Vegan Purity 2: Bivalvegan Era
"red velvet i'm selfish ten bands just to go and eat some shellfish" - bladee
This is a sequel to the first Vegan Purity, which I wrote last summer. I’ve been vegan since I was 19, and vegetarian my whole life. In the first Vegan Purity I wrote about my belief that veganism is important as a set of restrictive purity rules to ensure continuous opting out of modern animal agriculture practices. More complex rulesets like “I only eat animal products that come from ethical farms” are very gray and can lead to fudging the ethics or abandoning them altogether.
With that said, I spend most of the piece talking about the visceral reasons that people are vegan, not the moral beliefs that I hold. Visceral aversion to flesh makes someone vegan just as much as strongly held moral belief. You are what you eat, and you eat what you are. It takes a certain type of person to be vegan, to opt out of so much of the world, to opt out of consumption of flesh.
At the end of the first Vegan Purity, I said I wanted to try oysters soon:
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.
Now, ten months later, I’ve done that. I’m living on the coast and I’ve eaten oysters for the first time.
The idea of bivalveganism is that though oysters and other bivalves are part of the animal kingdom they are not sentient, cannot feel pain, and so they are ethical to eat under a vegan diet.
I spent some time scrolling around the computer to make sure that oysters really are vegan. The science is not 100% settled and there’s some fun debates in Reddit and YouTube comment sections. My main takeaway is that oysters are really weird. Bivalves are ancient animals, forming on earth before fish existed. They don’t often move around; they sit still and let water wash over their gills, eating algae or phytoplankton from the water for their food. That process also results in cleaning the water of the algae, as the ocean’s natural filters. I saw some vegan takes that oysters are vegan from a sentience perspective, but it’s bad for the environment to eat oysters because you’re removing a natural filter. But then I saw some second takes that most commercial are rope-farmed, put into the water on a rope by humans, and that nothing is being taken away.
Bivalves in the wild have the physical capacity to move though. It’s sort of eerie when they do:
This is a clam, and when a human approaches it it flaps its shell to swim through the water and escape. It looks a little bit alive here, but also it doesn’t seem like a lot is going on inside its brain. Before oysters and clams form their calcium shells they also float around the ocean, looking for a place to settle down.
Is this meaningfully different from a plant’s inward sentience to go towards the light? Or the pain a potato plant feels when you remove its roots for your food? I don’t know. Oysters are so different from plants biologically, but from a sentience perspective it becomes much harder to say. There’s no real evidence that oysters can feel pain; the most I can find is vegan resources online that argue it’s possible we might one day learn they feel pain. And that seems like excessive precautionary principle for a rational set of vegan ethics.
The first time I opened an oyster I didn’t feel uncomfortable from an ethics perspective. It didn’t look like a sentient fish; it looked like a piece of flesh inside a pearly container. I did feel a bit viscerally uncomfortable though. Oysters are slimy and cold, and dense with protein and blood like flesh is. I did like how they taste like the ocean though. I didn’t really find them very pleasant or even filling, but I wanted to be brave, so I ate five of them.
From a health perspective oysters are a good addition to a vegan diet. Vegan diets prompt supplementation of B12 and often Omega-3, and oysters contain good quantities both of those things. I think a vegan diet with monthly or so consumption of oysters is healthier than a traditional vegan diet from the perspective of getting those nutrients directly from food rather in supplements.
But I’m not a dietician, and I didn’t try oysters for health reasons. I’ve been alive as a vegetarian my whole life without flesh and I think humans can live without it fine. What drew me to oysters was the idea of being brave. Having been vegetarian my whole life, I find eating plants very comfortable. The ethics are the framework for my comfort, and while I deeply believe the ethics, it’s important to challenge my comfort. Oysters presented a really interesting gray space where by all ethical vegan rules they are fine, but they’re viscerally uncomfortable and culturally uncomfortable because they aren’t plants. I wanted to push into that space.
I still so firmly believe in the importance of purity in vegan ethics. It makes me sad when my vegan friends admit to small cheating on the diet, or when I explain to people that they can compromise. You of course can compromise, and I believe in general kindness to my fellow man more than I believe in veganism, and veganism is a hard thing to ask fellow people to do. But it should be hard, in order to prove that you care about it and enforce your continued caring. The way we treat animals today is bad, and we need people to actually care.
But I think eating oysters as a vegan actually affirms that purity rather than undermines it. It proves that the purity isn’t entirely a visceral aversion to flesh, but instead a set of ethical rules based on treatment of other sentient creatures.
Now that I’ve eaten oysters it’s reopened up a few other vegan purity questions for me. I joke with people about roadkill, and other carrion items, but it’s a slightly real question. Is it ethical to eat roadkill as a vegan? Is it a moral imperative to prove that my ethics are not based on visceral repulsion to flesh? I think the answer is probably no, roadkill is so gross that most meat-eaters don’t eat it, and the foxes and raccoons will appreciate it being left so there’s nothing karmically going to waste.
But that same roadkill line extends out to eggs produced at more ethical farms, where eggs really do sit on the ground as animal products mostly free of exploitation. I know some vegans argue that you should still opt out of these eggs, because they could otherwise go to people who would eat factory-farmed eggs, but from a capital allocation perspective you can argue the reverse, that financially supporting eggs from ethical farms is what’s necessary for that to replace the very unethical factory-farmed egg process. I don’t actively live in the countryside at an ethical egg farm, but maybe I should seek it out.
The other tough question is food being served to me with non-vegan ingredients; is it really ethical for me to reject fries served to me with sprinkles of Parmesean cheese on the top? The products of the animal exploitation are going to be discarded, and the waiter probably isn’t going to rethink their cheesetopping ethics as a result of my principled moral stance. Most of the time I try to find a friend to give the food I don’t want to eat, but that’s just passing my karmic mess to someone else who isn’t bound up in my same set of thoughts and won’t notice it’s messy.
In my head, my continued rejection of nonvegan foods that were created because of my action is okay because I’m rejecting the world for being this way, saying please stop putting cheese produced through very unethical processes on my fries. It’s exhausting to always say the arguments that we should stop, and people don’t really care to them, so I don’t do that, but maybe that’s weak. And most probably it’s visceral aversion to the food too. I can’t eat it because it makes me sick to think about what happens to produce the food.
I don’t know. Ethics are hard. I’m still very bound up in the visceral, but I’m trying my best.
love this