A couple of weeks ago, I was at the 9th International Animal Rights Conference in Luxembourg. This conference is held every year at the beginning of September. I attended for the first time in 2018, and then gave a presentation about ableism and ageism in the movement. This year I gave a presentation about Representation of other animals. About vegan turkey and voiceless animals.
A recent US study by Morning Consult on consumer trends covered these three topics: 1) online versus in store shopping habits 2) purchasing considerations and 3) product labelling. In this last section on product labelling, respondents were asked to indicate whether respective terms made food more or less appealing to them. The terms included free range, glutenfree, fresh, natural flavours and another dozen or so terms. A vegan labelled product Stats with respect to the term vegan: Overall, 17% said the term vegan made the product more appealing to buy. 35% said the term vegan made the product neither less nor more appealing. Another 35% said it made the product less appealing. And 12% said they didn’t know, or had no opinion. So that means that over half of respondents (52%) find a vegan labelled product more appealing or neither less or more appealing (combined). ‘Fresh’ was found to be the most appealing term to label a product with, while ‘vegan’ was overall the least. 81% of respondents say that a food or beverage product would be more appealing …
Pinnacle of speciesism: when an animal is reduced to her function or yield Animals are not ‘egg’, ‘bacon’, ‘wool’ or ‘milk’, but each and every one sentient feeling beings, who can suffer pain, each with their own individuality. Spotted in a shop in Valkenburg (the Netherlands)
Misogyny. Ableism. Ageism. Vystopia. Health-shaming. These are some of the words that I have come to learn more about in recent years. After a long period in which I hardly found the time nor had the energy to follow up any literature closely, I have recently refound a drive and eagerness to pick up some ‘more serious’ stuff again. I have been reading about vegan activism, the sociology of human-animal relations, intersectionality and the entanglement of the oppression of humans with that of other animals. I am also picking up information from discussions in facebook groups, blogs and other online articles. I have looked up terminology that was new to me, discovered new authors, and am trying to work my head around theories and hypotheses. I still have many questions, but I am learning (aren’t we all, always?), helped with feedback provided on online platforms. View this post on Instagram I feel this is a must read for anyone in the animal rights movement, ànd those fighting for human rights. Truly inspirational. It seemed like so …
Words are not simply neutral expressions of how we experience or want to describe reality. They shape and give meaning to our thoughts and ideas, and even though we think we are giving an objective account of reality, our choice of words often has a very subjective interpretation. Here are a few texts about veganism (or a vegan diet). Note the use of ‘strict’. The repeated use of the word ‘strict’, portrays veganism (even more) as something extreme and hard. Don’t make it sound more difficult than it is, and drop the use of the word ‘strict’.
Although veganism is on the rise, and the numbers of vegans is steadily increasing, there are some within the vegan movement that shy away from using the word vegan in advocay and campaigning. Even some animal advocacy organisations use plantbased, or obscure acronyms like veg’n or even veggie instead of vegan. This seems to be informed by the idea that the word vegan is a deterrent and scares people away, supposedly hindering them from making lifestyle changes that would benefit animals. The main reason why the word vegan is seen as a deterrent is that it is perceived as something ‘extreme’, or on a personal level, associated with ‘extremists’ and ‘fanatics’. First, the alternatives mentioned above hardly carry the same meaning as the label vegan. Veggie can refer to vegetables, but is also used to refer to lacto-ovo-vegetarians (thus including the use of eggs and dairy). Plantbased refers to a diet that focuses on whole plant foods (and in short: no processed foods like sausages and burgers, even if they do not contain animal products). Both veggie and …
The Bruges Vegan 