Veganism in Online Media

I found an article in the Manila Standard this morning with its authoritativeness reflected in the phrases like "I once read" and "it has always been said" that punctuate it. Its unfortunate scribbler starts off talking about how "you are what you eat" and goes on to discuss the damaging effects of serious alcohol and drug use on a person's physical appearance (particularly in a person's face). Although near the end he does bring up the benefit of eating "fruits, veggies and whole grains" to keep your skin looking healthy, somewhere in the middle, he manages to tuck in the following:

The vegan diet also has a detrimental effect on skin. The lack of protein results in a sallow looking complexion making vegans look pasty and pale.

Considering that the piece's writer also ends up describing coffee as a toxin that needs to be flushed out with antioxidants, I have a hunch that his "expertise" in diet and nutrition aren't going to be tearing him away from his day job anytime soon.

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Yet another young and hip anti-vegan gets to hatemonger in online media this week ("The carnivore's guide to veganism") -- but hey, it's all just humour, right? In London's The Independent, Guy Adams ends up squeezing as many insults at vegans, misinformation about veganism and "meat is sexy !" comments as a body can in less than a dozen paragraphs. For instance, in response to being asked by his editor to supposedly "go vegan" for a week by giving up meat, dairy and eggs, Adams states:

I'm a carnivore. Not just any, bacon-sandwich-eating-carnivore, but a principled one. My auntie is a farmer. My parents keep sheep and chickens. I grew up fishing and shooting. My sister is a vet. On occasion during my adult life, like our new Prime Minister, I've ridden to foxhounds. For our honeymoon, I took my wife to Alaska, where we murdered several hundred salmon. Killed 'em, cooked 'em, ate 'em.

Then he makes clear his opinion of vegans:

I hated vegans. Really, I did. They're farty bores, I used to say, with pallid skin and bad breath, and the cheek, the utter cheek, to lecture people like me about animal "welfare", when their knowledge of wildlife extends no further than pulling tapeworms out of a house-bound cat's arse (all vegans have a cat).

So to get out and hobnob with vegans, Adams claims that he attended a (who??) "Humane Society of America" function. He comments on the food, admitting that some of it was good, but then trashes meat and dairy substitutes. That's fair enough to a certain extent and Adams might be surprised to know that many vegans aren't fond of most substitutes, either, for a wide variety of reasons. The misinformation comes when he writes about substitutes' having a "dirty little secret":

They're not all that great for animals, either: most are made from soy, a crop that is single-handedly responsible for swathes of the planet being carpeted by heavily fertilised bean plantations, where barely a wild animal survives.

It's not so much "misinformation" as it is a huge failure to properly contextualize a statement. What Adams neglects to mention is that the amount of soy needed to produce to feed a vegan is a fraction of the amount used to feed the animals eventually slaughtered to feed a non-vegan. Not to mention that soy products today are everywhere in processed foods and are most certainly not limited to those free of animal-products. Add to this that (as previously mentioned) not all vegans even consume soy-based substitutes, and that those who do choose to consume often do so in moderation, and it makes his whole "gotcha!" moment pretty irrelevant.

And then there's where he claims that his "fingernails started falling off, possibly due to lack of calcium"...

What's funny is that aside from begrudgingly admitting that eating a plant-based diet for a week did have some positive health benefits for him, Adams gets one thing right when he identifies the inherent problem of forsaking animal flesh on "welfare grounds" while continuing to consume dairy and eggs. Unfortunately, his final point is a bit lost as it seems more of an attempt to take a jab at vegans since he qualifies it as "a purist's contempt".

There's Cranky and Then There's Hateful

Back in mid-February, I wrote about a piece about Cal State Fullerton's Daily Titan student paper in which one of the paper's writers, April Ehrlich, went on a tirade against a vegan friend who had purportedly offended her by not eating animal products when invited along on a camping trip. Her piece read like an indignant entry in a sixth grader's diary (no offense to sixth graders--I've no doubt that many of you could hop-skip circles around her where maturity is concerned) and seemed more of a fabrication mustered up to provide Ehrlich with an excuse to take a swipe at vegans. Why? Who knows why anyone chooses to use public forums to attack any group of people hatefully, really. Just last week, Ehrlich pretty much confirmed my hunch that she had just been out to spew a couple of vitriolic passages to perpetuate stereotypes about vegans, when she wrote yet another awkwardly-written and hostile piece for the paper ("Assassinating apples").

She starts off writing about a "small population of responses"--people who had apparently confirmed with her that they, too, "had experienced pomposity regarding a 'showing off' of prominent cruelty-free diets". Then Ehrlich goes on to try to attempt to portray this "pomposity" by slipping in that she supposedly forgot to mention that she too had apparently recently decided to "embrace" veganism. Laced with the sort of sarcasm that's smelly for want of cleverness, Ehrlich describes how "loose vegetarianism" had been her starting point and that she'd occasionally eat meat "for the sake of loved ones and cultural experiences" until things supposedly changed:

I have decided to stop eating fish and other animal-murdering substances such as gelatin and broth. In addition to this, I have nixed all forms of dairy from my diet, such as cheese, yogurt and ice cream.

Why? Well, let’s just say a light has shone upon me. I now understand why anybody would call an egg-frying, milk-chugging vegetarian an insufferable monster that was raised off a family of twits. Veganism, after all, stretches all the way back to the 1940s. At this point, how can anybody NOT understand and bow down to vegan culture?

Ehrlich continues, mentioning Americans' being "so good at understanding and embracing diversity", but of how her newfound veganism convincing her to reject this American trait or custom to instead tell all of her "omnivore friends, family and casual acquaintances that they are wrong". How wrong, according to her vegan-caricatured self?

I don’t care if you were raised off chicken fingers, or if your species had developed canine teeth after billions of years of natural selection – your culture and your beliefs are completely wrong, and better yet, monstrous.

I mean, where does one even begin with something like this? Has she been skimming through the anti-animal rights Weston A. Price Foundation's website?

But then she slips out of caricature long enough to flip things around to display a fairly mangled understanding of basic plant reproductive biology by going on about how vegans are somehow responsible (because non-vegans obviously don't consume any plant-based foods?) for damaging plants' leaves when fruit is picked and somehow interfering with photosynthesis, and damaging stems and thus depriving insects and birds of nutrients from flowers these stems would ordinarily "hold up" for them. Because of this, Ehrlich asserts that she's in fact become a "fruitarian" to set herself apart from "those barbaric vegans wolfing down standard store-bought fruit". The whole thing, of course, devolves into that old familiar and dearly unoriginal taunt found in the comments sections of articles dealing with animal rights in tabloid papers the world over: "Well, it looks like the least hypocritical way to avoid the exploitation of animals and natural sources is to just stop eating altogether."

I'm not sure if Ehrlich thinks that she is being humorous. Other than appealing to a small pocket of prejudiced readers who might delight in her jeers and find value in her clichés and stereotypes, I'm not certain who would benefit from her writing. Surely it isn't anyone whose reading interests reflect any sort of basic intelligence or open-mindedness. Surely it isn't the students at her school who take the interests of nonhuman animals seriously and who live their lives accordingly (and who seem to be her intended targets). The sad thing about all of this is that were Ehrlich writing about a group of people whose lifestyle choices are grounded in anything other than straightforward ethics, her piece could easily be deemed hate literature by some. Instead, we're left to hold it at arm's length as just another hostile and badly-written piece of filler in a college paper in Ehrlich's diversity-embracing America.