ABSTRACT
Historically, long-standing debates play out between vegan animal rights activists, who argue for the care and rights of individualized animals, and ecologists, who claim that healthy symbiotic eco-systems and bio-diversity are essential to the thriving of all life on the planet. At the same time, environmental justice advocates bring forth the narrative that environmental issues, such as pollution, climate change, and food production, unevenly affect marginalized populations—the poor, indigenous people, and people of color—and often the solutions to environmental disasters come at the expense of the very same people. Yet, most of the “cruelty-free” vegan discourse on human and nonhuman relationships helps to sustain colonial and race-based histories of violence that continue to proliferate old hierarchies of western and white supremacist cultures. The false promises of these liberal vegan narratives dismiss the labor that goes into producing vegan and plant-based foods, mostly by workers in the Global South. Bananas, for example, are staples of vegan and plant-based diets. Countless reports of abused workers on banana plantations in Latin America and the Caribbean in addition to the ways that cultivating monocrops ravage the land and localized animals are not included popular discussions of eating a healthy diet. This chapter traces the paradoxes evident in the mainstream rhetorics and materialities of “cruelty-free” vegans as well as the workers and environments that are harmed in producing “cruelty-free” foods. By juxtaposing these three disparate narratives—of vegans, of workers, of environments—the research aims to answer the following question: Is it possible to be a truly ethical vegan, who engages in a decolonial lifestyle, and advocates for the animals, the workers, and the land?
