jenna

I love cooking.  When I went vegetarian in my pre-teen years and then vegan in high school, my family didn’t really know what to do with me, so I learned pretty quickly to make my own meals.  (I remember, actually, that I had a Mickey Mouse cookbook when I was, like, seven or eight years old, and I’d make simple dishes like macaroni and cheese and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches from its pages.  I thought I was so accomplished.)  Even now, years later, one of my favorite activities is to make and share a meal with friends; there’s something cathartic about chopping vegetables, stirring pots, and making food magic from raw ingredients.

I’ve been talking with friends lately about how food is sometimes treated as “toxic” or “bad,” especially by female-identified people.  There’s such emphasis on thinness in western culture that we are taught to feel guilty about putting food into our mouths, despite the simple fact that it’s food that keeps our bodies functioning normally.  One friend of mine remarked that her female coworkers are always lamenting what they ate the night before and are endlessly resolving to go on a diet.  And, sadly, vegans are not immune to this kind of behavior, either.  Veganism has been sold as a dietary panacea, and the underlying implication (or sometimes, the straight-up message) is still “fat=bad.”  I’ve had my struggles with this in the past, and one of the things I’ve been working on for the future is eating as much food as my body needs, without feeling bad or guilty about it, and making a point to incorporate as much healthy, local, sustainably-grown foods as possible into those meals.

I keep a pretty good-sized pile of vegan cookbooks on my shelves, and I’m quite adept at Googling for recipes containing a particular ingredient, but I often bump into a few issues when I am trying to plan a cooking extravaganza.  For one, I don’t have a lot of money.  I’m not someone who can waltz into the natural foods store and drop $20 on a jar of coconut cream and then use a tablespoon of it in a recipe.  In fact, I pretty much have the same twenty (cheap) ingredients on-hand all the time and try to incorporate them into different recipes to keep things interesting.

The other problem I have, especially when finding user-created recipes on the Internet, is that sometimes the written directions aren’t very clear.  I’m a kinesthetic learner, meaning that I prefer to see and do something with my hands in order to commit it to memory, so reading words on a page (or a screen) doesn’t always translate into a delicious dinner.  However, the Internet saves the day again, because ingenious people have begun making vegan cooking videos and sharing them with the rest of us, for optimum kitchen awesomeness.  Check these out, and if you’re inspired, send me your videos.  Maybe we will start a regular L.O.V.E. featured video cooking series, which is a lot more fun and energizing than always writing about heartbreaking things.   (Though I will probably still do that as well.)

The lovely P.M.A. (aka Tara) has created a charming series of vegan cooking videos that include easy, simple gluten-free and vegan recipes for both humans and nonhumans.  Here is her delicious tofu scramble:

The folks over at Veganism Is the New Evolution (VINE) have started a video series called Cooking With Real Vegans, featuring sanctuary founders Aram and Miriam in their real kitchen making real food.  This is making me hungry:

And finally, I love Manjula’s Kitchen.  She creates simple, delicious, vegetarian Indian dishes, including this tantalizing plate of chola tikki:

I find these videos so much more instructive than looking at letters on a page.  The filmmakers and hosts are so charming, I sort of wish I was in their kitchens making these dishes with them.  As it stands, I’ll probably just haul my laptop into my tiny New York kitchen and try to find room to mince garlic on the keyboard.  That can’t be bad for your computer, can it? Well, if I never write a blog again, you’ll know what happened.

At first glance, this seems like such a fender-bender in a world that is otherwise full of overturned eighteen-wheelers.  In fact, when I first heard about it, I didn’t even think it worthy of a mention until a few days later, when I had mulled it over (actually, I couldn’t STOP thinking about it) and decided that it warranted some further analysis.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that even these seemingly insignificant, nit-picky points about the message by which we deliver our activism can have a huge impact on the world.  For one thing, if individuals and organizations continue to make these tragic missteps, the heart of the vegan argument — don’t exploit animals — is going to get completely lost amongst the outrage; in fact, I barely read any of the rest of the article in which this particular offense is contained.  Not only that, but we are going to actively lose allies if we continue to ignore the voices of those not in power: if we repeatedly perform actions or make statements that contribute to women’s exploitation; if we disregard the histories and stereotypes that contribute to the exploitation of people of color; and if we make a mockery of people’s gender identities and sexuality, they and their allies will not want to align themselves with animal activists.

