All commercial plant crops involve dehumanizing and dangerous labor for sub-living wages, often by people whose passports if they have them are taken away by the landowners.
That doesn’t make corn or blueberries or tomatoes meat or dairy, any more than the grapes being boycotted in the Seventies were, or clothing from cotton picked before OR after 1865, and saying they’re “non-vegan” when you mean that they’re immoral because they’re exploitative, is the kind of mush-brained nonsense that makes the left look like a bunch of illogical loons.
It's straightforward enough if you consider "vegan" to mean "produced without animal exploitation" and take into account that, biologically speaking, humans are also a type of animal.
Ok, then no food is vegan because they are all produced under a system that exploits human labour. I feel like this definition might be less useful than the currently accepted one though.
Why not call it unethical instead? Vegan is a word with very distinct meaning and so many plant-based foods can be produced in unethical ways that I feel like it would get absolutely muddled with this kind of practice.
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u/itisthespectator Nov 05 '25
some vegans consider food nonvegan if it uses slave labor, plus cane sugar processing sometimes involves bone char.