The Plant Based Alternative and Modern Puritanism

Almost all food for humans is ulmtimately based in plants, even if we eat meat. For instance, the meat we eat is usually produced by a creature that eats plants, like the cow eats grass. We cannot avoid the fact that as part of the food chain we as living things die and get eaten, somewhere along the line. Evolution even relies on this. It is a circulating spiral.

One of the big problems with, say, the vegan alternative to meat eating is the illusion that you are virtuous and avoid harming animals. The growing of vegetable crops in the current way is a massive cause of loss of biodiversity, so kills creatures. Modern farming, not just for meat products like cattle, but also for crops, change the landscape on an enormous scale and make it an inhospitable environment for countless animals and insects, and this includes of course the use of pesticides.

And no, we cannot suddenly change all this to nice organic smallholdings that do no harm, or masses of people will starve. Modern farming might be bad in the way it has ended up, but it has been able to feed billions of people, and this must be acknowledged.

Still, one of the ways our bourgeois class tries to market new versions of its commodities to us is by extolling how it is more virtuous, so that the customer can get a warm glow of satisfaction that not only is she or he a part of the wealthy who can afford such things, but also at the forefront of ethicality, a ‘good person’. So, you are also buying this image.

With electric cars, for instance, this has recently turned sour: not only because of the antics of Elon Musk in support of fascistic Trump, but we have found (from scientific research by the University of Aukland, Australia) that the production of electric cars has made more harmful emissions in those countries that have championed electric car technology the most. This is partly because of the manufacturing process of these vehicles, which leads to more emissions, but also the lifetimes of the vehicles, which rarely get to ‘pay back’ what they owe in these emissions. And, of course, unless they fully run on renewables, they also use fossil fuel generated electricity.

The marketing, in the media, of vegetarianism and veganism often seems like a version of political correctness, something mainly for liberals. This is not the fault of vegans or vegetarians of course. It is a problem with the market, mass production, and capitalism. Do we really still need to say it? That the way that farming is performed as a massive agribusiness, for profit, whether for meat or crops, is the problem, and you cannot change this by simply altering your diet as an individual.

But even if you suppose that this puritanism might make some difference, on the other hand it stands as a kind of moral signpost that the problem is people, individuals and their choices, their behaviour, what they want to purchase as consumers, and it ignores and let's off the hook the industry. It is a way of accepting the blame and the guilt not just for yourself, the person who takes this position, but for every ordinary person, it says you are guilty, not capitalism. 

But we are not guilty. We simply need to eat, sleep, and get to work so we can be exploited by this same market. We are like the animals and vegetables being farmed.