Veganism in the Age of Collapse
There are no ethical choices in a burning house. Only faster exits. Only quieter screams. Only decisions that still reek of smoke.
This is the truth I return to. Over and over. As I run my fingers across the frayed edges of a movement I once believed could save us. Veganism. Beautiful. Brittle. Born not in power but in protest. Not in perfection but in refusal. A promise whispered over chickpeas and chalk slogans. We will not feast on the suffering of others. And yet here we are. Post-COVID. Post-truth. Post-harvest. Mid-collapse.
The climate unspools like butcherâs twine. The seas hiss and acidify. The bees vanish. The cows cry on cue.
And the vegan movement still bickers over almond milk.
I. The Fantasy of Forks
Vegans love a fable. The myth of salvation through shopping. The fantasy that the revolution lives inside a basket. If you pick the right carton, from the right aisle, with the right slogan, you can buy your way out of bloodshed.
It is a lie.
Capitalism consumes everything. Even our attempts to resist it. A fourteen-dollar coconut yogurt may be dairy-free. But it is not free from exploitation. The hands that plucked the fruit were brown and blistered. The soil was stripped. The water stolen.
Avocados grow in deserts only because someone somewhere went thirsty. That turmeric latte glows gold only because a system allowed it.
The wellness influencers with their spotless benches and gut-health hashtags are sucking on the same pipeline as the butcher. The branding is better. The bodies buried are the same.
We made a mistake. We started selling ethics as aesthetics. Oat milk as moral high ground. âPlant-basedâ as the pinnacle of purity.
This is veganism with a Whole Foods accent. The kind you can monetise. The kind that sells documentaries with drone shots and orchestras. Films that try to guilt suburban mums into skipping steak while ignoring the fact that meat is still a symbol of power in places we never bothered to understand.
We turned our backs on the messy. The marginal. The inconvenient truths. We picked palatability over politics. And it shows.
II. The Failures We Carry
Veganism has failed. That is the hardest truth. But it must be named.
The numbers are brutal. After decades of effort, the global vegan population remains tiny. Meat consumption continues to climb, especially in countries still crawling out from the rubble of colonisation.
The Amazon burns. Australia ships sheep to slaughter on the sea. Corporations cash in on âmeat-freeâ while still investing in the slaughterhouse.
We ask why.
And the answer stings.
Because the movement was built on sand. Or worse. On shame.
Instead of building power, we built pedestals. We scolded. We smugged. We moralised. We targeted working-class families buying sausage rolls instead of billion-dollar beef lobbies. We posted infographics and felt holy. We let rage rot into performance.
Too often, we centred whiteness. We forgot culture. We forgot class. We forgot community.
We let groups like PETA define us. And sure, theyâve made mistakes. Billboards that dehumanise. Campaigns that miss the mark. But they are not the root of the rot. Just one thorny branch in a much vaster, more vicious tree.
There are bigger beasts.
Cargill. Tyson. JBS. The corporations that engineer suffering at industrial scale. That spend billions lobbying to silence whistle-blowers. That profit from environmental devastation and call it progress. The politicians who let them. The tech titans who fund âclean meatâ while investing in climate collapse.
PETA might not sit well with some. But Big Ag bankrolls genocide. One is a public relations problem. The other is planetary.
Our ire should scale with the harm.
And maybe while we're naming failure, I should name mine too.
I went vegan when I was fifteen. Spindly, self-righteous, clutching a copy of Animal Liberation like it was scripture. But I didnât stay the course. Somewhere along the line, I traded ethics for aesthetics. I wanted a stronger body, so I ate chicken breast and drank egg whites. I swallowed whey protein made from cowâs milk because I thought there was no other way to grow.
I told myself I didnât know better. Maybe I didnât. Maybe I didnât want to.
