What They Do to Her, They Do to Us: On Feminism and the Dairy Industry

By emilie isch

I, like many others who have made an active effort to remove dairy products from our diets, know the industry to be cruel and senseless. There are numerous negative effects of dairy on our collective and individual health, our environment, and overall wellbeing. The production of milk, cheese, and other dairy products amount as a massive contributor to global temperature rising, despite the prominent focus on factory farming for meat. Dairy production accounts for increased water pollution, land degradation, air pollution, poor soil health, and deforestation – just to name a few of the major contributors (Hussain, 2022). For example, one single litre of milk requires 8.95 square meters of land and 628.2 litres of freshwater (Hussain, 2022). The dairy industry in Canada is responsible for nearly 20% of all greenhouse gas emissions, and 90% of that comes directly from farm related activities with the greatest level of emissions released happening during forced lactation (Vergé et al., 2013; Mcgeough et al., 2015). Additionally, nearly 70% of the world’s population cannot digest milk sugars (lactose intolerance), a phenomenon which is occurring more specifically amongst people of African, Asian, Hispanic, and Native American identity (Del Prado Alanes, 2022). Meaning the consumption of dairy is directly responsible for worsened indigestion, IBS, and health sensitives. It’s also resulted in a prominent racial bias as milk continues to be sold and marketed to folks with lactose intolerance, as mentioned, typically those of racial identity. This why folks who are vegan say that giving milk to our Indigenous and black or brown friends is actually a continued act of colonization.

According to Gabrielle Victoria Fayant, a member of the Assembly of 7 Generations, milk is part of the three deadly ‘whites’ brought to their communities during colonization along with flour and sugar (Panel discussion held in Ottawa on April 14th, 2025). Indigenous peoples in Canada were not consuming milk before the arrival of cattle during the 1500’s to 1700’s when cattle first appeared off Nova Scotia, then Quebec, and later Newfoundland and Manitoba (MacLachlan, 2006). The import of Portuguese, British, and French cattle assisted in the takeover of land through trading posts and foodstuff (MacLachlan, 2006). Mathilde Cohen, professor of law, has long written of this tie between milk and colonialism as part of a growing scholarship on ‘Animal Colonialism’. In her 2013 paper she argues “that lactating animals became integral parts of colonial and neocolonial projects as tools of agro-expansionism and human population planning” (p. 297). Not only is there themes of population control, eugenics, and expansionism, but as I will expand on in this article, the treatment of female cows and lactating animals is a direct reflection of the ongoing sexual assault of women, girls, and gender diverse folks. In essence, what they do to her (the animal), they do to us (the human). Dairy is inequitably an intersectional issue, and one that is necessary for any conversation on the rights of mothers (both animal and human), and the rights of female bodily autonomy (of animals and of humans). More importantly, it’s a conversation we are long overdue having around the conscious efforts for anti-speciesism as part of any liberatory or abolitionist ideology. We are not truly liberated unless we are all liberated.

Part One. Milk as a Colonial (and Neo-Colonial) Tool

Let’s return to the work of Mathilde Cohen. Cohen, along with many other scholars interested in the intersections of law, ecology, and our society have begun to write on milk as a tool of power and colonialism. How this has proliferated will be explored throughout this article, but specifically as we discuss milk as a colonial tool. Anthropologist Rosa E. Ficek explains how cattle began to take more and more space through conquest, and as a result, native inhabitants like animals and humans were invaded not only just by the colonizers but by the very animals that surrounded them. The land began to shape to fit the needs of colonizers, and not the people from that land. Moreover, writer Matilde Nuñez del Prado Alanes (2022) expands on capital interest and the growth of forced milk consumption throughout the Americas even after independence was granted from Europeans colonizers. This is why scholars name milk as a tool of colonialism.

Milk as a colonial tool extends to the behaviors of numerous colonists who used animals to conquer ecosystems from the time of Christopher Columbus in 1617 with the import of horses, cattle, swine, sheep and goats, to Dutch settlers who brought their own cows in 1629, and to the British who arrived with sheep and bovine on the shores of Australia and New Zealand in the 18th and 19th century (Alanes, 2022). Before modern colonization, the act of animal milk consumption was confined to only select parts of the globe, those being Central and Northern Europe, what is known as the ‘middle east’, sub-Saharan Africa, central Asia, and the Indian subcontinent. Historian Deborah Valenze expressed how the global history of milk was really the emergence of it as a cultural and universal commodity. This depicts a story “of [the] conquest of space, energy, and dietary preferences.” The arrival of these various domesticated animals to colonized lands suited European interests, as settlers continued their habits of milk product consumption abroad. As we approach the late 19th century, dairying became one of the leading industries in Europe and the United States through “economic rationalization and new technologies which transformed milk from a substance that spoiled so easily that it had to be consumed on the spot into a commodity that could travel huge distances” (Cohen, 2013, p. 269). This where we begin to see connection between the globalization of food markets, which it possible to consume dairy products in one side of the world, produced in a completely different part of the world.

Part Two. Cultural Hegemony, and Media Representations of Dairy

In Marxist ideology, cultural hegemony is defined as the domination of culture in a society whereby the ruling class shape the culture of that society. This refers to the ways in which our culture is influenced by norms, representations, and the status quo – all which is determined by those who hold power, the capital owners. To contextualize cultural hegemony within the dairy industry this section will unpack the interests of the dairy farmers, the industry as a whole, and more pointedly, the media and advertising realm that control the attention of our minds and wallets.

