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Most animal rights activists dedicate their lives to change people’s diet into a vegan one. They promote plant based diet, using the slogan cruelty free, with the hope that one day it would spread among all. Throughout this website we variously argued that this ambition is not achievable. We based our argument mainly on the human character and humans relationships with the rest of the species and other humans as it manifested throughout history. As we showed in numerous examples humans behavior and priorities don’t leave any chance for hope. But in this article we ignore the impossibility of a vegan world and argue that a vegan world is not a moral option regardless of its feasibility. We also ignore the fact that veganism is incomparably less cruel than animal based diet because even if the gaps are immeasurable, less cruel is still cruel and is not suffering free, therefore can't be a moral alternative.

As hard as it is for us, as vegans ourselves, to say and for you accept, veganism is actively encouraging one of the largest systems of human domination worldwide, which takes a huge toll on the environment and its inhabitants. Eating a vegan meal is participating in a long and complex web of intensive food production. Animal rights activists are so dazzled by the allegedly moral option that they forget some of the basics of every industry which are not absent in the case of vegan products. They know or at least can figure out that among the main stages of plant based diet production are land clearing, plowing, irrigation, fertilization and pesticides dispersal, harvesting followed by a great deal of processing, packaging and transportation. Just as all other industries, all stages require vast amount of mechanization, energy, vivisection (products tests), pollutants and habitat destruction. All are invisible when the final product sits on the shelves.

Our attempt to cover it all in the deepest, most thorough way is pretentious as well as chanceless considering the innumerable production processes involved and the endless suffering which is caused.

You will find here extremely distributing and distressing data of how vast and basic the suffering us vegans inflict on non human animals and how ridiculous the pretension to live cruelty free actually is.
Many if not most of the animal rights activists know that plant based diet is not 100% cruelty free. But very few acknowledge that a plant based diet is actually 100% cruel.

Deforestation

We are so used to agricultural lands that it’s almost like they were always there. But they didn’t come out of nowhere, they are all former prairies, arid areas and forests that were cleared. Most vegans relate deforestation to cattle grazing only, but deforestation occurs for decades and on a very massive scale for many crops that most vegans consume on a daily basis.

In the last 50 years around 3 billion hectares of forest, nearly half of world’s forest cover, were lost. Today, the urgent need for cultivation land accounts for 80% of the deforestation. In each of the last 12 years forests have been cut, bulldozed and burned, at a rate of 2,000 trees a minute.
Even if plant based diet accounts for 10% only are you comfortable with cutting 200 trees a minute? Do you know how many creatures are dependent on just one tree?

Clearing of ecosystems to make way for cultivation has taken place since the beginning of agriculture. Brutal and violent methods such as "slash and burn" - a widely used technique consists of cutting and burning forests or woodlands, to convert them into crop fields, started back then and are still relevant today. Since chopping down trees is not enough to make sure that no vegetation, soil microorganisms or "pests" are left, humans burn whatever and whoever remains in the area to the point of scorched earth. The ones who managed to escape the fire, are doomed to invade into populated habitats and fight over territory, food and water with the inhabitants.

Less tangible but not less harmful is the massive soil erosion which occurs because the trees and plants are removed, the heavy air pollution as a result of burning vegetation, hundreds of millions of tons of CO2 gas are released to the atmosphere annually as a result of the “slash and burn" method and because there are much less plants that can absorb the carbon.

As opposed to tobacco, coffee, tea and cacao which vegans can relatively easy manage without, there are many basic products that involve deforestation like cotton and sugar which are very common components in many products vegan use very often. Most of the vegan cloths are made of cotton and most of the processed food contains sugar. Palm oil which is the second most widely produced edible oil and is very important component in soaps and washing powders, is grown on former rainforests. And speaking of edible oil, soy, the vegans’ ‘unofficial’ main food is the most widely produced edible oil and it is considered to be the most harmful crop in terms of deforestation.

Avoiding any product that got any connection to deforestation is almost impossible and as you’ll see further in this article, detecting each and every part of the history of each and every part of each and every product is totally impossible.

Plowing and land degradation

After they destroy everything on the surface, humans move to destroy the surface itself.

The first stages of cultivation are tillage and plowing, which means in simple words, intentionally breaking the soil and turning it over. These practices are as old as agriculture and are still a main characteristic of it today. Currently, tillage practices can carve up to a meter and a half (5 feet) into the ground in order to bring deeper soil layers to the surface. This invasive procedure is accomplished with massive machinery as moldboard, disks or chisel plow (also called rippers) which destroy everything and everyone who is “in the way”. In fact one of the formal functions of tillage is to destroy nests, dens and burrows, home to millions of creatures.

The purpose of the plowing process which is done repeatedly before planting or seeding, is to change the soil formation, warm it and provide a seedbed. After the seeding, the soil will be plowed again, few more times, to keep the weeds down.

Plowing and tillage leave the soil bare and unprotected, exposed to wind and rain, heat and sun radiation, leading to severe land degradation. Most of the rainwater runs off the bare land, carrying important nutrients from the land topsoil, and a snowball effect starts: The land’s vulnerability to heat increases evaporation which increases loss of soil moisture which causes the ground to become saltier, the breakdown of organic matter in the soil is intensified and this decomposing releases greenhouse gases.

Virtually all cultivation activities lead to land degradation in the forms of acidification, salinity, organic depletion, compaction, chemical contamination, landslides and erosion, all are brought about by agriculture practices such as plowing, tillage, irrigation and the repeated planting in fields, which depletes the soil of nutrients. Eventually all the cultivated lands become less vigorous and some are totally unable to support plants. Land degradation has many consequences that effect distant regions too. One is polluting aquatic ecosystems by the amount of nutrients that were washed off the soil.

