Easier to shift a vegan to the left than vice versa. Source: myself. Vegan memes probably contributed to my “radicalization” more than anything.

Not what you asked for, but a floret to chew on.

Same. I’ve made no progress with any of them, their treats are more important to them than the suffering of our animal comrades. I recommend that we start calling them, “slaughter-house” Marxists.

The consumer market has a big part to play. A large amount of the heat-and-eat food that fits into the meal category, instead of the snack category, is full of meat and other animal products. It steers people’s familiarity based on frequency, and the availability bias keeps it going.

The vegan options are often framed as a specialty that can command a surcharge. And of course it doesn’t help that the meat and animal feed industries are heavily subsidized.

I think a big part of the solution is breaking the addiction to convenience, spotlighting really memorable plant-based dishes, and encouraging people to take more agency by cooking these dishes themselves. Big-batch cooking is a revolutionary skill to spread to the masses; everyone should learn it.

I feel your pain. Its ironic when there are loved ones that claim to be “animal lovers” while devouring an animal that knew nothing but torture its whole life. Even better when there are just as good vegan alternatives RIGHT NEXT TO IT on the menu and they still decide to go with torture.

Luckily my partner is also vegan, so I can rant to them about it later, but its really painful to watch the ignorance in real time.

Hi comrade! I’m vegan.

I do think that being vegan makes one a more coherent leftist. And I encounter more vegans in left spaces than other spaces, so anecdotally this makes sense.

I do think that most people on the left are not coherent and that’s something we just have to deal with, working to improve that state of things as we build for liberation and revolution. Every successful revolution has not been vegan, so I think it’s not necessary for doing the work and I don’t think there are new conditions that make veganism essential for doing our work here and now, objectively. I still wish everyone was, but I don’t think of it as a necessity.

I think there is a similar situation we can compare to, which is people being COVID cautious. It is about people and not human animals, trying to be consistent in one’s empathy despite social forces opposing this, it has niche communities, and it has both an individual action aspect as well as attpts at mass action. I think COVID cautious leftists are more coherent leftists as well. They have avoided one of the more obvious forms of liberal normalization, every leftist should’ve noticed and rejected that normalization, but most leftists are not that disciplined or coherent. Similarly, I don’t think COVID cautiousness is necessary for revolution, but it would probably help.

I think it really is just resistance to self-crit and inconvenience 95% of the time. Those are strong forces among the people we try to organize with. Many already have trauma and that makes those forces even stronger. Moving past those things is a long-term process and not really about veganism (or being COVID cautious) at all, it is a more fundamental barrier. And I would bet that you and I have some barriers like that, too.

I’ve had lots of luck on helping people who are “trying out” veganism stick with it by helping them find foods they like and can eat regularly. Convincing someone that isn’t already vegan, much less luck, though I wouldn’t necessarily know anyways. I’ve seen people around me go vegan and start agreeing with me on things I’ve said, they just don’t explicitly credit me. If there’s something I’m doing, it’s being someone people feel comfortable confiding in and looking to for help. Like various famous communists recommending that organizers be exemplary workers to gain the confidence of their coworkers, having social influence is also power to spread your own habots or ideas.

My wife used to be vegan but went carnist again before I met her so there was some understanding but after a few years of being together and having a kid i went rather abruptly vegan in the anti-speciesist sense (you know how it is with sharpening contradictions and quantitative changes) so now I feel like I have to be the conscience of the whole family. She has been trying her best as she says to replace or circumvent animal products and I believe her. The issue is that we do have to make compromises (like e.g. my medication has no vegan alternative) and she has been more willing to make compromises than me (like e.g. kids shoes are really bad for their feet except this one style of shoe that somehow only gets produced with leather. I would have said barefeet or the least bad of the terrible options but she was adamant). But being the conscience seems to work, I can be uncompromising in my stance in how it affects me, voice my opinion in how we raise our kid and every now and again this gives me the opportunity to point at some contadiction.

Like for example when my sons kindergarten went to an aquarium I would have liked to kept him home, but I had to go to university so my wife would have had to take care of him for the entire day, which she didn’t feel like she could. So he went there and had a lovely time according to the teachers. Because the fallout of the decision would have fallen on her and not me, of course she had the last say.

But when they planned a trip to a zoo, I could stay home and even though my wife would have liked him to go, his teachers wanted him to go I made my position clear. Now the ball was in my wifes court and it opened up quite the discussion about veganism. Especially since this particular zoo has had human exhibits in the past, the question of “what if they were humans” wasn’t such a big hypothetical. This forced my wife to actually spell out that she values humans over other animals because that’s ultimately what is required to find the one ok but not the other. This gave me the opportunity to say why I do think the suffering of animals and humans are comparable and we left in a agree to disagree way and ultimately agreed that he wouldn’t go but we would make it up to him with a trip to a swimming pool and a trip to an animal sanctuary that has exotic animals.

Then we had to tell the teachers and of course that opened up a dialogue and my wife now was on my side defending this decision, because we had made it together. So we talked about how we think the majority of the animals in the zoo have complex social structures, their own will, wants, needs and how the commodification of them to us is just an abhorrent thing that our son is too young to understand. He would just have a nice day in the zoo and have it normalized.

Then we had to explain it to our son, who just took it in a matter-of-fact way that the other kids are going and he isn’t, because he is that small and my wife actually took charge and did a really great job explaining the why. So I don’t know where she actually lands on the vegan spectrum currently. It could have radicalized her further but I don’t wanna poke at it myself, lest she get defensive about it, but let the contradictions mount on their own. I think that’s the best strategy really, have others defend their non-vegan choices when they have to, i. e. when they do something that affects you or something you have a say in, but don’t force them in theoretical discussion. Facts and logic never convinced anyone.