We cannot afford to lose anyone.

Anyway, the story.  An article called “5 Reasons to Thaw Your Frosty Relationship With Winter” was recently posted on Vegan Chic, a fashion and lifestyle blog for (primarily women) vegans.  It was written by self-described “Ethical Man” Dan Mims, who also posted the article at his blog.  So why did this particular piece ice me up instead of thawing me out?  There’s a teeny, tiny line in the section of the article devoted to snuggling that caused the hairs on the back of my neck to stand on end.  “In the early stages of a dating relationship, gauging each others’ interest isn’t so easy,” writes the Ethical Man.  “Boundaries have to be respected, but they also have to be pushed.”

Insert sound of scratching record here.

In a paragraph about presumably consensual contact with a romantic partner, Ethical Man Dan Mims suggests to his (predominately male) audience that it is ok to push boundaries.  Not only that, but they HAVE to be pushed.  Can we talk for a second about why people have boundaries in romantic and sexual relationships?  How about the fact that one in six women has survived a sexual assault (a statistic, by the way, that does not account for women who were repeatedly assaulted)?  Or the global cultural narrative that women’s bodies are for consumption and men are the ones who do the consuming at will?  The less-privileged groups in this equation (women, gay men, trans- and gender non-conforming individuals) have been forced to establish boundaries for themselves because otherwise, we get attacked.  We get assaulted.  We get killed.

It is the opposite of ethical to suggest that those boundaries be pushed.

And this is why we have to be so careful with our words.  I am not saying that Dan Mims is encouraging his audience to assault women (just as feminists have been arguing that we don’t detest rape jokes because we think the people telling them or laughing at them are or will become rapists).  What I am saying here is that this inattentiveness to the lived experiences of disempowered groups is not only detrimental to the cause of animal activism and indeed all social justice, but it is also straight-up dangerous.  In my activism — and in my vision of a vegan world — people listen to one another.  We consider whether our words will inadvertently trigger or cause discomfort to the people to whom we are speaking.  And if we are called out on our mistakes, we apologize, we educate ourselves, and we fix it.

No one is free when others are oppressed.

[[ Trigger warnings for discussion of rape and exploitation. ]]

I’ve had a really hard time getting out of bed this week.  At first, I assumed it was because it’s the middle of winter — an especially brutal winter here on the east coast, I might add — and the urge to hibernate is downright overpowering.  In a city where my method of transportation is primarily to put on my earth boots and walk from point a to point b, when there are 4′ tall snowbanks and 12″ deep puddles on every corner, it just makes more sense to stay under the covers with the cats.

But then I realized that the snow is nothing compared to feeling like it’s open season on my body every time I walk out the front door.

It’s been kind of a brutal month for female-identified people and their allies here in the United States.  Following the November elections, a whole new set of leaders have been ushered into our government, some of whom (both Democrat and Republican alike, let’s make no mistake about that) have made it their priority to take away the rights of women to have control over their own bodies, reproductive choice, and health care.  The “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act” (H.R. 3) — followed closely behind by the “Title X Abortion Provider Prohibition Act” (H.R. 217) and the “Sanctity of Human Life Act” (H.R. 212) –  was introduced into the House of Representatives and deemed “a top priority” by the new Republican-controlled congress.  There is much more to be read at those links, but in a nutshell, these acts are undeniable attacks on women’s health and bodily autonomy.  They target poor women, women of color, young women, and trans-identified people by removing funding and support for the medical procedures they may need as a result of rape, incest, abuse, coercion, prophylactic failure, health, or any of the myriad reasons why women would seek to terminate a pregnancy.  These acts also seek to redefine “rape” as something that happens forcibly — and never not ever in any other situations — completely invalidating the experiences of millions of women whose rapes and abuse might not have come at gunpoint.   This is an epic failure on the part of a government whose purpose is to protect its citizens.  While plenty of people are raising their voices and fighting back, we need many more to be doing the same thing.  And frankly, it’s exhausting: not only the fighting itself, but also the fact that we have to do all this fighting in the first place.

