Over on www.thisdishisvegetarian.com I ran across a new-ish pseudo-vegan rationalization in this (I’m sure) well-intentioned piece by Elizah Leigh, in which she purports to show all she’s learned being a “weekday vegan.” This makes about as much sense as Mark Bittman’s “vegan before six” construct, which is to say none at all, but the thing that jumped out at me were Leigh’s stated reasons for her “vegan” transition: 

How this squares with being non-vegan on the weekends is anyone’s guess, but it still makes no sense at all. As Leigh herself allows, she’s only “test-driving” her own version of semi-veganism. This totally ignores the ethical position that underlies veganism itself. We have to oppose this if we’re ever to have any chance of communicating that ethical position itself. If veganism can be “test driven” (and part-time, at that) then it’s just another diet. The ethics don’t much matter, here. 

Think it through: would we applaud this construction on any other sort of social justice claim? Can one claim to be opposed to racism or sexism “part-time?” Can one claim that the treatment of animals weighs heavily on one’s conscience and then that moral concern can be discarded on a whim, when the almighty tastebuds win out, but hey, we’re limiting it to the weekends, so let’s all join hands and call this progress for animal rights…and make no mistake, Leigh would like folks to think at least part of her concern is, indeed, animal rights. 

Then why not make a sincere effort? Does your need for milk chocolate or whatever your trigger food really is justify animal consumption so long as you tell yourself you’re making “progress” by limiting your consumption to Saturdays and Sundays? Are you really committed to the RIGHTS of nonhumans you exploit for your trivial tastes? Can you really rationally make this claim? 

Of course not.

Now then: if the folks at This Dish had called the piece “Weekend Vegetarianism” or something similar, there wouldn’t be much point in objecting. Given that “vegetarian” has become so diluted as to be meaningless, I’d have (regretfully, perhaps) left it be. But words matter. Meaning matters. An ethical consideration that animals are not ours to eat or wear was why Donald Watson coined the term vegan in the first place. Veganism is not a diet. It’s not about eating healthier, or living in a smaller ecological footprint or even reducing factory farming. It may incidentally include those things, but ultimately, veganism is a moral commitment that animals do not exist for us to exploit for food, clothing and trivial, easily avoidable human conveniences. Any claim to “part time” veganism removes this ethical consideration and makes veganism just another fad diet that one can try on for size when one wishes to lose some weight or “get healthy” or “live green” or other such ego-fulfilling cliches…but ultimately it simply means that the folks promoting this notion haven’t fully considered animal rights ethics, no matter how much they may claim to support those ethics.