Your Positions

• We should all be vegan. Animals should never be exploited, because they are sentient and have the capacity to suffer. (Start over)

• Buying meat or dairy is never OK, but some activities possibly including eating abandoned backyard eggs from rescued chickens, buying second-hand leather or honey, going to zoos that use some of their profits towards conservation efforts, or eating dumpster meat are OK. (Go back)

• Eating meat/dairy abandoned in a dumpster (or perhaps stealing it from an unethical company) is OK, because you are not contributing financially at all from the companies producing it, in fact you may even be hurting them. In addition, you are withdrawing support from capitalist food systems, which is a good thing.

Things to Consider

Look, I get it. You read something on The Anarchist Library about freeganism, and you think vegans who refuse to eat dumpster meat are a bunch of weak-willed virtue signalers who are doing it more for personal purity than actual ethics. You steal sweatshop-produced clothing from H&M in order to help tear down the system, and share meals cooked with dumpster meat with all your anarchist friends.

But for some reason, you never go so far as to eat the flesh of a dog or cat that was hit by a car. The number of CEOs you have personally guillotined rounds up to zero. Isn’t it convenient that your ethics lines up so well with you obtaining and benefiting from the products of these industries you are trying to tear down?

Let’s put it this way. Maybe you think we should lynch the landlords, purge the capitalist parasites on human freedom and dignity. Or perhaps do these things more metaphorically than literally. But if it’s really a matter of principle, then you better also be destroying the oppressive institutions of society in ways that don’t directly benefit you personally.

Maybe it helps to make an analogy, one which we can look at from the third-person perspective. Let’s consider a fictional person, Joe. Joe views Northrop-Grumman, a defense contractor which builds things like unmanned military drones, as a harmful company which needs to be destroyed for the greater good. Let’s say in pursuit of this goal, Joe kidnaps the the President and COO of Northrop-Grumman, Kathy. All looks perfectly consistent so far, at least according to Joe’s espoused views. Now let’s say Joe rapes her, films it, and publishes it online. Does this bolster his ethical claim here, or does it discredit him? Of course, Joe could make the case that the purpose of this rape was to discourage anyone from taking her place in the corporate hierarchy. But a lot of people are going to see that and think, “Jeez, Joe really just wants to rape someone.” Who knows what Joe is actually thinking. Maybe he’s a hardcore anarchist and really lives by his ideals. But if you saw a hundred or a thousand people doing similar such actions, would you really believe that all of them did it just because of their steadfast adherence to their ideals, and not one because they wanted to rape in a way they could get away with? What if you found out this Joe likes to shop at Whole Foods and eat fancy cheese, lives in a nice house in a quiet suburban neighborhood, and his only other actions were beating up someone wearing a MAGA hat one time at a protest and smashing a few windows? Would you really believe that Joe was acting here purely for the sake of ideals?

Basically, the way you might view Joe is the way many serious vegans view those who are quick to eat dumpster meat or steal from H&M, but never show up to direct action animal rescues or really do anything else that indicates they care about animal exploitation besides giving lip service. Those people seem to us like they are acting mostly out of self-interest: they like those clothes and want to wear them, the enjoy eating the meat.

You don’t have a right to that animal flesh, or to those sweatshop-produced clothes. No one does.

That being said, we can’t immediately rule out the possibility that there is a coherent philosophy consistent with veganism in which eating dumpster meat or stealing sweatshop-produced clothes from H&M is OK. But let’s just say that such actions would be very much on the fringe, and there is a real risk of falling into inconsistency if you aren’t absolutely clear about your philosophy.

The reason we can’t immediately rule it out is that veganism is not a philosophy based on not eating flesh. It is a philosophy based on avoiding the unnecessary exploitation of animals. It is consistent with veganism to eat flesh when it is necessary for survival (even human flesh), or when it is done with consent such as in funeral rituals that involve consuming the flesh of the deceased. Many vegans take consent to be essential to their understanding of veganism, to be part of the very core which underlies its more practical prescriptions. It’s debatable whether that should be the case, but let’s explore this for a bit. The main objection to placing consent as central to veganism is that animals cannot explicitly consent in the way humans can: they can’t tell you in words “Yes, I’m OK with that”. However, they can still implicitly consent or refuse to consent. Try to forcibly impregnate a diary cow, as farmers do as part of standard industry practice, and you’ll understand what is meant by an animal implicitly refusing consent. Or watch a video on YouTube of the “rape racks” they put cows in for this “medical procedure”. To fill out this philosophy of veganism a bit more, you could extrapolate many of principles of consent we have for human social interactions to other sentient beings as follows: We shouldn’t try to benefit from that which arises through the violation of consent, explicit or implicit, of another sentient being.