Oh, and there’s this other thing.  Compared to the links above, it’s relatively minor, but it’s been destroying me a little bit, so I’m going to write about it!  Backstory: I used to consider myself a gamer.  When I was younger, I played video games and tabletop games like it was my job.  It was common to find me planted in front of the PlayStation after school or at a (male) friends’ house playing Magic: The Gathering or some other equally-nerdy and wonderful tabletop game.  I still love games, actually, and am so happy to spend an afternoon in the company of friends playing board games or cards, but as I got older and more aware of feminism and veganism and power and privilege, I felt myself pulling away from the gaming community.  It became unsafe for me.  The gaming world is a man’s world, no doubt about that, and I started realizing that beyond the failure of most gaming companies to include strong female characters and strong storylines for them, many were actively creating weak or degrading female characters and storylines.  When I played multiplayer games, especially those from behind the anonymity of the internet, I encountered a lot of hostility toward women: rape jokes, objectification, stalking, harassment.  I might have considered attending a convention at the height of my gamerocity, but many women who dared to set foot in that male-dominated arena found themselves attacked by leering, commenting, harassing male gamers.  It was becoming clear that this was not a place for me.

So, recently, this by-gamers-for-gamers webcomic, Penny Arcade, of which I used to be a huge fan, made a rape joke.  It was offensive, and they got called out on it, and yet instead of saying, “Oh, shit, we’re sorry fanbase (and world at large), we made a mistake.  We apologize.  We’re learning from our mistakes and hope sincerely that we don’t make a similar one in the future,” NO, INSTEAD they decided to defend themselves with snarky comments, follow-up unapologetic comics, dismissal of the concerns and accusations, MERCHANDISE BASED ON THE OFFENDING COMIC, and all-around assbaddery.  You can read a timeline of the whole thing here, but beware, I have been following this for weeks and it has just sapped the life right out of me.  To see the way in which people staunchly defend their right to disrespect and disregard other people — and worse, to hear about the real, genuine, scary threats and hate speech that the (mostly female) folks on the “opposition” have been receiving — is just exhausting and disheartening.

And then, there’s PETA.  I am so tired of writing about PETA, y’all.  Seriously.  If I could just skip this part, I would, but they’ve gone and done something that made even my cynical, jaded jaw hit the floor, and so it definitely merits a mention in the context of this post.  This video is straight-up pornography.  It is two minutes of nearly-naked women performing sex acts with inanimate objects and each other, while a disembodied male voice gives them commands from off-camera.  It is exploitation and rape culture at its worst — when women’s bodies are offered for consumption, when women are paid to be attractive and sexual for the male gaze — and it is being done by an organization that purports to be working on behalf of animals.  No, no, no.  NO.  This is a wheelbarrow full of no, people.  You know, PETA and its supporters often claim that they are adopting the tactics of the mainstream in order to get the mainstream to get up and notice, but WHAT, exactly, will the mainstream notice in this video?  I noticed, for example, humiliation and degradation and the beauty myth and subservience and sexualiza– oh, wait, this is about going vegetarian?  No.  This is PETA employing sexism and misogyny to make money and draw attention to itself.  It is not helping anyone: not women, not people, and certainly not animals.

Ok, so, bring it back for me, Jenna: what does the rape culture have to do with veganism?

Here’s the thing: right now, as I write this, as you read this, billions of female nonhumans are being exploited for their reproductive capacities.  They have been reduced to that terrifying spectre that those of us fighting against H.R. 3 and Dickwolves and all the other shit we have to slog through on a daily basis just to get some respect are SO WORRIED ABOUT: they are enslaved, exploited, and murdered so that someone, somewhere (in fact many people) can profit off of their bodies and the products of their reproduction.  Chickens live on farms and in cages and are murdered so that we can eat their eggs or so that they can produce more chickens to live in cages and be murdered.  Cows live on farms and in cages and are murdered so that we can drink their milk (hell, the equipment used to impregnate them is referred to by industry as “the rape rack;” IT DOESN’T GET MORE EXPLICIT THAN THAT, FOLKS) or eat the flesh of their children or make more children to make us more milk.  Mice live in laboratories so that their reproductive organs can be filled with cancer or cleaning products or trans fats and we can figure out a lot of what we already know about preventing cancer and not using toxic chemicals in our homes or on our food.  They have been reduced to living, breathing incubators.  Human females on this planet fear that as their rights are eroded by legislation and the media and society, that this will someday be their fate.  For billions of nonhuman females, it already is.

