Question
But you can't eat that!
Alternatives
It's not vegan, but it is gluten-free. Can you eat bread?
Summary
Non-vegans and new vegans focus on what vegans don't eat, whereas established vegans focus on the things they do eat. After being vegan for a time, your consciousness shifts as to what is and isn't food. Veganism is not about self-denial, though because it excludes things it can seem that way from the outside perspective of an animal-product-centred diet. Veganism is about aligning our consumption with our compassion, which is the opposite of self-denial as it is about living in a way that expresses our best selves. Replacing a handful of ingredients is a small price to pay to be part of healing humanity's relationship with the non-human world. Given the almost infinite variety of the world's cuisines and plant foods, thinking that a vegan diet is inevitably uninteresting or limited is a failure of the imagination.
Discussion
Few people become vegans because they are looking for an identity or a belief system. For my own part, I didn't set out to become vegan. My journey started with learning about how veal was produced and deciding it was too cruel to eat. After this, I stopped eating animal products mostly one at a time as I found out about the cruelty inherent in producing them. Refraining from eating each animal product was the result of educating myself and a deliberative process, not some attempt to become "vegan". Nothing stops me or other vegans from eating animal products, as embodied by the word "can't", except our concern for the animals involved. Perhaps this seems like nitpicking; after all "can't" is only a word, but the fact that it is so often chosen over alternatives suggests that people are missing the salient point. Veganism is not like an allergy or a religious duty, but an ethical stance. This may seem like quibbling about the choice of words, but it's important to frame veganism as what it is: an active and powerful set of compassionate choices.
Something in the phrasing of the statement "You can't eat this" is revealing. After you have heard this phrase enough times, you start to wonder why people so commonly frame vegan dietary choices with the word "can't", rather than "won't" or "don't". The use of "can't" makes the phrase sound like something that is involuntary or not thought-through. There are people who "can't" eat things, such as people with allergies, intolerances, or taste aversions, but vegans are none of these. There are those who "can't" eat something because of the belief that doing so would cause them to lose favour with some higher power, or at least their religious community. Performative renunciation, or aestheticism, too, is not what veganism is about.
Compassionate choices
Veganism is a boycott of unnecessary cruelty. Veganism is about our relationship with animals. It is not a club or an identity; not about purity or blind adherence to an arbitrary set of rules; it is not about vegans or even veganism. It isn't about vegans making "personal" choices, but rather the opposite. Veganism is about starting to take responsibility for the world beyond our person, and our contribution to suffering in it. What we “can’t” do is separate our lives and actions from all other life, for we are locked in an interdependent relation with it, one in which, as humans, we have inordinate power. In making choices about what to eat, we regularly and powerfully affect the world and the lives of others. If we could trace the origins of all the ingredients on our plates over months or years, they would reach out into a vast area of the earth, involving thousands of individuals and complex processes to bring them to you. The sheer scale of agricultural corporations that feed billions of people every day means that there are many potential ethical concerns involved. The ethics of how we eat is a complex intersection of corporations, governments, billions of consumers, millions of producers, countless wild and farmed animals, and our global environment. The decision to follow a vegan diet is a potent way to claim our power and responsibility within this complex system.
Defining veganism
What exactly is a vegan diet? What do and don't vegans eat?
The original Vegan Society, based in England, has a statement that most vegans take as the de facto definition:
"Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of animals, humans and the environment. In dietary terms, it denotes the practice of dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals."
This makes a good start, but ethics is something that also needs to be thought through by each person. The Vegan Society, in its early days, didn't consider honey to be vegan, because it involved killing bees, cruelty such as sometimes wing clipping of queens, and stealing the products of their labour intended for their children. In 1948 the Vegan Society changed this stance. They went back and forth between considering honey vegan, not considering honey vegan, and declaring it a matter of individual conscience over the ensuing decades. In 1988 they finally returned to not considering honey a vegan product. This may even change again as more humane techniques for farming bees are created in the future, or as comparative psychology evolves. Veganism exists within a changing world, with cell-cultured meats, precision fermentation, new farming techniques, scientific understanding, and even the accuracy of many “mock” products creating an ever-evolving discussion about what should and shouldn’t be called vegan. Veganism must evolve as the world evolves, and not make the same mistake that many religions have, of fixing their morality at a point in time or on a set of ideas that lose relevance as the world around them changes.
