I’m an ex-vegan of several years. I used to believe in the full intersectionality thing, in that speciesism was as much an axis of oppression as race, gender etc.
Then I had a falling out with some other SM vegans who questioned my commitment when I merely posed a social dilemma question. It led me to fall down a rabbit hole and discover Lierre Keith’s book The Vegetarian Myth.
In this she outlines her own journey into and out of veganism as it wrecked her health (degenerative spine disease, anxiety, depression, digestive problems etc). Also how she woke up to the fact it’s not animal product consumption that’s harming animals or the environment, it’s the context that’s taking place - factory farming, feed lots, grain feedstuffs plus grain-based arable diets for humans. Agriculture is basically biotic cleansing - you take a prairie or forest, you strip it of every living thing, down to the soil bacteria, you apply poison, you apply artificial fertiliser (massively fossil fuel heavy - we can either eat “poo”… fertilise the soil with dung, or we can eat “fossil fuels”… fertilise the soil with CO2 intensive Haber Bosch fertiliser). Then you draw down rivers killing every aquatic thing in them for irrigation. Bees and other essential pollinators are killed by the poisons, which uphold a significant part of the ecosystem on which myriad other animals depend.
So basically eating a local organic permaculturally or polyculturally produced diet of grass fed meat & dairy, vegetables, fruit from local orchards etc is far more sustainable, ethical and has a lower “suffering footprint” than eating almond milk from california, which are sucking the ground so dry contributing to the many wild fires there. Tofu from Argentinian soya, the agriculture of which requires huge mega-hectare field systems that are totally monocultural (ie otherwise totally dead zones) and pesticides that are causing horrific birth defects in the human population, never mind what it’s doing to wild animals. Quinoa from South America, the production of which for hip westerners is pricing out locals of their traditional foodstuff. Even just the humble grow your own lettuce in the back yard requires valiant snail control efforts, so maybe not so vegan after all. In short, the whole journey of soil to table requires death in its roundest sense, which ever way we eat.
The way I see it is that we need to eat in such a way that minimises disruption to the wider ecological system, so very local community level animal-integrated permacultural systems. That way we minimise impact on the wild where by far the greater number of organisms reside and we minimise impact on them.
The shift to grain based agriculture in the neolithic is what allowed civilisations to flourish, in that land and stores of grain could be hoarded. Hierarchies became established such as monarchy and patriarchy… those plebs and sheilas became necessary to control as broodmares, soldiers, shipbuilders and navvies to help expand the imperialist project. I see democratic, community based, low impact farming systems essential to demolishing such hierarchies. Nourishing the soil is a feminist act!
www.zoeharcombe.com/2011/08/the-vegetarian-myth-lierre-keith/
library.uniteddiversity.coop/Food/The_Vegetarian_Myth.pdf