The Omnivore’s Deception by John Sanbonmatsu

Author Interview

I first encountered John Sanbonmatsu in 1989 when I read his groundbreaking article in Z Magazine on why the left should take animal rights seriously as an idea and as an important social justice movement. Since then, he’s become one of the most important advocates for animals who frames animal justice as integral to a progressive agenda of social change. Whether you agree with him or not, or your political views are compatible, John’s work is important for everyone who cares passionately about animals. He offers a clarity of analysis and a sparkling vision that’s as provocative as needed. John’s latest book, The Omnivore’s Deception: What We Get Wrong About Meat, Animals, and Ourselves, refutes arguments made by Michael Pollan and many others in favour of “enlightened” omnivorism. Further, as the book’s publicity states, it exposes the “fraudulent notion that we can go on raising and killing nonhuman beings for food without wrecking the earth, inflicting terrible suffering on animals, or ruining our souls.”

Were you raised by parents who made you aware of social justice? Or was it something you discovered? How integral was animal exploitation to your understanding? Was it integral or emerged later?

My sisters and I were brought up with strong ethical values by our parents, a sense that others should be treated with kindness and respect. In addition, our family’s experiences of intergenerational trauma and social marginalization played a role in my moral education. My mother is Jewish and grew up during a period when antisemitism was an accepted norm throughout the United States; my father, meanwhile, the son of Japanese immigrants, was imprisoned along with the rest of his family in a Japanese-American internment camp during the Second World War. Though my parents mostly avoided talking about these experiences when we were growing up, this background of trauma shaped all of us. As an Asian-American growing up in an overwhelmingly white community in New England, furthermore, I was subjected to a great deal of racist bullying. So, I learned to abhor injustice at an early age, and I also learned to empathize with other kids who were picked on or victimized, whether for being disabled, Black, or for being girls.

Image courtesy of the author.

However, it wasn’t until I was older, in college, that I began thinking about injustices toward other animals. Though I loved animals as a child—we grew up with cats and dogs in our household, and treated them as members of our family—I nonetheless killed insects with abandon and even sadism, as a displacement of my own alienation and feelings of helplessness. Needless to say, no one in my family was a vegetarian, and indeed I can’t recall having encountered a single vegetarian in my hometown throughout my childhood.

During my second or third year of college in the early 1980s, however, I came across Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation in a bookstore in Amherst, Massachusetts. I was already familiar with Singer’s moral theories, having encountered them in a philosophy class the year before. Animal Liberation really opened my eyes to a structure of domination I had never known existed, and I became an ethical vegetarian, then (a few years later) a vegan. While today I find Singer’s utilitarian framework problematic for animal rights (something I discuss in my new book), it was reading Animal Liberation that set me on the path to veganism and animal advocacy, and for that I am grateful. Next year I’ll have been a vegan for 40 years.

The title, The Omnivore’s Deception, responds to Pollan’s best-selling book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Why is it important to refute arguments made by Pollan and popular authors like him when it comes to advocating for vegan living and animal rights?

In the summer of 2006, a friend of mine told me that she was reading a new book called The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History in Four Meals, by the journalist and bestselling author Michael Pollan. My friend assured me that I would find in Pollan a sympathetic “ally” in the animal cause. But I knew, having by then read reviews of Pollan’s book, that The Omnivore’s Dilemma was going to do more to hurt the cause of animal advocacy than probably any other book of the century. And I was right.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma came out at a critical time in the animal economy, when a variety of powerful business interests and cultural forces had already converged to create a new narrative around animal exploitation through the myth of “humane” and “sustainable” animal products. What the movement had lacked up until then, however, was a book that could provide intellectual scaffolding for this nascent “common sense” in American society. And Pollan’s book provided it, in much the same way (though on a much, much greater scale) that Singer’s Animal Liberation provided the animal movement with its own intellectual foundation.

Pollan’s book was a critique of the environmental and communitarian losses that had accompanied industrialized animal agriculture, but it was also an attempt to smother any lingering public doubts about the moral virtues of meat-eating. Pollan attacked animal rights directly and at length in his book, and he also personally killed dozens of animals with his own hands—killing chickens on Joel Salatin’s farm, and shooting a pig in a forest—in order to write about his experiences.

Here, let me take a step back for a moment to give context to Pollan’s intervention. The animal economy today is the greatest system of mass violence and injustice in the history of the world. It is not only morally abhorrent—in fact, radical evil—but contraindicated with the ecological survival of life on Earth. Now, for such a vastly dangerous and unjust system to be maintained, it must be continually legitimated. We know this from the history of social oppression, that every system of power must constantly be shored up and justified. This justification or “legitimation” must occur at all points of the system, culturally, politically, and intellectually. That is why vegans are the butt of jokes on late-night TV, and why the public is bombarded with countless advertisements of happy chickens and pigs dancing their way to the barbecue, and why even now some philosophers of mind still deny complex consciousness to nonhuman animals. In fact, it is essential that no one question the chief premise of human civilization, which is that all the other beings of the Earth are unworthy of life and were put here to serve our interests and needs and desires. Because if we seriously questioned the stories we tell ourselves about the worthlessness of animal life, the whole system would crumble.

