I Veganize: Veganism Has a Privilege Problem. Here's What That Looks Like.

Picture a man in a fully stocked kitchen. Organic chicken on the counter. A $22 ribeye defrosting in the sink. He hears the word "vegan" and nods thoughtfully. "I mean, it's a privilege," he says. "Not everyone can afford to eat that way." Then the topic closes. The meat stays. The conversation ends. Crisis averted.

I've been in that conversation more times than I can count. And every time, the communities being invoked as moral cover — low-income families, people in food deserts, Black and Indigenous communities with limited grocery access — are nowhere in the room. They're being borrowed. Their material disadvantage is being deployed, without their knowledge, so a comfortable person can feel good about doing nothing.

Here's what I want to do: take the access argument seriously. Because the problem it's pointing at is real, documented, and genuinely unjust. And because getting it wrong — either dismissing it or weaponizing it — hurts both veganism and the communities it pretends to protect.

It's Not a Food Desert. It's Food Apartheid.

Food justice activist Karen Washington has argued for years that "food desert" is the wrong word. In a landmark Guernica interview, she explains why she uses "food apartheid" instead: deserts are natural. What's happening to low-income Black and Indigenous communities isn't natural. It was built — block by block, redlining decision by redlining decision, zoning vote by zoning vote. A desert just exists. Apartheid is a policy choice made by people with power. Call it what it is.

The numbers behind that framing are stark. The USDA's 2024 food security data found that 13.7% of US households faced food insecurity at some point during the year. That number tells you almost nothing until you break it down by race: 24.4% of Black households. 20.2% of Latino households. American Indian and Alaska Native households: 23.3%. White households: 8.0%. The Food Research & Action Center's December 2025 report put 47.9 million Americans in hunger territory. That's not a policy gap. That's a structural failure running precisely along racial lines.

The Annie E. Casey Foundation has documented that white neighborhoods contain, on average, four times as many supermarkets as predominantly Black ones. Four times. That is structural racism baked into grocery real estate. And what those neighborhoods DO have access to? The Food Empowerment Project has documented how low-income communities are saturated with fast food chains and dollar stores stocked with the cheapest, highest-margin processed animal products on earth. The system doesn't leave poor communities with nothing. It fills the gap with what's most profitable. That's not an oversight. That's a business model.

So yes: the system is rigged against healthy eating for low-income communities and communities of color. This is undeniably, documentably true. Should you be furious about it? Absolutely. Is eating a factory-farmed burger your way to fight it? No. That's the part that never gets explained.

Who Is Actually Making This Argument?

In years of talking about this — online, in person, at dinner tables — I have never once had the food access argument raised by someone actually living in a food desert. Not once. I've heard it from people in cities with a vegan restaurant within walking distance. From people who just ordered DoorDash. From a man I watched order a $22 ribeye right before he told me not everyone can afford to eat ethically.

Sociologist Dr. Jessica Greenebaum, whose peer-reviewed commentary was published in Humanity & Society, has documented exactly this pattern: how framing veganism as an elite lifestyle functions primarily as evasion rather than advocacy. Using someone else's disadvantage as your personal permission slip isn't solidarity. It's solidarity cosplay — and if you pay attention, you can spot it by the fact that the person making the argument never actually does anything to help the communities they're invoking.

The argument also defeats itself in a way no one acknowledges. If you genuinely care about people living in food apartheid conditions, the logical response is to demand structural change — better zoning, SNAP expansion, produce subsidies, community gardens, grocery infrastructure investment. Not to eat a burger. Eating a burger does exactly nothing for the person who lives four miles from the nearest supermarket. Calling your city council member does. That most people who make this argument do neither is, I think, the entire point.

The Cheapest Grocery List on Earth Is Already Vegan

Let's run the economics. The "veganism is expensive" claim falls apart on contact with an actual grocery receipt.

An Oxford University study found that vegan diets are the most affordable dietary pattern analyzed — cutting food costs by up to one third compared to meat-based diets. A randomized clinical trial published in JAMA Network Open (2023) found that a low-fat vegan diet cut food costs by 16-19%, saving roughly $650 per year. Not as a side effect. As a primary finding. Plant food is cheaper. This is not controversial in nutrition economics.

Rice, lentils, dried black beans, oats, potatoes, frozen vegetables — these aren't boutique items. They're what billions of people eat as dietary staples across India, West Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. A bag of dried black beans costs less than one fast food burger. A 5kg sack of rice costs less than 500g of ground beef in almost any market on earth. Rice and beans together form a nutritionally complete protein and have fed entire civilizations. They are not a compromise. They are the foundation.

The expensive version of veganism — Oatly lattes, $14 cashew cheese, a Beyond Burger at $8 a patty — is vegan culture. Not plant-based eating. Not the same category. When people conflate those two things, they're not making an economic argument. They're describing a lifestyle brand and calling it a nutritional requirement. I've done a full week of vegan eating for under $25. With receipts. It's not a stunt. It's what most of humanity already does.

