Sym Abdul-Hadi

Professor McCarthy

ENGW1111

9 September 2019

Consumer Activism Is Not Enough

Our world is filled with many very real, and increasingly important large scale crises

caused by human actions. It is normal for us to feel like there is very little that we can

individually do to affect large systemic change. And still where there are problems there are

activists, the people who feel like they can no longer stand idly by and watch as we slowly kill

the planet. This essay is going to be a critique of one type of activism that is very prevalent

when it comes to veganism. Activism with the sole goal of getting consumers to change their

consumption habits, or what we will call “consumer activism” for the purposes of this essay. This

will focus on how consumer activism is not an effective way to bring about change in the case of

veganism.

This argument is targeted towards those who advocate for there to ideally be zero

cruelty in our food consumption, including cruelty towards animals. And how they can better

advocate to get closer to that goal. The purpose of this essay is to stress that vegan consumer

activism that focuses solely on peoples’ personal choices to not consume meat, while ignoring

the inherent structural and societal causes of the problems in our current system is not an

effective way to bring about radical change. I hope to steer vegan activists away from only

advocating for change by telling people about the perceived benefits of veganism, and to

instead focus their advocacy on the root causes of the issues that they hope to fight through

veganism.

Consumer activism for veganism is largely based on the idea that if everyone started

making the correct consumption choices, then cruelty towards animals for food production

would just disappear. The tricky thing about arguing against that mindset, is that it is absolutely
true. If everyone stopped eating meat today the world would be a much better place for humans

and for animals. There wouldn't be billions of creatures brought into this world just to suffer until

we kill and eat them and the earth would stop dying as quickly from climate change.

Unfortunately, that is not something that will happen through consumer activism. We cannot just

rely on consumers to solve problems created by markets in capitalism. Activists should not

focus on shaming others for making the “wrong” choices in our current system which

incentivises them. What’s more important to focus on is why those choices are so easy, and

often necessary for people to make. Such as the many structural and racial barriers that prevent

people from making the purchasing choices that they’d like them to. Activism will not begin to

address structural issues by telling people that their consumption choices are bad, and implying

that they are bad for making them. A better approach is to focus vegan activism on the systems

that cause millions of people to not have the time, money or energy to find the most ethical

sources for their food.

However, Imagine that consumer activism for veganism was effective. Activists could

just tell everyone to be vegan, give them a few studies on how it is better for their health, the

planet, and animal welfare. Would that turn us all into ethical, and environmentally friendly

consumers? Unfortunately that is not how things work in this economic system. All of our food

comes from very few companies and conglomerates which are responsible for untold cruelty not

just to animals, but to humans as well. Food is no different than any other product sold to us in

America. It is seeping in cruelty that we blindly export to wherever we can't see it, usually to

poorer countries or marginalized communities (Smolski).

For example, Nestle is and will continue to be very happy to manufacture all the vegan

options we could ever want. They will gladly produce whatever is profitable, and they will do

whatever they can get away with to maximize those profits which will often be quite cruel. Nestle

in the past utilized child slave labor in developing nations to make us products (Larson).Vegan

does not by any means mean cruelty free. If we only get rid of cruelty towards animals in our
food production we will be left with plenty of cruelty towards humans. In our enlightened all

vegan society there will still be massive corporations that will be selling us all the vegan

products we want.

Effective activism needs to focus on addressing the root causes of the problems that

they want to address. Vegan consumer activism is too focused on getting people to change their

grocery lists, and not touching the deeply political roots of our system for food production and

distribution. Consumer activism is not adequate for fixing these systemic issues, but it is very

good at making activists feel superior to the people who are making the “wrong” consumer

choices, as they are the ones making the “right” consumer choices in our current system. It is

however not very useful for achieving the stated goals of whatever is being advocated for, and it

will not fix the world. While consumer activism can make small gains in shifting production, it

does little to address the systemic issues created by a global capitalist system, a system which

has readily demonstrated its resistance and violent hostility to incremental reform.

Works Cited

Larson, Erik. “Nestle, Cargill Again Face Suit by Ex-Slaves in Cocoa Fields.” Bloomberg.com,

Bloomberg, 23 Oct. 2018, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-23/u-s-appeals-

court-revives-slavery-suit-against-nestle-cargill.
Ritchie, Hannah, and Max Roser. “Meat and Dairy Production.” Our World in Data, 25 Aug.

2017, https://ourworldindata.org/meat-production.

Smolski, Andrew R. “Stemming the Exploitation of Immigrant Farm Labor.” Contexts

Stemming the Exploitation of Immigrant Farm Labor Comments, 4 July 2019,

https://contexts.org/articles/stemming-the-exploitation-of-immigrant-farm-labor/.