Beyoncé and Her Husband Want You To Go Vegan for Concert Tickets

[beysactingcoach]

https://instagram.com/p/BtSNVwqAmXv
The wannabe billionaires have endorsed a plant based diet for the last couple of years in order to prepare for tours. Looks like fans will have to opportunity to reap the rewards of a plant based diet. If the fans enter the contest and commit to adapting a vegan diet, they can win free concert tickets for life

Comments

[totteringg]

The conditions that the big produce companies subject their workers to is horrific, but that problem isn't avoided when you buy from local farms because they also have similar, and often worse, horrific working conditions. Buying from the farmers market doesn't actually mean anything in terms of the treatment of the farm workers and because those farms aren't subject to even the limited oversight that big operations are (and we see how they still get away with treating workers horribly) and the profit margins are smaller so the pay tends to be even worse (even if they somehow were doing things completely by the book which they obviously don't, farms with fewer than seven or so employees aren't even legally obliged to pay workers minimum wage).

They typically don't have to comply with any of the safety standards all other workplaces are held to or anything. It's also completely legal for children of any age (including the ones under 12 who would legally be too young to work on a large farm - again if anyone was doing things by the book which we know they don't) to work on small farms so they use a lot of child labor.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/08/farmworkers-local-locavore-agriculture-exploitation/
https://newfoodeconomy.org/small-farm-worker-death-osha/

The reason vegan diets work out somewhat better from a human rights perspective is because when you add meat in, you're just adding more avenues of exploitation to the ones that already exist as you'll also involve slaughterhouse workers in addition to the workers who grew whatever fed the animals for years. Close to half the crops we grow are used to feed animals. Neither veganism nor omnivorism is going to be good from a human rights perspective, but it's better to involve only the people who producing the grain and produce you eat than involving those people plus the people raising the
animals, and the ones working at the slaughterhouse and the people who produced the food for the animals.

[kinokol]

I feel like a lot of this is unfounded and implying that there's no point in trying to support small local farms because they're just as bad because that is patently false.

If you think large corporate owned farms are really a better environment for workers and have more well enforced safety rules than the average smaller scale operation, that's not reality. Do you really think abuse of power goes away as the scale of an operation increases?

Half of the food we produce may go to animal consumption, but there's too much food being produced period, and most of it goes to waste. Agriculture based around destroying the natural order of how things grow (believe it or not, it's not 100 acres of monocropped Roundup ready corn) so millionaires can line their pockets and poor people get more processed foods doesn't work for the environment or human health.

I am well aware of ag workers rights and abuses. I've lived it, I've studied countless statistics from the department of labor and the department of agriculture and the health department. I've read plenty of articles. I'm going to keep on making diet decisions based on trying to support ag workers and sustainable food production. And I'm not going to feel like a monster for enjoying some pasture raised beef when I can.

[totteringg]

Which parts exactly are unfounded? It's a fact that small farms have much higher rates of worker injury and death than large farms. The woman who wrote the Jacobin article wrote a book after interviewing hundred and fifty workers on local farms in NY. I'm definitely not suggesting that working on a large corporate owned farm is going to be a good experience, but with some exceptions, it's not going to be any better to work on a small local farm where you might not get paid if the farm-owner is having trouble making ends meet and they coerce you into accepting it because you're part of their small "family" even though they're holding your immigration status over you.

The issue tends to be just as bad on the smaller scale because the government has given an exception to pretty much all the few labor protections that exist for farm workers in general (which obviously most corporations have a habit of ignoring anyway) to small farms. Unless state governments make their own legislation, and they tend to defer to the federal government for this sort of thing, safety rules for small farms don't exist and therefore can't be enforced at all. Like kids of any age are allowed to operate dangerous machinery on small farms while on large farms, they're supposed to be at least 16. You're basically saying that the part of the industry where there's pretty much no oversight at all is better than the part where the rules only get enforced sometimes.

It's the exact same thing as people romanticizing small businesses because big business are fucking awful (which they definitely are) even though small businesses tend to pay worse and provide less benefits because they flat-out don't have much money and there are a ton of laws that they're exempted from. Like the Obamacare one where large businesses have to either offer their employees health insurance or pay a fine, but small businesses don't have to do anything and typically don't because it adds an additional expense.

[kinokol]

I understand what you're talking about, but the definition of "small farm" is extremely broad. IIRC it can mean anything less than an acre to 200+ acres. They can make $1000-250,000 a year. Of course there are people out there who will abuse the fact that they are exempt from certain small business laws, I have worked for a couple of people exactly like that. Just because there are technically laws preventing a certain abuses doesn't mean those same issues or related ones aren't rampant on larger scale operations. There should be more awareness of the plight of workers in general so there is public demand for more legal and financial protection for people and their families at every level.

There will never be real change for the expansion of protection of workers if people aren't being made aware of the suffering these workers and how completely devalued the extremely skilled labor they perform is.

And the people making millions off of the need for people to eat are not going to be the ones advocating for fair wages and better treatment, they're the ones at best doing the bare minimum and finding loopholes around laws. They're the ones laying on muscle to lawmakers to make sure family members who do no actual farming are able to reap the benefits of their subsidies. They're not fighting for immigration reform, they want more slave like migrant worker programs. They don't want health care or health insurance despite the physical and often hazardous nature of the work.

I'm not naive or romanticizing anything. There are farmers out there who are willing to work with smaller crews, or focus on a wider range of specialty crops and different markets to be able to pay and treat their workers fairly. That may or may not be common depending on where in the country you are, but I believe in supporting small businesses who treat their workers well, not blindly accepting labels.

There are plenty of conventional farmers who will wait the require amount of years without using pesticides on certain plots of land to become certified organic, but that still treat their workers like slaves and hostages, and because of wind and other forces of nature, it's not possible or realistic to expect an organic plot and it's workers surrounded by crops sprayed with pesticides to be unaffected. I want to advocate for large scale systematic change in farming and I vote with my dollar while trying to be an informed consumer who doesn't want to be complicit in the exploitation of others for doing something as basic as eating food.

I can only hope the general public gets more informed. I'm pretty damn disillusioned with vegans who want to point fingers and tell people they have blood on their hands when anyone who eats who isn't growing their own food or buying local and organic is supporting the whole broken system. Shaming people about something as personal as their diet doesn't seem like the way to gain support, education and awareness is way less alienating and has real potential to enact change.