seriously rethink as a movement.
Some might say that veganism or promoting plant-based diets is the issue they care most about, and they are excited that NYC’s mayor will help advance their cause, no matter his position on other issues. But most vegans do not see plant-based eating in a vacuum, divorced from broader ethics. For those of us who cite social injustice, human health, or environmental degradation as drivers for a commitment to veganism, Adams seeks to advance an agenda that seriously sets back those issues. For us, Adams’ is the kind of vegan the makes the rest of us work overtime to set people straight on what it means when we say we are vegans. He doesn’t lend credibility to true food justice, and our movements shouldn’t work to lend credibility to him.
Sarahjane Blum, co-editor of Confronting Animal Exploitation, is a small-business owner who grew up and lives in New York City, serves on the board of VINE Sanctuary, and has been vegan since 1996.
Ryan Fletcher works in social movement communications, is a fundraiser for the animal advocacy movement, and has been vegan for more than 20 years.
