[Update: for more on this topic, see this piece as well]
The vegan world has been shook up by Alex O’Connor (aka Cosmic Skeptic) recently announcing that he is no longer a vegan. After a couple of years of passionate advocacy which won over several people to veganism, he has decided that it simply isn’t working for him anymore and has called it quits. If you’re reading this you probably already read his announcement, but here it is again anyway:
I’ll be honest: when I first saw he’d posted a long announcement, I thought it was to announce his conversion to Christianity. Others had apparently seen this de-conversion from veganism coming following a conversation with Mikhaila Peterson (which I have not watched and therefore will not comment on).
The range of reactions from the vegan community has been about what I would have expected. Anger, disappointment, embarrassment, assumptions of bad faith, intellectual laziness, above all, betrayal. As someone who has radically changed his views on a few topics in his life, I don’t jump to the bad faith accusation. A lot of vegans are quite insistent on the notion that there is no such thing as an “ex-vegan”, only people who were pretending to be vegan and finally decided to stop pretending. This in my view is no different than the Christian (Protestant) fundamentalist idea of “once saved, always saved” - if you apostatize, you were never saved. You never really believed. No one can look at our belief system, actually live it for a time, and decide it isn’t for them. They must have been false from day one.
Though I am going to be critical of Alex’s statement, this just isn’t going to be one of my criticisms. I do believe that some, probably most people who declare themselves “ex-vegans” were in fact insincere or failed in their due diligence. I do not believe Alex was insincere, and I’m not going to say it in some futile attempt to defend the honor of veganism from any stain or blemish or to mitigate any embarrassment I might feel at having promoted his vegan content (not that I feel any, but I can see this being a motivation for some). I do believe it is likely he failed in his due diligence, but until he clarifies more, that’s all I’m willing to say.
I’m not interested in a line-by-line deconstruction of his post. I will focus on a few key points, however.
First, on the multiple references to factory farming: I think that at this moment, he believes it when he says he will continue to oppose factory farming. But as he thinks this through, his opposition is going to fade away. Why would I assume this?
Because it logically follows from the premise he is implying: that one cannot be healthy without animal products. If this is what one truly believes, it simply makes no sense to oppose factory farming. CAFOs are the only way that animal products can make their way into the diets of 8 billion people. The efficiency required for production at that scale necessarily involves a system that cannot consider animals “morally worthy beings whose interests ethically matter.” They will do the bare minimum to comply with what few laws are actually enforced with respect to animal welfare, which adds up to virtually nothing.
Let’s assume that Alex and others like him only opt for the maximally ethical animal products - pasture raised, grass fed, live most of their lives in relative peace on a small farm instead of a CAFO, quick and relatively painless deaths. Even if one were to accept that such products are ethical, given what is presumed to be a legitimate human health requirement, these products cannot scale. There is a reason why only 1% of the beef produced in the United States, to take one example, is actually from cows “grass fed” their entire lives. The timescales and resources required for its production are greater. Or to put it another way, its production is far less efficient. To make it more efficient to meet the demands of billions of consumers would require land and water usage on a scale even right-wing reactionaries wouldn’t be able to defend.
To hold that animal products are essential for human health and to oppose CAFOs is to declare that you are opposed to the most efficient means of providing an essential requirement of human health to the majority of humans. It is a position that is as intellectually unsustainable as CAFOs themselves are for the environment.
Enter lab-grown meat, or fermented meat. Some vegans still ethically object to these, but I can’t find any reason to, provided that their production doesn’t make use of bovine fetal serum. It is a potential solution to this “problem” (again, assuming you believe animal products are essential). My only issue here is that lab-grown meat is taking on the status of fusion power planets - always just around the corner, just over the horizon, but never seeming to really hit the market. If it happens one day, great - but like the coming of the Lord, no man knoweth the day nor the hour.
All of that being said, I believe anyone actually can be healthy on a 100% plant-based diet, but yes, you do have to supplement correctly. This means more than taking B12. There are other vital nutrients our bodies require which we cannot fully obtain from plants that we typically eat such as DHA and EPA omega 3s. You can get them from algae but most people are unwilling or unable to eat it in sufficient quantitates. We need to be taking multi-supplements designed for plant-based diets, which do exist and work well (I take one myself, this one). I don’t claim to be a nutritional expert but I do know that there are vegan nutritional experts who take these issues seriously and have developed products specifically calibrated for us. Whether or not Alex was adequately supplementing is something only he knows for now.
And really, even “omnivores” need to be supplementing given the overall decline in food quality that inevitably results from mass production. Deficiencies in micro-nutrients are not limited to vegans and vegetarians, but are now fairly common even among omnivores. Everyone should be supplementing.
What is inescapable though is this: if humans really do require animal products, if specifically-calibrated plant-based supplements aren’t enough, if lab-meat never really takes off, then we are left with only two possible outcomes: 1) in an effort to ensure everyone has what they need for optimal health, we ruin even more ecosystems leading to an eventual collapse. We run out of fresh water to grow the crops needed to feed, at present, 70-80 billion land animals and in the future even more as the human population and demand continues to grow. We cut down more forest, we draw down less carbon and put more methane into the atmosphere. We increase our risk of global pandemic, as zoonotic viruses leap from the animal to human population and the rising average global temperatures facilitate the spread of disease. 2) We dismantle factory farming, for the environment of course because who gives a shit about the animals, and have a two-tiered system where some people have access to “ethical” animal products that don’t wreck the environment and everyone else struggles with sub-optimal health. Perhaps those people will “eat ze bugs” while privileged layers around the world eat their imported grass-fed beef. The Saudis need our water, our land, our resources, our cows, who are we to deny them or ask them to take supplements? The world belongs to those who can buy it. The rest of us will have to eat shit. As the carnivore trolls on Twitter like to admit on occasion, “meat is elite.”
Not that I think Alex is consciously promoting such a world. But these are the things everyone needs to think about before deciding that a plant-based diet can’t work for human beings. Even 8-9 billion people eating plant-based and supplementing will cause plenty of sustainability problems. Monocropping is still going to be the most efficient way for most people to get most of the plant foods they need, and it too is an ecologically destructive process. Our problems don’t disappear if the world goes vegan, but they get worse at a slower rate. Time enough perhaps to address the real underlying problem, which is the size of the human population.
So all I am really saying is: you better be sure. Sure you did everything to make this work. Because the future of our species and our planet depends upon it.