‘Got milk?’ advertisements ran from the early 1990’s, peaking in popularity throughout the late 90s into the 2000s. Created by one American advertising agency in 1993, the campaign was originally created with interest of the California Milk Processor Board, a non-profit marketing board funded by the California dairy processors (James, 2015). The board came into existence in light of declining milk sales in the 90s as Americans consumed other beverages such as soft drinks. The ’got milk? ads typically displayed celebrities or models drinking milk with the very infamous milk mustache. In Figure 1, we see Beyonce and her mother, Tina Knowles posing with text below that reads “milk your diet, loose your weight” accompanied by so-called expert advice that encourages women to low fat or fat free milk as part of a way to lose weight. Not only has milk been used as a feminine and puritan symbol, as discussed in culture and film commentator Mina Le’s video (2024) on the “Evil Symbolism of Milk”, this along with countless similar advertisements reminds women to hate our bodies and always be looking for ways to improve ourselves. The ad can also be analyzed as an insidious celebrity marketing tool targeting younger Black women, given the immense sway and fame someone like Beyonce has in the Black community. Moreover, pulling insights from Le (2024), milk within the media often represents whiteness, making got milk? ads that feature black people an ideal marker of culture’s obsession with whitewashing Black people and further positions a cultural hegemony that places whiteness at the centre.

These ads, and many other depictions of milk showcased muscular or fit bodies also cement a manufactured tie between sex appeal and milk. Milk was, and is, desperate to be sexy and cool. And by that, I mean those who ran the milk lobbies were desperate to keep milk relevant in our culture. Since its peak there has been an attempted resurgence of these ad campaigns. The board was also part of a few other marketing endeavours and the more recently in 2023 with the ‘Get Real Inc.’ targeting Hispanic American consumers in Spanish (Get Real). The desire of this ad was to encourage the supposed ‘real’ benefits of consuming milk during these unprecedented times of AI, and ‘new’ fad milks (California Dairy, 2023). Essentially, this the board’s attempt to position dairy milk as ‘real’ and other types of milks as ‘not’ real. This stance is illustrated in their media campaigns with cow milk juxtaposed alongside alien, octopus, bee, and salmon milk. The emphasis of this campaign on ‘real’ is a shallow attempt to combat research coming out around milk being an insufficient source of nutrients (Alexander et al., 2016). It is also meant to poke fun at the rise and popularity in alternative milks such as oat milk (more on that later). The intentional ploy to have these ads run in Spanish and feature Latinx faces is also yet another example of racial capitalism and the very direct ways in which the health and wellbeing of some of our most vulnerable community members are not taken seriously. I repeat. Milk consumption has been proven to not be healthy. Most Black and Brown people are lactose intolerant. This is simply greed and intentional life denying politics.

Beyonce and Tina Knowles posing in a got milk? Advertisement

Figure 1. Beyonce and Tina Knowles (2006)

Meanwhile, Fortis B.C and the Canadian Dairy Industry have been hard at work greenwashing campaigns of their own. Specifically, the two have partnered up to boost lies that Fortis B.C will help produce RNG (renewable natural gas) with the offset of a dairy farm in Chilliwack, BC. However, feeding cows to produce milk is not, and will never be, a sustainable process. This will only continue to be a harmful practice and dairy will never be a comparable RNG source. Secondly, the Dairy Farmers of Canada (DFC) are also claiming they will be “net-zero” by 2050 (Figure 2). I should note here that DFC is the national policy, lobbying and promotional organization representing Canadian dairy producers. Meaning, just like ads like got milk? and the DFC has a vested interest in maintaining the positive image of milk in order to continue profit generation. The DFC ads which ran in 2022 used a lot of fluffy, nonsense language like ‘planting trees to purify the air’ and ‘reducing emissions’, all the while images of hand drawn cows next to a red barn with a windmill and trees covered the landscape. These imageries, parried with greenwashing lies about the dairy industry foster a sense of whimsical bliss and unrealistic positivism. Greenwashing campaigns heavily rely on childlike imageries, and this evident as we see the DFC ‘cute-ifying’ their aesthetic. These fictious ads prey on the consumer with a promise of feeling good, and ethical, because the images used are pointing to a make-believe world where the worlds roam the fields in glee, with nothing scary or violent happening to them at all. This is doubled down in a recent campaign from Farm Boy (an Ottawa based chain grocery store) where plush cows were neatly positioned in woven baskets next to the diary aisle. The cow has a name, a cute face, and is something your kid can take home with them. Attempts to make the dairy industry palatable and cute is no different than Japan’s ‘Kawaii’ culture, a deliberate strategy to deflect their war crimes, and have their culture instead known for hello kitty and other cute iconography. I won’t spend too much time getting into the history and concept of Kawaii, but I will link resources to learn more in the reading list at the end. How Japan is externally branded reflects this internal cultural denial of their rampant violence and imperialism, and just like the dairy industry across North America.

Two cows stand in grass with trees, a windmill, and a red barn behind them

Figure 2. Net Zero Graphic

The power of the dairy lobbyists in both the US and Canada are extremely strong. Just like the meat industry, dairy has the single interest of maximizing profits. They want to uphold a particular cultural hegemony to be successful in maximizing those profits. The culture they are building and maintaining is one where dairy and meat are central to the diets and lifestyles of the traditional all-around American family. However, the recent rise of alternative and plant-based milks has left dairy with an interesting new association, and one that is seemingly unfavourable to many gen-zers. Oat milk is cool, hip, and queer, and dairy milk is not. In fact, there’s been so much relevant cultural indicators of this shift, that some baristas will ask if you want a non-dairy milk right off the bat. Although the vast majority of these trendy cafes charging sometimes upwards of two dollars extra for plant-based milk will never be cool, hip, or queer. Now, the consumption of plant-based milks as a trend isn’t entirely evil, since I do marvel at the fall of big dairy, but there’s a fine line to walk when it comes to consumption because of ideology and out of an ethics, and consumption for status or for an attempt to fit in. This lends itself to unsustainability in behavior, since there’s no real backing to your choice, just a desire to be Instagram worthy. If you’re catching yourself choosing plant-based milks, that’s awesome, and hopefully you’ll continue reading this article and decide to cut out all dairy products, not just pick and choose for your morning coffee.

