There isn’t any kind of justified reason to broadly dislike veganism though many people do. I get that sometimes vegans are preachy or annoying, but that’s the case with a noisy percentage of every diet. Vegan, keto, gluten-free, even the “standard” (it isn’t) Western meat-heavy omnivorous diet–there’s not really any difference between “uh, actually I’m vegan,” and a person who eats meat regularly complaining about how annoying people that don’t are to them, even when none that they know of are in their presence.
What really frustrates me is how much antipathy people have for veganism and vegetarianism, which while not necessarily everyone’s cup of tea, don’t negatively impact the world in any meaningful way. Meanwhile, organic farming movements, as nice as the idea sounds, are actually pretty bad for the planet. Organic farming is, at best, an appeal to antiquity. The horrifying reality is, if we farmed the way we farmed even 100 years ago, far more people would be starving now than there are. Yet, despite this fact, “going organic” is considered an unquestionable Mainstream Good Thing.
I understand the notion that natural is better, but no farming is natural, ever. Between 50 and 30 thousand years ago our distant ancestors started unnaturally selecting plants and that was it. That’s when we started interfering with the natural process of things, we started to change the world to make it better for us, but it also means that we are reducing the biodiversity of the planet, which significantly increases the risk that we’ll lose the ability to feed ourselves. It could be a mutation in a common mold, or a sudden change in animal behavior triggered by climate change, there’s all kinds of things that could knock a massive hole in the human food supply and the only way we can protect ourselves from it is with tools like genetic engineering and industrialized farming.
I’m not saying that people should be cheering on pesticides and huge agribusiness. Monsanto and their ilk are almost entirely amoral corporations that nobody should be cheering for, and who don’t care about sustaining the human race beyond their own skin and profits. We need the technologies that they are gatekeeping, but we don’t need, and sure as hell don’t want them to be the keepers of it. That technology belongs to humans, not specific ones, all of them, and cannot be chained to capitalism because there will be cases where something seems completely safe, but then we find out they aren’t and we have to stop using them immediately. Things like neonicotinoid pesticides, when originally developed, were supposed to be safer for the environment. It turns out they’re probably seriously interfering with bees, which puts the entire world’s food supply in danger. If we are working collaboratively rather than to turn a profit, that’s challenging, but doable. With capitalism making the calls, anything that might result in less profit, is suppressed, contested, buried, whatever.
What I am saying is that it’s far more hypocritical to support organic farming than it is to hate something that’s probably a net zero or net positive for the environment and survivability of the human race (vegans and vegetarians). At worst, a vegan or vegetarian might be kind of annoying to some people, some of the time. At best organic farming is mildly safer for people and the water table, and generally not meaningfully better in terms of quality or taste. Sometimes organic foods are claimed to taste better or be more nutritious, but the first is entirely subjective, and neither hold up meaningfully when tested. In pretty much anything other than that best case scenario, organic farming is wasteful, produces more carbon and more waste, produces less viable product, and is far more susceptible to pathogens and less tolerant of environmental change.
With things like selective breeding and genetic modification, we don’t have to wait for things to adapt. With genetic engineering especially, don’t have to rely on being able to create a hybrid cultivar that is resistant to changes with just the genes available in current cultivars. We can go in and specifically fix things. It’s risky right now, but it’s considerably less risky than it was a decade ago, and less risky then than it was a decade before that, and prior to that it was “impossible.” These are the tools we’ll need to survive the next 200 years, and they’ll likely become non-optional faster than you’d expect.
…Of course the real interesting twist to all of this is that lots of the angry carnivores, “bad” vegans/vegetarians (that chose the way of life to use as some sort of moral superiority cudgel), and organic-only proponents are all pretty much drawing from the same psychological well. Angry carnivores complain about vegans/vegetarians and call them weak and annoying to feel superior to them, also being able to afford lots of meat is a class status symbol. “Bad” vegans/vegetarians who chastise strangers and call their friends and family monsters are rarely doing so out of a deeply-valued sense of inter-species equality, and more because being a vegan/vegetarian is–at least for a lot of people–also a class status symbol. (I add that to differentiate between people who can only afford things like beans, rice, and lentils or who eat that way for heritage, religious, or cultural reasons from the generally affluent white people who choose to eat that way to feel superior to others) Organic-only advocates? That’s a class status symbol too. Organic food is expensive, spoils faster, and tends to be smaller. So basically, when you filter for just the worst advocates of any of the three (there’s certainly crossover in this Venn diagram too, of course) most of them end up not really caring so much about the thing they’re browbeating you over, and are instead just interested in the way it makes them feel superior to others, and how it communicates class/status to anyone who might be around.
Anyway, as for the Food magazine editor. Dude, your job is to make sure that stupid shit doesn’t get printed, and based on this incident, I rather suspect you’re terrible at your job.