I’m daring to suggest that if we don’t get angry and get active and stand up against the fact that these ladies are being used for their bodies by the billions — as long as the privileged, powerful groups are profiting off of their reproductive organs, removing their consent from the equation and enslaving them in the most horrifying unfunny definition of what a “life” could be — we are next.

And that is enough to get me out of bed.

With the new year just a few days away (well, one version of the new year, anyway), I have begun feeling reflective about the year that just passed and what to make of the one looming on the horizon.  I don’t typically make new year’s resolutions — not because I don’t stick to them, but because I’d like to think that I’m improving and growing and resolving with every day that passes, not just all at once on January 1st — but I do like to spend the quiet, usually-snowy morning of New Year’s Day in meditation or in front of a pad of paper, brainstorming about how to make the most out of the 365 days ahead.  I’ve dedicated my life to making a more vegan world, but I think this year will demand some reflection on what the word “vegan” means to me and how it manifests in my life.  Miranda once said it best: veganism, to me, is like a line in the sand, where after conquering one hurdle (giving up animal products, examining my privilege, figuring what kind of activism suits me best) I can feel free to push that line a little bit further, demanding that my veganism encompass more things beyond that initial “good enough” (subsequently giving up products that are harmful to the environment or the people producing them, irrespective of their ingredients lists; devising new forms of activism that don’t look like other offerings and being brave enough to try them out).

Does the term “vegan” actually fit what I am doing anymore, given that the mainstream definition of veganism is a more comfortable label for a package of veggie burgers than it is for all-encompassing, anti-oppression activism?  Has the word “vegan” become too muddied by versions of veganism that, when not explicitly fatphobic, transphobic, ableist, racist, classist, or sexist, aren’t doing much to  challenge these oppressions either?

It’s tough sometimes to know where to go from here.  I’m plagued by anxiety about not doing enough or not doing the right thing, especially when sometimes only the folks in this collective seem to be on the same page as me.  When most other animal welfare corporations are peddling veganism as a weight-loss solution or a springboard for an entirely new capitalist market and customer base, it can feel really lonely out here.  I’ve certainly stumbled a few times along the way, and reflecting on years spent working for organizations that don’t align themselves with my values can be painful and disheartening.  But I think this year my resolution will be two-fold: keep on working, even when it feels sad and lonely, and don’t be afraid of change (including not feeling bad about having to change if something isn’t working anymore).

Steve and I were talking recently about how much we enjoy writing (and, in his case, filmmaking) and how our activism often takes these forms.  While perhaps this isn’t the splashiest or most dramatic way to make a difference, it is, at least for me, incredibly cathartic and productive and often necessary.  One of my favorite writers, Derrick Jensen, often states that to create revolution — and, subsequently, when revolution has occurred — we will need people with all sorts of talents, hopefully including writing (and filmmaking, and nursing, and communication, and cooking, and all those skills that no one necessarily thinks of as “activist,” but which we possess and which are important in their own right).  I worry sometimes that the time I spend writing in this blog, or writing articles for books or websites, is time taken away from “real activism;” but in the new year, I hope to eradicate those thoughts from my brain.

This is just one example, but I hope it encourages people to reflect upon their lives and see that there are myriad ways to make a difference — activism and true anti-oppression veganism are not only “doing,” but “being”.  When the world is falling down around us (see also: non-human animal abuse and exploitation, human animal abuse and exploitation, earthquakes and floods, policing and immigration, WikiLeaks, rape apologism, poverty, food deserts, revocation of welfare and education funding, hate crimes, high-fructose corn syrup, etc! etc! etc!) it’s all I can do sometimes to keep from falling right down with it.