So, I mention queerness and oat milk not because I personally identify with this stereotype as a queer woman who drinks a lot of oat milk, but to draw our attention to the very deliberate ways that food choices reflect onto our culture and vice verca. Raw milk for instance has become another one of these ‘new’ trends in the world of food culture. The consumption of raw milk has been heavily connected with what many are calling the “crunchy to far right pipeline”. Influencers all over TikTok and Instagram preach the supposed benefits of raw milk, oftentimes arguing in tandem for the consumption of other raw animal products such as raw beef. These individuals may also be against vaccines, believe in a whole host of conspiracy theories and generally, are advocates for an alternative (conservative) leaning lifestyle. They may have started out more benevolent, going on juice cleanses, or even being plant based, but the years post pandemic we see this dramatic shift from silo to mainstream. I won’t really be getting into all the nuances of raw milk drinkers here as I don’t condone attention on conspiracy theorists or anti-vaxers, instead I bring them up however as an example of dairy’s association to right wing ideologies and dangerous portrayals of so-called health and wellbeing.

Part Three. The Dairy Industry is Anti-Feminist: Exploitation, and Rape

This will likely be the heaviest section of the article. Please read with discretion.

Cows, like human mothers, give birth after carrying their young for 9 months. Cows, like human mothers, lactate milk from their breasts as food for their young. Cows, unlike human mothers, have their young taken away from them at birth because the milk they produce instead actually for their calves, it’s for us – grown adults, children, and even pets. Humans are the only species on this earth that drink the breast milk of another species.

Farmers can’t waste even a drop of valuable profit filled milk, so the separation of calves and mothers happens typically right away or within a day. USDA statistics reveal that “97 percent of calves are separated from their mothers within the first 12 hours of birth” (Cehn, 2023). Once the milk production begins for the matured female cows they undergo mechanical milking – different from the joyful images you may have in your head of a gentle handle milking on an udder early morning at the farm. These machines are instead hooked to the cow’s udders, and they are milked 2 or 3 times per day (Cehn, 2023). Dairy cows are bred to produce over 10 times the amount of milk they would naturally make, which means many suffer from painful udder infections, often resulting in pus in the milk (Najana, 2023). Yuck!

The fate of those separated calves is much like the fate of their mothers. A lifeless adolescence void of companionship and bonding from their mother and siblings. The calves, unable to be breastfed are forced to consume bottled formula and confined to cramped quarters. Once the female calves hit 2 years old and are considered fertile, the cycle begins once again. Insemination tools (see Figure 3, although please note it is mildly graphic) are used to forcefully impregnate cows who have reached puberty. Just as their mothers were once forced to endure, the farmer’s hand is inserted inside the cow’s anus to complete this invasive procedure. Let’s pause here. The cow in that moment has zero ability to consent to what is done to her – and before we get caught up in the speciesist debate claiming that a cow’s ability or inability to consent is not worth our time, because they are just a cow, I want to remind everyone reading that a cow’s consent is just as important as our own consent. Behaviour imposed onto one living being reflects all living beings. Why should a farmer stop at forcefully impregnating cows. We know well from history that female bodies are constantly disrespected, and their autonomy compromised, all the same as these cows. The point isn’t whether one body belongs to a human, and one belongs to a cow, the point is that a patriarchal society will always jeopardize and take control of what they deem the subordinate. In this case the cow and the human are not so different in how assault and rape become normalized.

A diagram illustrates how to artificially inseminate a female cow.

Figure 3. Their Turn, 2016

So, after around 5 or so years of non-stop milk production, the female cows have served their purpose and are usually no longer able to produce any more milk. This doesn’t mean they get to live happy lives free from torture, no, these cows are useful still as meat and are sent to the slaughterhouse.

We have not mentioned yet what happens to the male calves, those who cannot produce milk. Male calves are typically raised to be beef cows, and undergo the torture of being overfed, and under stimulated. However, some are kept to be slaughtered immediately as veal meat, and in some situations, they are raised to be higher priced veal. Higher priced veal requires the calf to have tender, pale meat. This means they need to be underfed, enough to be low iron and anemic (Cehen, 2023). This portion of the industry is more widely rejected for the known and inhumane conditions the male calves are put in, however the connection between the dairy industry and the veal industry are inherently tied. To condemn one part is to condemn it all. This draws parallels to the conditions in which one overarching harmful industry, dairy, also influences the harms of another industry, veal. Just as a patriarchal society harms women, it also harms men. Men are perpetrators of most of the sexual assault and violence, not because they are biologically predisposed to be the agitator, the conditions in which this system allows their behavior to proliferate and go unchecked is the cause for attention. Fighting for justice and liberation as a feminist also requires the ongoing work to unpack how all genders are forced to conform to social norms and behaviors.

Cows possess intelligence, social bonds, the ability to grieve, and form memories. Their emotional and physical torment experienced during the course of their life as a dairy cow or as a beef or veal cow is not without its own form of trauma and lasting distress. Women and all genders who have suffered from assault and violence are not magically healed one day and left to forget all that was done to them. Cows, like humans deserve a life that is mitigated from unnecessary harm and unwanted experiences. 