This may sound a bit abstract at this point, but let’s give another example to make it clearer. Say someone posts revenge porn of their ex on the internet: a clear violation of their consent. Other people download it and enjoy it. Let’s say you have a copy of it, and only later find out it was produced without their consent. Should you still keep it and use it for your own pleasure (if you still can, knowing what you know)? Just as people argue that dumpster meat causes no harm, because the animal is already dead and its flesh would otherwise go to waste, you could argue that the consent was already violated by the person who uploaded the video, and it is not causing the victim further harm for you to watch it. Let’s even imagine for the sake of argument there is no way of them finding out that you are watching it (maybe they don’t even know it’s online and will never find out, or recently died of cancer or something so it’s impossible for them to find out). A lot of people (even omnivores) are going to say it’s still wrong to watch it. Let’s try to figure out if those people are correct or not. If they are correct that you shouldn’t watch it, then you might want to reconsider your stance on the analogous situation with dumpster meat. If they are incorrect, it needs explaining why so many people disagree.

The main argument that it is OK to watch is that there is something about this example that riles up people’s emotions and shuts off their critical thinking skills, making them think it’s wrong, when really it’s perfectly fine. Just look at what happens when people hear Hitler was a vegetarian (which, by the way, is false propaganda promoted by Goebbels – speaks wonders of our public discourse that this is still floating around). All of a sudden by the mere association with the Nazis, they are totally incapable of performing the critical thinking skills to recognize the obvious fact that plenty of evil people did good things sometimes, and this is no good reason not to do those good things. Hitler loved dogs! Better start beating my dog! When the topic of rape or non-consensual recording comes up in a hypothetical example, people aren’t going to actually think about the example at hand, and are going to think of all the real cases where the victim did find out, where their co-workers saw the video and they were devastated. This hypothetical situation is playing on emotions, not on reason. On the basis of reason, there is nothing wrong with it, since no one is actually getting hurt if the conditions of this hypothetical example (which are necessary for the analogy to work) are met.

OK, great! If you can understand enough to make this point, then you personally are not one of the people who would be misled by the emotional content of this hypothetical, so let’s continue this conversation with the assumption that you are not a fool easily led to irrationality by emotion. Would you personally watch it?

There are some pretty good reasons not to. Even if you can be sure it won’t hurt that person in this one instance, it is still building bad habits. You are building an association in your mind with your own pleasure and non-consensual behaviors. Even if your rational mind can make the distinction between this case and other cases, the vast majority of your mind is unconscious and non-rational. Just ask people trying to quit smoking: as well-aware as they may be rationally that they should quit smoking for their own benefit, it is almost out of their control to stop, and completely out of their control to not strongly desire it in the moment. Of course, after they have quit smoking for a long time, those desires die down to the point that it is again within their conscious power to not smoke, but this only comes with practice not smoking, not from being rationally convinced that smoking is terrible for you. Your own mind is not nearly as easy to control as you think it is. In terms of conscious parts of the mind, watching it builds attitudes that people can be used as mere tools for sexual gratification. In the moment you are watching it, you are holding the attitude that this person’s lack of consent doesn’t matter as much as your gratification. You have other options, but you are choosing specifically this.

But moreover, is it really right to assume that the person uploading the video is the only person violating the victim’s consent here? Presumably they wouldn’t have bothered uploading the video at all if they knew no one else was going to watch it: the entire point was to exploit people like you who might watch the video, because of the way it exploits the victim. The fact that the victim never finds out they are being exploited is not really a good reason to do it: this is an excuse used by rapists caught using date rape drugs all the time. Are rapists who are methodical enough using drugs that their victims never find out somehow acting more morally than those like Bill Cosby who get caught? Or to amplify this point: suppose you walk in on a rapist and their drugged vicim, and they offer you to participate directly (instead of indirectly like watching the video), participating in the rape itself. They offer to take full responsibility for the rape if the victim ever finds out, and you 100% believe them. Is it OK to participate in this rape then? After all, the damage is already done, right? If you are gentle, the victim would not be able to tell the difference between one person violating them and two (or three, or four, or twenty), right? The fact of the matter is you simply don’t have the right to use that person’s body in that way, whether it’s physically or through images. It’s not yours to do as you wish with.

