rabble.ca's Vegan Challenge 2012
So, rabble.ca is asking its staff, contributors and readers to particpate in its the Vegan Challenge for Earth Week, April 16-23 2012. Here is the facebook group. babblers are welcome to participate as well.
We had a great discussion about this last year (parts 2 and 3) which has convinced me not to take place in the challenge this year. However, I would love to hear from babblers who are interested in participating or who are already vegan about their experiences, frustrations and expectations.
Of course, if anyone is interested in reopening or restating some of the arguments we've had already, that's welcome too.
Will any babblers be taking this up? I think the best part of the challenge is that it makes omnivores who consider themselves ethical who may have become complacent in their diets (e.g. me) to consider all the ingredients in every meal.
So: who's in, and who's out?
The department of Agriculture and Rural Development (Alberta) has an interesting site as part of their "Dine Alberta" project. Without purchasing foodstuffs that have crossed provincial or international borders I have year round access to:
Beef, pork, lamb/mutton, goat, poultry (and eggs), bison, elk, farmed fish (rainbow trout and tilapia), dairy products, honey, mustard, sugar (from beets), mushrooms, sunflower, canola, lentils and more varieties of grain than I need list here.
On a seasonal basis (and spring is NOT the season) tomatoes, corn, root vegetables and berries are also produced in quantities that allow for a semi-commerical market. Given the climatic conditions that are experienced here in southern Alberta (and taking into consideration altitude and precipitation patterns), conventional truck gardening is not generally considered commercially viable, it is more of a chancey "boutique" enterprise.
Also on a seasonal (although significantly more reliable) basis I do have access to a wider variety of produce from the south central interior of British Columbia that will be transported less than 1000km, but once again, early spring is NOT the season.
I am kind of left wondering why on earth such a challenge would be issued at this time of year? Does rabble.ca have a vested interest in some experiment dealing with nutritional deficiencies? *wink*
I've been in for about 6 years.
I don't think there's anything wrong with taking part, but I do take issue with the uncritical claim, made both years, that going vegan is "one of the strongest ways most of us can contribute to Earth Week and make every day Earth Day".
This assumes that environmental destruction is the result of individual choices, kind of like the way some people assume that our individual consumer choices are somehow going to change the economic system as a whole - not shopping at Walmart will usher in the revolution. Going vegan will save the earth.
I don't buy it. But that doesn't mean that going vegan, or avoiding shopping at Walmart, aren't good things to do, and a good way of making the personal political. I haven't darkened the door of a Walmart for years, and I did go vegan for about a year and a half, so I'm not against doing those things and bringing about political change in our personal lives.
(By the way, I also appreciate that there are other thoughtful points of view from folks like Life, The Universe in the other threads where his choice to eat meat has been made after careful consideration of what would be most sustainable environmentally and food security-wise. I've learned so much over the years about this subject from both him and Bookish Agrarian.)
But unfortunately, it's not individual choices that are going to save the world from environmental ruin.
I'm out, for reasons elaborated in last year's thread.
I'm in in spirit.
That is to say, I think it's a great idea, and in any given week we usually have a fair number of meals which are vegan, and we pay pretty close attention to what comes from where most of the time.
I will be having cream in my coffee, though
(edit)
and @ bagkitty
I hear you loud and clear (here in the province which grows 70% of the world's lentils, and India and Pakistan buy from us). I think the 100km diet is a great rule in moderation, but to apply it strictly is absolutely ridiculous. There is a workaround for a lot of those things if one has the time and the space - sprouting those pulses and grains, or using the potatoes which are still in storage from last fall - but the playing field is definitely different here than it is in other parts of the country.
6079... oh I was using 1,000km, not 100km - if I tried the 100km thing I would have to survive on mammal flesh, probably fried in sunflower or canola. I might be able to get a few potatoes too. I couldn't even have corn on the cob, Taber is 200km away.
Hey, 1,000k would get you apples, wouldn't it? I know it gets us into zone 3 in southern Manitoba. I know the only coffee we would get is the dandelion root that people actually had to drink here not too many years ago. And as for greens, I think the pigweed, dandelion and lambs quarters are already sprouting. It would be kind of funny though, to watch a whole city of 200,000 fighting over the little sprouts that are peeking out between the concrete.
By the way, I'm kind of surprised that rabble did a repeat of this challenge this year. Is this going to be an every yearly thing? Why not choose different types of activism every year to celebrate Earth Week?
