@Rinel said in What do you eat?:
@Kestrel
The privilege of the vegan position is that it generally consists of white people of a very specific subsect of society seeking to divorce lower class groups from culturally meaningful foods while ignoring issues like food deserts.
Food deserts are a valid point but associating veganism with white people isn't.
Buddhists, hindus, jains and rastafarians have for generations embraced veganism & vegetarianism as part of their culture either as an ethical standpoint or by necessity. In most parts of the world, and throughout most of history, meat was and still is a luxury; in terms of pure logistics it always has been and still is much more expensive to manufacture than vegetarian cuisine, and the only reason it's cheaper to buy in the West is because OECD countries subsidies animal agriculture to the tune of over $52bn a year. (That's how much it was in 2012; I couldn't find more recent stats.) That comes out of your taxes, by the way, and contributes to food & economic inequality in the countries bearing the brunt of manufacture for us, such as Brazil, where indigenous communities are being displaced in order to clear room for cattle ranches.
This is a cookbook I own; I bought it in New Orleans where I also ate at an extremely cheap, local-favourite vegan diner called Sweet Soulfood in the Tremé neighbourhood. I recommend using the "look inside" feature to see what the author has to say about embracing veganism as a reclamation of his African heritage from the malnutritious effects white colonialism has had on his communities, and the disproportionate impact Western cuisine has on black people in America, who have higher incidences of chronic disease such as diabetes and various heart conditions.
Another book worth reading is The China Study, which documents how the westernisation of traditional Chinese cuisine has led to higher rates of cancer, diabetes and other chronic diseases which were previously unheard of in rural communities until American exports and advertising started gaining traction.
Here's another first person account of a black woman who pursued vegan cuisine in order to benefit her local community: https://youtu.be/X3B905qQ-mE
I've been vegan for seven years. I'm grateful for the recent changes in accessibility with companies like Beyond and Impossible, but before vegan cheese and imitation meat burgers became a thing, most of the vegan options and recipes I used to educate and feed myself came from Chinese, Indonesian, Ethiopian, Thai, Vietnamese, Indian, Mexican, Caribbean chefs, communities, restaurants and influencers. Tofu has been a cheap convenience in the East long before white people discovered it; rice & beans were a Latin/South/Native American staple similarly; and India has the largest vegetarian population in the world. I'm lucky enough to live nextdoor to a korean supermarket where I buy all my rice, beans, tofu, enoki mushrooms and bok choy in bulk.
Calling this a white thing is whitewashing.
And that's just on the cultural front; there is much, much more to dissect on a geopolitical level, when you consider that the devastating effects of climate change — driven in no small part by animal agriculture — will impact most severely the poorest and most underprivileged populations of the world, especially those living near the equator or in forests being burned for cattle — or that the UN has long since estimated that veganism alone has the potential to end world hunger. (Source #2: As have other scientific publications.) Meat is a wildly inefficient means of feeding our growing global population.