As corporations that profit from factory farming begin to diversify into the growing vegan market, this diversification continues to complicate the ethics of food choices. Some vegans won't buy products from companies that get most of their income from animal products, while others see this as a way of incentivising those companies towards more ethical production. Palm oil production, or other products that cause major species loss and deforestation, is not considered by many to be consistent with veganism. Others see environmental concerns, or concern about a relatively small number of wild animals compared to the lives of billions in factory farms, as being of lesser ethical importance. This is one of many ongoing debates about competing truths within the vegan community, with compassionate and sensible people on all sides. People who are unfamiliar with the diverse intellectual landscape of veganism often speak quite clumsily about it in black-and-white terms, such as "can" and "can’t", but there are few sharp ethical lines in our dynamic and complex world.
To delve into this complexity, it's worth discussing Freeganism. There are people who intellectually agree with all the arguments for the ethical necessity of veganism, but think that a moratorium on eating animal products doesn’t always achieve the best outcome for animals or the planet. These people call themselves “freegans”, people who combine vegan ethics with the vital issue of food waste. While a freegan will only purchase vegan products, they will eat animal products that would otherwise be discarded. This is often the motivation behind dumpster diving: rescuing and repurposing the vast amounts of food and other goods thrown away by businesses. Businesses regularly throw away food when it passes or nears its “best before” date. There is no environmental or ethical benefit in discarding something when all the misery and resource expenditure involved in its production has already happened. So long as you are not helping create a market for it, consuming products that would otherwise go to waste reduces your environmental and ethical footprint. Many vegans admire and understand freegans, but they no longer consider animal products to be food, and the idea of eating them provokes a disgust response.
Delving deeper
To complicate our ethical considerations further, there are people called ostro-vegans. Ostro-vegans consider only sentience - the level of conscious awareness and ability to experience things like pleasure and pain that a being has - as a factor in the ethics of their consumption.
The terms plant and animal seem pretty clear in our minds, but evolution is more subtle than such black-and-white terms can encompass. Evolutionary science points towards a vast, complex web of interrelated life that exist on many continua. As far as we know, there is only one family of life on Earth; plants were first and animals evolved from them, and there are endless forms of life at each stage in this progression, in both terms of physical and mental attributes. Ostro-vegans delve into the blurry lines between species, between plants and animals, sentient and non-sentient, and draw the line of compassionate duty differently than vegans do. There are creatures called bivalves, such as clams and mussels, that lack a centralised brain. They can make simple movements such as opening and closing their shells, but don’t appear to have any of the internal wiring needed for consciousness. Do these seemingly simple creatures require the same moral consideration as clearly sentient beings such as pigs, chickens, cows, and tuna? Ostro-vegans consider it ethically acceptable to eat bivalves, and perhaps find it an easier diet to follow than veganism, especially in terms of social conformity. Although they don't see the need to eat these animals, many vegans are sympathetic to the ostro-vegan approach as more ethical and considered than that of most others.
Given the complexity of the world, the journey towards an ethical life is similar to climbing an unfamiliar mountain: You see a peak above you and climb towards it. Only once you reach the summit of the first peak, are you able to see another previously obscured peak rising behind and above it. Veganism is not about ticking a list that offers ethical absolution, but rather a path we take hoping that each step gets us closer to an ethical life. Veganism is about trying to make the world kinder for all life, to be better than we were before, not about self-denial or moral purity.
When people start the vegan journey, they will often accidentally eat an animal product. A phrase one commonly hears from incredulous new vegans is "Why does this have milk solids in it?" Many products that you wouldn't expect, such as flavoured potato crisps, might have dairy in the form of milk solids added to their flavouring. Even when one has been vegan for a long time, through accident or complacency, eating some animal products unfortunately happens. Some people get upset about this more than others, but from the viewpoint of the universe, the ethics are less relevant. We should focus on what we do and consume 99% of the time, rather than expending too much energy on the final 1%. It is the totality of our life and actions that are important, not the occasional, inevitable errant step. We learn, we move on.
