Foods don’t become more nutritionally valuable because someone had to die for it. Therefore, veganism is not a diet. It’s not about restricting calories or any kind of nutrients – plants have plenty of those! There is no nutrient that one can’t get from purely plant-based foods.
I eat pizza and donuts and cheeseburgers and bonbons and chocolate bars regularly. Just as I eat salad and avocado on wholegrain artisan bread with fleur-de-sel on occasion (and before anyone asks: I’m poor and severely mentally ill, not a paragon of privilege. Sometimes I still get the chance to eat nice food). The point being: A vegan can and should eat a wide variety of foods according to their preferences, needs and tastes. Some people have an easier time accessing this than others, but that’s one of the main things the existing vegan movements have actually already changed dramatically: Vegan specialty* food options are more widespread, easier accessible, more well-known and cheaper than they used to be. I’m not saying the work here is done, far from it! In fact, vegans should fight for food sovereignty!
But acting as though it’s vegans of all people who are somehow to blame for or don’t care about food deserts or the inaccessibility of cheap and variable and nutritious food choices for some people is disingenious at best. If I had to name only one single factor as most responsible for that, it would be the animal agriculture industry – grabbing land and dispossessing or outright killing indigenous peoples and subsistence farmers, lobbying for huge subsidies in industrialised countries so that meat and dairy and other animal product prices are artificially lowered, monopolising food markets to the best of their abilities, while unloading the true price not only on the backs of the countless animals that are killed, but also the exploited workers (including field workers who grow animal feed!), the communities that are polluted (look up environmental racism), the water that is polluted and diverted, the land erosion and deforestation, the climate change…
Of course all this has more factors that play into it. But it’s undeniable that animal agriculture plays an important and terrible role. In fact I have a hard time imagining how a world could be as food-injust as it currently is without industrial animal agriculture! (Not that the way plant foods are currently grown is infinitely better. We all know there is so so much wrong with that as well, up to downright slavery. But eating animals does not help exploited farmworkers… I’m for land-redistribution and decentralised community-run food production systems that empower and revitalise indigenous and traditional practices and/or adopt permaculture principles as appropriate to the time and place and circumstances.)
But really, we cannot forget that animals are feeling living beings who deserve to live and who should not be harmed or killed unnecessarily (even if there were a socially just or environmentally friendly way to do it, as far from our current reality in western society as that is).
*lots of food is and has always been vegan without having been labeled as such. Especially the staples of most people around the world, especially especially the global poor.
