Status Updates From No Meat Required: The Cultu...

Super interesting! I'll be hearing her speak later this month.

The US government subsidizes the industrial meat and dairy industries for $38 billion per year; meat and dairy are socialized food industries with horrifying working conditions in a country that won’t give us Medicare for All or wipe away our student loan debt.

the future needs justice, reparations, the redistribution of wealth, and radical restructuring of who has land, who farms, and how land is used.

the United States, as a settler state, destroyed ancestral knowledge of the land and the medicinal purposes of what it could grow, and so as an imperialist and capitalist entity, its corporate arms go around the world to extract resources to sell back to its people.

The planet needs the radical restructuring of land use and people need self-determination with regard to farming for the Global South, as well as for the Black and Indigenous people upon whose land the United States and other nations settled. Indigenous farming practices and agroecology are the documented ways forward, as well as a new economic system that isn’t built upon cancerous, endless growth.

What does it matter if Oatly is in every coffee shop if one of its stakeholders is Blackstone, a private equity firm also invested in a company deforesting the Amazon and led by a CEO who donated $3 million to a super PAC supporting Trump’s re-election? More vegan food doesn’t inevitably lead to a more just world, but it does let a lot of companies greenwash their money-making in its name.

Vegan and vegetarian food-makers are held to a higher standard than omnivore ones—that’s a fact, because by being dedicated to one particular facet of environmentalism and care, they are implicitly dedicated to more.