This gets at a common confusion people have of exploitation. Exploitation does not require that the victim understand or conceptualize themselves as being exploited by you. Often the worst forms of exploitation happen when the victim doesn’t even know its happening to them, or that you are the one doing it. The question is not “Did that individual explicitly tell you you can’t?”, it is “If that individual understood fully what was happening to them, would they consent to it?” or “Does that individual’s behavior indicate that this is the kind of thing they are seeking in life?”. And an anarchist above all should recognize this point. Many people do not view themselves as being exploited by capitalism. They may view their boss as a benevolent force in their life, providing them with the necessary resources to live their life, not realizing that their boss is part of a system which exploits them for their labor and which deprived them originally of their long-forgotten ability to live freely, not realizing it was those bosses who initially deprive them of this ability by claiming disproportionate ownership over the resources necessary for survival.

Now, people can and do argue that all of this is too abstract, and what really matters ethically is where the rubber meets the road. They argue that what matters are the individual intersections in which one person causes another to suffer, in which one person stands there denying another of food which was obtained through an illegitimate capitalist system, in which one person exerts bodily control over another person, etc. People, especially “effective altruists”, often think that your personal attitudes should not matter at all, as long as the actual effect on the experiences of individuals is overall good. There is of course something to learn from this: you could make the case that Mao Zedong’s abstract ideology ended up weighing ideological concerns over the actual impact of the policies he implemented, and that if people had focused more on individual interactions and who is being directly hurt rather than having the right personal attitudes, a lot of suffering could have been prevented. But this is to ignore the social structure of attitudes and ideologies. It’s really freaking hard to combat things like racism, patriarchy, classism, etc. without having the right attitudes. When it comes to the victim in our hypothetical example here, even if there is no “moment of discovery” where the victim recognizes they have been harmed, by watching that video you are subscribing to attitudes which, in the broader context of society, lead to rape and sexual exploitation. These attitudes are bad, even if you can be sure that personally those attitudes will not lead you to do something which directly hurts someone else.

To emphasize this point, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation if I didn’t find out about your attitudes. In this hypothetical example, we can take it that I and other people find out about your general attitudes, in fact you share them openly. You openly espouse eating dumpster meat, or watching the video, using the product of someone’s exploitation for your own personal benefit. The victim relevant to you doesn’t find out in either case, we may suppose. But you are a human, and your attitudes show, and other people see your attitudes and adopt them, and then those attitudes lead to other people doing things that do directly hurt others. In fact, consider the store owner who put that meat in the dumpster. They find out a bunch of freegans are digging in the dumpster and taking that meat, sharing it with homeless people. Of course, they have concerns about liability should someone get sick from it, but what else is going through their mind? They are now thinking, “Hey, there are people out there who are benefiting from this, so while I previously felt guilty about all of this waste, now I don’t feel so guilty, and I don’t need to really worry about all those extra animals being killed for no reason”. Or the person uploading the video: “Hey, there are people out there who are benefiting from this, so while I previously felt guilty for this, now I don’t feel so guilty since my actions are leading to people enjoying themselves”. When it comes to freeganism, this is not hypothetical at all. Many stores (not as much in the US as in other countries) now donate their food waste to organizations which help the homeless. And if we think about the role this plays like a good anarchist, we can see that one of the main effects is not to help the homeless and marginalized, it is to make these people profiting off the exploitation of others feel good about themselves, to calm the ethical worries of people in power.

When you engage in freeganism, it’s not nearly as subversive as you think it is. It is playing into a system in which the exploitation of others can be excused as long the people by and large responsible for the exploitation are able to justify it by pointing at the benefit it brings to others. When you steal sweatshop-produced clothes from H&M, do you really think the CEO is then sitting there suddenly brought into awareness of the atrocities they are bringing about? Or are they sitting smugly, happy that even the most ardent of anarchists desire the products they helped bring into fruition?

Let’s move on from our non-consensual example. Even putting aside concerns with bad anarchist ideology, with consent, with exploitative systems, etc., what do you think the practical implications are of integrating dumpster meat into your diet? We know for a fact that many of your friends are not as serious about anarchism or freeganism or veganism as you might be. They are going to continue buying meat from those stores. Habits are hard to break. We don’t necessarily need to blame those people as individuals, any more than we need to blame a heroin addict for being addicted to heroin. But when you serve this dumpster meat to your friends, you are enforcing in their mind the idea that eating meat is OK more generally. They aren’t going to understand the subtle distinctions you make. They’ll see you wearing your H&M clothes, and then want to copy your style and go and buy it. They’ll see you eating meat and think it’s OK to treat animals as commodities. It would make a much stronger statement to burn those clothes rather than wear them.

