Answers to common political objections about veganism

The argument in four points

Steelman first

Most of these objections contain a true observation about advocacy, wrapped around a false conclusion about the ethics.

Concede what is true

Conceding the accurate part is what makes the rest credible.

Return to the shed

Every answer should end back at the concrete practice being defended.

"Veganism is just woke politics"

The observation behind this is real: a lot of vegan messaging has been produced by, and aimed at, one political subculture. The conclusion does not follow. Anti-cruelty law in Britain dates to 1822; ahimsa is two and a half millennia old; the most-cited conservative book on factory farming was written by a Republican speechwriter. If the position were a recent political fashion, it would not have a 200-year legislative record and a 2,500-year religious one.

"It's elitist — poor people can't afford it"

Also partly true, of a certain version of it: a diet built on imported speciality products is expensive. But the cheapest staple foods on earth are plants. Dried lentils, beans, rice, oats, cabbage, potatoes and seasonal vegetables cost less per calorie and per gram of protein than almost any meat. Studies comparing whole-food plant-based diets with omnivorous diets consistently find them cheaper, not dearer.

The genuinely elitist position is the one that assumes the poor cannot cook.

Almost every political objection is an objection to a tone. The crate does not have a tone.

"It's virtue signalling"

Sometimes it is. People signal; it is what social animals do. But whether a behaviour is used for signalling says nothing about whether it is right — giving to charity, serving in the military and going to church are all used as signals, and none of them are thereby discredited. The question is whether the pig in the crate is better off. That question does not become irrelevant because someone posted about it.

"Individual choices don't matter — it's the corporations"

This objection arrives from the left more often than the right, and it is the weakest of the set. Animal agriculture is a demand-driven industry: producers rear the number of animals they expect to sell. Unlike fossil fuels, where consumers face genuinely constrained infrastructure, the substitute here is on the same shelf at a similar price. Structural change and personal change are also not rivals — the countries with the strongest welfare laws are those with the largest constituencies who already changed their diets.

"You're coming for my freedom"

Nobody with any political traction is proposing to prohibit eating meat. The mainstream policy asks are: stop subsidising the worst systems, ban the most extreme confinement, enforce transport and slaughter rules that already exist, and label honestly. Three of those four reduce state intervention or merely enforce existing law. The freedom being defended in practice is usually the freedom of a processor to keep the price artificially low and the cameras out.

"Vegans are hypocrites — phones, roads, crop deaths"

Consistency arguments cut in one direction only if the standard is perfection. It is not: the standard is reduction of avoidable harm. Crop deaths are real, which is why it matters that most crops are grown to feed livestock — eating plants directly reduces total cultivated area and therefore total field deaths. The person pointing at crop deaths while eating an animal fed on those crops has made the vegan's argument for them.

Questions people ask

Sources

• Springmann et al. (2021), Lancet Planetary Health — cost of sustainable diets
• Faunalytics — attitudes towards vegans and advocacy
• Our World in Data — land use of food production

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