We live in an incredibly imperfect world, and despite all my wishing upon a star, utopia isn’t just going to settle over the current blueprints overnight.  Every little bit helps, whether a particular action is actually making tangible change for animals or is simply helping me to feel like I can go for another day/week/month/year/lifetime.  All roads lead to revolution.

Through the magic of technology, I have my email set up to send me daily alerts when the word “vegan” appears in news or blog headlines.  (I also have one set up for “LGBT” and one set up for “roller derby,” which tells you a lot about me as a person, I think.)  Usually, this results in some great recipes, some funny reviews, a post or two from me over at SuperVegan (which makes me feel important), and finally, the occasional op-ed about how someone could never stop eating animals (sigh).  But recently, this gem popped into my inbox, and I think I had to physically move my laptop out of the way so I could pound my head against the desk.  While it’s no surprise to me that PETA hates women (and people of color, and gender non-conforming people, and, well, animals) I was just flabbergasted that even they would get behind the wedding-industrial complex to encourage women to lose weight, have surgery, and spend a million dollars on their wedding days.  For PETA, even that seems egregious.  But I guess I should learn to not be surprised.

A little background info: After reading “Against Equality” and working with the Alternatives to Marriage Project, I’ve become more disillusioned than ever with the institution of marriage and, of course, the wedding-industrial complex.  On a very basic level, yes, it is an atrocity that the relationships of some people are recognized and validated by the U.S. government, while others (based on gender or gender presentation) are not.  Married people in the United States receive over 1,000 different state and federal benefits that are not available to people federally designated as “single,” including tax breaks, immigration, health care, adoption, and many others.  Understandably, the LGBT community has demanded that those privileges be extended to its members in long-term committed relationships and has poured millions of dollars into campaigning for federal recognition of gay marriage.  But is this the right goal?  While our children are beating bullied and killed, our parents and peers are being denied jobs and health care and housing, and the United Nations is declaring that gay, lesbian, and transgender individuals around the world are not worth protecting by law — we’re worried most about whether or not we can get a ring on our fingers and assimilate into an institution that kind of hates us?

For women, marriage (and “the big day”) has created unnecessary pressure and expectations.  Society portrays relationships and marriage as the ultimate end-goal for women: girls are taught to prepare for their weddings from an early age, single women are ridiculed, and divorcees are considered failures.  There are so few examples of unmarried women (or women not angling for marriage) in the media that a test exists for movies and television shows to determine whether you can expect to see the female characters talking about more than just men and relationships.  We are expected to do just about anything to get a man and raise a family: lose weight, have plastic surgery, downplay our intelligence and opinions, shave our legs, act demure, play hard-to-get, write poems and songs and pine pine pine.  I want a world in which everyone is free to make hir own choices about love and relationships, whether that means you are celibate, single, in a committed relationship with one person, in a committed relationship with many people, or sleeping with the entire state of New York.

So, back to PETA.  PETA recently sponsored a contest in which the woman who lost the most weight before her wedding — by adopting a vegan diet — would receive a $6,000 eco-friendly wedding gown, provided by PETA and designer Linda Loudermilk.  I don’t even know where to begin to parse out this trainwreck.  Weddings are a full-blown industry here in the United States, with people routinely spending thousands of dollars to have the best dresses, flowers, food, entertainment, and venue for their wedding days.  The narrative that this is the most important day of a woman’s life leads her to do things like crash dieting, plastic surgery (there is a TV show called “Bridalplasty,” for fuck’s sake), going into debt, marrying someone for the sake of getting that wedding day before “it’s too late,” etc.  The fact that PETA would play right into the hands of the wedding-industrial complex with a bridal weight loss contest makes me just see red.  In addition, treating veganism as a weight loss method ignores all of the analysis of power and privilege that goes along with choosing an animal-free diet.  It also makes invisible all of those people who are currently eating a vegan diet and who have not experienced drastic weight loss (or who have experienced weight gain) or found veganism to be a panacea for all that ails them.  As someone who celebrates diversity (and not just as a buzzword) and wants to ensure that everyone’s experiences are valued, a contest in which the implicit demand is that everyone be skinny does not jive with my worldview.  My vision of vegan utopia has neither exclusionary politics, like the sort that accompany marriage and weddings, nor crash diets.  Shame on PETA for buying into both.

