Yearly on this blog, Professor Buchanan writes a "Veganniversary" essay, the portmanteau of his own creation marking another year since he became a vegan. His first announcement of adopting a vegan lifestyle was in July 2008, which was a little less than two years after I became a vegan. I am less able to pinpoint the exact date for me. I do know it was some time in the fall of 2006, meaning that I have recently passed or will soon pass my 20th veganniversary. To mark the occasion, I offer some observations.
When people learn how long I've been vegan, they often say that it must be easier now than it was 20 years ago. That's true in one sense they mean and one that they don't. The sense in which they mean the point is that there are many more items in grocery stores and at restaurants (even in some unexpected places) that are and are clearly marked as vegan (or plant-based) now than there were then. Even so, 2006 was pretty far along in the movement. Donald Watson coined the term "vegan" in 1944. I have friends who have been vegan more than twice as long as I have been. I'm sure they've experienced much greater changes than I have. The biggest change I've noticed has been the proliferation of products that effectively mimic animal-based foods. In 2006, I couldn't find any vegan cheeses worth eating. For the last decade or so, there have been many. This is one of my favorites. Grocery store sales launched in 2017. Beyond Burgers have been available since 2016. Impossible Burgers debuted the same year.
But being vegan is easier for me now than it was in 2006 for an additional reason: I know what I'm doing. For the first several years of my vegan journey I wasn't exactly a junk-food vegan surviving on potato chips and Diet Coke, but I wasn't exactly a health-focused vegan either. As I was exposed to more people in the movement, I discovered what are sometimes referred to as its three main objectives: sparing animals (my initial reason); protecting the environment; and health. (There are other benefits as well, such as the reduction of food insecurity.) As I took on these additional goals, the health focus led me to do much more of my grocery shopping in the produce aisle. If I had been a health-focused vegan in 2006 or, for that matter, 1986, it would have been easy enough to buy fruits, vegetables, and beans. I'm glad the animal-free meat, dairy, egg, and other substitutes are now available for others, but these days I rarely eat them myself.
And the substitutes don't just come from big companies. Here's some hand-crafted vegan nigiri I had last week at a terrific vegan restaurant in Kyoto. It undoubtedly took a whole lot of skill and work to make something that looked so much like fish and seafood, and it tasted great.
But even with minimal training, anyone with modest kitchen skills can make decent-looking and tasty vegan sushi (or pretty much anything). Here's some vegan nigiri that I made using a red pepper, avocado slices, lotus root, and diced cucumber.
And yes, of course, I can also make vegan maki. Thanks for asking.
If I were writing this essay on my tenth veganniversary in 2016, I'd be more optimistic about the trajectory of the movement, but the number of people who are vegan or plant-based has stalled since then at about 1-3 percent of the population (with the uncertainty in the percentage based on a pretty wide variety in the way that survey questions are asked and the unreliability of self-reporting). At the same time, however, the more optimistic people in the movement point out that in the last decade there has been a significant increase in the number of people who aren't vegans but who consume considerably fewer animal products than they formerly did. In strictly utilitarian terms, a sufficiently large increase in the population of so-called flexitarians and reducitarians could result in a greater reduction in animal consumption than would a modest increase in the number of vegans.
In terms of the environmental impact, a reduction in consumption is a reduction in consumption. Likewise, on a population basis, the health benefits of the reduction could be comparable but more spread out. And so far as the impact of animals, well, as a friend of mine likes to say, the animals don't care why you don't eat them. I have heard him say that as a way of welcoming health-focused or environment-focused people into the movement, but it could apply to reductions thanks to flexitarians and reducitarians as well. The
average American eats more than 20 chickens per year. If four flexitarian Americans each cut that number by a quarter, that's the same number of chickens not being eaten as if one average American goes vegan. Presumably the 20 chickens don't care whether it's one vegan or four flexitarians who aren't eating them.
All that said, I've never thought about my veganism in strictly utilitarian terms. For me, as for many vegans who became vegan for ethical reasons, it has always been about not wishing to participate in activities that I've come to see as wrong. And for that reason, I'll say that for me the hardest part of being vegan is not the actual being vegan part but the fact that I keep having to have the same conversation--the one in which I answer the questions that Sherry posed for herself (because people were already constantly posing them to her) in
Mind If Order the Cheeseburger? And Other Questions People Ask Vegans, published in 2013.
