Vegan Purity
retrospective on six years of veganism
Veganism, more than any other belief system held by people today, requires constant action against the grain of society. Marxism calls for more radical change in the human social fabric than veganism, but marxists know society can’t change overnight in the way they ask, so they're pragmatic. They patiently spin their theories, and involve themselves in society as normal people, with their purer ideology as a guiding beacon.
Vegan idealism says that purity must start now, in what you eat. Vegan ideology is purity by abstinence. It's the omission of evil, not creation of good. That’s how real good is often done in the world, but it takes a certain type of person to omit the foods others put into their bodies every day. What you eat is a very personal and primal thing. This makes vegans evangelizers and inconveniencers, and people dislike us because of that. But the purity in veganism is also admirable, and I feel kinship with anyone who holds vegan purity simply because of how much it takes to live this way.
My personal conversion to vegan purity came at age 19, when as nineteen year olds often do I was converting in many ways. This in 2017, a time when many influencers made careers talking about veganism online and posting pictures of themselves being hot while vegan in green places. Many of those people who I watched on YouTube are not vegan now, which is strange.
Rationally, I’m vegan for ethical reasons. I think the way that animals are treated in modern animal agriculture is beyond cruel, hundreds of millions of sentient minds treated as expendable flesh resources, the violence hidden away in dark warehouses so that humans don’t have to watch the blood be spilled. I’m not going to talk about that in this piece, because violence is boring and I’m selfish and prefer to think about interesting things.
In June 2017, I watched my first Ellen Fisher video. Ellen Fisher is a very large vegan YouTuber. Not the largest, but definitely the largest influence on me.
Ellen Fisher lives on the Hawaiian island Maui, with her husband and what was then two kids and is now five. Then, she lived in a small house, but she made a lot of money off of YouTube so now she lives in a big compound. Her favorite book is Ayn Rand and she judiciously homeschools her kids, but she’s also very pro-vegan. Her care for her children is the most palpable thing in her videos, beyond the vegan ethics or even the beauty of Hawaii. The end result is tradfamily lifestyle vlogs, filmed with the lushgreen Hawaiian jungle in the background, and the green purity of veganism as a guiding force. At age 19 I found Ellen Fisher’s vision very compelling.
This is the “aesthetic” of many vegan influencers, although more often the YouTubers were unmarried and them personally being hot in green places takes the place of the tradfamily. But both having a family and being hot are aspirational on the same gradient.
I think this vision, veganism smoothed over with green beauty, is far more effective propaganda than traditional PETA-style “expose the animal agriculture industry” propaganda. It’s deeply upsetting to see the way we treat animals, and many viewers are turned off from the messenger and reject the message. Aestheticized veganism has things to actually be excited about, not just rejection of brutal violence, even if the things to be excited about are a bit disassociated from the main vegan message.
Vegan youtube is not intended as a propaganda machine though. It was people competing for attention and unintentionally creating propaganda while they did it. One very memorable video for me from my YouTube anthropology era was a seventeen-year old young vegan girl who went to an Ellen Fisher event on her family’s trip to Maui hoping to meet her favorite YouTuber’s famous children, and instead the event played brutal slaughterhouse footage after Ellen Fisher briefly spoke and she left crying and upset. Even the creators don’t fully get the reasons why they’re such effective propagandists.
Ellen Fisher is still going strong as a vegan creator today, because I have good taste and select people who are pure of heart for my deep influences. But many of the other YouTube vegans that I watched at that time in 2017 are not. It’s always a minor disgrace whenever one of these influencers announces their decision to eat meat again, fans betrayed wondering how long they were led on, because the apologetic video is certainly not the full truth. Most of them still do exist as influencers because they were doing so much more than just creating vegan propaganda. Filming themselves being hot in pretty places sincerely did take real talent. They rode the wave of purity up, and exited when it no longer made sense for them.
Before I was vegan I was vegetarian, which makes it less of a conversion and more of an inherent truth about the way that I am. I’ve been vegetarian since birth, my parents chose it for me, but we always have a choice in our lives and I chose to continue it. I’ve never consensually consumed meat in my life. Unintentional events like restaurant mistakes infringe upon true purity but I’ve never consciously acted on the desire to eat meat.
Even though my parents chose vegetarianism for me I was always more vegetarian than my siblings. When I was very young I debated other kids at the school lunch table on the moral imperatives of vegetarianism. I really loved the teen mall-punk protest band Rise Against because all the members were vegetarian. I gave speeches in my high school English class about the evils of factory-farmed milk. I didn’t drink milk because it felt thick and gross, though I still ate cheese and other milk-derivative products at this point.
