How can "vegan leather" be plastic (based on oil) which is dead shellfish?

[missedmyappointment]

I don't understand how something made of dead shellfish can be called vegan. So how can vegan leather be plastic? ( question arising from other thread I don't want to derail)

Crude oil is not exactly "animals". Along the same vein, you would have to label yourself a cannibal because of course all dead bodies eventually enter the food chain.
I've noticed a couple of posts on here and read several newspaper articles recently attacking veganism which make me think there's an industry agenda somewhere.

There are serious problems with soya. Not only is it grown on soil which will contain remnants of dead animals, it will have been treated to kill animals that like to live on it.

Saying that something containing oil can’t be vegan because oil contains dead shellfish is a bit like saying a potato can’t be vegan because it’s grown in soil. You know soil is partly made up of dead things, right?

Thats coal

who's attacking veganism? I am trying to understand it. Although I guess there are many different shades of veganism.

Ok, so I was generalising because oil is made from a variety of organic matter but you’re still incorrect in it being made from shellfish.

https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/petroleum/

That’s coal you’re thinking of. Oil is composed of the remain of phyto and zooplankton.

But my point is, it includes shellfish, which coal doesn't. Hence my query about veganism. Although I think I may have misunderstood the definition of veganism.

I thought it was - not to use or consume anything of animal origin.

But from this thread it looks like it is

Not to exploit any living animal in the environment

But by that definition, could vegans eat road kill?

@BobButtons it’s formed in large part from zooplankton which consists of adult and larval crustaceans and molluscs, isopods, cnidarians etc. AKA ‘shellfish’. Small ones admittedly.

Some vegan philosophy argues that yes, it would be ok to eat road kill. Or at least it wouldn’t be wrong in principle or contradict their philosophy.

Veganism isn’t about doing things perfectly all the time. It’s about harm reduction, for the vast majority of people. Anyone living in the west in 2024 will have a detrimental impact on the planet in some way. No one asks to be born! All we can do is reduce our impact as much as we are able and willing to do. Veganism and vegetarianism is a good place to start. We all have to eat.

but really, who - vegan or otherwise - wants to eat road kill? It is a vanishingly small number of people (isn’t there a mumsnet thread in classics about an ex husband who wanted their kids to eat roadkill? General consensus was that he was a lunatic). Unless you’re hassling meat eaters to go and scrape their dinner off the nearest A road, why bother asking if vegans can do the same? What’s the point?

You are really stretching ways to make vegans seem a problem 😂

Maybe worry about what you eat and vegans will sort themselves out

of all pointless answers!

Maybe just don't post anything on Mumsnet and lets not talk about anything

The point is I want to understand what veganism is. That is the point

I already answered this, very early on. Veganism is about not exploiting animals. Tiny organisms who died a natural death then ended up as oil have not been exploited. Therefore it’s not at odds with veganism to use it.
Same for wild animals that die without being specifically taken for slaughter, I guess.

I don’t get the point about roadkill and I’ve certainly never heard of any vegan philosophy that says it’s ok to eat roadkill. Roadkill is just another way that humans kill animals.

If it is made of plastic derived from oil, I wonder what the Just Stop Oil protesters think of vegan leather then...

JSO aren’t against the petrochemical uses of oil, although they do want to see plastic usage reduced. They are primarily against the fuel use of oil. I tend to agree, oil is such a marvellous resource with so many hundreds of uses that it seems a shame to just burn it.

On the 'roadkill' argument, surely by the same logic if you were trapping rabbits to stop them eating your lettuce, you could then eat them? As long as you didn't intentionally kill them in order to eat them?

Personally I think we need much tighter rules about the conditions animals are kept in, the dairy cows I see out of my window seem perfectly happy, but I do understand I ate dive farming happens and can be awful.

I'm not sure from an environmental standpoint 'things made from oil' are the answer to any of our problems (though you can make plastic from bioethanol, and yeast don't count as animals, so maybe that's the answer, not sure how environmentally friendly the chemical industry around that is though.

I guess everyone has to balance their own ethics.

You know what veganism is.

Try giving up the bacon butties/milk in your brew/ cheese on toast/whatever other animal products you consume before you start handwringing over whether you can ethically eat road kill and wear shoes made from long dead shellfish.

On the 'roadkill' argument, surely by the same logic if you were trapping rabbits to stop them eating your lettuce, you could then eat them? As long as you didn't intentionally kill them in order to eat them?

I'm not a vegan, but I doubt they approve of human actions (driving cars) killing animals even if not deliberate. So, still wouldn't be interested in eating roadkill.

Same with the rabbit cull- they wouldn't approve of killing then that way in the first place, so would not eat it.

Also heard that some vegans and vegetarians and repulsed by the smell of meat over time, so not necessarily the case that they all crave it

I haven’t eaten meat for years. It doesn’t seem like food to me at all now, so I definitely do not crave it!

Obviously because veganism is a stand against modern farming, not against the concept of catagenesis.

Ì was about to ask the same question! I thought this was about how ethical is it to use plastic, which is non biodegradable instead of leather, which is. Saying plastic is not vegan because ts made of fossilised animals is barmy!

Maybe time for a little educational reading about the dairy industry.