Hi! I’m Olivia and I’m passionate about: cooking with my friends with wine and music in the background, baking vegan cakes and baked goods for events, biking/cycling/public transit as a way to fight car dependency, and progressive social movements.
“Bread and Roses” is a slogan associated with labor union strikes, where women on strike carried signs stating, “We want bread, but we want roses, too!” As a phrase associated with justice and freedom for the women and workers of the world, it’s fitting with my values and what I want the world to look like.
Veganism is inherently about justice. Veganism is an ethical practice–not a mere diet. It’s a lifestyle of rejecting the violence and murder imposed on some of the weakest and most innocent beings in our world–gentle animals like calves, lambs, baby chicks. It rejects the lack of autonomy female animals are given over their bodies and reproductive systems. They are impregnated to make them lactate and produce milk, and their babies are taken from them to be slaughtered for veal or kept in horrific and cruel confinement. Cows don’t produce milk because they are cows, they produce milk because they are MOTHERS. If any human mother was forced to have children to make her lactate so that another species could steal her milk and rip her baby away from her to be killed–that would be among the worst and most horrific crimes humanly imaginable. That’s on par with some of the worst war crimes ever committed, yet we do this daily to millions of innocent and intelligent beings for string cheese and feta.
You don’t have to think animals are equal to humans to know they are worthy of moral consideration and it’s an unnecessary evil to cause them pain and suffering for 20 seconds of enjoying the taste on your plate. Vegan food is a rejection of the inherent murder, violence, and injustice that is apart of 100% of dairy and meat products. Meat isn’t something–it’s someone. I’m personally friends with cows, chickens, goats, sheep, and donkeys at a local animal sanctuary. I can’t eat chicken wings or chicken nuggets when I personally know chickens and have seen their intelligence and individual personalities and preferences. I can’t serve steak at my wedding when I know a mother cow, Dani, and her son, Phoenix–I cannot serve up my friends on a platter for murder for a single forgettable meal. What is one meal for you is the entire life of that animal. Not to mention, 90+ percent of animals in America live on factory farms, which is one of the few things Democrats and Republicans both agree is horrific and evil. Yet many people pay for these factory farms to continue churning out gory body parts in plastic saran wrap so they can purchase pork chops, with no thought that pigs are as intelligent and sweet as human toddlers.
While many people assume vegans don’t care about HUMAN suffering in the food industry, I think it’s quite the opposite. Vegans are some of the most thoughtful people about food I know. Vegans are on the front lines to fight for agricultural workers and slaughterhouse workers to live more dignified and just lives. We support unions, living wages for workers, and other fights that involve making our food system more just for animals and humans alike.
Food is inherently political, and politics affects food workers and food systems. Hence, bread & roses.
*(I am not affiliated with any political group or business entity using the name Bread & Roses and any such overlap is purely coincidental).
https://allpoetry.com/poem/8550457-Bread-And-Roses-by-James-Oppenheim
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/356835426_The_Vegan_Food_Justice_Movement