Plant-based kebab: Yes or No?

Last night I ate at a vegan restaurant near Taksim Square. I ordered homemade oven-baked meat-free kebab, served with basmati rice, roasted pepper and tomato, kimchi, cashew tzatziki, and salad.

While eating, a few trains of thought appeared in my mind:

1. This meal is expensive (compared to the other meals I’ve had here so far).
2. But it’s delicious and balanced. And the ingredients are allegedly organic.
3. Is plant-based meat vegan, though?

I will save the money talk perhaps for another time. In this post, I want to focus on the third question.

I didn’t come up with this question originally. I had even mentioned before that I use “plant-based” and “vegan” interchangeably when discussing food, so this wasn’t a question for me until I heard a talk titled “Is plant-based meat vegan?” at Umbra Institute’s Food Conference earlier this month in Perugia, Italy.

The talk was given by Joseph Campisi, a philosophy professor. To delve into the question, he drew a distinction between meat analogs and meat substitutes. The former were described as plant-based meat products specifically designed to mimic the taste, texture, appearance, etc., of conventional meat, whereas the latter included foods like tofu, tempeh, and legumes which are traditionally used as sources of protein without necessarily being designed to replicate the characteristics of meat.

Taking a philosophical approach, he argued that the answer to the question depended on our understanding of veganism. Among the three primary arguments for veganism—nutrition and health, environmental impact, and animal welfare and rights—he found the argument for animal welfare and rights the most compelling (and therefore difficult to argue against). That is, simply put, vegan diets respect animal welfare and rights compared to diets that contain meat or animal products. Consequently, he focused on this perspective to address the question he raised.

To illustrate his logic, he used a few analogies. He compared a vegan who eats plant-based meat to: 1) an anti-racist activist who, in their private life, abuses a dark-skinned, human-looking robot as a slave, and 2) a feminist who engages a woman doll in coercive sex. (Isn’t all sexual behavior with a doll coercive? I thought to myself, but I guess that isn’t an important question here…) The commonality between these, he argued, is the private enjoyment of simulated behavior that would be considered immoral if done to real humans.

So is this anti-racist activist truly anti-racist and the feminist truly feminist? Do they act in accordance with their moral values? And should such behaviors be morally permissible?

While I agree with him that the answers to all these questions are negative, I think they are not comparable to a vegan eating plant-based meat.

By definition, veganism concerns whether animals are harmed and whether they’re used as food sources. Logically, the answer should only depend on whether any animals are harmed in the process of producing food. Thus, plant-based meat—or, really, plant-based anything—that doesn’t contain animal-derived ingredients is vegan.

But Campisi raised another concern about the symbolic value of plant-based meat, which he described as a product that is parasitic upon the speciesist value that vegans are trying to change. In other words, the consumption of plant-based meat might be seen as an endorsement of the enjoyment of the taste of meat. Even if I eat a vegan burger at McDonald’s (which I’ve never done), those around me may not know that my burger doesn’t contain animal ingredients and see me as any other meat-eater, consequently feeling supported in their meat-eating.

I don't know of any study or data that supports this assumption, but if we consider the symbolic value of my plant-based burger to meat-eaters, then we need to ask whether the symbolism of consuming such products undermines the ethical stance of veganism. Does enjoying a plant-based meat product inadvertently perpetuate the cultural norm of meat consumption and thus weaken the movement’s efforts to promote animal welfare and rights?

So in the Q&A, I asked Campisi about the implications of his argument for vegans. Should vegans not eat plant-based meat?

His answer? “No, vegans who are vegan for the animals should not eat plant-based meat.”

“But what about vegan foods that accidentally taste like meat? Once I mixed crumbled firm tofu with oatmeal and shaped them into little patties to cook on a pan. The texture came out to be so similar to ground meat patties. But I had no intention to make meat-like food! I just wanted to play with ingredients I had at hand.”

“My answer to that is I want the recipe!” He said with a bright chuckle.

At the end of the day, I find myself at odds with Campisi's conclusion. His analogies are thought-provoking, but the comparison between enjoying plant-based meat and engaging in morally questionable simulated behaviors feels misaligned. Women who see an alleged feminist abusing a doll may be terrified and mentally and emotionally harmed by the sight of such behavior, whereas animals who see a human eating a plant-based burger wouldn't be hurt by that. To those who matter, the impacts of the behaviors Campisi compared are not the same.

With these thoughts, I enjoyed my vegan kebab with a few cats around me, knowing they weren't afraid that I would eat them. I also hoped that no one who saw my food would interpret it as support for the production and consumption of meat kebabs.