Part Four. On the rights of mothers: Reproduction and Breastfeeding

The violation of a cow’s reproductive system draws parallels on the forced sterilization of Black, Brown, and Indigenous women across time and place. Paola Alonso, scholar at the Texas Women’s University outlined reproductive rights and eugenics in one of their papers. They point to one district Alabama court exposing “between 100,000 to 150,000 poor people were sterilized annually under federally funded programs, and others were coerced into consenting to sterilization under the threats by doctors to terminate their welfare benefits if they denied the procedure” (Alonso, 2018, p. 4). This was almost exclusively happening to Black and Latino women in the US, with Puerto Rico having some of the highest sterilization rates of women in the twentieth century (Alonso, p. 5). In Canada, a very similar project of sterilization was occurring for Indigenous women, notably one of these being Alberta’s Sexual Sterilization Act from 1928 to 1972 (Stote, 2019). The reasons being disdain for these population groups expanding, and a desire to control the levels at which they reproduce. While forced sterilization is happening less overtly today, the eugenics programming is alive and well. Discourse around who should be ‘allowed’ to have babies, and why is very prominent in immigration policies, and media propaganda. The rights of mothers to continue their bloodline, especially if it is one the ruling class does not view of worthy of life, is a radical act. This of course is determined by the important notion of choice. Anti-abortion rhetoric continues to serve as a political pawn, fueling religious and cultural talking points. The bodily autonomy of women here is no different than the bodily autonomy of a cow. Ultimately, the commodification of cows for meat or dairy is the crux here and what leads to all this in the first place. An ideology which marries the patriarchy and capitalism is indeed our society’s treatment of animals and by extension, women. Specifically, this connects race issues, feminism, and the rights of mothers.

The forced separation of cow and calf is no different than the forced separation and kidnapping of Indigenous children by social workers and other officials during the 60s scoop, a colonial tactic which continues to this day. The commodification of early child nutrition has meant than millions of babies across the globe do not consume the breastmilk of their mothers and are instead given baby formula. This is the colonial capitalist output of years of melding in the affairs of mothers and families. When the Gold Coast was fighting for independence from the British in the 1950’s, the colonial British government released a cookbook which they claimed to be a source for nutrition and cooking (Nott, 2019). A long-utilized tool, as we discussed earlier, food as a power grab was maintained and the cookbook argued to add milk in tea for extra protein, and further encouraged the consumption of meat, and fish which were not typical parts of a traditional diet. Moreover, the cookbook suggested that breastfeeding was not an adequate source of nutrition for babies and instead began to market baby formula as the necessary ‘missing’ part. John Nott, professor of medical history discusses the rise in bottle feeding across colonial African countries arguing that in Uganda, the percentage of children who were bottle fed in the early 1950’s went from 14% to 40% by the 1960s (Nott, 2019). Additionally, long time evil villain company, Nestlé was found to be melding with affairs in the early 1970s, depicting their employees as nurses in uniforms in various maternity wards across Africa, South America, and South Asia (Sartore, 2022). These ‘Milk Nurses’ encouraged the growing curated dependence on breast milk substitutes and is explored in more detail in Mike Muller’s 1974 report titled ‘The baby killer A War on Want investigation into the promotion and sale of powdered baby milks in the Third World.’ Here, we begin to understand just how integral Black liberation, and food politics really is.

This incessant shift towards bottle-feeding is nothing new however, it goes back even as far as 1939, when a speech given by Cicely Williams, a Jamaican physician on the Gold Coast, called out the marketing and policy shifts for baby formula “murder” (El-Sherbiny, 2022). Of course, much of this was guised under the banner of foreign aid, with the caveat however of introducing dependency on billion-dollar corporations like Nestlé. It was estimated in 2015 six companies, including Nestlé, “spend close to $50 for each baby born worldwide to market breast milk substitutes, a total of $6 billion a year” (El-Sherbiny, 2022). This is no different than pulling cow mothers away from their calves, who the milk is produced and intended for, and instead is fueling the pockets of the dairy industry. Just as Indigenous peoples across this globe were sold the lie that formula was better for their baby than their own breastmilk, we are complicit in the intertwining of claves consuming formula, cow mothers producing milk for humans, and human mothers “choosing” oftentimes to consume both formula and cow milk. (I say “choosing” because as we have just learnt, the push for formula and for cow milk is largely curated for profit and capital growth by the ruling class).

A much simpler and more natural (but less profitable) solution to all this we leave the milk produced by cows and humans for their own respective babies.

Part Five. Towards Anti-Speciesism

There’s no better way to close a piece on animal and human liberation than with a push for anti-speciesism. Anti-speciesism is in its simplest definition is the case for a dismantling of the unjust hierarchies and power structures which impose human exceptionalism and an argument against positioning humans above animals. Speciesism promotes the systems of which the dairy industry exists and continues to shift norms and practices that harm our ecologies. Working towards a world without racial capitalism and heteropatriarchal values means working towards a world without speciesism. There is no way around that.

Now, this is not to say the point of this entire article is to pressure or ‘force’ anyone to go vegan. I’m just here to expose the contradictions and leave you to figure out the rest. Because I am a Marxist-Leninist, I also know there is no ‘forcing’ someone to become a communist, because well, once you begin to explain the scientific empirically tested method of Marxism to anyone who has begun to seriously question capitalism and imperialism, the rest just falls into place. I believe strongly in my duty as someone with the resources, time, and privilege of education to share my knowledge and the knowledge of countless other scholars in an effort to inform and empower the masses. There is no reason to walk away from this article feeling guilty – I have consumed dairy for the better of my life as a person who was raised not as a vegan, and I imagine many of you are in the same boat. But it’s not too late to shift habits, and to become an outspoken advocate of an anti-speciesit future. Going vegan is a fundamental way to be a better feminist, a stronger ally to our Black, Brown and Indigenous friends, and to really begin to advocate for total liberation.