So, when L.O.V.E. was first hatched, the project that most excited me was the Vegan Buddies Project.  The idea was that we could connect activists in similar geographic regions and start forming these groups who would take L.O.V.E.’s anti-speciesist, anti-exploitation message and spread it in the ways that were most appropriate for their communities.  It felt like a great way to make friends and make change all in one fell swoop.

Sadly, our scope was a little too broad, and it was nearly impossible to find groups of three people who lived in the same region and were willing to connect as vegan buddies.  L.O.V.E. is, admittedly, a small effort at the moment: with all of the collective members busy with their own lives and projects, and an intentionally non-existent operating budget, we’re not expanding dramatically anytime soon.  Thus, the Vegan Buddies project never really got off the ground.

Enter Vegan Buddies 2.0: The Vegan Pen Pals Project.  This second incarnation of our previous efforts negates the necessity of participants living within a certain number of miles of one another, which creates for us endless possibilities.  Vegan Buddies from South Africa can now be paired with folks in Ireland; pen pals in New York can easily and effectively write letters to their pen pal in Hawaii or Russia.  We’re really excited about the possibilities and hope you’ll join us in our efforts to make connections, expand our outreach, and start new friendships around the world.

So, what are you waiting for?  Check out the program guidelines and then sign yourself up to be a Vegan Pen Pal.  We expect that the first letters will start rolling after January 1.  As always, leave comments here or contact us with any questions you may have.

Holidays can be a trying time for a vegan.  With both Thanksgiving and the winter holidays often built upon a shared meal, if you choose to spend your time with folks who do not follow a vegetarian diet, the prospect of facing animal bodies as the centerpiece of the table can be a really challenging and horrifying one.  Nearly 40 million turkeys are slaughtered annually in the United States for Thanksgiving alone; the thought of that massacre is enough to make any bite of food enjoyed on that day, vegan or otherwise, hard to swallow.

There are additional challenges for vegans and social justice advocates at holidays as well.  Native Americans and folks in solidarity with those communities may not associate the American Thanksgiving holiday with love and sharing and harvest but instead rightfully acknowledge Thanksgiving as a reminder that Native populations were wiped out by those Pilgrims whose “kind gesture” of sharing and community is now at the center of this holiday.  Additionally, members of the LGBT community whose identities are not accepted by their family members — whether completely disowned by those families or just made to feel uncomfortable in their presence — may be isolated and lonely.  Holiday cheer?  Not so much.

Several years ago, I made the decision to no longer celebrate either Thanksgiving or Christmas, despite those being traditional holidays within my family and community.  I find the notion of eating at a table full of dead animals anything but peaceful or joyful, and even though a vegan Thanksgiving dinner may be free of animal products, it still aligns itself with that deceptive, oppressive holiday.  Living in a large metropolitan area, it’s not difficult to find myriad vegan Thanksgiving celebrations happening around town, but as the years have gone by, I find myself less and less interested in participating in that holiday in any of its incarnations.  In fact, my personal tradition for the last three years of Thanksgiving days has been to take a three-hour walk with my canine friend, Miles.

I like the idea of a harvest celebration — especially since foods traditionally grown in the fall, like pumpkins, apples, and squash are some of my favorites — but if I were to have a shared vegan meal with my friends and family, I’d probably choose not to have it anywhere near Thanksgiving Day or Columbus Day or any holiday whose history has been altered by those in power to erase the experiences of those without (see also: most of American History as taught in schools).  I’ve said it before, but it merits repeating: my idea of a vegan world is not a vegan version of the one that currently exists.  I’m envisioning many more changes to the landscape than just replacing animal flesh with tofu.  I want the end of oppression, the elimination of hierarchies, and a world in which people work together to support their families, communities, and selves.  Thanksgiving as it stands doesn’t really fit that mold.

