Starting the vegan pledge … what is ethical?

So I’ll say that I started this post yesterday after the first meeting or the local PAN Vegan Pledge.  I was struggling some to really capture my thoughts, so I waited to finish.  I came back today and the draft is gone.  So I will just have to start over. I will however admit, I am really struggling with this post.

I attended the first meeting of the Pan Vegan Pledge yesterday.  I’ve been excited about this meeting for a while, so I will admit my expectations were high.  The first meeting consisted of introductions, a cooking demonstration, and some time for small group discussion of different issues and concerns that we pledges might have.  I will start by saying I was overwhelmed by the enthusiasm and energy the hosts and mentors brought to the meeting.  We’d had an ice storm the night before, but the room was filled with about 40 people (including mentors and pledges).  The mentors shared their journey to becoming vegan, sharing both how and why they became vegans as well as describing their recent meals to offer a sense of a variety of vegan meals.  A theme from many of the mentors involved becoming vegan for ‘ethical reasons’  or described themselves as ‘ethical vegans’ (I put this in single quotes because it is a paraphrase.).  In discussing ethics, there were two dominant concerns that were mentioned: 1) concern for ethical treatment of animals and 2) concern over fair-trade and child labor issues.

These are important concerns, but actually don’t reflect a significant concern for me and the core of this blog.  I think we have a major problem in this country with regards to food; we don’t know what we eat, where it comes from, or how it gets to our plate.  My vegan exploration was primarily motivated as an exploration that would inform me of alternatives and also allow me insight into the vegan lifestyle’s views on these issues.  Clearly this is not a scientific study, but I wonder now whether these issues are as pressing.  Throughout the meeting there were some mentions of GMOs and the environmental impacts of industrial animal agriculture.  But we also talked about chain restaurants that prey on low wage earners, use food sources from the lowest prices to make profits, and rely on an industrial food system that obfuscates the origins of the food we eat.  Similarly, people shared ideas for using convenience foods to simplify vegan eating, but these foods are also suspect in terms of environmental hazards from production as well as transportation, refrigeration, and packaging.  From my perspective these are also huge ethical issues; just not ones that involve physical harm to animals or children.  Please understand I am not advocating either.  But we do need to keep in mind that ethics is complex.

Let me make this more concrete.  Tonight I cooked my first vegan meal.  Last night was another fantastic meal at Fiction Kitchen to marvel the tastebuds marveled – I had the ‘pork’ barbeque and was having a hard time staying in my seat for the joyous cascade of flavors! – I digress.  So tonight was Sweet Potato Burgers with a Side salad:

I will say that I don’t know where any of the ingredients came from – save one I used homemade chili powder from chilies I dried and crushed – and that’s the issue with this.  I can get Sweet Potatoes now at the Farmer’s market.  In fact, I can get most of the ingredients for this dish there.  When I do that, I give the money to the farmer, the food travels a shorter distance to me, no animals are harmed in the process, and no children are forced into labor to get that food.  This is the kind of ethics I am talking about.

During the next few meetings I’ll start asking more questions.  I am really stumped by this.  More than one person talked about the fact that  ovo-lacto vegetarians are not really responding to all the ethical dilemmas.  But I think this it a straw man argument.  If that is your stance, is it any different if you aren’t considering all the environmental issues as well?  I don’t want to come off negative or argumentative… I really want to understand.

Is there more to this?

I started this blog with an idea that I wanted to think about where the origins of the  food I eat.  My thinking focused on environmental issues, personal health, and also thinking about knowledge that we need to be effective consumers (this is both an economic issue and a scientific issue).   I could write pages and pages about each of these issues, but I want to take a moment and consider another issue that was highlighted for me recently:  how food and sustainable agriculture is a cultural issue.  I’ve always been frustrated by the multicultural food fairs because to me these are superficial considerations of food in culture. While I listened to speakers at Elon’s Fall Environmental Forum, I came to understand that there is more to sustainable food than just tamales, spring rolls, and dahl.  Now I want to think more about this issue in this blog.

Here’s the argument made by multiple speakers, ‘ agriculture is at it’s core culture.’  From their views, it is an etymological, social, and ethical issue.

Etymology

First, the origins of the word refer to cultivation of fields.  And culture can be thought of as social mechanisms the cultivate the human enterprise.  The point is that growing food – agriculture – etymologically includes culture.

Socially

As we have evolved socially, the word culture has taken on new meaning.  But if we think about the food that sustains us, there is a social dimension that shares this new meaning.  Growing food is hard, there are many things against the effort to grow food.  Blights, pests, climate, weather, and many other natural and man-made factors of life impact growing food. This year our tomatoes have not done well, we think it has to do with the summer weather.  But the point is, it brings humility and gratitude when you grow food to know first-hand about the challenges.  That definitely cultivates my own life experience.

Moreover, we build culture when we begin to know and speak with the people  who grow our food; we begin to build relationships and understand one another.  How is this not culture? I always remember when we visited friends in Sweden and following along on trips to the farmer’s market.  There was one farmer there who they knew personally and always shopped from him.  It was interesting because there was a bond between them.  We learned later that at times our friends went to his farm and worked with him.  I really believe that this was building the culture of that space and time, and it was important.  It makes me want to go back to the market and talk more with the people I buy from.

Ethically

This part gets a little hard, but thinking about the ethics of our culture and how that is reflected in food choices is another issue.  I’m reading, with my students, The way we eat (I’ve listed it in Good Reads), but this also came up from the speakers.  The issue is this, what does it say about our culture if we are willing to poison the earth from overuse of pesticides and fertilizers in order to have cheap food?  OK, this is a big generalization and readers might not like that, but it is an important point to worry about.  However,  we can also think about the ethics of using petroleum products to make fertilizers, packaging and fuel to transport food when we know that petroleum is a limited resource and one that when used results in environmental degradation.  What would this say about our culture?  Again, another generalization, but it is hard to not consider the ways that our choices about food reflect something about the ethics of our culture.

Wrapping this up…

I could write more about these issues, challenges, and questions.  But my point is to suggest that this blog might be more than I started.  I now am thinking about both impacts and reflections of culture that arise as I consider the origins of my meal.  Many readers don’t read for my pontificating, so I’ll get back to foods soon.  Tonight is stuffed giant marconi peppers from the garden (a different take on that dish) and I’m planning a trip to the market on Wednesday.  Maybe I will talk with a farmer about this ask their view on the issue.