Carnist Queries - “What makes you an expert on what I should eat?”
Welcome everyone to the first instalment of: “Carnist Queries”. These blog posts and podcast episodes will certainly differ slightly from the usual ones, but I do hope you enjoy it. I have a lot of other types of ideas and content for the future, so just as a heads up - the blog and podcast will very much go on to be used, from time to time, as a bit of a sandbox for testing new things, and talking about them openly. So what is “Carnist Queries”? It is a series to help arm ethical vegans with comebacks against carnists. My aim is to slowly gather and organise easy resources and answers, so that vegans can readily draw from a diverse range of knowledge and wit in their most trying of times. So if it isn’t obvious enough - this post will be more for the fellow vegans and animal activists out there. That is not to say that you shouldn’t read on if you’re a normie omnivore, but be warned - this stuff can be triggering and confronting, especially if you’re new to reading animal liberation rhetoric.
With today’s topic I am getting the ball rolling by answering one of the many, all too common carnist queries that vegans are often asked by the general public of blood breath bastards.
“What makes you an expert on what I should eat?”
The reality is that I don’t think it even takes an expert of moral philosophy, a scientist or even a nutritionist to recognise the simple fact that we no longer have any need in the modern world for slaughtering animals for the purpose of food, clothing, or anything else. Perhaps we once did and it served us well but we no longer benefit from the killing of beings with a central nervous system, because we have simply outgrown the need to. There are better options for our conscience, our health, and for the planet.
In the western world we live in a time of general prosperity, we have better, healthier, and more sustainable solutions and alternatives to all animal products. But we also have such an abundance of food that we are getting sick from it, we are burning our forests and creating vast farms all over the world for our desperate desire for burgers. Plants are cheaper, they consume less water and land if we simply harvest them directly for ourselves rather than trying to feed billions of farm animals an enormous amount of food that could instead be going towards feeding starving people in countries much less fortunate than our own. When it really comes down to it, buying a steak is selfish and wasteful, and it would be completely unethical to continue along that path once you have had the chance to ponder on it for just a second, and answer for yourself your own initial conflicting questions with a little bit of research.
Maybe it's too hard for you, maybe one day someone else will fix it all for us, maybe governments will get to the point of banning animal exploitation altogether and we will all be forced into a beautiful, vegan, ethical world, eventually. But until then the choice comes down to the individual… You. That is why we vegans think that we can tell you what not to eat, because we all wish that someone could have convinced us to question our own decisions sooner. That is why we care enough to say something, anything, because for every single day that someone buys a steak or a sausage or an egg, there are animals being treated like shit and being killed by the millions. Right now that weight falls on us as people who are a part of our societies.
Meanwhile there has never been a better time to be a vegan, the products are all there in the shops waiting for you; beans, rice, veggies, fruit, beyond meat, oat milk, coconut cheese, whatever the fuck you could ever want or desire.
So the only question really is: are you willing to align your actions with your morals? Or are you going to make another excuse and remain unchanged despite your new knowledge? Go on then, keep questioning the validity of other people’s critiques of your actions, brush us all off as annoying vegans, don’t ever follow your introspection to the point of any real self-criticism because that would require some actual effort and sobriety. Grow up, take some responsibility and stop paying for animals to be killed.
Go buy a tofu satay curry already, its fucking delicious. Thank you.
That's hopefully another carnist query quelled for today so thank you all for joining and please outlet your anger online with us - especially if you have a story of your own to share in relation to today's topic.
