Adjectives imply something unusual, something different from the standard object the noun refers to. If we say “cheese” for the animal product and “vegan cheese” for the plant product, we implicitly send the message the animal product is normal and the plant product is abnormal.
Strike that. Reverse it.
Say “milk” for plant-based emulsions and “cow milk” for stolen baby cow food. SAy “burger” for veggie protein patties and “cow/pig/turkey burger” for dead rotting animal flesh.
The meat industry doesn’t get to control your language.
Words are activism.
Carol J Adams - The Absent Referent
In The Sexual Politics of Meat, I took a literary concept, “the absent referent,” and politicized it by applying it to the overlapping oppressions of women and animals. I explained it this way:
“Behind every meal of meat is an absence: the death of the animal whose place the meat takes. The absent referent is that which separates the meat eater from the animal and the animal from the end product. The function of the absent referent is to keep our ‘meat’ separated from any idea that she or he was once an animal, to keep the ‘moo;’ or ‘cluck’ or ‘baa’ away from the meat, to keep something from being seen as having been someone. Once the existence of meat is disconnected from the existence of an animal who was killed to become that ‘meat,’ meat becomes unanchored by its original referent (the animal), becoming instead a free-floating image, used often to reflect women’s status as well as animals’. Animals are the absent referents in the act of meat eating; they also become the absent referent in images of women butchered, fragmented, or consumable.”
“There are actually three ways by which animals become absent referents. One is literally: as I have just argued, through meat eating they are literally absent because they are dead. Another is definitional: when we eat animals we change the way we talk about them, for instance, we no longer talk about baby animals but about veal or lamb. As we will see even more clearly in the next chapter, which examines language about eating animals, the word meat has an absent referent, the dead animals. The third way is metaphorical. Animals become metaphors for describing people’s experiences. In this metaphorical sense, the meaning of the absent referent derives from its application or reference to something else.”
I’m not a vegan, but I upvoted this because it seems logical to me that removing the stigma caused by an adjective addendum to the “normal” word would be beneficial in normalizing vegan choices as comparable to animal products.
As another poster pointed out, adding the name of the animal to the name of the product (ex: cow burger) un-does some of the deception and erasure of animal life done by changing the name.
However, I can see this post is getting downvoted. Is it the vegan community that disagrees with this, or is it the general population stumbling upon a vegan post and downvoting it?
It’s always the anti-vegans. It was the same shit on r/vegan, its German equivalent, and meme derivates. Downvote culture in general is toxic af, but it’s really ridiculous when it comes to anything related to veganism
I definitely agree about downvote culture. This isn’t a space for vegan haters to hate on vegan ideas, but you can’t really moderate downvotes the way you can with comments. It’s a way for people to voice their disagreement of an idea without providing any context or conversation, which is ultimately useless and makes “non-majority” posts feel unwelcome, even if the post was never meant for the majority. There are instances that have turned downvotes off for this reason.
I think more communities and instances should turn them off. Don’t like it, don’t read it; if the post violates any rules, report it. It’s that simple. If you actually feel like arguing about something, go ahead and do so, but don’t just downvote and move on. It’s just such a knee-jerk reaction that, as you said, does not contribute anything worthwhile to the conversation. Really riles me up.
I think it was instance-wide where lemmynsfw.com removed downvotes altogether as to encourage OC posting singles, couples, whatever, and to encourage people posting at all as a test. Then people felt like complaining, so they have been reimplemented.
Thinking back to reddit, posting something that the collective hive-mind has decided to not be appropriate for the subreddit - be it a legitimate concern or not - would just be buried in downvotes and die in “new” immediately. It discourages people from participating and getting involved with the community outside of “DAE [super popular take]?” which again does not contribute anything.
Sorry for the wall of text, but downvotes really have been annoying me ever since I started using reddit 10ish years ago. The fact that Lemmy even shows the negative scores for actual posts and not just comments is just kinda baffling.
Most likely the latter. I find anti-vegan stigma is worse here on Lemmy than it was on reddit, which is saying something. On reddit, we at least had strength in numbers. I think one factor is that there are a lot less posts period, so a higher percent of eyes from c/all come across vegan posts. Another factor might be the age demographic, Lemmy skewing a bit older, and the younger generations being a bit more willing to question the horrors of mass animal agriculture.
That is what I figured. As I say, I’m not a vegan and I came across this from /all, but I generally don’t downvote posts unless the content is harmful (racist, disinformation, discriminatory, etc).
Spot-on, couldn’t have put it better. Back on reddit, there were a lot of carnies “infiltrating” the sub and spewing their ignorance but at least the sub was big enough to foster a good sense of community and discourse
Based take. I already use these in daily conversation and don’t even think about adding vegan before it. It does help that most people know that I’m vegan though. I’ll make sure to add “cow”, “chicken”, whatever, where applicable moving forward
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