As always, I’m not prescribing that this is a solution for everyone.  There’s a lot of value in spending time with family and influencing non-vegetarians to enjoy vegan meals; truthfully, I don’t have the fortitude for it.  I just want to emphasize that there’s value in creating new traditions, even if they are challenging.  Even if they do not resemble old traditions at all.  Even if it garners you some strange looks and angry emails from friends and family.  Indeed, changing traditions — reshaping them to reflect the values that mean the most to you — is the only thing that will bring about a vegan world.

I recently picked up a new activity in my life that has thrown me headfirst into a large group of people who are not vegan or socially justice-minded.  Until this point, I’d been incredibly selective about the people with whom I associate: most of the friends I’ve made in my town have come to me through activism, so they have naturally been vegan-minded.  I have a relatively small family, and they all live several hundred miles away or more, so I can choose to see them only when I’m confident that there won’t be a dead animal involved.  Basically, it’s been a long time since I’ve had to endure chatter about how delicious animals are or hear a barrage of words that I consider to be insensitive or disrespectful.

I’ve talked before about how important it is, as an activist, to do things that make you happy.  Life doesn’t always have to be gloomy, and frankly, it’s really challenging to a person’s heart and mind to always be thinking/working/living anti-oppression work.  There’s a reason people burn out, and I’m trying desperately not to hit my limit.  This particular activity in which I’m participating is recreation for me; it has no repercussions for my work or my activism or my desire to make the world a better place.  It’s just fun.

… except that I wince whenever someone says something completely intolerant in conversation.  And at events, it’s not uncommon to have animal body parts by the hundreds being served as food.  There’s no discussion about privilege and little awareness of social justice issues.  And I’m feeling like a fish out of water.

I recognize that not everyone is in the same place as me in their thinking (or non-thinking) about these issues.  And it has been very isolating at times to try to self-select down to a social circle comprised only of those folks who “get it,” so I’m actively working to not do that anymore.   I am trying to look at some of these cringe-worthy instances as opportunities to educate, but I also don’t want to turn an activity that I am doing for fun into a constant struggle.  I’m probably not going to be able to turn everyone on to an understanding of these issues, and though I am happy to live by example, I’m feeling a lot of internal struggle when I am in these surroundings.

Basically, I don’t know what to do, short of walking away.  And I’m not happy considering that option.  Does anyone have any experience with a situation like this?  Any advice or suggestions for me or other LOVE members who may be experiencing something similar?

There was a really incredible article in make/shift magazine’s spring 2010 issue about male domination of social justice movements and how the replication of those patriarchal power structures have both directly and indirectly helped the state to topple some of the most influential organizations working toward a just world.  I discovered this article via the INCITE! blog and would love to share it with LOVE readers and collective members and, well, every activist on the planet.

The article can be accessed here: http://inciteblog.wordpress.com/2010/07/15/why-misogynists-make-great-informants-how-gender-violence-on-the-left-enables-state-violence-in-radical-movements/

I think the INCITE! blog and its commenters have dissected and discussed much of the same things I would choose to mention, but I just want to emphasize how incredibly relevant and important I find this analysis to be.  My time as an activist has been plagued with struggles against male domination and the oppression of female-identified activists, ostensibly from people who are billing themselves as allies: whether it’s an individual vegan activist who is abusive toward other female activists and partners or an entire organization that has allied itself with this culture’s hatred of women.

I do love this passage, though:

“Maybe if organizers made collective accountability around gender violence a central part of our practices we could neutralize people who are working on behalf of the state to undermine our struggles. I’m not talking about witch hunts; I’m talking about organizing in such a way that we nip a potential [informant] in the bud before he can hurt more people. Informants are hard to spot, but my guess is that where there is smoke there is fire, and someone who creates chaos wherever he goes is either an informant or an irresponsible, unaccountable time bomb who can be unintentionally as effective at undermining social-justice organizing as an informant. Ultimately they both do the work of the state and need to be held accountable.”

It seems so important to get activists and activist organizations to stop thinking of misogyny and abuse of women as something that will resolve itself once we solve the “real” problems.  And for as long as male activists are exploitative of female activists, they are just as bad as the animal abusers, racists, homophobes, and the state against which we are all struggling, together.