Maybe it really is true that you aren’t treating that animal as a commodity when you eat it’s flesh, but it sure does not appear that way to other people, and so it enforces this ideology in other people. You are responsible for this. If you conceptualize anarchy as a struggle against oppressive institutions and ideologies, you should be taking visible steps to demonstrate to others how it is possible to live in a way that bucks these ideologies as much as possible, and being aware of public perception is just as important as having the inside of your own mind in order.

This brings us to one final point, the “no ethical consumption under capitalism” argument. If you are really a vegan, you probably already think this is a bullshit excuse for continuing to engage in the most extreme forms of vapid consumerism as if you “don’t really have a choice”. Some people living in food deserts just barely scraping by don’t have the choice to avoid buying products of the most horrible forms exploitation, but most people (and probably you) do have a choice. If you put your mind to it, you could probably find enough people to start a community garden together and grow your own food. Of course it’s a lot of work, but who says anarchists don’t need to work? When people use the phrase “no ethical consumption under capitalism”, this usually means that their espoused approach to anarchism is to exacerbate the problems with capitalism and other institutions, bring the problems to a head to build support for a complete overthrow of those systems. In other words, the first priority should be to tear down the system, and actually helping individuals should come second. People with this ideology often make arguments such as: “If you personally reduce your own harm, go off and live in your anarchist community and withdraw from broader society, this does nothing for the rest of the people still trapped by these systems. It doesn’t bring about the end to capitalism, it just removes the people most capable of bringing about the end of these systems from the front line”. There is some truth to this, but let’s be real, most people are using this ideology to justify continuing to engage and benefit from these systems without holding themselves accountable. What would you say of a purported anarchist that gets a job at a big bank and uses their power to screw over a bunch of poor people, claiming ostensibly to be trying incite popular revolt against the system? How would you view them in comparison to someone like Papas Fritas, the Chilean artist who snuck into the University of Mar and destroyed loan documents, freeing students from $500,000,000 worth of debt? If that anarchist banker was using all of their salary to help other people, and doing other actions which demonstrated their commitment, perhaps they would have a leg to stand on. But if they are taking advantage of their situation for their own personal benefit, while fucking over a bunch of vulnerable people in the short-term, in order to achieve some kind of mass revolt which likely won’t even happen, all while escaping legal responsibility, it’s really hard to justify.

More generally, a good anarchist should be trying to increase people’s ability to live outside of the system. They should be promoting non-hierarchical spaces. They should be supporting communities that reject corporate control. They shouldn’t be stealing the lunchbox of striking workers or dining on the flesh of exploited sentient beings. The idea that the only way to achieve anarchism is to first make things a whole lot worse for everyone is naive. Sure, there is good reason to be wary of encouraging the kinds of mild reforms that allow oppressive systems to continue by quelling the sense of rebellion and the will of the people to abolish those systems without making any real changes. But if you are taking this stance when it comes to reforms that might help others, you better not be a hypocrite and support such reforms when you stand to benefit personally from them.

Overall, you should probably learn some history. Changes which might be considered mere “reforms” in the short term have had a huge impact on individual liberty in the long-term. The Magna Carta was, at the time, merely a way for nobles to exert their own power in a monarchic system, something which many would view today as simply an agreement among the powerful to not screw each other over, hardly the kind of mass popular revolt anarchists might hope for. But look at the long term consequences: it has led to a much-weakened system in which the people have more power than ever before to remove their rulers and put them in prison if they so choose. Those reforms eventually led to a large amount of power being returned to the people. Now, it didn’t go all the way, and it ultimately enabled our global capitalist system where private power reigns supreme, which has its own problems. But to pretend that this was not progress is to be ignorant of reality. If the people of Britain so wanted, they could vote to abolish corporations altogether. They could vote to abolish the police. They could vote to abolish the entire capitalist system. The fact of the matter is that the majority of people simply don’t want those things to happen. If you bomb the police station, those people will go and build another police station, hiring even more police officers. If you burn down the treasury, those people will vote to create a new treasury and restore whatever debts existed. The reality of the situation is many of the people you aim to help are actively working to perpetuate the systems that essentially enslave them. To think that it’s a handful of wealthy and powerful oligarchs exerting control over a mass of unwilling people is just plain wrong. It can be refuted by sociological research. Most people participate willingly, and largely support these institutions, because they view them as necessary. The primary goal of an anarchist should be to demonstrate to these people that these institutions are not necessary, to offer them a real alternative. When they see freegan anarchist “vegans” eating meat out of the dumpster, those people are thinking, “Look, these people obviously can’t survive without the meat industry, without those big businesses on which they act as parasites. If we abolish those corporations, those anarchists are going to starve, because they don’t have any alternative. They are quite literally biting the hand the feeds them”. Prove those people fucking wrong!