Note to readers: I did not cover anything relating to the labour rights of human industry workers, interconnections between human and animal under capitalism or studies showing higher rates of toxic health issues, and violence and aggression amongst meat and dairy workers. This is simply because the article would have gotten too long. That is to say, another article on those topics will be coming out soon. 

References

Alexander, P., C. Brown, A. Arneth, J. Finnigan, and M. Rounsevell. 2016. “Human Appropriation of Land for Food.” Global Environmental Change 41 (Novembe): 88-98.
Alanes, M. 2022. “Dairy in the Americas: How Colonialism Left Its Mark on the Continent.” Sentient Policy.
Alonso, P. 2018. “Autonomy Revoked: The Forced Sterilization of Women of Color in 20th Century America.” Health Equity 2 (1): 249–259.
Cehn, M. 2022. “What’s Wrong With Dairy & Cow’s Milk? World of Vegan.
Dairy Farmers of Canada. n.d. Net Zero by 2050 | Sustainability.     
El-Sherbiny, E. 2022. “Baby Formulas and Cash Crops in Africa Led to Poor Diets.” New Lines Magazine.
Hussain, G. 2019. “The Devastating Impact of the Dairy Industry on the Environment.” Sentientmedia.org.
James, S. 2015. “Got milk? (A Brief History).”         
Maclachlan, I. n.d. The Historical Development of Cattle Production in Canada.
Mc Geough, E., S. Little, H. Janzen, T. McAllister, S. McGinn, and K. Beauchemin. 2012. “Life-cycle Assessment of Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Dairy Production in Eastern Canada.” Journal of Dairy Science 95 (9): 5164–  5175.
Media, M. 2023. “California Milk Processor Board Launches ‘Get Real Inc’.” California Dairy Magazine.            
Mina Le. 2024. The Evil Symbolism of Milk.         
Muller, M. 1974. The Baby Killer.
Najana, P. 2023. “A True Feminist Is Also Vegan.” Medium.
Nott, J. 2019. “’No One May Starve in the British Empire’: Kwashiorkor, Protein and the Politics of Nutrition Between Britain and Africa.” Social History of Medicine 34 (2): 553–576.
Nuñez del Prado Alanes, M. 2023. Sentient.            
Sartore, M. 2019. “Nestle Bombarded Developing Countries With Their Baby Formula, and The Consequences Were Deadly.” Ranker.
Seger, S. 2023. Veganism Is Not Anti-Indigenous.
Staff, E. 2023. “RNG – Thoughtful Journalism About Energy’s Future.” Thoughtful          Journalism about Energy’s Future.
Stote, K. 2019. Sterilization of Indigenous Women in Canada. The Canadian    Encyclopedia.
Vergé, X., D. Maxime, J. Dyer, R. Desjardins, Y. Arcand, and A. Vanderzaag, A. 2013. “Carbon Footprint of Canadian Dairy Products: Calculations and issues”. Journal of Dairy Science 96 (9): 6091–6104.

Recommended Resources

Statistics and Data
Ritchie, H., M. Roser, and P. Rosado. 2023. “Meat and Dairy Production.” Our World in Data.

Collection of Animal & Earth Liberation Zines
Warzone Distro: Category: Animal Liberation & Earth Liberation. 2025. Noblogs.org.

Learn More about Kawaii Culture
Miller, L. 2011. “Cute Masquerade and the Pimping of Japan.” International Journal of Japanese Sociology 20 (1): 18–29.
Osenton, S. 2007. “Insidiously ‘Cute’: Kawaii Cultural Production and Ideology in Japan.” Library And Archives Canada = Bibliothèque Et Archives Canada.

Learn More about Veganism from Black Vegans

Events, Resources and More:
https://blackvegsociety.org
https://www.afrovegansociety.org/black-vegan-activist-resources

People to Follow:
Tabitha Brown @IAmTabithaBrown
John Lewis @BadAssVegan
Russel Simmons @UncleRush
Alexis Nicole Black Forager
Eats by Will @eatsbywill

Documentary:
They’re Trying to Kill Us (2021) directed by John Lewis and Keegan Kuhn

Music:
Wu-Tang Clan (most of the members are vegan!)
Stevie Wonder
JME
Lenny Kravtiz
Akala
Mya
Macka B


emilie isch (she/her) is an interdisciplinary scholar and community organizer currently residing on unceded Syilx Territory in British Columbia. 

Colonialism-Privatism-Speciesism

By Marv Wheale

Nation-states in many regions of the globe were founded and controlled by abled, white male powerholders on Indigenous peoples’ and animals’ lands. On Turtle Island (North America), for instance, the land was taken (treaties notwithstanding) and offered by the government to white settlers from Europe for homesteading. Because of this invasion and occupation, there was and is an unequal, intertwined relationship among Indigenous peoples, the state, white settler property holders, and animals. 

The state, our capitalist economy and privatization of land could not exist without the appropriation of First Nations’ decision-making over their territory. The rationale used by this trinity to carry out colonization was based on the contrived belief that “uncultivated” and “unproductive” land is vacant and unused because it is not tilled for crops and/or grazing domesticated animals. Such land lacks the private property mode of production to fulfill the soil’s bountiful potential, liberating the land to its rightful destiny, a freedom that was racialized, gendered and human-centric. 

Once the white state and settlers had validated, among themselves, their sense of ownership, the violent subjugation of the original inhabitants was easily justified. Law enforcement officers, soldiers and settlers killed or forced Indigenous peoples and free-living animals off their lands. The government settler pact replaced the refugees and natural terrain with privately run tracts for monoculture crops and animal imprisonment farming. As well, hunting the displaced, relatively free-roaming animals as “game” was promoted on private and public territories by these white men and their institutions. 