In this context, it would be difficult to exaggerate the extraordinary influence The Omnivore’s Dilemma has continued to exert over American culture. Pollan remains by far the most revered expert on food and agriculture policy in the United States, the subject of countless books, articles, and films. (He even has a course on food at MasterClass.com.) The Omnivore’s Dilemma is taught in a greater number of disciplines, and at a greater number of different educational levels, than any other book in the United States, from grade school to PhD programs. It’s even part of the state-mandated curriculum for middle- and high-schools across the US. So, each year, The Omnivore’s Dilemma is acculturating a new generation of young people into its morally bankrupt and intellectually dishonest vision of animal agriculture as a beneficent force, and of animal rights as the discipline of losers. Pollan’s work has been absolutely devastating to nonhuman animal interests, though, of course, there are also hundreds of like-minded critics doing awful work, too.

Because of Pollan’s outsized cultural influence—and because no one in the media ever criticizes his work—I decided to entitle my new book The Omnivore’s Deception. By “deception,” I mean three things. First, the animal industry deceives the public each day by obscuring or papering over the violence at the heart of the food system. Second, prominent critics like Michael Pollan, author Barbara Kingsolver, and animal behaviorist Temple Grandin are deceiving the public by telling them that they can have their meat and their conscience, too. And third, that we deceive ourselves by refusing to acknowledge or take responsibility for the vast cruelties we inflict on other beings. My book is an attempt to expose all three modes of deception, in the hopes of disrupting the animal economy’s central “legitimation” mechanism.

In the conclusion, you write, “Isolated legal victories and piecemeal reforms alone, however, won’t end the animal economy. The broader structure of violence and ecological desolation described in this work will endure so long as we continue to view nonhuman animals as our slaves and commodities.” What’s your position on the abolition vs. incremental approach to animal rights?

The truth is that the animal advocacy movement has failed. It has been 2,500 years since followers of Pythagoras founded vegetarian cults, more than a century since Henry Salt published Animals’ Rights (1892), half a century since Peter Singer published Animal Liberation, and 35 years since Carol Adams published her groundbreaking book, The Sexual Politics of Meat. Yet more animals are being exploited and killed each year for food than ever before, and per capita meat consumption, already at a record high, is increasing. Recently, the journalist Yasmin Tayag published an article entitled “America Is Done Pretending About Meat” in The Atlantic, noting that interest in plant-based foods has rapidly waned, to the point that consumers no longer are even “pretending” to care about the suffering of animals in agriculture. It was a disturbing piece, not least for the author’s glib attitude as a meat-eater herself. But it was an important marker of where we’re at in the culture. While advocacy has made strides to eliminate greyhound racing and the exploitation of elephants and other animals in circuses, etc., it has not had the slightest impact on the public’s view that killing and eating animals is “natural” and therefore right. I know this because I teach hundreds of students and perform part-time as a professional magician, and deal with the general public. And I can tell you that the basic ideology around human supremacy and the centrality of animals in the human diet has been left virtually untouched by our movement.

Some part of this dismal situation is due to the poor choices of the animal advocacy movement itself. There has been simply too much equivocation in the movement about whether it’s wrong to exploit and kill animals “as such,” rather than only in factory farms. But if the public is consistently told that it’s morally acceptable to exploit and kill animals for food so long as it’s done “ethically”—a position, by the way, still maintained by Peter Singer, who says he gives a “pass” to “conscientious omnivores” so long as “we rear animals in ways that give them good lives” and don’t cause them to “suffer when they are killed”—then we can hardly expect such a public to take animal rights seriously.

Both welfarism and “incrementalism” have failed as strategies. To say this is not to suggest that a more radical, abolitionist approach would yield victories in the short term. But if we are serious about protecting nonhuman beings from human violence, then we must be honest in naming the problem, which isn’t “factory farms” but human domination, human colonialization, human enslavement, human killing of our fellow creatures. I am not categorically against campaigns that target specific industries or abuses, so long as they do not reinforce the prevailing ideological view of animals’ lives as worthless. But every time we tell the public that we can create “more humane” forms of animal agriculture or fishing, we lie to them. Every time that we say that it’s okay to go on killing animals for food and other purposes, so long as it’s done in “the right way,” we’re undermining the cause of animal liberation, making it harder to dismantle the system in the long run. For the same reason, it’s a mistake to promote veganism only as a healthier, more sustainable “lifestyle,” rather than as a moral imperative of the very first order. As I say in the Introduction to The Omnivore’s Deception, though most people think of animal rights and the question of meat as a trivial matter, the way we treat the other beings of the Earth is, on the contrary, the most important issue of our time.

What is the relationship between speciesism and capitalism? Should the animal rights movement critique capitalism as part of its argument against the exploitation of animals? If so, how different would the movement’s campaigns and activities be?