Some of the strongest defenders of the earth in Canada against industrial and systemic destruction are the indigenous peoples whose territories those of us from other areas of the earth are squatting on. And most of those indigenous peoples have hunting and meat eating in their culture and traditional diet.
Do they get a special (unmentioned and unacknowledged) exemption from this challenge, or were they not thought of at all when coming up with this idea? (Considering that this challenge is a direct rip-off of Oprah's exact same vegan challenge of a few years ago, I'm going to bet on the latter.) Is this a cultural declaration of superiority over such peoples - that vegan culture is an environmentally superior way of life to indigenous culture?
If not, then why would rabble choose a challenge that alienates and excludes some of the most solid and committed environmental activists in North America?
@ Michelle
I have have no problem with it particularly because I see it as directed at our consumer society - the same society which has driven overconsumption of animal products, as well as sugar. and chemical additives.
I don't see the fact that it is a vegan challenge as particularly important. I think any challenge which makes people think about what they put in their bodies, where it comes from, and at what cost, serves the purpose.
That's why I said I support it in spirit. But I won't be observing it strictly in practice.
It also assumes that commercial factory farming of grains and vegetables is somehow better than factory farming of livestock. From an environmental standpoint, any kind of factory farming is a problem. The vegan dream is based on cheap oil.
I was going to introduce myself in the newbie forum and all that before jumping in and throwing punches, but this is just too great to leave alone.
The short answer is yes. Vegan culture is better than non-vegan culture because it recognizes the moral personhood of non-human animals and as such that we are not entitled to use them as property.
It's far more than an environmental thing. What gives us the right to cause all this harm and kill other sentient beings?
I understand your appeal to indigenous culture and its traditional exploitation of non-human animals, but we, as a species, have grown past it. Just because you've been doing something for a long time doesn't make it any less morally wrong.
Progress is awesome. :)
So you're starting off on babble by passing a negative moral judgment on indigenous culture? Good luck with that.
I get that argument, and when I was vegan, it was almost completely animal suffering that was my reason, not environmentalism, although I bought the environmentalist arguments. So I understand where you're coming from.
The truth is that we as a species have NOT grown past it - not even close to it. A relative handful (in relation to the population of the planet) of people (usually non-indigenous) in western industrial countries have embraced veganism as a philosophy of not exploiting non-human animals, as an understandable reaction to our (settler) society's completely inhumane and detached relationship to food and food systems.
Once you've convinced the majority of settlers of your point of view, then it might be time to have discussions and debates, from a starting point of equal footing, with other cultures and traditions. Until then, grand declarations about people who embrace vegan culture being superior activists from an environmental standpoint when colonized and oppressed indigenous meat-eating cultures are at the forefront of standing up to environmental destruction could be argued to be extremely oppressive and racist. And it's no way for settler activists to forge links with indigenous counterparts.
Psh, of course I wasn't doing that.
I was passing a negative moral judgement on anyone who doesn't reject the property status of animals.
Go big or go home.
So suddenly the meat-rich Standard American Diet is the subsistence diet enjoyed by non-industrialized, non-western countries?
Veganism isn't difficult. We aren't special in our ability to not kill things. Our (settler) society's use of animals is just as not-cool as Olde Worlde use of animals and low-earth-orbit use of animals.
Hm. Anyway, doesn't it seem a little bit condescending/patronizing to assume that the "colonized and oppressed indigenous meat-eating cultures", if presented with compelling arguments wouldn't be able to decide to move forward and leave animal exploitation behind? We are absolutely in agreement though that oppression and racism are bad, just as speciesism is bad.
Lordie. I wondered to myself, self, is that pineapple still an issue? And what do I see but that it is being recycled, and not in a good way. No effort made to promote a more local or sustainable or container-free option:
Sorry to be swooping in to be critical, but that's what triggered me to post last year about the very same thing! So let's do a little more recycling, in the spirit of the thing:
Hugs and kisses, T.
Generally speaking, I think it's fair to encourage people to think about their relationship with their food and the environment. But I don't think it's fair to expect that everyone is going to come to the same conclusions.
Hi Tehanu. Great points.
I do think meat is a particular problem, not because of animal rights, nor because veggie production can't be poisonous and wasteful.
I am aware that during the wintertime a head of lettuce has the same carbon footprint as a hamburger.
