Freegan Practices Explainer and Open Letter to Vegan Advocates (New Channel Video)

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brimstoneSalad
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Re: Freegan Practices Explainer and Open Letter to Vegan Advocates (New Channel Video)

Post by brimstoneSalad »

Kind of hard to follow Liam's position.

So, he's advocating for kind of hard-line virtue ethics?
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Re: Freegan Practices Explainer and Open Letter to Vegan Advocates (New Channel Video)

Post by NonZeroSum »

brimstoneSalad wrote: Mon Jan 08, 2018 2:00 am Kind of hard to follow Liam's position.

So, he's advocating for kind of hard-line virtue ethics?
He's thrown out a lots of ideas, that inherent to the definition of veganism is that everyone holds a value/virtue of not consuming animals, that veganism is a counter-cultural response to carnism, that you're slipping back on the overton window of the cultural battle by consuming animals, that we should close ranks around that one uniqueness that makes us an in-group.

I thought I might try to address the conservative in-group and holding onto uniqueness more with Gary and Eisel. And I've got good quotes on this from ModVegan also.

I've just been posting bits and bobs to the forum, is it clearer in it's full here? (feel free to make edits on here or the wiki):
http://philosophicalvegan.com/wiki/index.php/Talk:Philosophical_Vegan_YouTube_Channel#Liam_Anthony_on_unnecessarily_exclusive_club.
So next up we’ve got Liam Anthony, his position is that if you plan to save food waste in the future then you're out of the club and shouldn't identify as vegan as a matter of rule-virtue that you would act like a cannibal. I think this represents the narrowing down of who can call themselves vegan on the ethical spectrum of interpretations of veganism.
. . .
Liam is trying to straddle both philosophies, intensely concerned with supply-demand, but seeing the social in-group as being something important enough to go through rituals like asking servers to change their gloves, and calling anyone a flake and not vegan if you 'exploit' the dead bodies not commercially viable anymore.

________

Script:
Doc: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1XHfcOyJBVyKcP3a3C3phrQ8OPOhdG78i
Wiki: http://philosophicalvegan.com/wiki/index.php/Talk:Philosophical_Vegan_YouTube_Channel#Freegan_Video

Sources:
Doc: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1nQhjrL-5A-hGQhT_y2VsYerUxDKhWGKH
Wiki: http://philosophicalvegan.com/wiki/index.php/Talk:Philosophical_Vegan_YouTube_Channel#Sources

____
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Re: Freegan Practices Explainer and Open Letter to Vegan Advocates (New Channel Video)

Post by NonZeroSum »

Yass! Amaze-balls video! Switching Mexie for APV in counter example to Francione then.