Alas, many people in animal advocacy don’t understand the capitalist system or how it damages animal interests. Wayne Pacelle, Bruce Friedrich, and others have endorsed capitalism and presented it as a benevolent force for animals, as the market opens new opportunities for plant-based products and cellular meats. But it’s naive to believe that the “free market” will somehow magically usher in a new age of animal liberation. Capitalism is flexible enough to accommodate niche markets in vegan consumer goods, while at the same time expanding industrialized animal agriculture. That explains why more animals are suffering and dying violently at human hands today than ever before, even as the number and variety of vegan consumer products have continued to grow. For every new vegan product on the market, there are a hundred new animal ones. “Consumer” veganism is therefore not a plausible strategy for altering the conditions of animals, as Robert C. Jones and I explain in our chapter in the Plant-Based and Vegan Handbook. (There are many excellent books on the intersections of capitalism and speciesism by Dinesh Wadiwel, David Nibert, Marco Maurizi, and others.)

It’s crucial for animal rights advocates to grasp why capitalism is incompatible with animal liberation. It is because of capitalism that meat consumption is the highest it’s ever been, and why the number of animals raised for slaughter or killed at sea is projected to rise in the coming years. So-called factory farms are merely the inevitable outcome of a system of production that treats nature, human workers, and animals alike as mere “things” to be exploited for profit. Meanwhile, this same system is undermining the conditions of all life on Earth through habitat destruction, global warming, toxic waste, soil erosion, and so on: due to the convergence of two vast forces, speciesism and capitalism, we are living through the greatest mass species extinction event in 65 million years. It is odd—and a strategic error—that the vegan movement is largely detached from a broader ecological defense of terrestrial life as such.

Capitalism also damages nonhuman animal interests because it undermines any basis for community, solidarity, and empathy in human society itself. It promotes militarism, war, and genocide. It makes us selfish, avaricious, and unempathetic, conditioning us to equate ever greater quantities of consumer goods and gadgets with a meaningful and fulfilling life. (Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, has called empathy “the biggest weakness of the West.”) Capitalism, meanwhile, strips working people of their dignity and autonomy, forcing them to labor their entire lives for the enrichment of a small class of wealthy elites. Finally, capitalism undermines democracy. The spread of fascist ideas and right-wing authoritarian movements throughout the world today is one consequence of the unlivable conditions created by the global capitalist system. The resurgence of the far-right is already damaging animal advocacy, as agriculture and fishing lobbies, biotech companies, and so on, find a relaxation of government regulations on the animal industry. Farmers in Europe and the US, opposed to state efforts to reduce carbon emissions in animal agriculture, are joining far-right parties.

There are only two ways we’re ever going to get traction on these issues. First, by developing a more mature understanding of society, economy, and culture, we grasp the animal issue as part of a broader crisis of human civilization. Second, by forming alliances with other social movements of the left to build a democratic socialist movement committed to animal rights. This will by no means be easy, since most leftists and socialists, like practically everyone else in society, are hostile to animal rights. But unless we begin to tackle the systemic nature of capitalism and the animal economy, we will never achieve our aims.

Unfortunately, Peter Singer’s utilitarian ethics has impeded our thinking about these issues: by reducing complex social and political problems to a matter of individual “choice,” he has obscured the inextricable relationship between capitalism and animal exploitation. Singer’s views have also become the basis of the reactionary philanthropic movement of Effective Altruism, which sneers at empathy-based ethics, misconstrues the history of social change, and places its faith in capitalist technocracy as the “solution” to the animal crisis. (See The Good It Promises, the Harm It Does, edited by Carol Adams, Alice Cracy, and Lori Gruen.) For years, the animal movement has focused its efforts on defeating “factory farming,” which it has denounced for causing “suffering”—the narrow, utilitarian approach. But our organizing needs to address the roots of the problem, not its mere surface manifestations.

How do you envisage a society that made animal liberation possible? How different would the political discourse be and the cultural representation of animals be?

This is such an important question, and the most challenging one of all. As things now stand, perhaps 98% of all humans consume animal products and are furthermore hostile to veganism and animal rights, while virtually every institution in civilization is rooted in the systematic oppression, enslavement, and ecological war on other animals. So, it’s hard to imagine how that could ever be changed, particularly when there are so few of us engaged in animal advocacy. Part of our project must therefore be to imagine new futures. The brilliant artist Sue Coe and the German artist Hartmut Kiewart have done wonderful work to depict a future society in which humans have surrendered their supremacy and chosen to live with other animals in peace and community. At the same time, however, we need a concrete strategy of social change, a way to bring about a qualitative shift in the way humans organize their societies and daily lives. To that end, we must seek a convergence between the movement of animal advocacy and a wider movement for a new society, one based on democratic, egalitarian, feminist, ecological, and post-capitalist principles. The Wobblies spoke of “one big union”; in our epoch, we need one great movement in defense of all life on Earth, human and nonhuman alike.

I have been a vegan for over 30 years, and I encourage others to become vegans whenever I can. But the life-destroying system we face will never be vanquished simply by convincing everyone to “go vegan.” The problem is much too complex for that. We need new movement organizations, political parties, and forms of culture that aim to found a new kind of civilization. And we must build these movements and institutions right now, while we still can, before the darkness that we see spreading across our planet extinguishes all light and hope.