Opinion: As a White Man in Africa, I'm Embarrassed by Vegan Rhetoric

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Opinion: As a White Man in Africa, I'm Embarrassed by Vegan Rhetoric

1/6/2020

By Seth Itzkan

As a white man in Africa, I'm embarrassed by the fundamentally racist and elitist rhetoric of the vegan movement leaders and their backers in the emerging high-tech, high-finance, chemical dependent, and utterly soil-carbon-depleting, fake-food industry - e.g. Bill Gates, Pat Brown, George Monbiot, Leonardo DiCaprio, etc. Their colossal misdirection to expressly end all animal agriculture is not only a ploy to turn food and food production into vertically-integrated intellectual property (IP) in the model of software, it also expands reliance on life-destroying monocrops, hastens the end of food sovereignty, and implies the inevitable extinction of pastoral people, including our friends, the Maasai. Stand with me as we stand against this horror. Stand with soil. Stand with animal agriculture. Stand with a future to believe in. Thank you.

7 Comments

Robert East link

3/11/2020 08:19:29 am

Couldn't agree more! Despite pressures from a globalized economy and abundant "green missionaries", the Maasai and other ethnic groups in Kenya are trying to maintain food production systems based on biological rather than industrial models. Full disclosure: I have long-standing personal ties to the region, particularly my wife of 33 years who is from western Kenya. I hope to connect my undergrad students to your work on a future field course.

Mo Markham

9/12/2020 04:30:48 pm

Disgusting. Stand with animal agriculture? What the hell is that? To reduce a movement based on compassion for animals, people and the planet to financial gain, you REALLY need to stretch. To blame vegans for monocrops when you know damn well most monocrops are being fed to farmed animals in factory farms? What garbage. Read Grazed and Confused, a PDF report out of Oxford university and numerous other well-respected universities and institutions across the world. They looked at more than 40,000 free-range farms across the world. The conclusion? We do NOT have time for animal agriculture. We're not attacking a small tribe living off the land. We're attacking a multi-billion dollar global industry that is undeniably killing the planet.

Paula

9/12/2020 11:49:25 pm

Well said Mo! Agree with you.

Mary Sarumi

9/13/2020 03:31:18 am

We said Mo, and don't forget meat used to be eaten very little in the past and people did fine without it.

Suzanne Castello

1/2/2021 07:27:01 am

Please step back a little. My husband and I are farmers, and the issue is not as black and white as you make it. Our land only started to regenerate and breathe when we started to graze on our crop ground. One has to consider the ecosystem that preceded agriculture. The closer one gets to replicating that ecosystem, the closer one gets to doing right by the land. There is no such thing as an ecosystem of only plants. We farm on what once was prairies where the dominant force was large ruminants, namely, Bison. By grazing our cattle in a way that replicates the Bison's impact on the land we have restored native species, and increased the biology in our soil. In many landscapes farming row crops (such as grains and beans) would be a crime to the earth. Grazing sheep and goats (both ruminants) is the best use of such land as long as they is responsibly grazed. Land is not a generic concept. All ecosystems must be considered separately. Thank you.

RayK

9/13/2020 06:28:24 pm

As a white man in Africa, Seth, you should be embarrassed by our race's swindle called colonialism. If your reason for being in Africa is to share your white man wisdom, just stop. If you think animal agriculture isn't a global problem you may have gone too deep into Africa; get in touch.

https://ourworldindata.org/land-use

Banks

12/1/2020 07:43:51 am

Couldn't agree more, the great white savior narrative is all Seth knows, it's disgusting and harmful. His perception of reality is so skewed, the only.thing that's more disturbing is he somehow has well intentioned but clueless people following him without any critical thinking of their own. Check out the WRI report on regenerative agriculture and soil carbon sequestration and you will realize how wrong his claims are.

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