Absurdly, the degradation and the decline in fertility lead to an even more intensive land management with deeper and frequent plowing and more chemicals use, creating a downward spiral.

Seeding & monoculture

After the heavy machines tillaged and plowed, other heavy machines go across the land planting seeds. Exactly the same seeds.

Monoculture is the practice of growing one single crop over a wide area. It's one of the most prominent features of intensive agriculture. Almost 90% of the global calorie intake currently comes from just 30 crops. More than 90% of the 1.5 billion hectares of cropland worldwide are under annual crops, mostly monocultures of wheat, rice, maize, cotton, soybeans and also coffee, cacao, sugar, tobacco, bananas, palm trees and other intensive crops. 500 million hectares are occupied by four grain crops. This process represents an extreme form of a drastic simplification of diversity - a process that first began with the early days of agriculture and is getting more and more extreme each year.

The large-scale homogeneous crops causes huge amounts of pesticides and herbicides to be depleted, since the monoculture practice increases the vulnerability of crops to pathogens and diseases, which can be devastating when infesting hectare upon hectare of only a uniform-crop. When a single spore infects one leaf and produces more spores, many of them will have a high chance of success because they will land on identical susceptible leaves wherever they are dispersed.
To avoid such massive losses farmers would go through great length, even if it means poisoning the entire area.

In the early 90’s one of the most aggressive elements in plant agriculture broke forth and is growing rapidly.
Not only that crops grown over acres upon acres are of the same species and of a very similar sort, now they are all genetically identical down to the last gene.

Genetic engineering

Genetically Modified crops have inundated the world, most of all in north and South America, Asia and Australia. Only a decade after the first commercially planted crop, transgenic crops cover 250 million acres worldwide and the trend keeps expanding. The most common transgenic species are very veganish: soybeans, corn, cotton, tomatoes, potatoes, sugar and rice.

The technology is based on inserting to the genetic material of the plant a strand of DNA that gives the plant certain desirable characteristics. The most common characteristic is a resistance to a specific plant poison (herbicide), which is very potent to all the non-transgenic plants. The ability to grow GM crops and spread a strong herbicide that destroys everything else, is turning the land into a sort of “crop desert”. The impact on the animals is devastating.

90% of the GM organisms belong to Monsanto, the largest agribusiness corporation in the world. Monsanto and its likening hold legal rights over the plants they distribute.
So after half the plants in the world were claimed human owned, it is now becoming corporate owned.
GM plants are totally depended upon “their” herbicide, so a farmer that grows those crops bounds to buy a specific brand from a specific manufacturer. Since the crops he cultivates don’t “belong” to him, he can’t hold on to the seeds the plants produce, and so cant plant them the following growth cycle. He has to buy new seeds with every cycle.
Accept the obvious grievance to the farmer, the non-obvious and mass scale grievance is that this means much more transportation and packaging, more production phases, more labeling and more waste.

The genetically modified organisms without any doubt best represent the control of agri-corporations and governments over the food production system which they shape according to their greediness and short sighted narrow view.
Industrial, complex, dependent and wasteful system is desired by every state since it means an expanding market, corporate dependency, currency reinforcement and so forth.

The green revolution was actually the chemical revolution setting the ground for the current revolution of genetic engineer. Behind the “feeding the world” slogan of the green revolution stood those hidden agendas, as creating a wide and extremely depended market for manufactured goods based on chemicals as fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and etc.

Of course you are not to blame for agri-corporations control. We have no doubt that you are against it. The problem is your self delusion of a suffering free diet in the middle of what seems as the most destructive revolution in the food system since factory farming.

Irrigation

Irrigation is another method of altering the soil to make it fit for the planted crops.
Irrigation damages the soil as the salts dissolved in the water are concentrated in the ground where they inhibit plant growth. The practice of applying about 10 million liters of irrigation water per hectare each year, results in approximately 5 tones of salts being added to each hectare. Worldwide, approximately half of all the irrigated soils are affected by salinization. The world amount of used land for agriculture destroyed by salinized soil is estimated at 10 million hectares a year.

Agriculture places a huge strain on water resources. Globally, the agriculture sector accounts for 75% of the fresh water consumed. Water, more accurately fresh water, is wrongly considered an abounded, almost infinite resource, however, almost all of the world’s fresh water is not within reach (stored in glaciers, for example) and the amount that is reachable, is being drained at a rate higher than it is filling back. Most of the reasonably accessible fresh water is controlled by humans, while other creatures are dried. Humans’ water plundering also deprives non-humans of food and cover as vegetation is also severely affected by the water scarcity.

Irrigation also worsens the pollution damage made by the agriculture chemicals (mostly fertilizers), by increasing the wash off to other ecosystems. In addition, irrigation requires a massive infrastructure and a significant amount of fossil energy, both for pumping and delivering water to the crops. In the U.S. about 15% of the total energy expended for all crop production, is used for water pumping.

The water required to produce various foods ranges from 500 to more than 3,000 liters of water per kilogram of produced crop. The world average is 3,419 liters of water for 1kg of rice, and 1,800 liters for a 1kg of soybeans. Each potato comes at a cost of 40 liters and each orange at 75 liters. A hectare of corn transpires more than 5 million liters of water during the 3 months of growing season.

Stages follow the cultivation are even thirstier. A bag of chips- 185 liters, one slice of bread- 40 liters, a glass of apple juice – 190 liters and a single cotton shirt no less than 4,000 liters.

