Beyonce recently launched a
new campaign to promote veganism and make changing to a vegan diet easy. It
involves signing up to having vegan (and healthy, and organic, and GMO-free,
etc.) meals delivered to your door, ideally over a three week period consisting
of three meals a day. The reasoning is that it takes 21 days to kick a habit,
so the plan provides for your food needs for those 21 days. While there are
several options available, from one meal a day and one week to the full three
meals and three weeks, the most comprehensive option would cost around $600.
There’s a lot that’s troubling with campaigns like this, but
I want to focus here on the class politics of it and how it works to exclude a
great many from veganism being taken seriously as an alternative to meat and
dairy production and consumption. Without wanting to disparage Beyonce (she’s a
role model for many and I’m sure does a lot of good on those grounds, and
anyway I would guess that her involvement is about as extensive as it is in her
perfume line), promoting a food plan which would cost around $800 a month
(extrapolated from $600 for three weeks) is, I think, very problematic.
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| Kale, the Beyonce of vegetables according to some. Image source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kale#mediaviewer/File:Kale-Bundle.jpg |
Average US salaries are estimated
at around $3000 a month after tax. Minimum costs are estimated at around $1500 not including food,
so on the average income a single adult could comfortable afford the $800 a
month food bill. It’s still about $550 more than the minimum food bill but they
could manage it.
However, because of incredibly high incomes for the top
earners in the country, the average wage and above only
covers some 40% of the population, with the rest earning below $3000 a
month. To be able to pay $800 a month on food, on top of minimal expenses on
things like rent, transport and healthcare, a single person would need to earn
around $2300, which still excludes 45% of the population.
On a federal
minimum wage, which would bring in just $1200 a month and represents about
30% of the US population, $800 on food would be completely impossible. Add to
this the fact that Hispanics
and African Americans typically earn 28.5% and 22% less than white Americans
respectively, and you can see how absurd an £800 a month food bill is for
huge sections of the population. And this doesn’t even begin to consider
families with childcare, education and added healthcare costs.
So while a vegan food plan like Beyonce’s might sound nice,
it targets itself at an exclusive group of high earners and excludes huge
numbers of Americans. If veganism is to become a realistic alternative it needs
to be made just that, realistic, to people on low incomes. And it’s no good
saying that incomes should be raised so that everyone can afford such a
lifestyle. Of course incomes need to be raised, but that has to happen at the
same time as food-related practices being made more sustainable and less
damaging to animal life.
This is perhaps one of the biggest challenges in terms of
promoting veganism as an alternative, with many vegan products clearly aimed,
given the price, at a middle class lifestyle version of veganism rather than a
politically radical one. Veganism can of course be very cheap (if you’re
cooking everything yourself), but with much of the vegan-specific fayre priced
out of the reach of large sections of the population it does send the wrong
message and maintains food-related politics as a luxury few can afford.
