r/Glasgow Tools

I was vegan for 10 years and a raw vegan for 18 months and I tried to live as ethically as possible and got more into the ethics.

Now I’m not.
Circumstances changed and I’m not.
I’ve failed the cause.

But one thing I learned when I was vegan, that you can’t win.

The world is built on exploitation.

A lot of vegan food is also seeped in contradictions.
Coconut products are farmed by slave monkeys who are tied to vans with chains. The ones that aren’t are so expensive that only rich people could afford them. Also this goes for ALL coconut products. So if you buy Lush Coconut Shampoo, depending on how they get the coconut products, they could be supporting this, but you think you are doing well because you bought from an “ethical” brand - and this also applies to fair trade goods. Fair trade goods only need to have 1 fair trade ingredient to be considered fair trade. So the the vanilla bean paste in chocolate may be fair trade, but the cacao isn’t, or the sugar etc but that product still gets the fair trade banner.

Avocado products require a lot of farm land to grow.
Cacao/coffee products often farmed by slaves, or such cheap labor.

Quinoa demand caused such pressure on Quinoa farmers to meet, that the had to use more land to farm the quinoa grains that rich vegans want. At one point to cope with the demand, quinoa was priced at about €13 per 500g.

Vegans do not like to acknowledge the demand that the have on the world’s resources too. (I was one of them, and I was blissfully ignorant of how harmful these things are too, because the sound of my own righteous lifestyle deafened me to the plights of the world that I WAS RESPONSIBLE FOR )

A lot of machine parts are made by slave children. Your mobile phone or computer or electrics in your house probably have parts that were sources from China and made by slaves, underpaid workers.

Tesla cars, marketed as the most eco car, mines lithium to the point it’s still costly. Who mines lithium? Well, poor people in Africa.

Basically the trajectory, if you wish to live as ethically as possible and don’t wish to harm anyone is to become a breathtarian, and live in an off-grid mud hut, and only shower once a year...

But you know what?
I live my comforts. And I’m a shot person because I eat animal products now, and I get that. There’s literally nothing I can say that’s redeeming about that. And I struggle with the guilt everyday.

But I had to do what was right for me.
And that changed my life.

And yeah, that’s totally selfish of me.

But yeah, just my 2 cents