The fact that animal products consume much more water than vegan products doesn’t help the thirsting animals. It doesn’t make them cruelty free.
It just hurts less. But we don’t want a world with less suffering we want a sufferingless world.

Fertilizers

Among the various chemicals used in agriculture, the most widely applied are fertilizers.
Fertilizers use, means applying substances to alter the ground’s nutrient content in a way that fits the planted crops.
Changing the soil composition to increase the yield, goes back 6,000 to 10,000 years ago, with the spread of wood ashes, ground bones and salt on the ground. But it’s the green revolution that extremely expanded fertilizers use. From a global use of about 14 million tons in 1950, to 141 million tons in 2000. The application of nitrogen compounds, the most common fertilizer, raised in more than 600%, and phosphate fertilizer 250%.

The appliance of fertilizers, especially the constant deploy of the same chemicals -creates an imbalance of nutrients and of soil acidity levels. Microbes that are vital to keep the ground healthy can no longer survive and the overall result is land degradation which increase the dependency on fertilizers and again the same with monoculture and GMOs it creates a downward spiral, the more you use harmful methods the more you are depended on them.

The rate of nitrogen application can be up to 240kg per hectare for wheat and 290kg for cauliflower. 280kg for Cotton, 345kg for maize, 560kg for potatoes, 185kg for rice, 750kg for sugar canes and 525kg for tomatoes.

Half of the applied fertilizers amount, never reaches crop tissue, but evaporates or washed. The leakage of fertilizers into the environment results in a nutrient overload of ecosystems. Aquatic systems are impacted the most, both above ground and below.
Nitrogen and phosphorus pollution is a widespread problem in rivers, lakes, estuaries and coastal oceans all over the world. It allows the algae population to increase and their bloom causes oxygen levels to decline and eventually to the suffocation of marine animals.
To terrestrial ecosystems human activity adds at least as much fixed nitrogen as all the other species combined.

Herbicides

An herbicide is a type of pesticide designed to kill species of plants that compete with the desired crop for light, water, nutrients, and space, and therefore are considered as pests.

At first, herbicides that are nonselective are applied to newly-cleared land. These are violent substances that kill every plant they come into contact with. Other pesticides as Insecticides and Fungicides are also sprayed at early stages.
After the planting and as the crop grows, herbicides are distributed all along the way.
A cocktail of different herbicides is applied to each crop, each aim at another group of weeds in attempt to leave the desired crop relatively unharmed.

Modern, intensively managed agricultural systems have an intrinsic reliance on the use of herbicides. Most high-yield varieties of crop species, which were cultivated by humans, are not very tolerant of competition with fast spreading local weeds which are usually more suited to the land. Therefore, for crops to be successfully grown, herbicides are heavily used. Even more dependence upon herbicides is created as the weeds develop resistance to those substances through natural selection, so a larger amount of newer toxics has to be administrated.

Each hectare of beets requires 5.6Kg of herbicides, each hectare of potatoes 6.7Kg of herbicides, each hectare of onions 6.1Kg of herbicides. Each tone of sugar evolves the application of 0.84 kg of herbicides, each hectare of cabbage 1.5kg, each hectare of carrots 1.3kg. each hectare of cucumbers 2kg, each hectare of beans 6kg, each hectare of peas 1.2kg, each hectare of peppers 1.8kg, each hectare of pumpkins 1.7kg, each hectare of sweet corn 3.5kg, and cotton leads the list with as much as 7kg for a single hectare.

It is estimated that over 95% of herbicides reach a destination other than their "target species", contaminating air, land and both waterways and groundwater, thus effecting many other species, plants and animals alike. Many are very harmful to animals as they dramatically change plants spread, some critical for animals. Birds, fish and other aquatic organisms are hurt the most due to loss of resources they depend upon, mostly habitat, food and cover from predators.

And finally and as minor as it sounds compared to starving and frustrated animals who wonder where all their food has gone… those chemicals are mostly sprayed by tractors and airplanes, accounting for a significant amount of fuel consumption during the cultivation process. And the cultivation phase is one of the modest in energy consumption compared to the more progressive phases.

Pesticides

In order to protect what they wholeheartedly believe is genuinely and naturally theirs, humans use extremely violent toxics which they speciesistly prefer to call pesticides.
Birds, insects, mammals, fish and any other species that dares to come near humans’ “property” are doomed to be poisoned.

Humans are poisoning the world while producing energy, for about 4,500 years now.
The first known pesticide was sulfur. Later, toxic chemicals such as arsenic, mercury and lead were applied to crops.
Pesticide use has increased 50-fold since 1950 and now more than 2.5 million tons are used each year. 10 or more cycles of pesticide sprays during one crop cycle are not uncommon, and sometimes the seeds are even sprayed before planting.

Today it is estimated that the agricultural chemical industry is producing about 50,000 different pesticides based on approximately 600 active ingredients. All of them do what they are designed for and kill any animal that attempts to make use of land and plants, humans systematically rob from the other species. And they do much more than that. Pesticides have devastative affects on plants and animals all over the world, as they are easily carried by wind, rain and animals that consumed them and managed to get out of the poisoned area and unintentionally disperse them.
Rains wash some pesticides into ground and surface waters. Pesticides were found to pollute every stream and over 90% of wells in the US. Contaminated aquatic systems are found everywhere. A major impact has been the widespread mortality of fish and marine invertebrates, which are extremely vulnerable to pesticides. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Department of Agriculture estimate that up to 14 million fish and 67 million birds die from pesticide poisoning each year. Ten times more suffer from exposure.

