Banned from c/vegan for this one. My bad.

Captions: Anakin Padme 4-panel:

  • “I’m going to make everyone go vegan and eat soybeans.”
  • “So we won’t destroy any more ecosystems, right?”
  • …
  • “We won’t destroy any more ecosystems, right?”
  • southerntofu
    3·
    3 years ago

    I really liked your posts so far, so I’d also gladly read your elaboration on that topic =)

    Haha thanks! I’m an old bird so i’m used to old-style mailing-lists and BBS where we have detailed discussions and not just flamewars for points like you find on Reddit. I hope more people like us can keep Lemmy a friendly place to have deep discussions and learn something.

    think it’s important to criticize the “eco-friendly”/“vegan” capitalist industry.

    The short version is vegan doesn’t mean eco-friendly, and “eco-friendly” in a capitalist context does not mean something that respects the environment. Two examples:

    • in the food domain, industrial monocultures destroy the environment ; we need to develop permaculture systems, but that’s mostly incompatible with the capitalist system… so even vegan food, while less bad than meat, currently has a huge impact on the environment, whether it’s imported from faraway places or not ; also, some brands such as “impossible meat” (or whatever) promote industrial practices that are very harmful to the environment when we can have simple seitan steaks
    • for another example, take soap: soap is simple to make from local raw materials (some kind of oil + some kind of alcaline base) and you can have nice olive soap (Marseille/Aleppo soap) without any kind of packaging… yet you’ll find all sorts of “eco-friendly”/“vegan” soaps in supermarkets that are packaged in various kinds of plastics and/or use ink on the packaging (which is really not vegan)

    Vegan is about direct and conscious harm to other living beings, while eco-friendliness is more large. But organic/eco-friendly labels are far from enough ; they’re just a form of feel-good capitalism. For a practical example, take a look at electric bikes/cars: it’s advertised as green but why? There’s plenty of raw materials that are fucking polluting that you need to make an electric bike. Don’t get me wrong, electric bikes are a nice piece of assistive technologies for persons facing situations of handicap. But the greener bike is the mechanical bike and what’s good for the environment is to produce less shit in all cases.

    Also interesting to consider: our personal consumer choices matter very little on the environment. Concrete and transportation industry account for a lot of pollution and CO2 emissions so as long as you reside in the city and eat vegan quinoa from the other side of the world, the environment keeps getting destroyed.