National laws enacted by white patriarchal governments to guarantee state power and private property rights further enhanced the reach of the state and settler proprietary status. State lawmakers were seen as a necessary medium to keep settlerism from falling into a lawless, chaotic, self-destructive competition for land. 

State-owned land was leased for private forestry, mining and fossil fuel extraction in keeping with the productive mindset. Even when state lands were not designated for production, they carry the potential for such use. 

Not all land could be used for production. Some had to be set aside for Indigenous reserves, conservation zones, and parks (ecological islands often used for tourism, recreation, and preservation of animal and plant species habitats). 

Land also had to be held for housing, education, healthcare, transportation, businesses, police, military and other state/settler services, for capitalist colonial economic production to function in an organized and sustainable manner. Without these structural supports, the economy and society couldn’t exist and thrive. 

State power, the for-profit economic system and private land holdings were foreign to the Indigenous ethos; humans and animals belong to the land, it does not belong to humans as a commodity any more than the sky. Unplowed land wasn’t perceived as empty, but teeming with endless plant and animal life. 

The colonial/private pretense illustrates that white maleness was a condition for becoming propertied and expanding its whiteness. To be a white man, then, is conflated with private property. White women had no property standing apart from their husbands. People of color didn’t have the right color or the means to own land. The superiority of whiteness and the inferiority of Indigenous, black, and brown peoples and animals were thereby fortified. 

The fiction that normalized a fusion of male whiteness and private property evolved into a naturalized identity of indigeneity – whiteness becomes nativist entitlement to the land. This created the misperception of Indigenous peoples as invaders and thieves when they go out of their prescribed space to pass through their stolen territory. In an act of astounding reversal, the oppressed are revictimized as the real villains. Undomesticated carnivorous and burrowing animals face similar treatment. 

As Dallas Jokic asserts:

“The image of the white male farmer defending his family and property is based upon the masculine ideal of “the ability to build a home, provide for and protect one’s family, and – most importantly – to exercise control over one’s private domain.”… This masculine ideal is highly racialized, and implies that his domain belongs to him ontologically [the fixed nature of his existence]. In other words, the white male farmer recognizes his ontological deputization and commits the violence required by it.” ** 

Ultimately, this androcentric ableist philosophy and practice, with its accompanying emotional trappings, e.g., “it feels right”, laid the groundwork for ongoing white rule, missing and murdered Indigenous women, species extinction and countless killings of untamed and domesticated beings. 


* The contents of this article are a cursory summary of Indigenous scholarship studied over decades. 

** Dallas Jokic, Fascism and Settler Colonialism in Canada, A thesis submitted to the Department of Philosophy In conformity with the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts, Queen’s University Kingston, Ontario, Canada, September 2019.

The Nation-State and Animal Emancipation*

Marv Wheale                                  

One of the main functions of the nation-state and its layers of government is to protect private property rights, at least for those with adequate income to afford property.  Nonhuman animals are embedded in the private property regime.  The state treats them as somewhat dissimilar to owning inanimate assets through the exercise of anti-cruelty laws.

The animal rights movement attempts to change the property status of animals to those of persons. The trouble with this line of activism is that even if animal property law could be undone most animals would still have lower-class status. The state would continue to allow these inferior animals as food while maintaining humane treatment stewardship laws. No laws would be enacted to prevent human animals from utilizing such animals because of the state’s obligations to cultural speciesism and capitalism’s animal agriculture and processing industries.   

By comparison, state-legislated eradication of capitalism’s labor exploitation would not end the subordination of labor to capital in the workplace.  Adequate pay and working conditions would put some limits on employers but not permit full democracy on the job.  The class structure of capital – the owners of production – which makes labor produce surplus profit for bosses, holds fast.  Capitalist-state altruism to other animals discloses a similar inequality.

This doesn’t mean ending the private property position of animals is unimportant. It indicates we are prone to distorting what can be done by state reforms (one step at a time ideology) in the liberation of animals.

For at least several reasons, the state by its very creation is not a neutral mediator that can be swung in any direction.  For one thing, it has often formed from the theft of Indigenous peoples’ land subordinating their authority in political decision-making. Second, the state is integral to reproducing capitalism and with it, the cultural customs of meat, dairy, eggs, and other animal uses no matter which political party is elected. More, the state is a male fabrication that depends on controlling women’s bodies to populate the nation and sustain capitalism by giving birth and providing childcare to prepare future workers for the citizenry and economy.  

Thus the state can’t be carried over to an equality-based society.  We have to conceive of abolishing the state – similar to what was done to feudalism and monarchical rule in many parts of the world – not making it nicer while leaving the underlying burdensome structures intact.

On the other hand, we can’t simply theorize to replace the state with organized free associations.  Human-animal dominance, male authority, white primacy, colonization, economic classes and ableism could easily be carried over from the former system by habitual conscious and unconscious attitudes/ways when organizing new paradigms.  A vegan feminist democratic framework for leveling hierarchies is essential to overcoming these injustices because it openly rejects them as nonstarters in the design process. Vegan feminism always cautions against working to halt human-animal imperialism in isolation of class, male, white, abled, gender binary, and heteronormative dominance. Many other social movements don’t have this expansive grasp of reality.  

Vegan feminism also sees the various structures of inequality within any given nation-state as connected to the multi-state apparatus.  States are not self-sufficient.  They depend on other states to cooperate, have a rule of law and advance trade in the global market.  Though some states have more power, they all mediate nationalism, internationalism, war/imperialism and capitalist accumulation across the earth.  They provide the official legal framework for organized violence against animals and human animals. 

Since state power operates internationally, worldwide solidarity must be imperative to our politics of total liberation, with special attentiveness to major state powers.  The cessation of animal subjugation, oppression among human animals, wars and ecological collapse depends on it.  