Many pesticides decompose slowly and remain in the environment for years. They tend to bio-accumulate in the environment and in organisms, at a level of up to ten thousand times their original concentrations.
Some pesticides evaporate into the atmosphere and drift by wind to great distances and deposit in remote regions.

Despite the massive increase in pesticide use, each year more plants are “lost to pests”. Over the last decades, at some corn fields, a 4 fold increase of “crops lost to insects” occurred and led to a 1,000-fold increase of pesticide use.

As time and generations go by, species develop resistance to pesticides, which leads to more spread of more types of pesticides. Each evolvement is more violent and hurts more creatures in severer ways.
It is an endless path of violence. And vegans are integral part of it.

Growing potatoes for example requires disperse of almost 8kg of pesticides per hectare in one season. Grapes use 66kg of pesticides per hectare. In the EU grapes account for 3% of all cropland while responsible for 15% of the synthetic pesticide applications.
Cotton is the most pesticide-dependent crop in the world, accounting for up to 25% of all pesticide use. In one year alone over 50 million pounds of pesticides are used on U.S. cotton fields. Every T-shirt made of conventional cotton requires 1/4 pound of poison.

Pest control

A more primitive weapon humans use to defend “their property” is traps. There is a huge range of traps from the common leg trap that snaps as someone tread upon it, to creative mechanisms that shoot sharp spears once triggered, scissor-like knifes that shuts firmly or a noose-like loop that tightens and chokes. Those inquisition devices are spread by the dozens on each hectare when “necessary”. In many cases the traps are covered and sometimes they contain baits. Usually they are placed right on top of burrows entrances or inside them, leaving no chance for the rodents who live there.
Burrows, which are the farmers’ main target, are also attacked by varied toxic gases, liquids called fumigants and also with foaming agents which are pumped into the burrow system, quickly filling it entirely.
Smoke bombs are also very common. First, all the burrow’s entrances are sealed shut making sure there is no way to escape suffocation and that the highly dangerous substances won’t be inhaled by humans.
Even flammable gases such as propane and oxygen are injected with a hose into the burrows and then ignited.

Flooding or burning fields after harvest are also common “pest control” methods. Many animals, mostly snakes and baby rodents, are drowned or burned alive.

The extremist variation of “pest control” is when farmers begin to harvest the field on all sides going from the ends to the center, so many animals are packed at the last square. Then they burn the area while surrounding it with tractors, pickaxes, listers, mattocks, pitchforks and etc. The animals that were able to escape the flames, the smoke and tractors, are clubbed to death by the farmers.

In the case of sugar the burning phase is done prior to the harvest since sugarcanes are protected by a very moist tissue. The leaves and the “pests” burn but the profitable parts of the plant stay complete.

Organic

Organic products are many vegans’ false hope for the impossible sufferingless consumption. But organic agriculture also uses many chemicals as pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers, which are still potent to the ones they are intended to harm and many others.
The only difference is that those compounds (which are all manufactured and transported exactly like in the non-organic agriculture) are more ”natural“ and better decompose as if it matters to the poisoned animal.
Several of the earlier mentioned pest control methods are far more common in organic farming, and along the violent repertory of traps, biological extermination is very common.

Guess what organic agriculture and the fur industry got in common…

It suits meat eaters, not animal rights activists to be satisfied with the label “no pesticides”, concluding that no actions were made to remove whom who gets near humans’ “property”. The desire to have an alternative option blurs critical and clear thinking. Can it be that what is economically senseless with animal products as you try to explain non-vegans again and again, is perfectly logical with organic ones?
Do you really believe that it is possible to produce sufficient amounts of food without any disinfestation?

The organic agriculture holds such a good reputation because the suffering is less visible.
All the activists know that avoiding pesticides use by organic producers is not for the sake of animals but for the sake of consumers. Many farmers take advantage of the “green” trend and the health trend, abandoning non-organic agriculture and substitute it with organic to increase profits. Most couldn’t care less about a few poisoned creatures. And indeed they use “pest control” methods which are not less violent.

do you really think biological extermination is better?

Being less productive, organic agriculture requires much more land, meaning more deforestation and more habitat destruction. Furthermore, since the crops are less treated they are more vulnerable to the climate and are more depended on the soil type so the growth is limited to smaller and fitter areas even though the demand is worldwide, meaning much more transportation.

Organic or not, local or continent away, regardless of the methods that were or weren’t used, every land is an occupied territory conquered by humans for humans’ use

A single shopping basket of 26 imported organic products could have traveled 241,000km and released as much CO2 as an average household of 4 does through cooking meals over eight months.
The crops’ vulnerability also requires more packing meaning more of the packages production harms (which will be specified further in this article) and eventually more waste.

And even if it was possible that all of your food was produced with absolutely no chemicals, no pest control methods what so ever, as little packages as possible, and supposedly you could really know that everything you buy is local, and you will only buy seasonably. What is the concept? That the occupation and domination is principally justified but it is just exaggerated?

Food processing

Food processing is the general name for a varied series of industrial processing stages done in factories, which differ significantly from one plant to the other. But they all have some common features as ingredients input, each of those produced, packed and transported of course, and the output of materials as waste - solid, liquid or gas, and usually all three.

The industrialization in the processing phases are much more evident than in the former phases, as they all generally require a significant amount of energy, transportation and packaging throughout the stages, so in many cases those processes are much more environmentally harmful than the entire cultivation phases that precede them, sometimes up to five times worse.

