Vegan Practically

When I was at the social ontology conference last week I went to two great papers that considered, among other questions, the broad idea of what counts as food? In his paper, “Friend (Not) Food: Livestock as a Social Kind,” Dylan Brown, PhD candidate in Philosophy at Duke, noted that not everything edible counts as “eatable.” Similarly, not all things eatable are edible (as anyone who has ever unwittingly consumed spoiled or contaminated food and paid the price will tell you). And in her paper, “Desiderata for a Social Ontology of Food,” Emma Hardy, PhD candidate in Philosophy at the University of Michigan, emphasized just how much our social/cultural context determines what is considered food.

It seems like such a simple idea when we consider the variation in cuisine across the globe. It’s not always about spices and seasoning and modes of preparation. It’s often about what people actually think is food. Hardy offered the fascinating example of this variation. Huitlachoche is a kind of fungus that grows on corn and is considered a delicacy in Mexico, where it is on the menu, often as a filling in quesadillas, of high end restaurants to street vendors. In the US, the exact same fungus is called Corn Smut, and it is considered a disease that needs to be managed and avoided.

These kinds of divergences in what different people consider food come up all the time, frequently in the context of the various animal products people are willing to consume. Some cultural cuisines include dog meat or horse meat, where for others both are off limits. Lately, there has been a lot of attention on crickets as a protein source. Across the board we tend not eat our pets. In any of the books I’ve read about the early days of Antarctic exploration, they often used dogs to help pull the supplies. Ultimately, the dogs would become food even if they started out, not as food, but as part of the team. In none of the accounts that I’ve read was it a pleasant moment when they decided it was time to think of the dogs as eatable.

When we think about the way veganism plays out in practice, a nice way of framing it is that there are a whole range of edible things that vegans don’t consider to be food. The main divergence from popular cuisine, of course, is that vegans don’t eat animal products. They may be edible, but we don’t consider them eatable. They are not food.

One way of thinking about what we might hope for as vegans, then, is that more and more people shift away from thinking of animal products as food. Of course the social ontology of food is a lot more complex than I have made it out to be in this short post. But I like this understanding of what is at the core of veganism. Just because something is edible doesn’t mean it’s food.