Tag: Ethics
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Engage or chill?
Considering I’m a philosopher who has essentially been trained to argue, you might think my answer to “when to engage?” is “whenever the opportunity arises.” But that is not my approach at all. I have limited time and energy. I do not engage when it is hopeless. And there is a certain baiting approach, where…
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What do you do with the “may contain…” allergen warning?
Anyone who has ever spent time reading ingredient labels to see if a product is vegan is aware of the frequently-seen “may contain” warning. This warning is usually associated with known allergens, and most often will list tree nuts, soy, wheat, dairy, or eggs. I confess that I have usually considered this warning to be…
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Bees: it’s not just about honey
Lots of people wonder why vegans don’t eat honey. The short answer is that it is produced through the labour of bees, which makes it an animal product and therefore not vegan. You may find some vegans who don’t worry about honey, possibly because they don’t consider insects to be animals or possibly because they…
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Killer Cute Shoes
Towards the end of his brilliant essay, “Consider the Lobster,” David Foster Wallace asks a series of questions, among them: Which brings me to the issue of leather shoes. [note that the shoes pictured above are cruelty-free, not leather] If people are open to thinking about these issues at all, they are willing to consider…
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Compassion as a reason to be vegan
I’ve said it before: one of my favourite things about starting this blog is that people send me things of interest that I might have missed. Last week someone sent me a link to Leo Babauta’s post, “Why I am Vegan (and how to make it easy),” from his Zen Habits site (thanks Daphne!). I…
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Making plant-based the default
I have had lots of opportunities to put catering under the microscope lately, and mostly it’s not been pretty. A colleague and friend elsewhere has been raving about a new menu item that’s been showing up at catered meetings in her workplace: an apparently delicious tempeh sandwich. This item deserves an A+ for being both…
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“Meat-eaters’ fragility” as an obstacle to change
A couple of week’s ago I gave a quick overview of my thoughts on meat-eating and the use of animals and animal products more generally as well-entrenched ideologies of privilege. Using “ideology” to mean not just a set of ideas, but a set of firmly entrenched ideas that solidifies relationships of domination and subordination, I…
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Meat-eating as an ideology of privilege
I have mentioned before that meat-eating is an ideology. Here “meat-eating” is really a stand-in for the use and consumption of animal products more generally. As for “ideology,” if you just consult the dictionary you’ll come away thinking of ideology neutrally, as a system of ideas, usually associated with political positions. But I like the…
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Good news for vegan eating at Western University (and we’re not done yet)
My workplace, Western University in London Ontario, has been in the news of late for some positive initiatives to increase the plant-based options on campus. You may remember that way back in May I got invited to the Forward Food Chef Training session at Western. It was a two-day training session for chefs at a…
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Does “vegan for the animals” support moderation as an end-point?
I have blogged a lot about reasons for being vegan. As regular readers are aware, I think “vegan for the animals” is decisive. Given the vast animal suffering and exploitation in factory farming, from which 99% of all animals products originate, and given that the moral balance in causing suffering and death to trillions (yes,…
Vegan Practically 