I think it is important because so much of our diet is dominated by animal products, and industrial meat production is one of the worst aspects of our food system. It has warped the industry by diverting a large part of our produce to animal feed, a large part of our land to keeping animals, to the point that wildlife is killed if they get in the way. The factory approach has also damaged small-scale farm culture. It introduces poisons, disease, and toxins - through antibiotics, feeding dead animals to dead animals, and also the damage to ground water by waste from factory farming.
Of course it is not the only problem, but I think getting bogged down in judgment and superiority games is just counterproductive. I think it is a good exercise because hopefully it will make some people think, even though I have no intention of stopping eating meat, eggs or milk products myself.
Besides, I have some canned free-range chicken broth from down in the celler that needs to get used.
(edit)
As well, I think trying out a radically different way of eating is also a good idea just to see how it feels, and to break out of old habits.
Goddess, not this again. Did rabble not figure out last year that they aren't correct in their assertion. The total ignorance of the general issue around the politics and impacts of food in the statement makes me give up hope of this organization ever getting it. This is a statement of fundamentalist-like belief, it is not a statement of fact in any way. If rabble wanted to do something around food they could have learned something from last year and done something to promote connections between urban rabblers and farming rabblers- including livestock farmers. This is the great disconect for many people as they don't know a farmer. This could have been a real opportunity for real education and information, instead rabble continues to propegate a complete myth by saying going vegan is one of the best ways to help the environment. It is also a myth to say that much of our agricultural production is for livestock feed. If you take a global perspective this is simply not accurate.
ETA I used the word myth, but you know what it is actually a complete lie.
I don't think the rest of the world is the real threat; it is the out-of-balance North American food system (and its effect on the rest of the world) that I am concerned about. And that includes the overgrowing of corn, which is tied into the industrial meat production system.
LTE, if you don't want to take part, fine. And if you, like me, see that having everyone adopt a vegan lifestyle is not actually the best thing for the world, good. I am glad that people have stepped forward, just like last year, to point out some of the different and equally relevant perspectives on this.
That doesn't take away from the fact that it is still a good exercise.
See this is where the wrong-headedness begins. Corn is not over-grown for livestock production. What the huge volumes of corn are used for is, well just about freaking everything. You would be amazed to learn how much corn products you are eating on a daily basis, whether or not meat passes your lips. What is often fed in the largest feed lots, is in fact corn by-products once the whatever element they processors have taken out is used up. Smaller farms feed corn straight up, but most of the large producers use those by-products because it is cheaper and they often buy rather than grow their own feed. There was a large operation in Ontario that was feeding reject tortillas and the left over meal not that long ago and that is repeated in many of those kinds of operations.
And no it is not a good exercise. It is based on a lie, that can't be substanated. There are plenty of good exercises that could be promoted to learn about food and environmental issues (along with a bunch of others). Providing a totally false premise is not that way. You can claim over and over that 2 plus 2 equals 5. That doesn't make it good practices for your math test though.
It is clear to me from last year and this that rabblites have a great deal to learn about our food system and sustainability within it, but this kind of thing doesn't help, it makes that ignorance worse.
On the subject of Veganism, perhaps I can recommend the new edition of Joseph Forest and Visanto Melina's book Cooking Vegetarian.
http://josephforest.com/cooking-vegetarian/
Forest spoke here in Saskatoon a few months ago; One of the most interesting aspects of his talk was not the nutritional value of foods, but their value as medicines, and the idea of exploring what you eat as a way of finding what works best for your body.
http://josephforest.com/cooking-vegetarian/
As well, a large part of the talk concerned which oils he uses as part of his cooking and his diet.
Corn:
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/plugged-in/2011/10/07/the-u-s-now-us...
Soy:
http://www.soyatech.com/soy_facts.htm
Antibiotics:
http://www.ucsusa.org/food_and_agriculture/science_and_impacts/impacts_i...
(it's buried, but non-therapeutic use for livestock accounts for 70% of all antibiotic use in the United States (2001)
Water, Land, Waste:
http://www.fao.org/ag/magazine/0612sp1.htm
LTU, I was waiting for you to join in - thanks for your perspective.
Regarding corn - we have been noticing lately when grocery shopping that it's near impossible to find corn tortillas. We're wondering whether maybe that's because there is so much focus with putting corn into our gas tanks instead of on the table.
It sure isn't doing Mexicans any favours.
