Veganism: Just a Trendy Lifestyle for the Privileged?
“Vegans are rich and privileged tho.”
“Human issues are more important than veganism.”
“Why don’t you try to solve human injustices before you focus on animals?”
This is how I used to think and talk. And here, in very condensed form, are the insights that have changed my mind.
Besides its other devastating effects, the livestock sector is a powerful driver of human social inequality.
Why?
Most workers in the industry endure harsh and dangerous working conditions, causing high rates of injuries, substance abuse, anxiety issues, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. The slaughterhouse employees currently being put at risk to satisfy society’s taste for meat are overwhelmingly people of color and members of other disadvantaged minorities.
The animal industry is the main and the only easily preventable cause of zoonotic diseases and of antibiotic resistance, which is projected to soon kill more people per year than all types of cancer combined — and will, of course, hit the most vulnerable in our society the hardest.
Animal agriculture is also by far the leading driver of deforestation on this planet and produces more greenhouse gas emissions than all trains, buses, cars, trucks, ferries and even planes, taken together — which, again, mostly hits the vulnerable, such as the many indigenous people displaced by rainforest destruction and the poor communities most exposed to the effects of climate change.
Finally — and it took me a long time to realize this — the livestock sector strongly contributes to world hunger. This is because animals are an incredibly inefficient food source. While roughly ten to twenty thousand people die from hunger and malnutrition every day, our society wastes massive amounts of grain, corn, soy, and fresh water to grow livestock. You need about 100 calories of grain to produce 12 calories of chicken or 3 calories of beef. The world’s cattle alone consume a quantity of food equal to the caloric needs of 8.7 billion people (which is more than the current world population). And while every third human suffers from water scarcity, the production of a single beef burger uses as much water as a hundred days’ worth of showers.
It is blatantly unfair and irresponsible to put the blame for the effects of animal consumption on the world’s poor. We have to face the fact that the highest consumption rates are found in the world’s richest countries and social classes — which is well illustrated, for example, by the world map of excess meat consumption shown below. Or by a recent US poll, showing that the plant-based diet is more common among people earning less than 30,000$ while being rarest among high earners.
The cheapest foods are vegan. The fact that the plant-based diet has the potential to be more expensive than the average diet doesn’t mean anything, non-vegan diets can also be very costly. The most expensive vegan luxury items couldn’t hold a candle to the luxury meats out there. A healthy, varied, easy and delicious plant-based diet can be pretty cheap. The price of my grocery bill actually went down once I stopped eating animal parts and secretions.
As someone who has been very fond of eating animals for most of his life, I know that I’m in no position to point fingers. Believe it or not, nothing is further from my mind than attacking anyone personally. But I agree with Jonathan Foer when says that our response to the animal industry is “ultimately a test of how we respond to the powerless, the most distant, to the voiceless — it is a test of how we act when no one is forcing us to act one way or another.”
A vegan lifestyle not only avoids unnecessary violence against animals, prevents many forms of environmental destruction and improves your own health, but also protects your fellow human beings from hunger, misery and exploitation. Hand on heart, can you think of a more convincing reason to try out a new diet and lifestyle?
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