The Inconsistencies of Veganism

I have another man crush, this instance on Rhys Southan and the fine words he spews:

If vegans want to convince us that it’s ethical to eat plants and unethical to eat animals, they need a coherent reason for this. So vegans settled on sentience. And yet when people want to eat non-sentient animals and say it’s okay by vegan ethics, the vegan majority gets upset. Christopher Cox outraged a ton of vegans with his “Consider the Oyster” manifesto that held up non-sentient oysters as a veganism-compatible animal food. Well, vegans… if oysters aren’t sentient, what is the problem?

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And then there are the vegans who hear about vegan-appropriate animal products and shrug them off with an indifferent “fine, but gross, I wouldn’t eat that” and never address the subject again. But that’s just damning oysters with faint acknowledgment and does nothing to reconceptualize veganism as an idea based on an actual principle rather than an arbitrary division between categories of food. If vegans really want to save sentient animals, they should be at the forefront of making insects more palatable. The Loving Hut vegan restaurant chain should have an actual seafood menu. Vegans should raise their next generation on peanut butter and jellyfish sandwiches, with human breast milk soft serve ice cream for dessert. They should be petitioning for the green “V” to appear on boxes of frozen New Zealand mussels. And they should be mass-marketing bivalve sausages. Hell, those would actually be good!

I understand the desire to reduce your impact and the harm your actions cause, but entrenching yourself on an arbitrary line like “No Animal Products Ever” is arbitrary and often counter-productive to your initial goals. There’s something to be said about stating an overall objective and leaving application to the particular situation.