∞ Let Them Eat Meat: Interview with an Ex-Vegan: Stella
Do you remember a specific turning point?
It was getting colder and I missed the fluffy, cloudlike duvets I’d had on my bed in the UK. I went to the store and looked at the astonishing array of them. I had to choose between real down and “artificial down,” and I couldn’t decide what the “right” thing to do was. (Of course the right thing to do in an ideal world wouldn’t involve me standing in a wide aisle under fluorescent lighting, looking at twenty different blankets produced in a Third World sweatshop, but I digress.)
The down duvet was out of the question; it was of death. It was made of the lives innocent birds, raised for their feathers and no doubt tortured throughout their short lives. On the other hand, looking at the artificial down duvets, I couldn’t ignore that they were made from polyester, which of course is a petroleum-derived industrial synthetic.
I debated myself: I want to keep warm. I do not have access to raw, organic, vegan fiber. I also do not have access to wild or sustainably farmed geese. I cannot afford to buy a blanket made from either of these sources anyway. An artificial down duvet, made of petroleum derivatives, has contributed to the destruction of whole ecosystems in the extraction process and has contributed to the deaths of potentially hundreds or thousands of individual animals (including humans) through oil spills, pipelines, wars for oil, industrial processing, industrial factory smoke, industrial wage slavery and, finally, transport in planes, trains, and automobiles. The down duvet of course caused all of this, too, as it is also an industrially-produced consumer product, plus it also resulted in the torture and deaths of the birds whose feathers are sewn inside.
I realized then that I’d been fooling myself regarding the magic of vegan consumer choices, and that I cannot escape the system of exploitation. I realized that in a healthy, natural, functioning ecosystem (or society), free of industrial exploitation, the best solution to my winter warmth problem would be to use feathers (or fur, or wool, or whatever material is supplied by my landbase). Unlike petroleum-based products, or huge quantities of mass-produced plant fibers requiring massive fertilization inputs (also derived from — you guessed it — petroleum!), feathers are a renewable resource.
Of course, like my vegan logic, this logic is working in a hypothetical universe. Like I said, I have no access to wild or humanely raised geese. But standing there in the blanket aisle, I realized that no matter how much I wanted it to be true, veganism was not and could never really be sustainable. Minus the industrial infrastructure, exploitation, and petroleum inputs, all these things I assumed enlightened future humans would rely upon in an enlightened vegan world would vanish: artificial down duvets, vinyl shoes, polar fleece North Face Jackets, soy candles, the lot of it.
So you bought the down duvet?
No, I bought the artificial one!
Baby steps.
this is amazing, a really insightful interview.
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