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Day two of the Vegan Challenge and I am going pretty strong. I did put cream in my coffee by accident yesterday (and today, um, on purpose), but so far so good. Lentil curry for lunch, meatless meatloaf with cashew cream for dinner and toast with peanut butter for breakfast today.
I like the vegan challenge even though I happily go back to omnivorism the moment it’s over. I like it because, as I’ve said in previous years, it forces you to rethink your rote eating habits that have become far too familiar. It implements a critical distance between you and your food, like a pocket of air that comes between a fish and the saltwater it swims in.
I’ve talked about this before, in previous challenges (far less successful than my current jaunt), and for the most part I still feel that the main problem with Western eating habits isn’t which foods we eat, but the fact that food production is nearly 100 per cent for profit. And in such a system, everyone (except the wealthy) loses: animals, workers, the poor, children and so on. Vegans, localvores, permaculturists: no one can individuate a way out of this problem because at it’s heart it will always be systemic.
But: having participated in rabble.ca‘s Vegan Challenge for three years now, my attitude has changed. The first year I failed almost right away (although in my defence I was travelling at the time: not the best context to start vegan for the first time). The second year I planned to take it far more seriously (although my glibness likely made more than a few vegans roll their eyes), but I still maintained the popular-among-leftist critique, at least at some level, that veganism was “posturing, ahistorical, superficial.” In a word: classist.
But I don’t think this is the case anymore. I think my thoughts began to change after reading the blog post by my co-worker Steffanie Pinch (Activist Toolkit coordinator and curator of the 2014 Vegan Challenge), “Class, stereotypes and the commercialization of veganism.” Pinch makes some wonderful points, encapsulated in the question: “when did being vegan rely on how much fake cheese you can afford?”
The dismissive critiques which call veganism elitist — either economically, culturally or morally — ignore the long history of vegan food choices and, more importantly, sidestep the important ethical question of animal cruelty. You might say that such criticisms are themselves posturing, ahistorical, superficial and classist. It might be true that veganism itself won’t cure the social and systemic ills of our capitalist food production, but neither can we excuse ourselves from the political and ethical question it raises.
There’s a reason my response to the vegan challenge has always been something like “Welp, gonna try the vegan challenge again this year ha ha ha”: those questions do, in fact, make me uncomfortable. I’m sure any vegetarian or vegan will tell you how many times just plainly stating the fact that they prefer not to eat meat raises the hackles of someone in their company. That discomfort isn’t just a lapse in common courtesy, it’s decidedly political.
So my goal for this year is not only to override, finally, my omnivorous habits for a week, but also to not be such a sarcastic jerk while I’m doing it either. It’s harder than it looks.
Michael Stewart is the Blogs Coordinator for rabble.ca. You can read his sarcastic-jerk blog here or follow his sarcastic-jerk Twitter feed here.
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