Barbara Gowdy introduces a series of public service announcements urging people and especially those who "live in their imagination" to participate in rabble.ca's Vegan Challenge for Earth Week.
Gowdy is an award-winning, best-selling novelist whose book White Bone is written entirely from the perspective of African elephants. The recipient of the Marian Engel Award in 1996 and The Trillium Book Award in 2008, she has been a finalist for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and a repeat finalist for the Giller Prize. In 2005 she was longlisted for The Booker Prize. She has been a vegetarian for 30 years and a vegan for 10.
This video can be found at rabbletv's YouTube channel
I challenge Barbara Gowdy to try to imagine what it would be like to be one of the 1.3 billion agricultural workers who grow the fruits and vegetables she eats.
Third-world farm workers and their families suffer from acute pesticide poisoning. They are too poor to be able to afford medical treatment. The poisons cause cancer, hormone or endocrine disruption, neurotoxicity, vomiting, blurred vision, skin disorders, and birth defects. Child labour is rampant. Millions are injured or killed in accidents involving agricultural and processing machinery. Long hours, poverty-level wages, backbreaking labour, substandard housing, and lack of safety and labour standards enforcement by governments are only part of the story of the lives of misery led by these people who put food on your table.
And it's not just in the third world that agricultural labour is so destructive of human lives and well-being. In the United States, farm work is the second most dangerous occupation - right after mining. The 1.4 million migrant and seasonal farm workers are paid below poverty wages, live in overcrowded work camps with poor ventilation and faulty plumbing or sleep in tents, cars, or open fields. They suffer from repetitive strain injuries, dermatitis from contact with chemicals, heat stroke, lung ailments (including tuberculosis), above-average rates of cancer, lack of recreation and mobility, depression, and psychological disorders.
In Canada, foreign seasonal workers who come to southern Ontario under the Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program provide cheap, hard labour while being denied proper toilet, drinking-water, and clothes-washing facilities, suffering physical abuse and blackmail by their employers, and enduring crowded housing and separation from their families for months at a time. The physical and psychological toll is devastating.
In B.C. migrant farm workers live in conditions of "indentured servitude" and "as bad as any third world country".
If Gowdy cares about people at all, she will give up eating vegetables forever.
My point is that you don't end the suffering of animals or humans by opting out of certain food choices. Animals and humans alike are made to suffer in order to provide private profit to a relative handful of plutocrats. Consumers do not have the power to change that reality simply by voting with our wallets.
If you want to end the suffering and oppression of people and animals the only solution is to struggle for the replacement of the rapacious and cruel system of food production that characterizes modern industrial, neoliberal, globalized capitalism. We can't opt out of the system; we have to change it in fundamental, revolutionary ways.
Why assume that those of us who care about animals don't care about people? That would be like me saying that because you care about agricultural workers you don't care about children being raped. It's ludicruous. There are a million evils, and those of us who recognize them should all be on the same side. Individuals CAN make a differece And maybe one day they will join together and take to the streets, as in Egypt. Until then, I say do what good you can. I completely agree with you, M. Spector. that modern, industrial food production is rotten to the core
M. Spector had a choice of how to respond, either by attacking or taking a collaborative approach. MS could have said, yes meat animals are treated horribly but we also need to work to improve conditions for workers in non-meat agriculture. Many non-meat eaters also go to the trouble to source organic food, pesticide-free, and support causes that do want to, as MS says, change the system in radical, fundamental ways.
It's discouraging to see someone with such a good point go on the attack instead of trying to enlist a logical ally in Ms. Gowdy.
All of M Spector's thoughts are valid points about cruelty and corruption in the agricultural world. We could add other cruelties such as in mining in the Congo, (so none of us should be using our computers which use coltan), Canada's track record on natives, the poisoning of indigenous populations north of the tar sands but this particular issue was about eating farm animals and horrifically treated farm animals. It isn't an and/or cause and I'm betting that Barbara Gowdy eats organic vegetables from sustainable farms and buys fair trade products whenever possible. Factory farming has raised an continent of meat guzzlers in north America. Take the vegan challenge, clean out your innards for a bit and then if you want to eat meat, eat far less and get better raised meat. (One could argue that parents who feed their children factory farmed meat (i.e., the meat you buy at the local supermarket) don't love their children. How could they possibly love their children if they are feeding them heavy metals, plastics, antibiotics, diseased animals, and hormones? How can you ladle horror and chemicals onto your little child's plate.)
Everybody who has commented so far has managed to miss my point.
"Challenging" people to go on vegan diets on the basis of cruelty to livestock (and not on the basis of any of the other good reasons that could be advanced for eating less meat) makes about as much sense as challenging people to go on an all-meat diet in order to stop the toll of human misery and destruction caused by the factory farming of vegetables and fruit.
The presumed moral superiority of a vegan diet is built on a house of cards. And as a strategy for fundamental change in the capitalist system of food production it is a complete non-starter.
I didn't attack Ms. Gowdy. I merely responded in kind to her "challenge" to eat vegan by challenging her, in turn, to consider the fact that people as well as animals are victims of the capitalist food production system, and that eating a vegan diet is not the solution to the problem of getting rid of that system.
I do agree with M. Spector about us needing to change our neo-colonial capitalist system. And sure it is fine to send another challenge back to Ms. Gowdy if you feel so fit. But like the other posts are saying there are a million issues to fix on this planet. Ms. Gowdy is just approaching one... the meat issue from an approach of animal cruelty...and going on a vegan diet IS one way of fixing that. I choose a vegan diet for that reason as well as for an environmental and health one. I agree we need more revolutionary approaches to tackle this capitalist machine that runs our world. Ms. Gowdy is doing her part to end animal suffering...she doesn't purchase animal products, and she is a revolutionary herself by spreading the message about animal cruelty to get others on board. Im curious what you are doing M. Spector to help put an end to the issues you listed?