Now strangely, there are those who deliberately eat specific animal products and refer to themselves as vegans. Some see this as harmless, but then the word "Vegan" has to mean something. When someone says they are vegan in a restaurant or other setting, the cooks and chefs should have a clear idea of what that means. If the last person who came in said they were vegan, but asked for cheese on something, that is confusing to food service professionals. The definition is simple: no animal products. Cooks shouldn't have to have a conversation with each consumer to find out what the word vegan means to them. Though veganism should avoid dogmatism, it should also not allow itself to become a vague, meaningless term.
Veganism is a clear political statement to others about our ethical stance towards animals. It is important to display an ethically consistent message, a clear narrative light, for people to follow. Hypocrisy is often the easiest and most damning way that claims to morality can be undermined. What we say about ourselves, what we ask of others, should be consistent and clear. Whatever label someone attaches to themselves, vegan, vegetarian, pescetarian, freegan, ostro-vegan, or some other, they become a representative for that idea in the world. We all have a duty to represent the ethical labels we claim in a way that serves wider and higher purposes than ourselves. If we call ourselves vegan, we should be careful to be so, or just use a different term.
Is it vegan?
Only something capable of having a philosophy can really be vegan. So an ingredient can't be vegan, but "Is it vegan?" is a reasonable short hand way to ask whether something is suitable for vegans. For some reason, what vegans eat is complicated or confused in many people's minds. And it's not even just vegans that come across this. When you ask if something is suitable for vegans, incredibly often the answer will come back, "Is it gluten free?" This shows not only that people have little idea about plant-derived diets, but also gluten is as well. Given that people eating a standard western diet will have gluten in nearly every meal, it's revealing how little they know about it. Gluten is part of grains, so has no bearing on whether something is vegan or not. Indeed, seitan, a popular chewy ingredient in plant based cooking, is made almost entirely from wheat gluten.
Some of the things that people regularly eat, and therefore assume they mustn't be vegan can be amusing. I’ve heard all manner of odd things be questioned when someone sees me order or eat them. My personal list includes bread, pasta, beer, avocado, oat cream and peanut butter. I saw a video of someone the other day, after saying they wouldn't eat vegan food, to try to argue that chips/french fries weren't vegan. Again it is revealing how little people understand their food, especially its ethical aspects. People conform to the food their culture and family serve up, and don’t question it. They generally don't know in much detail what nutrients, or even ingredients, are in the foods they eat, much less the repercussions of their diet on the world. Of course, no one is born with an in-depth knowledge of nutrients. Most vitamins and minerals in the human diet weren't isolated until the 20th century. Given how consequential the ingredients and nutrients of our diets are, knowledge about them is essential for our health, as well as our ethics. If we find people with relatively open minds, starting discussions about food and ethics will not only be good for them, but also animals and the environment.
We can start to demystify what vegans eat by pointing out that most people, especially those following a relatively healthy diet, will already be deriving the majority of their nutrients and calories from plant foods. By starting to make the unfamiliar familiar, we can help begin the process of people eating more consciously. For people who have grown up only knowing one way of thinking about their food, we need to lay the groundwork for another possible conception of their diets and themselves.
Focusing on what vegans can and can’t eat mistakes the forest for the trees. Veganism is not a diet; it is a philosophy of compassion. People who mistake veganism for a diet display how little they understand its vital message for our world. Veganism is not about ticking some arbitrary boxes; it is about having a thought-through personal response to deep ethical questions about the way humans currently treat other life. Focusing on the "can't" in how vegans eat, ignores the deep philosophy that the active choice to eat a plant-derived diet represents. What we "can't" do collectively is continue living in a way that depletes the shared living systems of this world. What we "can't" do is continue sending animals into slaughterhouses and factory farms and think our ethics towards animals shouldn't be questioned. What everyone "can" do, is make more compassionate and thought through choices about how what they consume affects the living beings and systems of this world.