not everyone can survive on a vegan diet, and not everyone has access to a vegan diet. Vegans need to remember that being vegan is their CHOICE, and that its a choice that only privileged people get to choose. Veganism is a privilege.
Poor people exist who cannot go vegan, I have never met a vegan who did not fully acknowledge this. Aside from the fact that the existence of poor people who cannot go vegan is not an effective argument against veganism itself, just as the existence of poor people who cannot afford meat is not an argument against an omnivorous diet, there are several other problems with the notion that only privileged people can go vegan.
Worldwide, an estimated 2 billion people live primarily on a meat-based diet, while an estimated 4 billion live primarily on a plant-based diet. Most people in poverty throughout the world subsist on a primarily vegetarian diet, and across the Chinese-Japanese, Australian, Hindustani, Central Asian, Near Eastern, Mediterranean, European-Siberian, South American, North American, Central American and Mexican regions, every single staple food is vegan; staple being defined as a food that is eaten regularly and in such quantities as to constitute the dominant part of a person’s diet and supply a major proportion of their energy and nutrient needs. This is because, despite popular opinion to the contrary, meat is a luxury. The only reason it is not seen as a luxury in the western world is because we heavily subsidise it with taxpayer’s money. A full 63% of all food subsidies go to meat and dairy, compared to <1% towards fruits and vegetables. 62% of your average American farmer’s earnings come from the United States government, meaning people pay for less than half of the real terms cost of their meat. If full ecological costs -including fossil fuel use, groundwater depletion and agricultural-chemical pollution were factored in the price of meat would double or triple. The rest is paid for in tax dollars, and this is the case in most western countries. It is the very definition of privilege to expect someone else to pick up the tab for your meal.
Poverty must also be viewed at a regional and global level rather than just at an individual one. 795 million people in the world do not have enough food to lead a healthy life. That’s about one in nine people on earth. Meanwhile, most of the crops we raise goes straight to farmed animals, not humans. It takes 16 pounds of grain to make one pound of beef. That’s 94% more land. And 94% more pesticides. All told, livestock eat 70% of all the grain we produce, and 98% of all soy. Farmed animals consume significantly more calories to get them to slaughter weight than they will ever produce in meat, meaning that they are literally detracting from the global food supply. If the world went vegan, we would add an addition 70% to the world’s global food supply, enough to comfortably feed everyone if it were equally distributed. Even considering the fact that global market forces and capitalism means that distribution would never be equal, 70% more food in the world means significantly less people hungry. The reason that can’t happen is because people eat animals. If demanding an unfair share of resource consumption in order to consume meat is not privileged, then I do not know what is.
Most vegan staples, including pastas, rice, noodles, beans, quinoa, lentils, chickpeas, breads, nut butters, frozen fruits and canned vegetables represent some of the cheapest and most nutritious food sources in any supermarket and they are widely available. This makes perfect sense economically because the lower on the food chain you eat, the less work has gone into the final product and thus the cheaper it is. The claim that only privileged people can go vegan is not only untrue, it is invalidating and erasing the struggles of poor vegans the world over. There are disabled vegans, vegans on benefits, vegans on food stamps, homeless vegans, student vegans, vegans living with their parents and vegans living hand to mouth all over the world. I know this because I was poor when I went vegan, and when I did it cut my food bill by a full third. I get asks from poor vegans all the time telling me how much cheaper it is for them to live this way, and entire blogs exist dedicated to being vegan while in poverty. By saying veganism is a something only the privileged can choose, you are either erasing us or telling us that we’re liars. You are ignoring the lived experienced of real, impoverished people. Listen to us and stop erasing us.
This is not to say that there are not situations where an individual may not be able to go vegan at this particular time in their lives, either because of their financial and living situation or their location, but it does mean that veganism is not inherently any more expensive, and therefore not any more privileged than an omnivorous diet is. An individual poor person may not be able to go vegan, but it does not follow that poor people as a collective group cannot go vegan, or that only privileged people can. We know not everyone has access to a vegan diet, but dismissing veganism as something only for privileged people, and maintaining that claim while poor, disadvantaged vegans are telling you that they exist, is not only wilfully ignorant, it is an outright lie.
VEGANISM IS A PRIVILEGE.
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