To be clear, in saying that it's hard for me, I don't mean the questions are difficult. Where do you get your protein? Beans, nuts, seeds, virtually anywhere. Don't animals eat other animals? So what? Do you generally model your behavior on what lions do? What about plants? If you really cared about plants, you'd eat them rather than animals, because more plants are killed making animal feed than if you eat them directly. And anyway, there isn't good evidence of plant sentience.
That last answer is the one that has given rise to what I regard as the oddest conversations, insofar as there's follow-up. I know that there's evidence of sophisticated behavior by plants but none that I've seen suggests that they're any more sentient than our own autonomic nervous system or our immune system, which are also capable of sophisticated behavior without any ghost in the machine. But let's put aside the question whether any plants actually are sentient. The odd conversations arise when I encounter people who concede that plants aren't sentient but nonetheless don't understand why I would choose not to eat or wear animal products but that I'm okay eating or wearing plant products. Plants are also alive, they say.
During these conversations, I try to invoke (without necessarily citing) Thomas Nagel's famous essay What is it Like to be a Bat?, putting aside a key point that interested Nagel: the unknowability of a phenomenon such as echolocation without experiencing it. I simply borrow the idea that it is like something to be a bat, a pig, a cow, a chicken, or a fish but (assuming plants aren't sentient, which my interlocutor also assumes during these conversations) it's not like anything to be a carrot, a head of broccoli, a soybean, or any of the whole plants on which those edible parts grow. And then my interlocutor will sometimes express indifference. They don't claim that it is like something to be one of those plants. They simply don't understand why that should matter.
Of course, for this sort of person, aliveness isn't actually a criterion for moral respect. This is someone who eats and wears animal products, knowing full well that they come from animals who were once alive. What they're saying instead is that I have no good reason to draw the line at sentience rather than aliveness, whereas to me it's just sort of obvious that sentience is the more sensible line: If a being has a subjective perspective, if it is "like" something to be that sort of being, then killing that being deprives them of the existence they have experienced and would otherwise continue to experience, whereas killing a plant that cannot subjectively experience anything does not deprive the plant of anything it could miss because, not having a subjectivity, it doesn't experience or miss anything.
I don't want to come across as insensitive to a different sort of perspective. Some people are what I'd call vegans-plus. They don't consume animal products because they agree with us vegans that it is wrong to kill or otherwise seriously harm animals (as is involved in the production of dairy, eggs, fiber, and other ostensibly non-lethal exploitation) without good reason (and there is almost never good reason). But they go further and say it's also wrong to harm plants without good reason. Maybe that's because they believe in plant sentience but it might be because they think that aliveness is the right moral criterion. Such people might be fruitarians (which is not really sustainable absent a great deal of supplementation, and
even then, it's not recommended) or perhaps
freegans. I'm neither a fruitarian nor a freegan but I acknowledge that there's an ethical argument for these approaches. A freegan isn't exactly a vegan-plus, because a freegan will eat discarded animal products. But if one's motivation for veganism is entirely utilitarian, then freeganism is compatible with that motivation, because it leads to no incremental increase in demand for animal products.
To return to the main point, while I can understand having concern for plants in addition to animals, I don't understand having concern for plants but not all animals. To my mind, this results from a kind of animalpomorphism of plants. And yet, it's a pretty common attitude.
Consider the widespread revulsion at
Donald Trump's cutting down of 430 trees in Washington, D.C. to facilitate his vision of a golf course. That was appalling for numerous reasons, including its apparent illegality, failure to consult with local constituencies, misplaced priorities, elimination of habitat for birds, squirrels, and other animals, and the loss of the trees' aesthetic value for residents of and visitors to Washington, D.C. But (unless one believes in plant sentience) it wasn't a harm
to the trees themselves. And yet, the vast majority of the people who are rightly appalled by Trump's chopping down of those trees routinely eat animal products that come from animals who surely experienced harm or death to make those products.
I'm all for reverence for nature extending to living things, such as trees, that have no subjective experience of the world. That reverence could be based on the fact that other living beings who are sentient, including humans, derive pleasure or sustenance from the non-sentient living things. It could just be reverence for its own sake. What I don't get--but what I continue to encounter--is reverence for the insensate bits of our wondrous world that doesn't build on a foundation of minimizing harm to the sentient beings who inhabit it.
-- Michael C. Dorf
