Column: People need justice, too

Since my senior year of high school, I’ve been vegetarian. Abstaining from meat was not unusual within my South Indian background — India’s tradition of the practice verges on militancy, as the country’s close to half a billion vegetarians exceed the rest of the world’s combined.

But let’s not romanticize India’s vegetarianism.

I’d like to complicate Matt Leming’s column on the moral subjectivity of eating meat and argue that the politics of vegetarianism is in need of an analysis of power, privilege and oppression.

Last month, right-wing Hindus banned the sale and possession of beef in the state of Maharashtra, a shift that comes with the political tide of the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party. This draconian piece of legislation is a thinly veiled attack on historically and presently marginalized groups for whom the beef trade and consumption is an integral part of their livelihood, such as Muslims and Dalits.

Angela Davis is famously known as a political activist and scholar, but lesser known is her status as a vegan. In a video recording on the Vegans of Color blog, she says, “I think there is a connection between, and I can’t go further than this, the way we treat animals and the way we treat people who are at the bottom of the hierarchy.”

But in my experience, the people fighting for animal rights are oftentimes not the same rallying against anti-Black police violence or the exploitation of Latina/o farmworkers. My mental image of the typical American vegetarian is a quinoa-eating white, middle-class liberal.

When walking through the grocery store, today’s locavore is more concerned with whether their vegetables are genetically modified or their beef is grass-fed than with whether the working conditions of the people serving or growing their food are fair.

Moreover, the moral absolutism of these white “food police” leaves little room to consider the material conditions determining what people can afford to eat or the historical construction of cuisine. Many cooking traditions are products of destitution and oppression because those with few means had to do with the “leftover” or “undesirable” cuts of meat left to them.

My parents, for instance, lecture me on how their working-class upbringing meant dividing small scraps of meat among their family. For them, being able to purchase meat is symbolic of their class mobility. Who am I to question the ethical implications of them consuming that which they’ve been denied for much of their lives?

The commodification of animals into property to be domesticated, contained, slaughtered and consumed requires serious interrogation. But vegetarianism, as a movement, is saturated with animal rights discourse to the exclusion of discussions of race and class. It represents feigned moral superiority rather than justice.

If you care more about the living conditions of the cow that makes up your cheeseburger than the $7.25 per hour your server has to survive off of, who is your “activism” helping?