Adbusters Corporate Flag

Many vegans these days seem a little too anxious to consume “vegan” chain food and are wishing for mainstream and wasteful restaurant chains to start serving up their favorite processed vegan products. Yes, I put vegan in quotation marks, because although the ingredients of these favored foods may in fact not contain animal products, many of them are obtained in ways that, unseen or unacknowledged by vegans, still harm animals (nonhuman and human) directly.

Some vegans really seem as though they could happily live in Generica, that curious country – America – that has evolved to the point where every town looks basically the same: Target, Walmart, Starbucks, Chili’s, Applebees, fast food chains, Pier One, Chipotle, box-style pharmacies, and a major grocery chain or two line new business districts on crowded arterials on the outskirts of town while empty storefronts peer sadly onto once-bustling Main Streets where parking meters now sit empty and unfed. You could be blindfolded and dropped into damn near any city and most small towns in this country and, when the blindfold was dropped, have almost no way of telling what part of the country you were in, let alone what city. Sure, the grocery chains may give it away a little bit, but beyond that, there are rarely any distinguishing features between a Burger King, Home Depot, or Rite-Aid in the northeast and those in the southwest. But when these companies, especially food companies, begin offering animal-free products, vegans seems to line up in droves and can never be satiated. A vegan product at one chain leads to clamoring and longing for similar options at another.

I could come up with choice quotations from vegans of all stripes that celebrate this transition from homemade to corporate made. And it’s not just that these chain restaurants serve up almost exclusively unhealthy vegan food. It’s that most of them play the games of cutthroat business strategies, unfair labor practices, and developing world exploitation that have been creating massive environmental and human rights disasters since the Reagan administration.

I get it that vegans want to be mainstream. I get it that it can be difficult to go out to eat with omnivorous friends when vegan options are so few and far between. I understand the dismay that comes with an iceberg lettuce side salad in oil and vinegar (the only vegan thing on the menu). It is great when you can find food that you can satisfyingly eat with friends or on the road. But isn’t it even better to plan ahead and have or bring great food that is more satisfying than chain food and more healthy for body and earth? Has it really become so hard to seek out and patronize locally owned restaurants that are serving fresh, scratch cooking possibly made with local ingredients?

Even my tiny town of ~18,000 has three such places. Three! Including a bakery. And the owners of those businesses have been more than happy to work with me and my partner to create delicious foods that we can enjoy as vegans. They have taken the time to chat with us about our lifestyle and dietary choices to understand how they might better serve customers like us. Try getting that conversation going with the underpaid, overworked “sandwich artist” at Subway. When you shop local, the business owner gets information, satisfied customers, and money. We get delicious vegan food that has whole, fresh ingredients that weren’t picked in California; shipped to Skokie, IL, for processing at headquarters; adulterated with preservatives and flavorings and combined with a bunch of other ingredients, fats, and salt; flash frozen for convenient shipping; and thawed out in a microwave, often to be served with a pound of excess packaging that goes straight into a trash can.

Now these whole, fresh ingredients that we’re eating could still be genetically modified. They still might have been (and in all probability were) picked by people who weren’t being paid a living or fair wage. There still might be excess fat and salt in the food. But the bottom line is this: one of our neighbors is making a living serving vegan food to us, and we have the opportunity to support his or her business and our community while minimizing waste and environmental harm and increasing the pleasure in our lives. We have a chance to encourage a business owner to provide additional vegan options or seek out organic produce. Not only that, but the business owner may be employing some of our other neighbors as sous chefs, waitstaff, or cashiers. And he might not be paying them crappy minimum wages set by the rich-ass CEO in Skokie whose only concern is about whether the shareholders are happy.

We need to ascend from Generica and seek community, not just in our towns, but in others that we travel to or visit. It takes a little effort (you know, like five minutes of surfing at Happy Cow to look for vegan-friendly local restaurants in your line of travel), and it doesn’t solve the whole problem of injustice, but we have to start somewhere. Sometimes it may take going without and making the effort to provide our own food. But we’ve managed to go without before: when even the iceberg lettuce salad wasn’t vegan.

It’s time to start thinking creatively about the world as a whole, about our communities, and about the future of not just animals but also of the kind of world we want to live in when animal liberation is reality. I, for one, don’t want it to be a world of chain restaurants, slave labor coffee shops, and capitalist greed.

Vegans have no place in Generica.