Radical Food Politics: Hunger is Political
https://youtu.be/BqE5YUOGK_g


Overview

So this is gonna be like my capitalism and the environment video where I do a broad overview and maybe I'll get into some other topics in follow-up videos but there's a lot to cover and a lot that could be said or talked about but yeah obviously I just have to pick a select few so I want to start by saying that how we understand a problem is incredibly important because the solutions that we come up with are going to relate directly to how we understand that problem for example if we think of hunger as something that is natural or that is totally disconnected from social political or economic processes or worse if we think that poor people can't access food because they don't deserve it or just that they've made bad choices then the solutions that we're going to propose are going to be things like food banks or charity where our notion of how to fix the problem is going to center around different ways to just try to get more calories to more vulnerable people instead of taking aim at the root causes of their poverty and vulnerability in the first place and trying to ensure that they're never in a position to go hungry again if we look at the root causes of poverty and insecurity and inability to access adequate food then our gaze has to turn directly to our capitalist political economic system policies that aim to free the markets reduce public spending and social safety nets liberalize trade in line with corporate interests and privatize and commodified food access and social rights contribute to the poverty that leaves many families unable to access adequate food in 2004 the UNDP reported that we were producing enough food globally to feed every single person on the planet at least 2,500 calories per day today on a global scale we are producing one-and-a-half times more food than is needed to feed literally everyone the problem is not scarcity it's not under production it's not even drought or calamity this is an issue of distribution and access and the priorities of the global and in this capitalist system only those with capital can access this vital necessity of life and up to 50% of the food in this world is wasted instead of being distributed to the millions of people going hungry in terms of priorities of the global market an enormous amount of soy grain and corn are being grown and diverted to feeding cattle and other livestock on food Lots instead of hungry people as we talked about in our first podcast episode food is literally being taken out of the mouths of hungry people to feed the unsustainable global meat industry for wealthy buyers capitalism as a system reproduces itself through the very fact that we all need food to live that sticking point is capitalism's gotcha because we've allowed food to be considered as a commodity and so those of us who don't own the means of production which is pretty much everyone 99% of people we have to sell our labor for a wage in order to buy food and due to the kind of super exploitation that is made possible by this political economic framework particularly a neoliberal framework working two jobs three jobs working 16 hours a day doesn't even guarantee that you'll have enough money to access adequate food if we think of food as a commodity that people don't deserve access to then we're essentially letting society and governments off the hook they don't have to ensure the welfare of their people they don't have to ensure that people aren't starving in the streets this is 100% in support of a neoliberal economic agenda charity can actually be a way for the welfare state to be rolled back because charity will come in as a flanking mechanism and allow the state to just wither away and not pay attention to whether people are accessing food or not well things like food banks and charity are good in the sense that they help desperate people in the short term first of all they tend to stigmatize poverty and stigmatize people who need to access them and they do nothing to challenge the capitalist structures liberalisation deregulation privatization and financialization that leave people in desperate states to begin with and they do not challenge the understanding of food as a commodity and not as a social right it supports and reinforces the status quo of inequality and it sets up a situation where people will only get if wealthy elites are benevolent enough to donate according to poppendieck this ideology of volunteerism obscures the fundamental destruction of rights it's not an accident that poverty grows deeper as their charitable responses to it multiply the growth of kindness the decline of justice are intimately intertwined Eric Holt gimen is in his new book a foodies guide to capitalism does an excellent job at detailing how the relationship between capitalism and our food system is leading to a number of latent crises and contradictions which are all excited to get worse as major agribusiness companies seek out new markets and avenues for growth I definitely don't have time to go into everything that he talks about in this video so I really recommend reading this book it's wonderful but he discusses Agriculture's role in dispossession and in primitive accumulation and the start of capitalism and as we talked about in the structural adjustment video flooding the market with similar crops makes the price drop and then farmers who have been convinced through various programs to grow cash crops and abandoned agro ecology or subsistence agriculture they must produce more and more and more just to make up for those losses but of course the more they produce the more the market is flooded and the more the price drops he discusses the example of the Great Depression where you had lines and lines of people lining up to get bread even while so much wheat was rotting in the silos overproduction in the north was used as a battering ram to open up grain markets in the global south to the detriment of unsubsidized farmers in the south who cannot compete we have major corporations like Monsanto in charge of all of our seeds now locking farmers into contractual servitude and leading to a number of suicides the huge industrial mono crop harvesting is horrible for the environment and yields but thanks to competition between firms companies are forced to increase use of more and more chemicals and fertilizers just to keep their yields from dropping too much each year it's been predicted even that our soils only have about 60 years of farming left if soil degradation continues apace anyway there is a wealth of information in there that I suggest to you explore but he really demonstrates that we aren't going to get anywhere meaningful with a capitalist approach or within a capitalist framework approaches like devising new GM seeds are trying to inject more nutrition into the crops that we already have or trying to make drought resistant seeds etc to increase yields aren't going to actually solve the problem because the problem is not one of under production we already over produce we already produce one and a half times more than we need so producing more and putting more and more strain on our Earth's systems and on our soils is not going to solve the problems of distribution or private land and property regimes or financial speculation on agricultural land that is causing these problems reducing and redistributing a food waste is a good idea that should be done we should be doing that obviously but even these kind of strategies do not get at the heart of the system which is making work increasingly precarious and making it more and more difficult for people to actually make a living and earn living wages in order to access food


