From: ra-AT-alor.univ-montp3.fr (Ronald Creagh, Moderator, Research on Anarchism List)
Date: 13 Feb 1997 08:20:29 UTC   (04:20:29 AM in author's locale)
To: ra-l-AT-bred.univ-montp3.fr

Date: Wed, 12 Feb 1997 17:34:10 -0330 (NST)
>From: Alka Chandna <ac-AT-math.mun.ca>
Dear Harald (and others),
> >From: Harald Beyer-Arnesen <haraldba-AT-sn.no>
> How to you argue with people who consider most of humanity throughout
> history as equal to Nazis? Can you get any further away from anarchism?
As anarchists, our focus is on human *potential*, not human reality.
Even confined to a strictly *human* space, it doesn't take that much
knowledge of history to observe that the reality - involving every type
of wide scale oppression - is very sobering. As anarchists through
history, we have continued to speak out against oppression, and have
occassionally triumphed. I don't think that saying: "sexism is rampant"
is "getting away from anarchism." It's painting the world as it exists.
In a like manner, the world created by the collective efforts of uncaring
humans for the animals with whom we supposedly share this planet is
hellish. This is a fact. If you don't believe me, visit a
slaughterhouse, visit a factory farm, visit a cosmetic-testing animal
laboratory, go to the training centres for animals in circuses, go to a
zoo. The possibilities for education are endless.
Just because I say that the world sucks, and that our species' collective
treatment of other beings sucks, doesn't mean that I'm betraying my
anarchist sentiments. On the contrary, it's because I'm an anarchist,
and because I believe that in smaller communities where people feel
empowered, they are apt to take responsibility, and act compassionately,
that I do any kind of activist work.
>
> Alka wrote: "Well, I do know plenty of people who are on social assistance,
> but who are vegan. But this debate is really about the
> ethics around food choices. You just have to look at an organization
> like Food not Bombs (which is exclusively vegetarian, and increasingly
> vegan) to witness the politics between food choices and hunger."
>
> If this means what it sounds like, then we are really back to the
> days of the missionaries, or the Maoist, where you have sacred
> right to enforce your sacred views and practices on others. If it
> is right as you write that Food Not Bombs has made this choice ON THE BEHALF
> OF those in need of the food they give out, then god bless the far less
> authoritarian Salvation Army. Presuming I have understood you right and your
> information is correct, maybe Food not Bombs should change their name to
> Vegan or No Food.
>
You've entirely missed the point here, Harald. Let's try this again. You
don't have to be vegetarian or vegan to participate in the Food not Bombs
distribution of food. It's just that the food that's distributed is
strictly vegetarian (and as I said, increasingly vegan). Why is this, you
ask? Well, because food choices are a political issue, and hunger is a
political issue. The choice to have meat/animal products is, for most
people who *make* this choice (consciously or not) loaded with political
implications. Eating high on the food chain is, as a result of simple
biology, extremely inefficient. Throw factory farming into the equation
and you're talking *disasterously* inefficient. Marie Antoinette's
oft-quoted remark, indicating the ultimate in being out of touch, "Have
they no cake?" could be updated for our times to read, "Have they no
meat?" No, the poor have no meat, and too often, the poor have no food.
If you want to maximize your resources to feed the maximum number of
people, you feed people bread and lentils and potatoes and rice. These
*are* the staples of the majority of the world's people. Food not Bombs
chooses to reflect our reality of a world with limited resources by
serving vegetarian/vegan foods.
Hope this clarifies things.
Cheers,
alka

"The crises of our planet-time, whether viewed in military or ecological or
social terms, result from a dysfunctional and pathogenic concept of self. It
is a mistake about our place in the order of things. It is the delusion that
the self is so separate and fragile that we must delineate and defend its
boundaries, that it is so small and needy that we must endlessly acquire and
endlessly consume, that it is so aloof that we can - as individuals,
corporations, nation-states or as a species - be immune to what we do to other
beings." -- Joanna Macy, _Awakening to the Ecological Self_

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Moderator/Moderador/Moderateur : Ronald Creagh
Co-Moderator : John P. Clark
e-mail : rcreagh-AT-alor.univ-montp3.fr
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