Clearly, the end of states is unattainable at present.  It requires long-term and complex collective work.  For the short term, the best that we might be able to accomplish is to simply raise awareness through the channels available to us learning praxis as we go.    


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The Chinese Doctor Who Advocated Tofu for the US War Effort

According to the Smithsonian, Benjamin Franklin, an inventor, gastronome, and “founding father” of the United States introduced tofu in the mid-18th century. Likely not having had any direct experience with the product himself, he only mentions it in a letter composed to a colleague. In the letter, he discusses his research of a Dominican friar’s account of Chinese cuisine with specific mention of “teu-fu” as an intriguing type of cheese.

One has to wonder why the huge population of Chinese immigrants might not be credited with this honor. The first wave began in 1815, and, surely, these folks would have brought knowledge of their own traditional foods. Unlike Franklin, they would have had a great familiarity with soy.

In any case, the efforts of a Chinese doctor can certainly be credited for an all-out campaign to introduce and popularize soy at the height of the first world war. The first Chinese woman to earn a medical degree in the US, Yamei Kin collaborated with the American government in its search for efficient and nutritious foodstuffs in a time of great scarcity.

Dr. Kin insisted that the US stood to greatly benefit from Chinese soy (and Chinese culture more broadly) and the many creative dishes it could render. She was also clear that the intense anti-Chinese sentiment of the era, coupled with imperialist stereotypes that characterized Asians as malnourished and weak, should be challenged. Indeed, she was quite aware that America’s qualms with the diet of the Chinese nation had much to do with nativism:

The chief reason why people can live so cheaply in China and yet produce for that nation a man [sic] power so tremendous that this country must pass an Exclusion act against them is that they eat beans instead of meat.

New York Times. 1917. “Woman Off to China as Government Agent to Study Soy Bean: Dr. Kin.” New York Times, June 10, p. 65.

Although she was raised in Japan and spent considerable time in the US, she was an ardent advocate of her native China. More specifically, she busied herself aiding girls and women of the country, making regular return trips in service to feminism.

Kin herself was not vegan, but she was certainly critical of meat and dairy. The world, she explained,

cannot very well afford to wait to grow animals in order to obtain the necessary percentage of protein. Waiting for an animal to become big enough to eat is a long proposition. First you feed grain to a cow, and, finally, you get a return in protein from milk and meat. A terribly high percentage of the energy is long in transit from grain to cow to a human being. […]

Instead of taking the long and expensive method of feeding grain to an animal until the animal is ready to be killed and eaten, in China we take a shortcut by eating the soy bean, which is protein, meat, and milk in itself.

New York Times. 1917. “Woman Off to China as Government Agent to Study Soy Bean: Dr. Kin.” New York Times, June 10, p. 65.

She sympathized a bit with the animals themselves. In an interview with St. Louis Post-Dispatch Sunday Magazine, she explains:

The trouble with vegetarians was that they expected us to eat such awful things. I’m not a vegetarian, but I must admit that I find great satisfaction in being able to sit down to most of my meals without facing the fact that I am eating slices of what was once a palpitating little animal, filled with the joy of life. I shouldn’t be surprised if the soy bean will save the lives of many American animals.

Kin developed tofu provisions for the war effort and successfully taste-tested them with soldiers. Unfortunately, logistical difficulties in procuring and transporting soy prevented its largescale adoption.

American experiments with soy as a potential savior of the nation’s nutrition would persist after the war. We also have George Washington Carver to thank for this. A scientist and food inventor who had been born into slavery, he is most often celebrated for popularizing the many ways to cook with peanuts. He did the very same with soybeans.

Tofu did not take off in American cuisine until the 1960s thanks to the hippie commune movement. Residents began making tofu (and soy milk) on-premises to feed the community. Some of these folks went on to start businesses as the commune movement came to an end and the back-to-the-land bohemians went back to their 9 to 5’s. The popularity of “natural foods” that persisted thereon catapulted soy into the American imagination, where it remains today.

It is a rocky love affair. Soy is increasingly vilified for its environmental impact, particularly when it is grown as a monoculture. However, the vast majority of soy that is produced today goes toward livestock feed, completely undermining the original vision of Kin and Carver. America’s hamburger culture, sadly, would come to prominence. The dream of a tofu nation populated by liberated animals and fortified humans would not fully materialize. Not yet, anyway.


Corey Lee Wrenn

Dr. Wrenn is Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Kent. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology with Colorado State University in 2016. She was awarded Exemplary Diversity Scholar, 2016 by the University of Michigan’s National Center for Institutional Diversity. She served as council member with the American Sociological Association’s Animals & Society section (2013-2016) and was elected Chair in 2018. She is the co-founder of the International Association of Vegan Sociologists. She serves as Book Review Editor to Society & Animals and is a member of the Research Advisory Council of The Vegan Society. She has contributed to the Human-Animal Studies Images and Cinema blogs for the Animals and Society Institute and has been published in several peer-reviewed academic journals including the Journal of Gender Studies, Environmental Values, Feminist Media Studies, Disability & Society, Food, Culture & Society, and Society & Animals. In July 2013, she founded the Vegan Feminist Network, an academic-activist project engaging intersectional social justice praxis.

She is the author of A Rational Approach to Animal Rights: Extensions in Abolitionist Theory (Palgrave MacMillan 2016), Piecemeal Protest: Animal Rights in the Age of Nonprofits (University of Michigan Press 2019), and Animals in Irish Society: Interspecies Oppression and Vegan Liberation in Britain’s First Colony (State University of New York Press 2021).

