The owners of an alternative supermarket occupied by animal rights activists say the protest “highlighted an interesting clash of ideologies”. Jim Manson wonders if it was a clash of ideologies just waiting to happen.
For decades the term ‘natural products’ has served as useful shorthand. Endlessly remouldable, it has allowed our industry to embrace a whole panoply of product categories and values.
‘Natural products’ has come to denote everything from whole foods to supplements and remedies; vegan foods to organic meat and dairy, sports nutrition products to natural beauty (in each of its organic/vegan/clean label variants!). Under same umbrella term independent brands and retailers (and a sprinkling of workers’ cooperatives) trade alongside large, multinational-owned businesses, and multiple value-systems compete for attention.
Most of the time this loose coalition of product categories, brands and movements coexist fairly well. We’re a broad church; there’s more that unites us than divides, we tell ourselves. But there are some relationships that have begun to come under strain. That’s because some of the ideas and values embraced by the natural products industry – to which we can now add newer priorities like sustainability, carbon footprint, regenerative organic, zero-waste, and business ownership issues – are not just different to one another, they’re oppositional. And that creates tensions.
“…some of the ideas and values embraced by the natural products industry are not just different to one another, they’re oppositional”
Here’s an example of how such tensions can quickly come to a head. Last month a large group of activists from the animal rights organisation Direct Action Everywhere (DxE) occupied the Brighton-based alternative supermarket HISBE (How It Should Be), and staged a noisy and, by some accounts, intimidating protest against the retailer’s policy of selling meat and dairy products. It was the second time HISBE had been targeted in a matter of months.
Irony? There is none
Some have commented on the apparent irony that a retailer that has worked so conspicuously hard to demonstrate its business ethics – on responsible sourcing, sustainability, social justice and animal health – should be a targeted in this way. But there is no irony. It’s precisely because HISBE positions itself an an ethical business that it has attracted such intense hostility from DxE.
HISBE’s stated commitment to ‘high welfare’ meat and dairy and opposition to factory farming identifies its owners as ‘welfarists’ – people and businesses, as DxE would have it, who “propagate the humane meat myth”. It’s the same reason the group has targeted Whole Foods Market stores in the US, and other ‘vegan-friendly’ retailers.
Responding to events on Facebook, HISBE noted philosophically that the protests had revealed “different sets of food ethics” and highlighted “an interesting clash of ideologies”.
Primarily an animal liberation group, DxE distinguishes itself from what it calls “the mainstream animal rights movement”. It is deliberately confrontational in its actions and the language it uses (meat is “mutilated bodies”). Through its anti-speciesism lens, meat eating acquires the moral equivalence of murder.
Vegan tyranny
DxE’s methods are untypical among vegan campaign groups and this particular flashpoint – animal liberation activism versus ‘supermarket rebels’ – is probably an isolated one. But what is clear is that there is increasing factionalization within the wider vegan movement. Take for example the disdain among some ethical vegans for so-called ‘lifestyle veganism’, strikingly exemplified by comments by the rock star and long-time animal rights campaigner Chrissie Hynde. In a recent BBC documentary Hynde attacked what she called the “vegan tyranny” – the tyranny in this case being that veganism has “become all about nutrition, not about compassion.”
A similar divide has opened up between veganism and plant-based approaches. A google search using the phrase ‘vegan vs plant-based’ yields an extraordinary 8.6 million results. Now, it’s true, many of the web discussions on this subject are straightforward attempts at defining the differences (and similarities) between these two approaches. But quite quickly the mood starts to change. ‘If you’re on a plant-bass diet, stop calling yourself a vegan!’, ‘vegan betrayal’, ’There’s a movement hijacking the vegan one and it’s called plant-based’.
At exactly the same time, both vegan and plant-based producers are being attacked for “hijacking” dairy and meat terms. Recent comments from the food campaigner and writer Joanna Blythman come to mind. In her column in The Grocer, Blythman noted the “audacious way the vegan and plant-based lobby exploits the feel-good connotations of the traditional language of foods while ideologically trashing the production systems that create them”.
“On one level these tensions are evidence of the deep passions that run through our industry. Being for the things we believe in often means being against other things (Big Pharma, Big Food, pollution, social injustice, pesticides, GMOs, intensive farming).”
Elsewhere, there is deepening frustration within the organic community over ‘natural-washing’ (alongside calls for ‘real’ organic standards), rifts between competing ethical standards, anger at pioneer brands who sell to multinationals, and outrage directed at eco companies for developing sustainable ingredients branded ‘not natural’.
Echo chambers
On one level these tensions are evidence of the deep passions that run through our industry. Being for the things we believe in often means being against other things (Big Pharma, Big Food, pollution, social injustice, pesticides, GMOs, intensive farming). It always has has done. That these tensions keep now coming to the surface is probably in part to do with the confrontational way we communicate in the digital world, the divisive echo chambers of social media. In so many ways and for so many reasons, DxE’s protest at HISBE was a clash of ideologies – or ideas at least – just waiting to happen.