Examples of campaigns pushing back

So I'm gonna turn now to a few examples of organizations and movements that are trying to decommodification around food access food production food distribution so I'm going to start by describing three which are Via Campesina, Food Not Bombs and freeganism and the Black Panther party's free breakfast program for kids and then I'll conclude by discussing to what extent I think that these ideas are going to be transformative


Via Campesina

so let Via Campesina is an international movement that grew out of Latin America which coordinates peasant organizations of small and middle scale producers agricultural workers rural women and indigenous communities from Asia Africa America and Europe it advocates for land reform peasant rights women's and indigenous peoples rights and against capitalism free trade and transnational agribusiness they were very large and well-known well organized movement that holds international conferences and seeks to forge an alternative to the colonial capitalist food system that dispossessed the people from their land through land grabs we're just undercutting local production they're fighting to maintain peasant seeds as well and not allow companies like Monsanto to gain a monopoly on seeds and associated pesticides and finally there's a strong focus on food sovereignty Food Not Bombs is a growing direct action social movement working to de-commodify food and challenge the charity model.


Food Not Bombs and Freeganism

Food Not Bombs shares food free of charge but not as a gift as a means of asserting and fulfilling array there are over 500 autonomous chapters throughout the world and each chapter is unique so their range of action can be broad typically they glean produce if they can get it from local stores that be throwing away or dumpster diving could be used as well and then activists will cook the food and set it up and share it with whoever wants or needs any they share pamphlets and information on political economy mutual aid and what they're all about they try to break the charity model by inviting people who eat the food to contribute to gleaning cooking and logistics as well thus truly creating mutuality and growing the movement to include more and more people dedicated to the seeker modified way of accessing and sharing food what I also like is they mostly serve vegan food unless of course they've gleaned something that is not fully being and of course they will serve it freeganism is quite similar freegans will dumpster dive and then organize to share food or whatever else they have acquired like toiletries or clothing or school supplies or whatever they are able to glean from non commodified sources
it's a combinations of the word free and vegan both living freely free from the oppression of a wage slave economy and free in that you're not paying for things not participating in a money economy freeganism does not equal dumpster diving there's freegans who don't dumpster dive there's people who garden people who wild forage people can grow their food and there's lots of dumpster divers who aren't freedom we're not just opting out participating in the economy on a purchasing level but for many of us were opting out in the you know standard work a nine-to-five job level
I'm not sure if there is necessarily the same focus on growing the movement and you know sharing information on political economy but they do seek to D commodify food access and to not contribute to the exploitation of either animals or humans


Black Panther party's free breakfast program

the Black Panther party's free breakfast for schoolchildren program was part of their revolutionary praxis they understood that inadequate access to food and black communities was keeping them down once again relying on mutual aid they understood that social reproduction at the community level was necessary for more widespread liberation through evolutionary practice and thought to create the conditions for liberation from the ground up according to E Cleaver a prominent black panther reference for children pulls people out of the system and organizes them into an alternative black children who go to school hungry each morning have been organized into their poverty and the panther program liberate s-- them frees them from this aspect of poverty this is liberation in practice this was actually the model and the impetus for all federally funded school breakfast programs in existence within the u.s. today


Conclusion

in my opinion even though programs like these are not going to shatter the bedrock of capitalism I still think that they are vitally important and especially vitally important in trying to build an eco socialist future speaking again about prefigurative politics it's vitally important that we actually get out in practice forging alternative social relations and forging new networks and new ways of conceptualizing you know what food production and distribution and access should look like and in terms of growing a movement I think that there is something so powerful about actually showing people our politics like it's easy to stay out loud you know we want a world where children aren't going hungry and where people have access to food as a social right and not as a commodity you know you can say that but it's another thing to actually get out there and show people this is what we're about if you want food if you want liberation then we're the ones with the vision we're the ones who want to make that a reality

