CerealMom and I spent the weekend at the Chicago Green Festival and one of my favorite takeaways from the weekend was a free issue of VegNews, a lifestyle magazine for animal rights activists that offers the most trite, pandering, self-congratulatory tripe for vegans and vegetarians that I have ever seen. (Full disclosure: I am a vegetarian and former vegan and wholly supportive of animal rights). VegNews is a lifestyle magazine for the PETA set. You know, the kind of people who describe kissing an omnivore as something akin to smooching one of Azkaban’s death eaters. It is a magazine rife with clichéd writing, stories about weddings and babies, and unlike my dead-yet-still-beloved Satya, doesn’t touch global food politics with a 10 foot pole.
VegNews peddles the kind of militant veggie self-aggrandizement that directly contributed my own disenfranchisement with the animal rights movement. Between condemning “flesh-eating death-masters,” forcing infants to be vegan and PETA’s disgusting use of women’s bodies to sell vegetarianism (a methodology that, quite frankly, reminds me of The Sexual Politics of Meat), I want nothing to do with the animal rights movement as a whole. I am not interested in being preached at or told that my morals are good simply because I abstain from meat. For a group of people that are supposed to espouse compassion, very little is shown towards other human beings. The congratulatory moralizing of outlets like VegNews and PETA is jingoistic and disgusting–and not one iota more informed or interesting than, say, Anthony Bourdain’s infamous remarks about vegetarians:
I guess what I’m trying to say is that yes, I think vegetarianism is good and right and just, and worth sticking with despite whatever Bourdain says, but there are some total assholes out there that are ruining it for the rest of us and definitely chasing potential allies away. [EDIT: these links refer to "the rest of us" and not the "total assholes". -SB] I’ll leave you all with this beautiful picture of a PETA protester:
ICK. Just ICK.
yo, why are you calling me a total asshole? Seems to me we have a good amount of common ground.
No, you’re one of “the rest of us” that PETA is ruining it for. Sorry if that wasn’t clear! I’ll rephrase.
Fact! Azkaban’s guards are called dementors.
Suggestion! You probably meant to say “one of Azkaban’s dementors”!
Admission! I’m kind of into Harry Potter.
Ahh! Now I see it that way. Yay!
[...] 22, 2008 by cerealmom To second SB’s post, the Green Fest totally sucked. Sure, you get lots of eco-swag, but putting up with self-righteous [...]