The Vegan Movement's Real Whiteness Problem

Here's where I'll give the critics their full due — because they've earned it.

Mainstream vegan culture, especially in the West, has a profound whiteness and class problem. PETA ran a campaign comparing factory farming to slavery. An overwhelmingly white organization used the documented trauma of Black Americans — without their consent, without their input — to sell animal rights messaging. And then expressed genuine confusion about why Black communities didn't embrace veganism. Claire Jean Kim's research in New Political Science (2011) traced this pattern across the movement: Holocaust analogies, slavery comparisons, all deployed without regard for the communities they referenced, and all pushing those communities further from a movement that claimed to speak for justice. It's not just tone-deaf. It's a betrayal of every justice claim veganism makes.

Faunalytics research on vegans of color found consistently that mainstream vegan websites, cookbooks, podcasts, and educational materials were created by and for white, middle-class audiences. Going vegan, for many people of color, carries the additional weight of being told — implicitly or explicitly — that your family's food culture is morally inferior. That's a real cost. The fact that it's entirely self-inflicted by the movement makes it worse.

There's a colonial dimension to the plant-based economy, too. Mass Western demand for quinoa, avocado, cashews, and coconut has driven prices up in the countries that produce them — displacing farmers who can no longer afford the crops they've grown for generations. A Peruvian farmer who ate quinoa as a staple food now can't afford it because it's in someone's power bowl in Amsterdam. That contradiction deserves scrutiny, not defensiveness.

All of it is true. None of it is an argument for eating meat. These are failures of the vegan movement — not arguments against veganism. The distinction matters enormously, and the fact that it keeps getting blurred is itself part of the problem.

Colonialism Built the Food Desert. That's Not a Metaphor.

Here's the piece of this conversation that almost never comes up: the communities most often invoked as unable to afford veganism had some of the most sophisticated plant-based food traditions on earth — before colonialism destroyed them.

The Three Sisters — corn, beans, and squash grown in symbiotic agriculture — fed civilizations across the Americas for millennia. Then colonialism arrived, displaced communities from their land, severed them from their food sources, and replaced traditional diets with government rations of lard, commodity flour, and canned meat. Now those same communities are told they "can't afford" to eat plants. The audacity of that framing rarely gets named.

Dr. A. Breeze Harper's Sistah Vegan Project has spent years documenting how mainstream veganism systematically erases the plant-based traditions of Black and Indigenous communities. Rastafarian ital cooking. Ethiopian injera and shiro. Indian dal. West African groundnut stews. Mexican frijoles de olla. These are not alternatives to Western veganism — they are plant-based traditions that predate it by centuries. When vegan outreach arrives to "educate" people about plant foods, it's often teaching people about their own history while pretending to have invented it.

Black vegans are one of the fastest-growing demographics in the movement. They were never waiting to be included. They were being excluded — while simultaneously being cited as a reason why inclusion wasn't possible.

The Structural Fight Is the Same Fight

The enemy of food justice and the enemy of animal rights is the same institution. Tyson, JBS, and Cargill are the same corporations flooding low-income neighborhoods with cheap processed animal products, lobbying against food labeling reforms, and externalizing environmental costs onto the communities closest to their operations. The $38 billion in annual US subsidies to the meat and dairy industry — redirected — could fund community gardens, produce vouchers, SNAP expansion, and grocery infrastructure in every food-apartheid neighborhood in America. Multiple times over. That money exists. The political will doesn't. Ask yourself who benefits from that gap.

These fights aren't in competition. They're the same fight, against the same enemy, with different communities on the front lines.

The Person This Post Is Actually For

Not the person genuinely struggling to feed their family in a neighborhood where the nearest grocery store is a 45-minute bus ride away. That person doesn't need my lecture — they need systemic change, political will, and investment in their community.

This is for the person with a fully stocked kitchen who uses food desert statistics as a rhetorical shield. The person who buys $22 organic chicken and calls lentils "unrealistic." The person who has read enough to know the vocabulary of food justice but not enough to notice they're using it to avoid what food justice actually demands.

The privilege argument only functions as a call to action — a demand for structural change, for redistribution, for real food policy. The moment it becomes a reason to do nothing personally, it isn't an argument. It's an abdication dressed as empathy.

If you're someone who genuinely can't access plant foods because the infrastructure isn't there — you're not who we're debating. You never were. You're who we're fighting for, even when we're doing it badly.

But if you're reading this on a device that costs more than a month of rice and beans, in a home with a refrigerator full of food: the privilege argument doesn't protect you. It borrows from people who can't be here to revoke the loan.

Own what you have access to. Use it. And if you want to fight food apartheid while you're at it — find out who represents your district and ask them why the lowest-income zip code in your metro has no full-service grocery store within walking distance. That question costs nothing. So does the lentil soup. Start with whichever one is harder for you.

References