I wish I could give you a super clear answer but that’s not realistic for me lol
Maybe this would help: The reason I said something here was because I saw someone who I thought might just have not seen the rules. I’m not trying to give people a hard time.
I don’t think I see an argument for it being beneficial to the community to name brands in the title or body of the OP, unprompted. If someone asks, that’s at least a prompt that makes sense to me.
Unsolicited personal opinion: I do think it’s important for people to understand that some ‘vegan’ products were developed through direct harm to animals. It’s good to have a little think about what you are choosing to buy and why.
I’m an ethical vegan, I should say, so I treat my veganism as a form of boycott to create pressure and deny profits from animal agriculture, particularly large-scale, cruel industrial animal ag. So I have hang-ups about lots of vegan products and the animal deaths and harm involved.
Gardein especially bothers me because they are a brand owned by ConAgra (one of the major conglomerates responsible for animal ag operations), so I feel like buying vegan products from them is essentially bypassing the ethical boycott entirely. It’s less relevant to me that the product I buy is not made of animals or whether I am eating animal products (i.e. the diet aspect is irrelevant), and it’s much more important to me that I engage in a critical consumerism that denies companies money for their unethical practices.
To that end, I consider labor concerns and human suffering as just as legitimate or even more important (considering human capacity for suffering, and humans are animals as well of course) as concerns about the suffering of non-human animals.
Admittedly this led me to some extremes like refusing to use a car in a very car-centric place that consistently landed me in emergency rooms, and I’ve been sorta de-radicalizing since a particularly bad time that I was hit by a car. I’ve been trying to put my moral feelings into perspective more.
I certainly think most if not all consumption can be tied to an extreme form of wrong-doing, and what-aboutism is a fallacy that doesn’t give us an excuse for not taking seriously those harms. That said, I have not been able to live as extremely as I would like to mitigate my personal participation in those harms, and the moderate actions I took ended not just in extreme discomfort and inconvenience but significant and permanent harm to me.
So I am trying to give myself a little grace and recognize that my responsibility as an individual consumer is proportionate, and that I am not singularly responsible for the harms of an industry I did not create nor do I support. So now I try to do what I can where it is helpful, but to engage in self-care as well because otherwise I seem to lean towards dying, which apparently causes other people distress in my life.
I wish I could give you a super clear answer but that’s not realistic for me lol
Maybe this would help: The reason I said something here was because I saw someone who I thought might just have not seen the rules. I’m not trying to give people a hard time.
I don’t think I see an argument for it being beneficial to the community to name brands in the title or body of the OP, unprompted. If someone asks, that’s at least a prompt that makes sense to me.
Unsolicited personal opinion: I do think it’s important for people to understand that some ‘vegan’ products were developed through direct harm to animals. It’s good to have a little think about what you are choosing to buy and why.
That’s OK, I think your answer is pretty clear.
I’m an ethical vegan, I should say, so I treat my veganism as a form of boycott to create pressure and deny profits from animal agriculture, particularly large-scale, cruel industrial animal ag. So I have hang-ups about lots of vegan products and the animal deaths and harm involved.
Gardein especially bothers me because they are a brand owned by ConAgra (one of the major conglomerates responsible for animal ag operations), so I feel like buying vegan products from them is essentially bypassing the ethical boycott entirely. It’s less relevant to me that the product I buy is not made of animals or whether I am eating animal products (i.e. the diet aspect is irrelevant), and it’s much more important to me that I engage in a critical consumerism that denies companies money for their unethical practices.
To that end, I consider labor concerns and human suffering as just as legitimate or even more important (considering human capacity for suffering, and humans are animals as well of course) as concerns about the suffering of non-human animals.
Admittedly this led me to some extremes like refusing to use a car in a very car-centric place that consistently landed me in emergency rooms, and I’ve been sorta de-radicalizing since a particularly bad time that I was hit by a car. I’ve been trying to put my moral feelings into perspective more.
I certainly think most if not all consumption can be tied to an extreme form of wrong-doing, and what-aboutism is a fallacy that doesn’t give us an excuse for not taking seriously those harms. That said, I have not been able to live as extremely as I would like to mitigate my personal participation in those harms, and the moderate actions I took ended not just in extreme discomfort and inconvenience but significant and permanent harm to me.
So I am trying to give myself a little grace and recognize that my responsibility as an individual consumer is proportionate, and that I am not singularly responsible for the harms of an industry I did not create nor do I support. So now I try to do what I can where it is helpful, but to engage in self-care as well because otherwise I seem to lean towards dying, which apparently causes other people distress in my life.