Author Topic: Dietary decolonization  (Read 5148 times)

Zea_mays

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Re: Dietary decolonization
« Reply #45 on: January 31, 2022, 09:48:38 pm »
Ok, time for some actual ideological decolonization:

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Tell us about the Sistah Vegan Anthology and why you started this project.

In September 2005, I transitioned to veganism because it aligned with my perceptions of social and environmental justice. I had been living in the Boston area for six years, and couldn’t find any other black identified vegans. I was also doing research on the internet just to look at veganism and African Americans when I somehow came to the BlackPlanet.com website. There was a dialogue about a PETA campaign and the images used—people suffering in the Holocaust, Native American genocide and African American slaves positioned next to nonhuman animals that were suffering from exploitation. There were 28 people on that dialogue and 27 were really annoyed and offended by this campaign. There was only one black woman who said she understood what PETA was trying to convey. I found that interesting and wondered if this was a case of racism from PETA or speciesism from the 27 black people on the forum.

I decided to do a call for papers and see if there were other female vegans of the African Diaspora in America. I wanted to look at how our philosophies are shaped by the fact most of us, collectively as black women, have experienced racism and classism. How does that shape how we understand food, nutrition, veganism and how we understand those connections to environmentalism and the treatment of nonhuman animals?
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Can you talk more about veganism as an approach to combating institutional racism, and the legacies of colonialism and slavery?

It is important to note a lot of the health disparities we face result from legacies of colonialism, slavery and current systemic whiteness.

A lot of the foods African Americans have been eating we were given as part of the slave system and colonialism. Most of the food and preparation was never actually healthy—high flesh foods, high saturated fat and sugar foods. A lot of it came from exploiting nonhuman animals and the reason we are eating it is because we ourselves historically have been exploited as slaves. We need to start reflecting deeper in our practices of anti-racism and decolonization. Like Dick Gregory notes, we even need to look at our own traditional black soul food diet as part of this decolonization process.

One thing I’ve been thinking about lately is the work of Antonia Dumas who works at the Food Studies Institute in New York. In 2001 she went to Florida to the Bay Point School for boys where she worked with low-income “at risk” adjudicated black and Latino teens. She asked the boys to incorporate a plant-based whole foods diet for six weeks and keep a food journal about how they feel. In the journals the boys recorded that their moods changed drastically. Their grades changed for the better and physically they felt better. It was amazing. I listened to an interview of her on the radio show Animal Voices, out of Toronto. The interviewer noticed Antonia was having problems getting funding for this project and asked ‘Do you think this has something to do with how profitable the prison industrial complex is?’ I thought that was an interesting link to what a more mindful and compassionate diet means for at risk youth. Whole foods plant-based veganism is potentially a great way to lower the risk of these teenage boys entering the prison industrial complex.


A few months ago, we were having a discussion about how the public dialogue around ethical eating is dominated by a select few, and how it often doesn’t incorporate the larger justice issue we are talking about here. It seems to be more about modifying the status quo than challenging consumption. Can you talk about that?

I’ve been thinking about that since I read Peter Singer’s interview in Satya. I understood his intent that maybe if we get people mindful and aware of where their meat comes from, then they’ll start buying organic and free-range. Maybe it’s more “humane,” maybe eventually this will spark something in the person’s brain to really reflect on where their food comes from. I think he was hoping people will keep on enlightening themselves to the point where they’ll realize they don’t need to eat meat.

But I think someone can actually fall into being apathetic and complacent. It just puts a band-aid on the larger problem. Back to African slavery, there were people trying to figure out how to make the state of slavery better, how to make the slaves’ lives better. But that doesn’t address the question, is it okay to enslave human beings?

Supposedly by 2048 we will no longer have a seafood stock from the ocean. And people are saying ‘oh no, well what fish can we start breeding so we can have more to eat?’ My question is why are we not reframing the question to, why do we still need to eat fish?

At least there is some mindfulness and compassion behind fair trade coffee, chocolate and tea, but I don’t want it to stop there. It is a phenomenal idea because up until recently many people were suffering to give first worlders their addictive substances. But then, I started thinking why are we using their land to give us our addictive substances—sugar, tea, coffee and chocolate—even if it is fairly traded? Why don’t we reframe the question, and ask why can’t we just let them use that land to grow their own crops to be self-sufficient?

It’s problematic because we are not trying to get to the very root of the problem, which is, at least in the first world, over consumption. We are not addressing our addictions.
https://www.loveunityvoice.com/sistah-vegans-the-satya-interview-with-dr-amie-breeze-harper/

