What Is Veganism For?

by Catherine Oliver

Across the world, an increasing number of people are turning to veganism, changing not just their diets, but completely removing animal products from their lives. For some, this is prompted by concerns over animal ethics; for others, it’s a response to the part played by animal agriculture in the climate crisis or an attempt to improve their own health.
Catherine Oliver shows why the veganism movement has become a powerful social, political and environmental force, taking an honest look at how we live and eat. She discusses the health and environmental benefits of veganism, explores the practical and social impacts of the shift to eating plants, and explains why veganism is not just a diet, but a way of life.

160 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2024

Reviews

[Ali Baniasad · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some insightful and thought-provoking quotes from the book:

When it comes to eating, it has been a case of ‘out of sight, out of mind’ for the impact of meat consumption on animals and the environment.
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Becoming vegan opens the eyes of people to how spaces can be sites of harm that can reshape engagement with the world around us in negative ways.
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A focus on reducing the amount of intensively farmed meat consumed, can obscure the violence of animal ‘byproducts’ (such as eggs, dairy and honey), which, despite the name, are anything but byproducts.
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Veganism isn’t just about not eating animals: it is about rethinking the human relationship with the non-human world through the lens of our consumption, but also through our treatment of other species, environments and humans. As such, it expands across the social, political, economic and ethical spheres, to refuse violence and promote compassion.
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The intensification of animal agriculture is part of a broader system of human domination over nature.
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Veganism is not simply about what we eat, but rather about how we live – with ourselves, with each other, and with the non-human world. There is therefore a strong emphasis on situating what we eat as part of who we are….
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Understanding food as cultural and social as well as nutritional is key to unlocking sustainable future food systems.
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The kinds of food we understand as acceptable is culturally shifting, across both time and space. Things previously or elsewhere common to diets – eyes, hearts or feet, for example – are unusual to others. What we eat isn’t just about nutrition, it’s about enjoyment, cultural connection, sociability and pleasure. It is also about the kinds of values that a society holds.
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Technology can’t save us from environmental crises and violent relationships with the non-human world unless it also ushers in an ethical shift. Technology might bring about the ethical shift needed for society to update its values; but it also risks a further severing of humans from nature.
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Becoming vegan isn’t just about what we eat: it’s about a changed way of being in the world. Like many kinds of radical and activist movements, veganism requires a commitment to ongoing education and learning not just about what is or isn’t vegan, but about the way being vegan shifts relationships with the self, others and the world.
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The geographer Karen Morin in her book Carceral Space, Prisoners and Animals shows how industrial farms, zoos, slaughterhouses and prisons for humans all share particular characteristics of captivity and confinement. She shows that the physical buildings of prisons and industrial agricultural farms are near-identical from aerial views; that solitary confinement and the zoo cage echo one another; that death in prison execution chambers and the slaughterhouse follow similar regulations of separating life from death; and both prisoners and animals are victims of pharmaceutical lab testing. These spaces are not the same, but they follow similar procedures and logics.
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The association between veganism and femininity has led to prejudice and homophobia towards vegan men, but it also paves the way for more fluid and subversive forms of masculinity and sexuality.
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What is veganism for? Veganism is a way of living that aims to improve animals’ lives, human health and the planetary future. It has emerged across the world in different forms and goes beyond simply a change in diet; becoming vegan changes the way people engage with the world.

[Kitty Russell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent overview of veganism.