Purpose:
Homemade Vegan is a cooking blog, a forum for its authors (Jen and JonBen) to share recipes with whoever actually reads random cooking blogs. We certainly would not describe ourselves as excellent or inspired chefs, though we both love cooking and wish to develop a more intuitive creativity in the kitchen. This blog is focused on what we cook, not what we have created in terms of recipes. A fair amount of the recipes are from cookbooks and are noted as such, though it’s pretty hard to resist modifying the recipes at least slightly (we assume no one reads this blog anyway, but if you find your recipe posted here and want it removed let us know and we’ll take it down immediately).
Veganism:
We are both ethical vegans who believe in the abolition of all animal exploitation. Animals feel pain just as you and I feel pain and their interest in not being used as a means to human ends should be respected, just as we recognize that similar interests held by people of all ethnicities, genders, religious beliefs, sexual orientations, etc… should be respected. Discriminating against animals — ignoring their interests as beings who feel pain and value life — simply because they are not human is speciesist and clearly as morally acceptable as discrimination based on any other irrelevant characteristic.
Hi, I love your blog!
Thank you for being one of the few vegans out there who believe in ABOLITION of animal rights, and extra points for reading Francione instead of….sigh…..Peter Singer.
I’m the webmaster for VeganAdam.com, you may have heard of the site. VeganAdam is a Vegan (Abolitionist Approach Vegan) site free for all with news, forums, recipes, videos, lots of stuff. Basically the abolitionist alternative to Peta without the donations. We’re a grassroots website run by its members and boy are we short on recipes. You’ve put so much work into this blog, the photos, the recipes, the consistency…
How would you feel about us opening up a section of the site just for what you do here?
We also use a native installation of WordPress for our blog, so you’d feel right at home.
Anyway, drop me a line at adam@veganadam.com
Also, where did you get that spam blocker plugin? I had to disable comments a while ago after we kept getting spam. I haven’t found a plugin that works the way I want it to yet.
Keep up the good work!
Adam
Hi Jon/Jen
Have either of you read the Omnivore’s Dilemna by Michael Pollan? In it he traces several different food chains: the industrial, the supermarket organic, the sustainable, and the hunter-gather. He has a section on The Ethics of Eating Animals that I was curious as to your response to in terms of the Veganism argument. If not, I’ll send Jon the section.
John
Hi John,
I haven’t read Pollan’s book, and I doubt that Jen has either since she tends to stay away from things that will make her angry. I’d be happy to read the section and offer a more specific rebuttal, but all arguments for eating meat are fundamentally the same so I can just respond to that argument.
The starting point for animal rights is to recognize that animals are in very many ways the same as humans. Of course we are different in many ways as well, but so are individual humans, the question is what is needed by an organism in order to be considered a moral agent. Most vegans have made the simple observation that animals have interests, they are sentient beings capable of feeling pain and emotions. They desire social contact and are capable of forging relationships with each other and with members of other species. They are self-aware and they are aware of their surroundings, they learn, and remember, they know comfort and they know pain. It isn’t hard to see that this is true, one need only spend time observing how animals interact with each other and the world.
The justification for killing them unnecessarily (because we like the taste of their flesh), is almost always reducible to the statement ‘humans are better than animals’. Which is rather perverse since we are animals ourselves. The justification for this hierarchy is always devoid of moral insight, animals are either ’stupid’ or they are some form of automata.
Animals may not posses the same flourish for linguistics and calculus that I do, but then neither do many humans. Animals are clearly intelligent, and the more that we learn about them the more we must concede that we are not alone in having abstract thought or being capable of using language (see a recent National Geographic article on animal intelligence http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/03/animal-minds/virginia-morell-text). The idea that animals are robots responding to stimuli with no thought process, memory or desire is a very old and a very silly one. Darwin was well aware that animals must feel pain and emotions in very similar ways as humans, to suppose that this isn’t the case is to completely disown evolutionary theory.
You have to realize that society is designed to marginalize oppressed groups, to strip them of their basic rights and to make people feel comfortable with the oppression. Our capitalist society makes a lot of money from the exploitation of animals, and those powerful groups (corporations and governments) have an interest in maintaining that relationship. We are fed a series of illogical assumptions in order to ensure that we 1) don’t question the status quo, and 2) conclude that animals are inferior to humans thus making our domination of them acceptable. Those that break out of these social dogmas are ridiculed and marginalized as well, vegans are radical/fundamentalists, and if you happen to be vegan and male you get labeled homosexual as well. I don’t have to point out the absurdity of using homosexual as an insult, gays are yet another break from social norms who have to fight for their rights just because they happen to be sexually attracted to members of the same gender.
Pollac probably doesn’t address any of these issues, but he must make an assumption of human superiority at some point, since it’s the only way to justify out domination of animals. If you continue to eat animals, you must, at the very least, admit that you are killing and eating a being who does not want to be caused harm and who has an interest in not being killed for your selfish fetish for their body. You take from animals the most precious of things, their life! The least you can do is own up to it and admit that you have wronged them. Just because you don’t understand the comfort and love a cow can feel over it’s life time, or the crippling pain and emotional devastation a life of captivity at the whims of a profiteering human causes, does not mean that you can write off the interests of that animal as morally irrelevant.
Hey Jon,
I emailed you the chapter from Pollan’s book. It was a big attachment so it might not have gone through. Let me know if you received it.
John
I did receive it, expect a post on the front page soon… ish.
From the bit I have read it seems abundantly clear that Pollan does not know what animal rights are let alone believe that they are important. He refers to Peter Singer as an animal rights thinker, which is astounding considering that Singer does not believe in rights of any type, human or animal. In a list of philosophical thinkers he fails to even mention Gary Francione, someone who actually does believe in animal rights, and has written an excellent book on the subject, Introduction to Animal Rights.
Pollan also seems to ignore the very real difference between veganism and vegetarianism, and seems to think that the latter is a product of an ethical ideal. Which one is free to claim as long as they concede that this ideal is inconsistent, advocating for the protection of animals in one breath and contributing to their exploitation and death in the next.
At best Pollan is an advocate of animal welfare. The difference between animal welfare and animal rights is stark, and is mirrored historically in the movement to abolish slavery. Those who believe animals have rights would like to see those rights respected and the slaves freed, those who advocate welfare care only to reform the exploitation by giving the slaves longer chains. A thorough analysis of welfarism and animal rights theory is given by Francione in another book, Rain Without Thunder.
In any event I will read the chapter and offer my comments on what Pollan has to say.
[...] the chapter to take something away from this discussion, but it would obviously help. I posted a ’sight un-seen’ response in the comment section of the aboot page, and I think what I wrote there is a perfectly valid [...]
To leave a very short comment, Pollan’s ideas are truly unique, however his ideas hardly regard animal rights. If they do, they consider the welfarism of such animals given the circumstance that they are to be property. It is this very circumstance on which I personally disagree with Pollan as well as the animal welfare movement.