Here is a partial list of what typical food items go through:

• Cleaning and removing unwanted parts such as the outer layers, for example the skinning of peaches, separating the beans from the pod, or on the contrary extracting the interior such as seeds.
• Chopping, milling and grounding as in chocolate production.
• Mixing and macerating as in preserved fruits and vegetables.
• Liquefaction and pressing as in fruit juices production and soy milk.
• Fermentation like in beer breweries, soy sauces and tempeh.
• Proofing (before baking) in bread making.
• Supplementation of ingredients such as emulsifications in margarine, soy ice-cream and chocolate, or gases as in gasification of drinks. There are thousands of different additives with tens of different purposes. Some animal derived, all animal tested.
• Cooling, freezing as with almost everything.
• Heating with all of its forms such as baking, boiling, broiling, frying , steaming.

There is practically no food product, not even vegan, organic and not genetically modified that doesn’t go through at least two of the mentioned industrial stages, usually more. Taking into account the earlier mentioned processes and the later mentioned processes and the whole production is summed up with about a dozen stages for each typical vegan food item

"Raw food"

Even foods that seem raw in the eyes of the costumer have actually been through several processes. Many crops, mostly cereals and legumes are stored for long months after harvest. Before the storage they go trough a drying process to reduce moister levels. The grains are transported to a drying facility, a factory structure made of heaters, aeration fans and conveyors. Crop drying requires a large amount of energy, in the U.S it seizes about 5% of the total energy consumption of agriculture. It takes more than a hundred liter of propane fuel to dry corn from just one hectare, from 25% watery to 15% of water which is the safely stored level.

When it comes to raw fruits and raw vegetables, stages include cleaning, sorting, cooling, coating, drying and storage. Usually post-harvest processing is done in mechanized facilities, with conveyor belts, automated sorting, room size refrigerators and etc. The more stages involved the more transportation and packaging.

The most important factor in crops maintaining is temperature. Many fruits and vegetables are kept below 10°C, stored in massive refrigerators equipped with fans for air circulation and monitored moisture which require a large amount of energy.
The so called raw foods even receive treatment to improve their looks. Fruits with a greenish tint are placed in special storage rooms where ethylene gas is used to bring out the color.

In order to retain moisture, inhibit mold growth and to make them more appealing and shiny in the grocery store many fruits and vegetables are covered with a wax coating. So not only that those which are considered as the most basic, least processed foods on the shelves go through several harmful process, they contain bee wax or other secretions of insects as shellac, what actually makes them non-vegan.

Pollination

Bees are not associated to allegedly vegan food products just through the not so well-known waxing phase that vegetables and fruits go through, but also because about 75% of all food crops, including many fruits, vegetables and beans are made possible by pollinators, mostly insects. Honeybees are by far the most common pollinators, accounting for 90% of the pollination that crops like almonds and apples are completely dependent on.

Farmers, who rely on factory-farmed honeybees for pollination, rent more than two million honeybee colonies every year in the US alone.
The hives are transported by trucks mostly and sometimes by airplanes, from field to field according to blossom timings.

Honey production is valued at $157 million a year in the US while the value of the food crops pollinated by honey-bees reaches $15 billion every year.
In economic terms it means that honey is strictly a sideline activity. Beekeepers earn much more from renting “their” bees for pollination than they do from honey production.
In other words the two industries heavily rely on one another in a mutual dependence.
And so ironically vegan food is what keeps the beekeeping business the profitable industry it is.

Somehow the question whether honey is vegan or not managed to be taken seriously as if there is a genuine moral issue regarding bees’ extreme and vast exploitation. If you are here you probably don’t have doubts that honey is not vegan but you should know that avoiding honey and products that contain wax is not sufficient to avoid bee’s exploitation. You should also avoid apples, almonds, avocados, peanuts, broccoli, onions, cauliflower, carrots, alfalfa, rapeseed, squash, pumpkins, cucumbers, citrus, cherry, raspberries, cranberries, blueberries, blackberries, strawberries, pears, watermelons, cantaloupes, kiwis, plums, sunflowers and even cotton and soybeans.

Vegan food is grown on the expense of billions upon billions of bees, that go through routine examination and handling, artificial feeding regimes, drug and pesticide treatment, genetic manipulation, artificial insemination, smoking, air blasting, transportation (by air, rail and road), starvation, slaughter and of course theft of their sole source of nutrition.

Shelf life extension

Prolonging the shelf life of food items was and still is a major breakthrough in the food trade.
On top of allowing more processing steps that the food can pass, it can also be transported for longer distances. Today any product can reach any place while it is still consumable.

Common shelf life prolonging methods include:

• Cooling, freezing and refrigeration are the most famous and common methods.
• Heating, either to reduce moister as drying of grains and legumes
• Pasteurization or sterilization in order to kill organism
• Forms of toxic inhibition such as smoking, using carbon dioxide, nitrite or sulphite, vinegar, alcohol and etc.
• Changing the osmotic pressure (mainly by sugar or salt)
• Modified atmosphere
• Ultra high water pressure
• Ionizing radiation

Packaging

Another integral part of the food manufacture chain is packaging. There is no food item that wasn’t packed at least once during its production, and in most cases much more than once. Many vegans without a second thought consume vegan products totally ignoring the amount of packaging involved during all the stages of production.
From the packed plant seeds, fertilizers and pesticides during cultivation, along the processing stage with all its packed material inputs (including the packing materials themselves) and some of its waste outputs, to the final packed products which are packed together while delivered to the retails, and when each is bought, it is packed again in a shopping bag.