and in terms of you know prefiguring environmental outcomes that we want to see I think it's awesome that things like Food Not Bombs and the freaking movement are thinking already about moving towards plant-based eating plant-based production and distribution of food and not be completely unsustainable and absurdly gross exploitative global meat industry

at the same time of course foraging spaces that are kind of on the outskirts of capitalism or foraging places where people can access things in a Deek modified way doesn't actually you know creating new alternative markets is not the same as changing the market structure that we're living in and the strategies of something like Food Not Bombs for example or freeganism this actually relies on the greater neoliberal capitalist model to produce the food to over produce the food and produce this you know waste that's able to them D gleaned and redistribute it in a new way

so there are a lot of layers to this but I think obviously we should not get too wrapped up in the idea of community or kind of cutting ourselves off from the broader economy and not actually make sure to also simultaneously take aim at austerity and neoliberalism and the global capitalist structures themselves that are producing all of these problems and can and will continue to produce them if we do not fundamentally shatter them I would love to hear what you think or if you have any examples of other really awesome radical food projects that are starting to forge these new relations and challenge these broader structures.
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Re: Freegan Practices Explainer and Open Letter to Vegan Advocates (New Channel Video)

Post by NonZeroSum »

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So had a funny voice chat with Liam Anthony the other night over 2 or 3 hours in discord. I'll try to give a short summary here, then might work some of it into the video script.

There was lots of jokes and we kept light-hearted, but was still pretty frustrating that I felt like had to give my whole life's history just to humanize myself, that I wasn't an addicted blood sucker. And only got him on board with what freeganism actually was half way in, as in not full time occupation that you have to practice every single action and not participate in normal society at all. Then felt he carried on arguing against it in the same way, using the same examples, basically trying to say it's something irrelevant or evil or both.

Timeline:

So at some point he tried to use name the trait on me for a parallel universe in which you can recover black slave’s bodies from dumpsters at the end of immoral commercial process, then disabled people.
- I basically came to the social capital/organ-farm answer; that it can make our lives worse knowing that could happen to us, same with our children who were born disabled. So it would be a moral wrong to practice that. We would want to legislate against voluntary cannibalism, which I'm sure we already do in practice, but universally in a different way to freegan nonhuman animal products, like how we wouldn't give nonhuman animals the right to vote. Even if we wish to make all animal harm illegal, because we don't have the numbers yet, so we can say it would never work if we tried to enforce it tomorrow.
Someone in the chat said which Liam agreed with that freeganism sounds like a welfarist approach, not abolitionist because people are experiencing a level of nutritional harm only associated with the exploiting diet, therefore still in the culture of harming animals?
- I said before that I support junk vegan food eating for the same reason as freegan food, freedom of choice and easier transition. That we simply look for ways to regulate industry to make healthy products cheaper, reduce unhealthy food advertising and access to kids, etc.

- Also heard today Francione denounced Anonymous for the Voiceless, for people possibly going away from the street activism feeling like meat eating would be alright if not for the type of slaughter conditions. I just think it’s a really far reach, if people there are educating on why the ethics say to buy vegan, same as at the freegan events.
Stayed on addiction and freegans not giving up the taste pallet
- I talked about how squeamishness can be a good thing, but shouldn’t shame people who just don’t happen to have that.
- I drew the comparison with programs for quitting smoking, where on day one they empty bags full of cigarettes in front of you, to show you the abundance, so that your brain stops worrying about running out. And how freeganism can actually have the same effect of re-aligning the value of junk food, getting rid of low level addictions, when you see the mountains of packaged baked goods, croissants and donuts produced that day in the shop, stacked in a mountain all in front of you, you know you can get that sugar crash whenever you like, you stop seeing it as such a hot option.
We kept going back to why I see freeganism as good, why would it make sense to label me carnist or vegetarian and not vegan/freegan if not contributing and advocating for end of animal agriculture.
- I brought up lab grown meat, how it just makes sense to grant these two exceptions, so the ethical vegan definition can be air-tight, and bring in environmentalists who have been doing these practices since the 60s, to critique animal agriculture's harmful and wasteful commercialization in society. How otherwise veganism becomes a dogma, that isn’t concerned with the ethics that is far reaching and relates to humans wellbeing also.
Oh yeah, he brought up the comparison of could it be vegan to work in a slaughterhouse.
I admitted I did have some sympathy for the idea of being able to report from the inside, if it was a job they'd certainly be able to find someone else to take. But I said in reality, I'd never be able to do it. Just an interesting thought experiment on whether determinism would make it okay.