The main reason I bring up that I’ve been vegetarian my entire life is that veganism was not totally a conversion but also a fact of who I am. Conversion was not a cold logical ethical decision or even susceptibility to propaganda, but a commitment deeper to being myself. I feel repulsion to meat beyond ethics, which I know because I struggle to eat fake meat products too. I don’t want to put food with that sort of flesh protein density in my mouth. You eat what you are.
I read The Vegetarian in May 2017, a month and a half before I converted to veganism, which in retrospect was what set me on the path. It was written in Korean by Han Kang in 2007, and translated by Deborah Smith to English in 2015. The novel is about a woman named Yeong-Hye who abruptly converts to veganism, but it uses vegetarian as its title because vegetarian is a prettier word. It’s told in three parts.
Part 1 is told from the perspective of Yeong-Hye’s husband, who has mechanized his wife into a domestic object. She abruptly converts to veganism which shatters their traditional Korean marital life. It upsets their marriage and her relationship with her parents as she refuses to eat the foods others do. Eventually Yeong-Hye goes to the hospital when she intentionally cuts her own wrist to avoid eating meat. Yeong-Hye escapes the hospital and because of malnutrition ends up in a feverish state biting into a small bird in the parking lot.
Part 2 is told from the perspective of Yeong-Hye’s sister’s husband. Months later, with Yeong-Hye now living alone, her sister’s husband becomes entranced with a birthmark on Yeong-Hye’s body, as well as her passive plantlike way of existing in the world. He puts her in an experimental art film where he paints her body to look like a flower and then has sex with her. Yeong-Hye is very passive through the experience, but is deeply compelled by the art of becoming a flower, of becoming a plant. Eventually this relationship too falls apart, and Yeong-Hye is institutionalized.
Part 3 is told from the perspective of Yeong-Hye’s sister. Her sister is the only person who really understands Yeong-Hye and empathizes with her, knowing the harsh childhood Yeong-Hye grew up with. They share a few moments together, but it’s really too late. Yeong-Hye is in a psychiatric institution, and is refusing to eat any food at all, desiring totally to turn into a tree.
Like all art that really strikes you, I didn’t understand The Vegetarian the first time I read it but I loved it. Han Kang’s authorial intention is to use vegetarianism as a metaphor for Yeong-Hye’s passivity and nonviolence. This is especially true in the context of her marriage in Part 1. The Vegetarian is often discussed in the context of Korea’s culture of female subservience in marriage, and marital rape. My experience of the metaphor was inverted, that the passivity of Yeong-Hye became crystalized through her literal vegetarianism, and later through her literal desire to become a tree. Yeong-Hye was sort of always this way, since she was a child, and finally converting to veganism is the moment where she starts eating like she is. Veganism was for Yeong-Hye and me about becoming more passive in the world, about destroying less, about existing as an observer and watching over things while not hurting any of it in the way everyone else must by being a part of the world. That’s part of who I am too.
Veganism is not easy, especially thorough commitment to veganism. Food at restaurants will often have minor amounts of animal products, like pasta noodles made from eggs or rice cooked in chicken stock. Some orange juice isn't vegan because it's supplemented with nonvegan calcium sources. Asking clarifying questions about animal products is not fun, but worse than that declining food in communal settings is very isolating. Veganism sometimes feels like a self-punitive game. Am I really making the world a better place by declining food that will be thrown out if I don’t eat it?
The way I justify it to myself is that veganism is a set of purity rules. An imperfect set of rules, but a set of rules that I’ll follow. I talk about veganism often, and while many logically agree with me about factory-farmed meat, I’m yet to find someone who refuses to eat restaurant food because of where they source their animals.
In the moments where veganism isn’t a practical solution to a real world subtle problem, the rigid purity of veganism is a guiding beacon, a beacon that takes real action which proves I care about it. I try to carry it into the future to remind other people that this is important, that this matters, even if it’s hard for me in some moments.
I’ve carried the vegan beacon for a long time, but I hold it in a steadier way now. This is how I’ve felt since about three years into being vegan, even though I don’t have it all solved. Is it ever ethical to eat animals if they’re killed in dignified ways? What does it mean that my own personal predispositions and aesthetic desires pulled me to these ethics? And while I think about those questions sometimes, I just carry the beacon anyways.
The only thing that’s changed in the past year is now I have the urge to eat oysters, still unactualized, to fulfill Diana Fleischman’s bivalvegan ethics. Oysters don’t have brains so it’s very ethical. The part in “Red Velvet” when Bladee says “red velvet, I’m selfish, ten bands just to go and eat some shellfish” makes me think oysters are cool. Also Moby-Dick gives me an eternal longing for what comes out of the sea. Oysters scare me because of the slimy high protein density but I think the point is being scared. Some day I’ll do it.