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Food Justice: A Primer

Food Justice: A Primer, edited by Saryta Rodríguez condenses a wide-angle view of ethical considerations surrounding the production and distribution of food into a concise collection of essays that is richly informative and thoroughly persuasive. This 239-page paperback covers a large range of topics, historical and contemporary. Each section is united by the common thread of undertaking the study “through a vegan praxis.” In other words, viewing non-human animals as deserving the same rights and dignity as people, when identifying the problematics of agriculture and proposing solutions. But this perspective should not be misunderstood as a narrowly defined scope through which to examine the topic. Rather, it is necessarily at the core of the issue and this book’s focus brings that reality to the forefront.

As the arguments put forward in each of the pieces show, food justice is not just about food; it is interconnected with many areas of life, such as how we work, our attitudes toward others, and how we perceive the world around us and affect it with our actions (or inactions). An essay by Lilia Trenkova draws bold parallels between racism as a driving force behind colonialism and neo-colonialism and speciesism—the idea that humans are superior to other animals and by extension, all manner of cruelty may be excused—as the widely unchallenged belief responsible for the inhumane treatment of animals, including their use as food. These parallels follow through their resulting effects on inequitable food supply. Just as the mercantile practices of colonial and neo-colonial countries squeeze the economies and drain resources from less developed countries, the (mis)use of land for animal agriculture significantly reduces the maximum amount of food that can be produced, and applies upward pressure on prices, thereby artificially limiting resources and increasing food costs. In another essay, Saryta Rodríguez points to data that show that cows used for beef consume twenty-five times more food than they produce. Conditions for farm workers are also netted in this equation of systemic superiority, as Trenkova dissects how racist attitudes baked into the North American Free Trade Agreement created second tier system, where laborers in Mexico and immigrants in the U.S. are not afforded the same basic rights that many American workers take for granted.

Land use is also addressed in other contexts throughout. The book’s introduction briefly describes some notable land rights campaigns including the formation of Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) in 1984 and Palestine’s Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC) in 1986. The UAWC is referenced as an example of a group that fights for food sovereignty, which is under the umbrella of food justice and pertains to a peoples’ ability to choose how their food is produced, distributed, and consumed. The MST is a movement that settled people to work on unused land and was able to make legal claims on much of that land through a part of Brazil’s constitution enshrining land as serving a public function.

Among the essays, the book also includes an interview by Saryta Rodríguez with Gustavo Oliviera, a spokesperson for Occupy the Farm, which comprised of a couple hundred activist farmers who took over an unused plot of land belonging to the University of California, Berkeley that had been slated for commercial development. It is an inspiring story of grass-roots direct action that demonstrates that anyone can take part in effecting change.

Rodríguez aptly curates an enormous depth of information and perspective in this slim volume making for a well-paced read that is small enough to carry on the go. After reading this compelling compendium, one cannot ignore that achieving food justice depends on recognizing that animal agriculture is unsustainable. Therefore, the notion that a complete and internally consistent understanding of food justice has as much to do with issues of equitable supply and distribution as workers’ rights and animal rights should not be a revolutionary one.


Dale Classen is a Brooklyn-based musician and sound designer. Dale performs with the band Grim All Day and lives with two cats, Sonny and Toad. He graduated from Stony Brook University with a B.A. in psychology.

Veganism, Degrowth and Redistribution

Bird subsumed in oil spill

By Marv Wheale

The Vegan Feminist Network is dedicated to scrutinizing the interconnections among speciesism, genderism, heterosexism, colonialism, racism, poverty, disablism, ageism, sizeism, ecocide…..  Today I would like to concisely examine some related elements that could exercise a role in overcoming these structures of subordination.

We know that veganism is the credible stance to take against the ideology and praxis of human  supremacy.  Yet when we practice and promote a vegan way of life within capitalism, veganism stands unopposed to the continuation of economic inequality, middle class values/lifestyles, the larger systems of animal use and ecological erosion (obviously vegans do mitigate these troubles to a limited extent).

Chicken corpses on conveyor belt

For veganism to succeed and not be isolationist it must be anti-capitalist and degrowth.  Though socialism may resolve economic class divisions, it’s emphasis on growing the economy puts a strain on ecosystems, nonhuman species habitats and climate (possibly as much as capitalist development).   Mining, industrial agriculture, intensive logging and fossil use are integral parts of many socialist agendas, except  the green kinds.  Perpetual production growth is a dead end for a liveable planet.

Compulsory societal wide frugal living is required for securing biosphere sustainability and enhancement.

We could call it “revolutionary simplicity”. But how do we end indigence with economic contraction?  Don’t the poor need growth to have a dignified life?  

Not in the conventional sense.  Improving employment, wages, living conditions, local vegan food production, education, public health and transportation and providing clean water don’t have the same devastating impacts on nature as aggregate expansion for private or government gain.

Free vegan food being offered at a Food Not Bombs tabling

Dispersing wealth evenly, vegan living, green energy, social housing, workers’ cooperatives, working less hours, men care-giving instead of worshipping porn and sports teams, cultivating talents, idle contemplation and revelry are types of progress that don’t ravage the earth and living beings like commercial extractivist societies do.

Redistribution, economic democracy,  animal/human animal equality, producing and consuming less, and post-growth economies would be powerful forms of intergroup solidarity and justice for all.

Veganist degrowth and redistribution is not a full-grown theory, plan of action or affiliation.  It is nonetheless worth exploring and perilous to dismiss.  Something nonvegan socialists and capitalists should adopt as well.   

SoaringFrigateBird

Dreamer?  Climate disruption, environmental despoliation, destitution and war may force us to take radical measures.  Now is the time to spread the conversation to raise consciousness to act for a nonviolent transition.

 


Marv is a moderator for the Vegan Feminist Network Facebook page.