(This article was written by a human without the help of AI! It’s kind of a unique experience y’all)
Should Rural People Get a Pass on Veganism Because Thier Meat is Found Outside the Factory Farming System?
What about all the homesteaders, tribal rural folks, and others who raise their own animals or hunt wild game to survive? Shouldn’t they be allowed to continue hunting and farming without vegan ideals being shoved in their faces?
What about tribal folks all over the world who still hunt and gather and have nothing to do with the factory farm system? Isn’t this food choice more complicated than vegans are making it out to be?
What about rural Americans who hunt and raise their own animals to kill and eat and have chickens and cows in their back yards? Shouldn’t vegans just leave these people to their traditional lifestyles?
Who is to say what is right for native hunting people and rural subsistence farmers?
It’s probably none of our business what these people do who are living a more natural hunter-gatherer lifestyle in isolated parts of the world. In parts of rural America like Appalachia many people still rely on hunting and raising their own meat, eggs and dairy to survive. They truly cannot afford to go on a vegan diet.
Or at least they don’t think they can or know that they can. Beans and rice and veggies are inexpensive and accessible even if you don’t have a ton of funds, as is B12 even in most rural parts of the world. Many farms end up buying a ton of grain for their livestock to eat in the winter months. It would be less expensive and even healthier to simply use the funds for legumes and grains for direct human consumption and to sell to other people to eat.
In extremely isolated parts of the world where people survive only on what they can provide for themselves and where there is no car or transportation, they often do not have a choice about what diet to eat. If crops fail, they must hunt. So obviously a strictly vegan diet would not apply to this small population.
But around 60 to 80 percent of the human population is now living in an industrialized world stuck with the factory farm system and forced into buying all or part of their food from grocery stores that have shelves stocked with plenty of beans and rice and other delicious plant-based foods and B12 supplements.
Those of us who live in the industrialized world have little to no access to hunting and gathering and limited access to growing our own food. Being vegan is simply a choice for us.
Living off the land 100 percent through hunting and gathering is not a necessity or an available action for most people. Capitalism has made sure that land is not available for hunting and gathering or farming. Only big business gets to farm and control most of the food.
For those of us who have to get our food from the messed-up food system that capitalism put into place for profits and not for health or compassion, we can boycott the factory farm system which is a very cruel wasteful way to feed humans and thier pets.
Who Should be Exempt from Vegan Ideals?
Native Americans, Appalachian subsistence farmers and other rural people who hunt are using every part of the animal and wasting nothing. Traditions and lifestyles are behind what they are doing. So, one could argue that they are exempt from our vegan arguments of compassion.
The new Homesteaders, “preppers”, back-to-the-land-movement, and ecovillage communities are not wasting animals’ body parts or polluting the world either. But industrialized people who go back to the land and start learning about animal husbandry have a choice to learn to create a vegan homestead or a vegan ecovillage instead of the standard animal husbandry model.
Do we need to preserve old farming practices on new farms and homesteads?
When we kill animals that we have played with, petted, snuggled, rubbed their tummies and behind their ears, fed and looked into the eyes of, we have to harden a part of ourselves to enable the killing. Do we truly want to build the new homestead based on this type of toughness, compartmentalization, and cruelty when we could do it a different way?
Our subconscious mind is intelligent. Deep down inside ourselves we “know that we know” we could do it differently if we wanted to. This leads to a schism within us. Raising and killing beloved farm animals leads to a kind of dishonesty that we have to live with. We all know the arguments that back-to-land homesteaders make about the need to kill animals. But maybe these arguments don’t hold up in a modern world with modern supplements and all the amazing techniques for growing food and cooking vegan meals that really taste good.
Ahimsa and the vegan way with Will Tuttle
“Compassion is ethical intelligence: it is the capacity to make connections and the consequent urge to act to relieve the suffering of others.” ~ Will Tuttle
Will Tuttle Author of The World PEace Diet
Are vegans insensitive to cultural norms in the rural world?
Appalachian writer Barbara Kingsolver in her book Damen Copperhead makes the argument about how city vegan people don’t understand the culture of rural people and that hunting is an intrinsic part of being from Appalachia. She also co-wrote a non-fiction book about her back to the land experience called Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.
Because so many of these rural hunters and farmers are obsessed with justifying their actions, maybe inside themselves they know they don’t want to keep doing this. If you are arguing about something so adamantly then you know deep inside you that you want to try something different.
I think living off the land can have choice included. We don’t have to do it the way people did it in the past. If we choose to live a rural lifestyle and create a food system outside the corrupt, wasteful animal factory farm system we can do it with conscious knowledge of new vegan ways to do it.
But this is easier said than done. With deep traditions all around the world how do we start to change something that is so deeply rooted?
The delicious actions we Can take toward a vegan world
All in all, once people are exposed to their own traditional recipes with vegan substitutions, and they see how tasty the vegan version is they will come around.
It is our job to go into our communities with vegan alternatives and get people to try the “green eggs and ham”. Once people realize they don’t have to give up any of the flavors, textures, and traditions they love with all the new vegan meat substitutes they will realize that it’s easy to change.
And though people might be priced out right now for some of the fancier alternative vegan versions, the more we use these products the lower prices will drop as we support new vegan companies. Money is the ultimate power. If we spend it in the right place the system will change for us.
This is the approach that Slutty Vegan takes. They make delicious burgers and fast-food items that look and taste like the real thing. They have restaurants and food trucks all over Georgia, Texas, and New York so far, changing minds with their delicious food. It’s nice to see a black female-owned company making traditional food vegan when heart disease and diabetes is at a record high for the Black community.
Slutty Vegan is saving lives by turning people on to vegan alternatives to high cholesterol traditional recipes. We need to change people through their stomachs and taste buds. So go out into the world my fellow plant and animal lover and feed the pre-vegans delicious alternative version of their favorite foods!
