{"id":758144,"date":"2019-09-04T07:44:56","date_gmt":"2019-09-04T11:44:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/animalrightswatch.us\/?p=758144"},"modified":"2019-09-04T07:44:56","modified_gmt":"2019-09-04T11:44:56","slug":"farhad-manjoo-stop-mocking-vegans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/animalrightswatch.us\/?p=758144","title":{"rendered":"Farhad Manjoo: Stop Mocking Vegans"},"content":{"rendered":"\t
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We will all have to become a little more vegan, and if we are to succeed in that, we will have to start by saluting vegans, not mocking them. We are nowhere close to that now.<\/p>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t<\/blockquote>\n\n

FARHAD MANJOO:<\/strong> ‘There\u2019s an old joke \u2014 \u201cHow do you know you\u2019re talking to a vegan? Don\u2019t worry, they\u2019ll tell you\u201d \u2014 that is as untrue as it is revealing about the teller. Although vegans can marshal stronger evidence to support their claims than adherents of many other belief systems \u2014 whether of other diets or major religions \u2014 they get little respect, and their ideas rarely receive mass media acknowledgment other than mockery… The tragedy here is that the mockery intimidates vegans.<\/em><\/p>\n

I am not a vegan. I am barely, failingly, a vegetarian\/pescatarian \u2014 I make an effort to avoid meat, but for reasons of convenience and shameless hedonism still end up eating it several times a month, especially fish. My purpose here is not to change how you eat, dress or think about the ethics of consuming something like the Popeyes\u2019 sandwich. Instead, as a fellow omnivore and a person concerned about the planet\u2019s future, I want to ask you to do something much more simple: to alter how you think about vegans…<\/em><\/p>\n

I want to urge you to give vegans a chance \u2014 to love and to celebrate them instead of ridiculing them. We need more vegan voices, because on the big issues \u2014 the criminal cruelty of industrial farming; the sentience and emotional depth of food animals; the environmental toll of meat and the unsustainability of its global rise \u2014 vegans are irrefutably on the right side of history. They are the vanguard. Climate scholars say that if we are ever to survive a warming planet, people will have to consume far fewer animals than we do now…<\/em><\/p>\n

Not even the meat-alternative start-ups themselves, which call themselves \u201cplant-based\u201d and strictly avoid the V-word, perhaps because food industry surveys find that \u201cvegan\u201d is the least appealing label that can be applied to food \u2014 worse than \u201cdiet\u201d and \u201csugar-free”… Summer Anne Burton, the editor of a new vegan-focused magazine called Tenderly, told me. \u201cEven people who are really radical and progressive in lots of areas of their lives still seem really suspicious, frustrated and annoyed by the idea of someone being vegan”…<\/em><\/p>\n

In the media, in pop culture and even in progressive, enlightened polite society it is still widely acceptable to make fun of vegans. The stereotype of the smug, self-satisfied, annoying vegan has taken deep cultural root. One survey found that vegans are viewed more negatively than atheists and immigrants, and are only slightly more tolerated than drug addicts… We will all have to become a little more vegan \u2014 and if we are to succeed in that, we will have to start by saluting vegans, not mocking them. We are nowhere close to that now.’<\/em>\u00a0 SOURCE…<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

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