The trend toward increased packaging started decades ago and still continues, as the rate of the packaging manufacture is growing faster than the rate of products manufacture, in both developed and developing countries, especially as western corporations enter “new markets”.
More than half of the vegetables in the US are bought as canned, frozen, or dried products, almost half of the consumed fruits are purchased as packed juices.

The food industry points out that without packaging the environmental cost of food will be even higher due to spoilage and food losses. Of course they have an economic interest to claim that (packaging enables to add preservatives and to label products and etc), but it’s true and it means that today’s excessive packaging allows more food to be shipped to longer distances.

Packages have another significant function, to attract the consumers’ eyes. This means many more redundant stages with many more harmful materials and much more energy consumption. The greater the competition within the producers the greater the use of paper, glue, ink, dyeing colors and etc.

Packaging came under criticism since after the product use the package is discarded and eventually piled up in giant waste mountains or filling up dunghills (for example third of the municipal waste in the US is packages). However, much less known is that many waste management processes the thrown packages gone through in the landfills, incinerators and collection trucks, are less harmful than the manufacturing emissions of the packaging materials.

The common soymilk (and most of the common juice boxes) includes 70% paper, 24% plastic, and 6% aluminum arranged in six layers.

Shipping

Vegans’ avoidance of so many food items creates a dependency on the variety of producers. One producer adds food coloring made out of animals that another producer doesn’t but do use albumen to stick all the ingredients together and only the third doesn’t use any animal ingredient in his version of the same product. This variety is derived from the capitalist institutes as free trade and free competition (which you all know is actually a race to the bottom), open markets and massive imports and exports. All enable vegans to consume products that might not contain animal ingredients, but hurt animals indirectly. Vegans unintentionally support these capitalist principles while consuming products that came from far places.

Transportation is the lifeblood of the world economy. Today's food travels much more than ever. Only little of what is produced someplace is also being eaten there. Everyone everywhere depends increasingly on long-distance food. Encouraged by food processing innovations, cheap oil, and subsidies, the value of global trade in food has tripled since the 60’s and the tonnage of food shipped between nations has grown fourfold. Food is now the largest component of air freight, and air transport is the most polluting and least efficient form of transportation.

In a supermarket in New Jersey, there are tomatoes from Mexico, grapes from Chile, lettuce from California and apples from New Zealand.
It makes no difference where the consumer is, to eat is to participate in a truly global food system.
Lemons from Argentina are sold in Spanish markets, onions from Mexico and pumpkins from Italy are sold in Irish markets. Canada is importing tomatoes from California and Mexico while exporting its own grown tomatoes. The average North American meal contains ingredients from five countries in addition to U.S ones. 95% of the fruit and half of the vegetables in the UK are imported.

The amount of foods marked with the number of miles they travelled is infinitesimal, and the mentioned miles only relate to what the final product has gone. We don’t know of any product that the total miles involved in its production are calculated and marked on the package. Probably because it is impossible and because nobody cares enough to make sure such a complicate calculation will be operated.

Transportation plays a vital role all over the food production chain, not only when the product is finished and ready to be consumed. From transportation of the minerals that compose the fertilizers, later to be sent to the farmer, to the many raw materials, including the oil used at the processing stages, to the transportation of waste after consumption.

Because of the way the food processing industry works, ingredients travel around from factory to factory, before they make their way to the shops.
As absurd as it may sound, a crop of potatoes can be transported many miles to be packaged at a central depot and then sent many miles back to be sold near where they were produced in the first place.

When lettuce from Los Angeles is flown to London, it requires 127 calories of fuel for every lettuce calorie. It takes around 1,000 kilojoules of energy to ship 170kJ worth of strawberries from Chile to the United States. In other words, the energy consumed in food freight often outweighs the nutritional energy in the food itself.

Food transportation has a significant and growing impact on vehicle congestion, accidents, climate change, noise and air pollution. Conventional food delivery truck uses 4 to 17 times more fuel and releases 5 to 17 times more carbon dioxide emissions than regional and local food distribution systems. A typical basket of 26 imported organic foods may have traveled the distance of 241,000km, six times around the equator. A weekly basket of imported food (fruit and vegetables) could add to one ton of CO2 emissions.

Observe the estimated miles that your food travels:

Apples	1,726 miles
Beans	1,313 miles
Broccoli	1,846 miles
Cabbage	719 miles
Carrots	1,838 miles
Corn	1,426 miles
Garlic	1,811 miles
Lettuce	1,823 miles
Onions	1,759 miles
Peppers	1,589 miles
Potatoes	1,155 miles
Spinach	1,815 miles
Strawberries	1,830 miles
Tomatoes	1,569 miles

Food miles symbolize the wastefulness of food production. This system is by large the result of consumer demand, that all over the world expect to have a year round supply of products, with no regard to season or location. And vegans are integral part of this demand when many times their only vegan option has come from the other side of the world. Today it is impossible to base all your diet on local food and even if you could, buying local is not always better. For example the energy needed to heat glasshouses for growing tomatoes in Britain is significantly larger than the energy used in transporting tomatoes from Spain, where no heating is used because of the warmer climate. Glasshouses are also a major cause of CO2 emissions so in this case it is better to import tomatoes from Spain than to grow them in Britain. But of course, as all the vegan options, it’s the lesser of two evils. And we shouldn’t compromise on either.

Do you really believe you should spend your time on debating with your fellow vegans about what is less worse: buying a product from a local company that use animals tests for other products they sell or a product from a company that doesn’t use animals tests at all but their products are flown 150,000km to reach your local grocery store?