I have a hard time generally trusting non-vegan leftists to authentically oppose oppression because I’ve gotten mask-off hatred from them simply because their “Veganism is just privileged and white!” card can’t work against me.

The reason why non-vegan leftists love their arguments is that they all revolve around trying to paint veganism as reactionary. They feel as if they can reconcile the glaring inconsistency behind claiming to support justice while not being vegan if they argue their out-there talking points about how veganism is actually the bigoted, anti-justice tendency. In other words, they want to feel more “woke” by opposing veganism rather than less.

Non-vegan leftists would rather stop pretending to oppose human oppression so that their take on it clearly aligns with their support for animal oppression rather than stop supporting animal oppression for their take on it to align with their alleged opposition to human oppression. That’s what I’ve come to notice. They’d rather roll with the shameful and hateful approach to being consistent than the one that is actually just and truly anti-oppression.

I’ve written about this before, so I may be working a little copy-and-paste magic here, but I find that this explains well why veganism intimidates non-vegan leftists who build their entire outlook on performativity and vibes:

There are several ways that veganism differs from other justice movements, and this is why non-vegan leftists drop the ball on it. Effectively, veganism’s very existence calls out their performativity and exposes a LARP in their supposed “anti-oppression” outlook:

1. The injustice is normalized to an excessive degree: Though, especially in the past, other injustices have been far more normalized than they are now, the injustice of animal exploitation is ongoing en masse and is so normalized that it’s not even taken as an injustice by most people. Victim erasure is incredibly common from non-vegans.
2. The victims that this justice movement advocates for cannot speak for themselves: Of course, non-human animals can speak in a sense, but it is humans who must be their sole advocates. On that note…
3. It’s the only justice movement in which the oppressor class solely comprises its voice: This would be analogous to all feminists being men, all LGBTQ+ rights activists being cishet, and all racial justice activists being white. This makes support for this movement require a certain degree of selflessness that other justice movements do not, as no vegan activist is a pig, a horse, a dog, a cow, etc.
4. It generally entails actual changes to habit and lifestyle: Most people are not, at least in the most explicit ways, conditioned into engaging in daily habits of supporting things like sexism, racism, and homophobia directly, but most people are explicitly born into engaging in daily habits of supporting non-human animal exploitation directly, habits that those who possess a truly non-oppressive mind would find easy and obvious to forgo. This reminds me of how so many crackers seem to think that opposing racism means not saying slurs and putting “#blacklivesmatter ✊🏻” in their bio.

Your skepticism is wholly justified.

I myself do not trust non-vegans to actually respect me as a person. I don’t trust non-vegans to respect consent. I don’t trust non-vegans to not objectify me and not be bigoted or discriminatory against me. This is especially why this shit came off as incredibly tone deaf to me.

The only grace I can offer here is that not all non-vegans are necessarily anti-vegans at heart. Some non-vegans could easily go vegan with the proper information needed to remove the human supremacist conditioning. I call these people “pre-vegans,” but I find that most non-vegan leftists (or non-vegans in general) I’ve interacted with are not in this category.

I’m a vegan and will be until I die or I can’t do it anymore for whatever reason, but it’s the other way around for me. I don’t trust other vegans until they say they’re leftist/communist cause they’re more likely way too into woo shit, bougie liberals that like the marketing term or health benefits, or right wingers/libertarians that stumbled into a good point/like the health benefits.

I also don’t think it takes being a communist necessarily to see suffering in animals and want to stop it in whatever way one can. It’s just if either non-vegan communists or non-leftist vegans honestly and critically looked at their beliefs, it would be hard to escape the correct conclusion.

Sorry your thread turned into a dumpster fire, OP. I’ve banned the carnists.

It can be really frustrating. I was recently at a Chinese restaurant with a group as the only vegan. One person at my table talked about how they are passionate about conservation and their love for animals while eating pork and chicken. I have to bite my tongue in those situations to maintain sanity and friendships.

Additional layer of derangement: Trot who says he’s vegan then in the next breath says “But actually, I like lamb”

Sure you do

I’ve had the opposite experience tbqh. So far just about all the most principled communists I’ve met in real life are not vegan, some even a little bit hostile to the idea. I don’t know how to feel about that but it’s what happened. I thought there would be more. I guess I haven’t asked everyone, but it has come up with many of them

I’m one of those people who was made vegan by another leftie! It took literally years of patient, open, honest and non-judgemental conversations and a lot of self-criticism. I actually owe that person a lot, and I’m incredibly grateful to have had them in my life. So it can happen, and people can appreciate it.

I want to preface the rest of this by saying it isn’t supposed to be apologetics, just my honest take. Food is kinda my thing, I spend a lot of time thinking about how and why people make the food decisions they do. Carnism is a brainworm like any other. It’s heavily pushed by industry, widely adopted by society, and strongly enabled by governments. If anything it’s probably one of the more resilient ones, just because of how deeply food ties in to identity through culture, family, history and memory. Everyone has a favourite comfort food, or a meal that brings back fond memories. That shit works on a biological level and the industry absolutely knows how to hijack it. Abandoning it all actually takes a hell of a lot of effort for most people, who can’t even seem to manage cutting down on soda. It takes practical lifestyle change, psychological, and to an extent, physiological, rewiring. Logically, I agree with you; if you’re a leftist, you should be vegan. People don’t generally make decisions like that logically though.

It’s also the hill I’m furthest from dying on with regards to my social circle. I’ve met enough vegans who see it as a shortcut to “being a good person” without actually doing any of the self-crit necessary to arrive at the decision organically. I’ve also been around enough otherwise switched-on, generally cool lefties who eat meat but get squicked out by even seeing it uncooked. And yeah, the secondhand cognitive dissonance hurts. But I know which one I’d rather hang out with.

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