So the soy people are promoting soy. Big surprise. Soya beans are a major component of most vegan and vegertarian diets. Soya beans production is a major cause of deforestation in places like Brazil. Soya beans for curd, veggie burgers and so on are grown with massive amounts of hebricides and pesticides and mono-cropping causing massive soil degration and major environmental and local population health problems in many of the places soya beans are grown. In Brazil there are reports of modern day slavery to process and harvest soya beans. As a former vegetarian, I lived in India for 3 years in my younger days, it is almost impossible to have a vegan or vegetarian diet (and be healthy) without beans, lentils or other legumes. All of these are grown industrially and are not avalible at the time this exercise is being promoted locally, at least not fresh. So the exercise is really promoting, whether intentional or not, the industrial food system. That is a problem for a progressive organization.
And as if the corn folks are going to say- uhm we grow the corn, the corn gets processed into almost every food you eat in our modern food system and then the processors sell it to the industrial scale feed lots as this gooey gross mass causing the animals to require to recieve massive amounts of anti-biotics just to survive long enough to get slaughtered. If you eat corn anything, whether it is corn fed beef, Coke, or nachos, corn meal biscuits or many, many other foods you are part of the industrial food system whether you passed over the beef or not.
As I said last year the problem is not meat vs other food stuffs. The problem is the current global industrial food system. Full stop. The pretence it is all about meat production is simply picking your poison to be concerned about, not determining what the poison actually is.
I haven't noticed that, but I shop at a few local organic/specialty stores and an organic buying co-op so I am probably insulated from that sort of things. Corn is probably to expensive now to use for tortillas when other grains are going cheaper. Probably has some link to ethanol, but also it is how much other stuff corn is used for these days. But yes ethanol is not nearly so green as some want to believe. (by the way the organization I was promoting last year (the NFU) was the first and to my knowledge only farm organization to question ethanol subsidies.)
Corn prices are really high. And here's how that reflects right here at home. Land is now so expensive and there is so much urban and foriegn investment money backing some of the biggest players that local small, medium and even largish farm operations can't afford access to the land. It is getting very troubling. I know of a 200 acre farm near me that went for close to a million dollars. Just for the land. Who can afford that.? Those guys aren't making their money on growing food, you could never make that back. It is all about investment money returns. I'm glad I am approaching the end of my farming career and not near the begining or in the middle. We are heading to a huge crisis in food production. That's part of why I feel so strongly about this exercise. As a progressive organization rabble could be doing something to educate people, instead they are indulging in mythology and missing the forest for all the trees.
When a positive guy like my near neighbour Bookish Agrarian, who I think you know personally if I have my babble family tree right, is openly talking about whether or not they can keep going as he was at a local NFU meeting because they can't afford land and had to even give up rented land because it became so expensive, I know we are in deep do-do.
You know, LTE, if you read what I wrote you might have noticed that I was making pretty much the same argument. And I did not make the argument about it being meat OR veggies. Yes, all kinds of industrial agriculture are an attack on all sustainable food systems.
But the North American meat and dairy industry is a pretty damned big part of it, and it is one of the worst parts.
I did read it and you are clearly trying to suggest something that is just not true and you keep trying to suggest that I have no right to point out that rabble is promoting something that is not progressive. And I don't get why you keep saying the same thing over and over. Neither last year or this have I suggested that industrial scale meat production is not an issue. Yet you keep refuting this point I am not making. What I have said and will continue to say is that rabble is not being progressive at all in promoting something that is simply not true and that being that a vegan diet is better for the environment than a non-vegan diet. The issue is sustainable vs industrial. Yet this is not what rabble is going at, in fact they are promoting the industrial system in some of their language. I think is appropriate to call rabble on the lack of progressiveness on this. I have been involved in food issues for a very, very long time. I think I have as much right as you on an open forum to express an opinion, even if it seems to upset you for some reason.
You haven't upset me at all LTE, and I have not said that you have no right to express your opinion. Perhaps you should go back and read the second paragraph of my post #21.
Quite the contrary. I think from my very first post here I have taken the position an exercise like the Vegan Challenge does not tell the whole story.
But the statement that it is an absolutely better alternative notwithstanding (because I don't agree with that) I believe it is a very good exercise for a number of reasons, which I probably don't need to repeat.
Can we stand down on this please? Because aside from our disagreement about Rabble supporting the challenge I think our positions on the issue are actually fairly complementary.