The suffering inflicted in animals test is more direct and perceptible so we guess you will pick the far distance non-tested products. We did too. But not anymore. Why do you keep choosing between two evils? Why are you compromising on someone else’s suffering?

Home consumption

Household cooking holds a much more Eco-friendly image than the massive factory facilities, but in many cases it is a misconception. Home preparation is just another form of food processing. Comparative studies found that a home cooked meal can be just as bad as one that was cooked up in distant industrial plant, packaged and transported to be sold at supermarkets. But since household activities are done personally on a smaller scale it is easy to miss their accumulating effect, that in some cases is the worst of all in the production chain.

Third of the total energy demand for food is used by domestic consumption. Industrial scale cooking or cooling mechanisms are less damaging than the kitchen pot or fridge. Bread baking for example is 3 times more energy saving in a plant than using a home bread backer. The larger the vessel, and the more volume it can contain, the more efficient it is in temperature preserving because heat is lost from the sides of the little vessels, and the larger ones have a better volume to surface area ratio and therefore better in energy saving.

Another important aspect of the volume to surface area ratio is with packing. On a larger scale it is possible to pack more material (volume) in less packaging (surface area).
When spicy tofu is made in a plant, the salt, soy sauce, oil and the rest of the ingredients come in huge containers, this as oppose to home preparation where the ingredients come in a couple of hundreds of grams package, or in a liter bottle.
Also, the industrial containers are not designed to draw attention so all the processing stages of improving their looks are omitted.

What is a maleficent most of the time but an advantage in that sense is that being a business, factories aim for expenses reduction and so make huge efforts to decrease energy and water use. Households generate large amounts of wastewater from food washing, cooking and dishwashing. These stages are calculated in a factory as opposed to the single consumer who is unaware of many aspects.

Waste

The amounts of household waste consecutively grow every year. Each person in the US is responsible for 2Kg of garbage a day - twice the amount that was made 4 decades ago. The western European produces about 1.6kg per day, a 25% increase since the last decade.
About one third of all household waste in industrial countries is packages (6.3 million tons in Britain each year). Since by far most packages are of food products, about two thirds of the household waste is food waste.

Before you count the number of packed products you normally purchase, consider the massive volumes of waste that you are not aware of and are generated all across the food production chain. Piles of agricultural waste are left behind right after the harvest since in all crops only a small part of the harvested plant is used. Most of this waste is buried or burned as a quick and easy mean of disposal. And of the food that actually leaves the farms’ gates about 30% is lost either by spoilage or wasteful processing. Studies regarding high-income countries estimate that the amount of loss is twice as much.

Waste is very wasteful in energy consumption sense as it is not only transported by the urban garbage tracks, it also travels great distances to be dumped far away from human populations, into someone else’s habitat. The rich countries dump their waste into poor ones and everybody dumps it into the poorest creatures in the world - the nonhumans.

In many cases the waste passes more processing stages, requiring more energy and the use of polluting chemicals. In the worst case, waste is burned, and then dumped into landfills. Both scenarios (dumping with or without burning) pollute the air, water and land, but burning creates a greater amount of potent toxins release into the atmosphere at a faster rate. For instance, during burning, food additives and the ink that made the plastic more attractive create dioxins when burned as well as emit heavy metals. On the other hand, plastics have high environmental cost when dumped into landfills without burning, since they are not biodegradable and simply don’t break down. In the best of cases it takes thousands of years for the decomposition to begin.

Recycling might seem like a good solution but as you’ll see in the next topic, it is convenient, available and it makes people feel good about themselves, but not at all environmentally effective.

Recycling

When asked what they do to help the environment 85% of the US population said they recycle. But what is considered to be a magic solution and a major conscience reliever regarding consumption and waste production, turns out to be no more than just another form of industrial processing with some very good public relations.

Recycling centers are just like any other factory plants, they require energy, chemical input and pollution output. Recycling plastic, glass and paper save little energy, and require many of the same processing stages as the production of the primal product. Some plastic recycling releases even more toxins than plastic producing.

After the pick up trucks dump the recyclables, the materials are piled on to large conveyer belts that transport them to the sorting area where they are divided according to type and color while materials other than the one intended for recycling are removed. In the case of plastics the recyclables are then washed, dried, chopped into pieces and sorted again. The left pieces are melted- in a fuel burning process that releases more toxins into the air than when the plastics were first made. The melted material is filtered, cooled and then cut into pellets or spun into a fine fiber.
In the case of paper for example, there is a stage of returning it to pulp by the use of chemicals such as sodium hydroxide, hydrogen peroxide and sodium silicate. These chemicals bleach and spread out the pulp fibers. These fibers are then run through cleaning and screening sequences that remove any contaminants. The pulp must then be heated and washed with clean water to remove ink particles that were removed from the paper by the chemical process. Toxic sludge is formed, composed of short fibers, glues, inks, dyes and some of the chemicals used in the recovery process. This sludge is much more harmful than the one that comes out of paper mill using trees.

Making things much worse is the way products and packages are designed. Guided by marketing tactics the products labels which their sole purpose is appealing to the consumer, are either impossible to be separated from the rest of the package, or that special efforts are made in order to separate them, making the recycling much harder and less efficient. Many packages cannot be recycled at all.

Generally, the benefits of recycling are so minor that taking recyclables to the stations by car can use more energy than is saved. The trucks that transport the waste to the factory are in some cases undoing the recycling job, and that’s without the whole recycling process’ outcomes we mentioned in this text.
Since the recycling stages are so expansive, many recycling factories reopen in central Asia to reduce expenses, requiring shipping half way around the world. Ironic, absurd, but so typical for this race.