That's all I can remember for now, will tweet Liam to see if can prod him one last time for his take. Would be interested to get other's thoughts.

This is where the never ending video script's up to, I should get on recording, just unnerving creating first on camera narrated video:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cAfXiyNASC_C0lwrnaqvpookNg2CbpAQAG2d-YwSQtY/

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Last edited by NonZeroSum on Sat Mar 17, 2018 4:20 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Freegan Practices Explainer and Open Letter to Vegan Advocates (New Channel Video)

Post by brimstoneSalad »

NonZeroSum wrote: Fri Mar 16, 2018 5:17 pm That's all I can remember for now, will tweet Liam to see if can prod him one last time for his take. Would be interested to get other's thoughts.
Sure, the only thing I think you were wrong on is the part about eating humans.

You're right about the disability part (which could happen to anybody), but maybe not about the race one.

If it were the context of a society of X looking people eating Y looking people, that's a barrier that would relieve social concern people might have about it happening to them.
I don't like to make race comparisons, but let's say we were a society of red heads and we enslaved and ate anybody with dark hair. With two recessive red hair gene copies in anybody who was a free member of society, there's zero risk of being enslaved and eaten yourself or having it happen to your children (unless you mate with a slave). Because there's a clear barrier there, it can prevent that aspect of social concern that would otherwise be a compelling argument against it. Such a barrier exists with animals, and could in theory exist with other humans if there were such a clear means of differentiation.
NonZeroSum wrote: Fri Mar 16, 2018 5:17 pm This is where the never ending video script's up to, I should get on recording, just unnerving creating first on camera narrated video:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cAfXiyNASC_C0lwrnaqvpookNg2CbpAQAG2d-YwSQtY/

---
Yeah, if you're willing to be on camera, you kind of just have to do it and try not to second guess or worry. I know it's not easy.
I can't wait to see it!
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Re: Freegan Practices Explainer and Open Letter to Vegan Advocates (New Channel Video)

Post by NonZeroSum »

brimstoneSalad wrote: Sat Mar 17, 2018 1:36 am Sure, the only thing I think you were wrong on is the part about eating humans.

You're right about the disability part (which could happen to anybody), but maybe not about the race one.

If it were the context of a society of X looking people eating Y looking people, that's a barrier that would relieve social concern people might have about it happening to them.
I don't like to make race comparisons, but let's say we were a society of red heads and we enslaved and ate anybody with dark hair. With two recessive red hair gene copies in anybody who was a free member of society, there's zero risk of being enslaved and eaten yourself or having it happen to your children (unless you mate with a slave). Because there's a clear barrier there, it can prevent that aspect of social concern that would otherwise be a compelling argument against it. Such a barrier exists with animals, and could in theory exist with other humans if there were such a clear means of differentiation.
Sure I understand, so social capital plus the golden rule. I want to respect their right to object, and see more social capital for all in that society. And whether or not I practice the nonhuman animal products rescuing part of what it can mean to be freegan, I still want to get to the future virtuous society where we no longer have to be confronted with the objects at the end of an industry of harm.
brimstoneSalad wrote: Sat Mar 17, 2018 1:36 am
NonZeroSum wrote: Fri Mar 16, 2018 5:17 pm This is where the never ending video script's up to, I should get on recording, just unnerving creating first on camera narrated video:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cAfXiyNASC_C0lwrnaqvpookNg2CbpAQAG2d-YwSQtY/

---
Yeah, if you're willing to be on camera, you kind of just have to do it and try not to second guess or worry. I know it's not easy.
I can't wait to see it!
Many thanks for all the encouragement and advice!
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