Later I circled back. Tried again. Ate mostly vegan, sometimes vegetarian, sometimes something else entirely. Stumbled home from clubs and ordered falafel wraps, asked for no cheese, then accepted it anyway. Told myself it was vegan even when I knew it wasnât. Because I was tired. Because I was hungry. Because I wanted the easy way out.
But I always came back.
And now, Iâm here. Fully vegan again. But thatâs the point. This isnât about food. Not really. Not anymore. It never was. Itâs not about personal purity or protein macros. Itâs about power. Itâs about practice. Itâs about the people and animals we lose when we pretend harm reduction is enough.
III. Collapse Is Already Here
Letâs be clear. Collapse is not looming. Itâs landed.
Itâs the heat dome over Delhi. The flash floods in Brazil. The dry dams in Spain. The silence where birds used to sing. The orchards in mourning. The grocery bills that bloat. The kids who donât know what bees are.
We are not waiting for the end. We are living it.
So veganism, if it still matters, has to become something else.
Not a lifestyle. Not a product line. Not a filter for your feed.
It must become a resistance strategy. A rupture. A collective survival spell.
It means composting our perfectionism. Learning what grows. Learning when. Learning who gets left out and why. It means tending soil like itâs sacred. Fighting for seeds. Fighting for clean water. Fighting for land back.
It means revering life, but not pretending death isnât part of the deal. It means knowing some harm is inevitable. Knowing even lettuce kills. Knowing that zero isnât the goal. Honour is.
Reciprocity is.
Reverence is.
We forgot that. But we can remember.
IV. The Ones Who Stayed
Not all vegans are in it for the likes.
Some showed up long before it was cool. Some stayed long after it stopped being safe.
The Save Movement stands outside slaughterhouses at sunrise, bearing witness to the bodies crammed into trucks. They look animals in the eye, whisper prayers into steel cages, and film what the rest of the world refuses to see. They donât stop the killing. But they interrupt the silence.
The Food Empowerment Project, led by women of colour, reminds us that justice is not seasonal. That you cannot liberate animals while exploiting people. That ethics must include the hands that harvest. That food justice means accessibility, not just ideology.
And then there are the ones who never made it home.
Regan Russell was seventy-eight when she was killed. A transport truck ran her down outside a slaughterhouse gate. She had spent years showing up. Holding signs. Bearing witness. The day she died, a new âag gagâ law had just passed in Ontario. A law designed to protect industry. Not people. Not animals. Certainly not truth.
And there was Mike Hill. Just eighteen when he died. A hunt saboteur in the UK. Killed while trying to stop a fox hunt. Run over by a man who wanted to keep killing. Mike didnât have a brand. He wasnât trying to go viral. He just didnât want animals to die. So he showed up. And paid for it.
These are the people I think about when the movement feels lost. These are the ones I return to when the hashtags feel hollow.
Not influencers. Not entrepreneurs. Not saints.
Just people.
Just flesh and fire.
They didn't ask to be heroes. They just chose to stay. To stand in front of the trucks. To speak when it would have been easier to turn away. To feed the fire, even when it burned.
So let us not forget. In our irony. In our exhaustion. In our attempts to simplify the sacred.
Let us not forget the ones who stayed. And let us become the kind who do, too.
V. What Remains
So what now.
Not the glossy cookbooks. Not the branded cheese. Not the cult of the clean plate.
What remains is what always did.
Soil. Sweat. Seed. Solidarity.
Meals shared, not sold. Knowledge passed hand to hand. Co-ops instead of corporations. Community gardens. Shared kitchens. Food made with purpose, served with dignity.
We need vegans who are not afraid of dirt. Not afraid of grief. Not afraid of getting it wrong and coming back again.
We need feral vegans. We need those who know how to grow. Who know how to grieve. Who know how to show up even when the world says itâs too late.
We need love that looks like labour.
Because this isnât about diet. Itâs about devotion.
And in the age of collapse, veganism must stop being a brand and start being a bridge.
From death to life.
From harm to healing.
From silence to something that sounds like hope.