Also, the new items that are made from used materials are very limited, mostly when it comes to plastics, which lose their quality when recycled. It’s sometimes hard to find a use for it. That’s how recycled junk that there isn’t a need for as picnic tables, doormats, pallets, frames and liners, funnels, flower pots, garden furniture and more decorative artifacts come to be. Finding a use for all the recyclable material, means creating a market for products of no necessity.
So even the single benefit of recycling - environmental education, goes to waste since it reinforces the environment greatest enemy – over-consumption.

Our point is not to show that paper recycling is worse than cutting down more trees.
We have no doubt that it isn’t. Our point is to show that paper recycling like any other recycling is very environmentally harmful and so can’t be referred as an appropriate alternative.

The idea that there is a solution for the massive waste production is false and illusive because many people won’t make the tiny effort of recycling and because recycling is at most only a tiny effort to reduce enormous ecological damage.

Recycling relative popularity is eliminative. There is no chance people will significantly reduce their consumption or their babies making, so they ease their consumption and waste production guilt by the “noble’ gesture of spreading plastic and paper from the general garbage. Big fucking deal.

Energy

Energy consumption has a significant role all over the food system. From the energy that is used to produce the trucks, to the fuel they use for the transportation of plastic rope with which logs (which their cut consumed a lot of energy too of course) that would become the farm's fence are tied together, and to the cultivation machinery which require much energy and etc.

It is an endless list and that is even before the first crop plantation.
By large all this energy comes of crude oil and other fossil fuels. It is impossible to really tell how much of it was used throughout the entire system for each food item.

During cultivation, the major fossil energy consumers include fertilizers, agricultural machinery, in-farm transportation, irrigation, and pesticide.
The energy required to manufacture fertilizers, accounts for up to half of all energy inputs. Another 5% goes to pesticides production. This is because oil and gas are both the energy source and the raw materials in the manufacture of fertilizers and pesticides- petrochemicals derived from fossil fuels are synthesized to make those agrichemicals. Fuel to run machinery which perform almost all operations amounts to about a third of the energy demand. Another 10% or more goes to water pumping.

And so far this was just the cultivation stage. On the total, in industrial countries, food production system accounts for 17% of the fossil energy used. The percentage of the processing phases, packaging, transportation, distribution and home preparation is about 75% of the entire food chain.

The Green Revolution increased the global energy flow to agriculture by an average of 50 times, in some places even 100 or more.

The transformation of grain into 1Kg flour requires 1.3kg of grain and about 2MJ of energy. The baking process takes another 5MJ for each Kg of bread.
It takes 1.25Kg of potatoes to obtain 1Kg of boiled and peeled potatoes, and 5.3kg of potatoes and 15MJ of energy to manufacture 1Kg potato flakes.
To grow 1kcal of plant protein requires an input of about 2.2kcal of fossil energy. About 1,000 liters of oil equivalent (as petrol of diesel or propane) are used for each hectare of corn.
And for every calorie of energy used by agriculture, five more are used for processing, storage and distribution. On average in industrial countries, food manufacture until items place shelves, consumes ten times more energy than it produces as food energy.

Plant based diet is cruel. The fact that there are much crueler diets doesn’t make it cruelty free. Cruelty free is a fiction. Veganism is inexpressibly less harmful compared to animal based diet but it is still a huge compromise on someone else’s suffering. As cruel as animal products are they can’t purify vegan products.

Mistakenly believing they can exist without hurting, vegans adherently preach for the delusional cruelty free diet. The conventional lie that a vegan diet is moral, significantly hurts the chances for a sufferingless world. Activists convince non-vegans and themselves that there is a cruelty free option and that it is accomplishable. This false belief prevents them from searching for real solutions. The more activists who acknowledge that vegan diet is cruel the greater the chance they would stop preaching for sufferingfull diet and acknowledge that the only true vegan world is sentientless world.

The fact that you object some if not all of the processes is meaningless because as you tell meat eaters, when they justify their consumption habits saying they are against animals’ torture and think that it should be made differently but actually financially support and practically encourage the exact things they are against, that they are resisting with words but supporting with actions.

Don’t get us wrong, we don’t call vegans hypocrites, we know vegans have no other option and as mentioned many times along the website we are vegans too.
We know vegans don’t have a choice and that is exactly the problem. In this world there are no moral options. There is no alternative to home racking, poisoning, polluting, fencing, deforestation, drilling habitats and etc. This is the world and we refuse to let it continue.

There is no way to avoid suffering causing. No matter how little we will consume, we will cause suffering. Suffering is an inherent part of life.
A vegan world is not achievable and it won't achieve a sufferingless world even if it was.

The veganism fixation is diverting activists from suffering fighters to vegan converters.
It seems that animal rights activists should be reminded all the time that veganism is not the goal but the mean.

Even if we momentarily ignore the impossibility of a vegan world, as dreamy as it would be, moral people should aspire for a sufferingless world, not a world of deforestation, systematic burning, asphalt, concrete, plowing, scooping, transportation, packaging and etc.

Why are you compromising on less suffering when you can eliminate all the suffering?

Animal rights activists call the attempt to improve some of the conditions in animal exploitation systems - welfarism. Well isn’t trying to help some of the animals knowing that some others will continue to suffer considered as welfarism too?

Are you familiar with the slogan “We don’t want wider cages, we want empty cages”? of course you are. So why not “We don’t want a world with less suffering, we want a sufferingless world”?

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