Animal Writings

I was most recently thinking about this at my parents' house a few days ago. I explained to my parents that I could—or rather, was willing to—eat the Smart Balance Lite margarine but not the regular Smart Balance, because the latter has whey in it.

My parents are quite supportive and knowledgeable about veganism even though neither of them are vegan. But I'm sure to them my Smart Balance rule was rather arcane, even though they knew why I did it and, I'll bet, could quite persuasively defend my reasoning.

But looking at two tubs of margarine evokes no emotional response. Even to me, though I know in my heart there is deep significance to my choice, at the surface it feels like a technical matter.

It is what led up to that one ingredient—whey—that is the issue. The suffering, the mutilations without painkillers, the horrific transport, the violence in the slaughterhouse. The wailing of mother cows who had their babies stolen from them, the pain of mastitis infections from being forced to produce too much milk, the writhing in agony of improperly stunned cows having their sides ripped open, the pregnant lactating dairy cows bleeding to death on meathooks. The utter wrongness of harming and killing animals for pleasure.

It is, unfortunately, too easy to flip open a tub of margarine that contains whey and spread some on toast. The horror and misery is totally concealed. In fact, to most people it is non-existent, out of consciousness. "Whey" in the middle of a long list of ingredients is—to the average consumer— minutiae, not a moral imperative. Therein lies the challenge to the vegan activist.

If I pointed a gun to a cow's head and said "Don't use that type of margarine or I'll shoot this cow dead, and then shoot her calf dead," the vast majority of non-vegans would refrain from using the margarine in question, and would use another brand if they knew it would save the cow. In fact, they would in all likelihood be horrified by the potential consequences of using the wrong margarine.

But when those same people see the whey-containing margarine in the refrigerator—even if they know about cruelties and suffering on commercial dairy farms—their decision to use the margarine has nothing to do with cows, or with animals. It is just a food, a spread. They are not making a conscious effort to push unpleasant images out of their minds; those images don't appear. This makes vegan advocacy more difficult.

Granted, there are many exceptions—for instance, some non-vegans hunt or boil lobsters—but for the most part, when non-vegans eat products that contain animal-derived ingredients, the animal, and the cruelty and death imposed on the animal, are out of sight, out of mind.

I'm not defending this thought process, but I can easily understand how it happens, and I mention it in hope that activists will take it into account when doing outreach. I don't have any definitive recommendations, much less solutions, to offer. But strategies that come to mind include:

• Focusing on the animals and what's done to them, rather than the food product;


• Acknowledging explicitly that deciding to eat one food instead of another based on an animal-derived ingredient may seem like a hassle at first, but is in actuality a profound and consequential moral choice;


• Helping people know about and find vegan alternatives to non-vegan foods whenever possible;


• Perhaps spending a bigger chunk of our vegan outreach time on trying to persuade and help people to reduce their consumption of "primary" animal-derived products such as beef, chicken, milk, and cheese.

Labels: advocacy, psychology