I have been dreading writing this post.  Each time I sit down to work on it, I get really anxious and worried: I don’t want to come across as attacking people who are otherwise doing good work, I don’t want to pretend that I am a perfect consumer (an oxymoron in itself!), and I definitely don’t want to alienate the four people on the planet who still actually listen to what I have to say.  But every time I subsequently close the browser window and don’t get the thoughts out of my head, I feel a different, worse kind of anxiety: the knowledge that well-meaning, vegan-identified people are spending their money on products that are incredibly harmful to animals and the planet — the exact reasons that we, as vegans, have stopped buying animal-based goods.

“Orangutans are literally dying for cookies.” So begins a report by the Center for Science in the Public Interest, published in 2008 and chronicling the myriad ways in which palm oil is troubling.  When this and another similar report were released, Michael Brune of the Rainforest Action Network wrote a really concise and informative article on the Huffington Post about the problems with palm oil: deforestation, loss of habitat for rainforest animals (both human and non-human), climate change.  But even before that, as an apprentice at the Chimpanzee and Human Communication Institute way back in 2006, I had heard about the loss of Orangutan habitat due to the production of palm oil.  If you want to help primates, my teachers there said, don’t buy palm oil.  Having been so educated and moved by the lives of the chimpanzees at the institute, I knew this was something that I’d try my best to avoid.

But once I left the safe confines of CHCI, my promise to avoid palm oil was virtually forgotten.  Truthfully, it seemed a bigger challenge to me than avoiding meat, dairy, leather, and the ilk: nearly 50 percent of consumer goods contain some sort of palm oil, no doubt many of them considered “vegan.”  Furthermore, I wasn’t prepared for the teeming masses of Earth Balance-lovin’ vegans unwittingly singing the praises of this problematic product.  It seems like nearly every magazine, recipe, and restaurant trying to sell me something vegan is celebrating palm oil.  Who am I to rain on everyone’s parade?

I decided recently to go outside of my comfort zone yet again and remove Earth Balance and palm oil from my diet to the best of my ability (possibly spurred by a re-reading of the book “Next of Kin”).  Just as I used to say that I couldn’t give up dairy because I liked the taste too much, I have to get over my unwillingness to give up a delicious but palm oil-laden vegan treat.  But now I have also had to deal with these squiggly feelings of not knowing how to address my concerns with fellow animal advocates.  I don’t want to be the vegan police, and I certainly don’t want to be prescribing a solution that is too utopian to be feasible for the average person to attain.

So what is the solution?  As usual, I’m not sure.  Most of the vegan restaurants and bakeries I’ve encountered have been huge proponents of Earth Balance and other palm oil-based margarine products because it closely replicates cow’s milk butter when used in recipes, especially baked goods.  When I made the decision to stop buying Earth Balance, it meant a serious change in the types of foods I cooked at home: no more toast with “butter” for breakfast, fewer cupcakes and pastries made from scratch, etc.  And I’m still struggling to not order these things when I go to restaurants: I’m a sucker for a cupcake, and it isn’t until after I’ve eaten that I worry about the ingredients I may have just consumed, “vegan” though they may have been.  It’s a difficult change and no doubt one that people are reluctant to make.

I acknowledge that calling out Earth Balance and palm oil for its harmful impact on humans, animals, and the planet is unfair; palm oil is just one of hundreds of problematic “vegan” foods we consume.  If we’re going to eliminate palm oil from our diets, shouldn’t we also be evaluating coffee?  Chocolate?  Tropical fruits?  At what point do we say that we’re “vegan enough,” since in today’s global economy, it’s a huge challenge to find a food or a product in general that doesn’t harm someone somewhere?  I completely agree.  Again, I’m in no position to tell others what to do, since I, too, am guilty of making these bad choices — just last night I bought mango juice, which probably traveled thousands of miles to get to me after having been grown by people making significantly less than a living wage.  I’d like to think, however, that if we allow ourselves to dialog about these issues — and not just assume that if something doesn’t list an animal product on the label that it’s “cruelty-free” — then maybe those choices will give us as much pause as the choice to purchase meat or dairy once did.  Maybe then we can push ourselves even further beyond what we thought we could do and create a world that is even more peaceful, respectful, and just than we imagined possible.