Article with some thoughts on how to use intersectionality/anti-racism to improve vegan activism.
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White Veganism is a reference to mainstream veganism—which is, undeniably very white, narrow, one sided and ignores intersectionality.
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The more constructive approach would be illustrating how our government heavily subsidizes this corrosive industry, then create programs (i.e. WIC)  that will disproportionately funnel disease-inducing food into Black and Brown bodies. How CAFO’s (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations) are strategically placed in or near PoC communities where irresponsibly managed waste poisons the air, water, and food supply of the community. How we shouldn’t attack slaughterhouse workers who are not evil incarnates, but poor and marginalized people forced to work a job most people would not do themselves. How realizing that our plant-based foods are anything but “cruelty free” when you consider the  farm workers who are horribly mistreated most places our food is grown. The intersection of capitalism and white supremacy utilizes the mass exploitation of animals as a medium to drive profit and power over people and the planet.  
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The adherers of white veganism (because white veganism is a way in which veganism is advocated and could very well be adhered to by a PoC) will often talk about how they do not care about the oppression of humans and will willfully engage in that oppression. They will often times perpetuate racism and sexism in their quest to promote veganism or just in everyday actions as they do not care about dismantling other systems of oppression. This is due to the privilege white vegans inherit that allows them to not think about race or racism on a daily basis. White veganism erases the role that whiteness and its constructs create and promote in animal exploitation. They will often say we are “divisive” and “taking away from the animals” when we speak on the issues of white veganism but nothing could be farther from the truth. White veganism creates barriers against veganism, it paints veganism as being inherently racist.

Animal liberation cannot succeed through white veganism.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200616042747/https://veganvoicesofcolor.com/2017/01/09/dismantling-white-veganism/

"White" identity alert! (Comment from someone who disagrees with the article):
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Anti-white hatred has gotten to the point where almost all leftist thought is soaked in it. I say this as a Jew, as a traditionally liberal Jew, and it really disturbs me. This is why veganism needs to be kept away from partisan politics.
https://old.reddit.com/r/vegan/comments/5n8bah/dismantling_white_veganism_mainstream_veganisms/dc9w1ws/


This article is mostly academic word salad, but it also raises the point that "white" veganism must be replaced with anti-capitalist and anti-racist sentiments if veganism is to be worthy of being called a social justice movement. Western Civilization is behind both the dietary colonization of non-Western nations (which, prior to colonization, were largely vegetarian/vegan), and ongoing racist oppression. Veganism as a social justice movement can only succeed if it is anti-Western/anti-"white".
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Recently, I watched a youtube video from Unnatural Vegan entitled, “Anti-Capitalism is Anti-Vegan”. I am not even going to elaborate on the nonsense that this video is propagating — there are response videos make a great analysis against this content. The creator has 250K subscribers and the video 142K views. But this explains why veganism as a social (justice) movement is in crisis. There is truth here — Veganism is not inherently anti-capitalist, and this is truly problematic as an anti-oppressive social (justice) movement. Unnatural Vegan’s arguments align with a white supremacist imperialist veganism, which was never disrupted by Watson and The Vegan Society, and is currently propagated by John Mackey of Whole Foods Market. This is a morally astute form of capitalism, “Conscious Capitalism”. For too many people there is only one form of veganism — a single-issue movement that is anti-indigenous, anti-Black, colonial, capitalist and centered around white supremacy and white saviorism.
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The animal agriculture industry has expanded in the Global South. Roeder’s “Beyond Diet’’ piece explains that for some BIPOC contemporary vegans around the world, “the return to a plant-based diet signifies resistance to a legacy of European colonialism that harms both human health and the natural environment.” But this walks around neocolonialism that enforces European-American customs and food traditions based on diets high in meat, dairy, and gluten (the Western Patterned Diet). Although Roeder positions veganism as “an obvious threat to the animal agriculture industry,” neocolonialism exists in more ruthless and hegemonic ways.

While mainstream veganism focuses on contentions with meat and dairy industries in the US and Europe, there is very little investment in disrupting the neocolonial take over by meat and dairy industries in the Global South. Neoliberal free-market policies in the last 40 years have exponentially expanded meat and dairy industries and pushed consumption throughout the world. In continental African, where prior to European colonization food was often vegetarian and still is in many regions, growing capitalist markets are attempting to change that.
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White-led anti-oppressive movements will always be problematic. Veganism is institutionalized, those who wield power and moral authority within veganism are white.
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Anti-blackness has never been positioned as unethical in western settler colonial nations, and neither has white savior trauma ****. The work of Reign Hervey contends that “race is seen as only worthy of discussion as a means of advancing nonhuman animal liberation. …Instead of addressing white supremacy as an ideology responsible for exploitation, white veganism maintains animal rights as a single issue or uses nonwhite bodies to fill a quota to avoid talking about race directly.” Hervey’s work connects with Aph and Sly Ko’s Aphro-ism: Essays on Pop Culture, Feminism, and Black Veganism from Two Sisters: “Comparing and contrasting the literal/physical violation these subjects experience misses the conceptual boat since the reason why they are each oppressed is precisely because they are all citizens of the same subhuman space. Naturally, their oppression might physically resemble one another since they have a common oppressor.
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When white supremacy and capitalism is ejected from our collective understanding and activism against speciesism, veganism as an anti-oppressive social (justice) movement is stripped from truly being revolutionary.
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Additionally, T. Colin Campbell coined the term “plant based” to depoliticize veganism and focus solely on diet culture further pushes colonialism and cultural appropriation. This connects currently with John Mackey, a self proclaimed conscious capitalist and vegan health advocate. So we can not be surprised when veganism projects and sustains elitism and white supremacy.
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Veganism is not yet fully ethical and not yet fully liberatory, but Black Veganism shows the way.
https://lbetty1.medium.com/veganism-is-in-crisis-36f78fa9a4b9