Beyoncé’s 22-Day Diet Is About More Than Veganism

This article originally appeared on Noisey Australia.

This week Beyoncé announced that she was going to reveal something huge on Good Morning America. The Internet hoped for a new album, it hoped for a Destiny’s Child reunion, it hoped for something epic. Instead, the Internet got Beyoncé announcing that going vegan for 22 days resulted in her slimmed down and loving her body more than ever -- essentially, an Oprah segment. And this disappointment is what the Internet is hung up on. They’re missing the point.

When You Wake Up Early Tomorrow & Beyoncé Announces Her Newest Vegan Diet pic.twitter.com/qxSFBle6go

— Lulu  (@LuNaysha) June 8, 2015

y'all are fat. Eat plants. -Beyoncé

— Toria Crispin (@tcrispy20) June 8, 2015

One of the great things about the strides towards equality our hellscape society has made in recent years is that now women can be crass, consumerist evangelists like men have been for centuries.

Men have always sold heaps of shit to people under the guise of lifestyle branding. But now Beyoncé can get a $50 million payday from Pepsi, Taylor Swift can mug for Diet Coke and Kim Kardashian can sell a game where the goal is to be her best friend. That’s not sarcasm. It’s all about choice, y’all—the choice to be as disgusting as each other. But if we’re going to buy shit anyway—and take our cues for doing so from celebrities—we might as well give some thought to buying the right shit. And that’s where Beyoncé’s latest branding exercise, with a 22-day vegan stunt diet, comes in.

This is a huge deal. Beyoncé’s branding is not without its problems but the general consensus is that for whichever ways she misses the mark, that such a prominent performer has advocated so vocally for feminism has, arguably, changed the world for the better. Her influence helped bring more famous performers into the feminist fold and now celebrities not identifying, as feminist have become a bigger controversy. In the same sense, Beyoncé advocating veganism has the potential to make a significant difference in the way people eat.

Let’s address the bummers first: veganism is sometimes used as control behavior for eating disorders and that deserves examination. And while Beyoncé’s diet is vegan, it’s also yet another fad diet presented by a celebrity for someone else’s commercial benefit. More broadly, it also kind of sucks that the emphasis is on looking slimmer.

Beyoncé so dumb I bet she doesn't even know what a vegan is she just knows she's one. She probably thinks it's her horoscope

— Bae of the pigs (@latry) June 8, 2015

But where vegans are still the butt of jokes on the level of “How d'ya know if someone’s a vegan? They’ll tell you,” Beyoncé’s announcement has the potential to start new discussions about the virtues of veganism. How awesome would it be instead of whining about Beyoncé trying to take away your bacon and cheeseburger, we talked about the often-horrific conditions in which that bacon and cheese lands between those buns? Beyond the argument that the mass slaughter of sentient creatures is absurd—which is evidently too hard for a lot of people to swallow—the conditions in which farm animals live can be terrible. In his book Practical Ethics, one of the most formative texts on modern ethics, Peter Singer argues that farmed animals have been demonstrated to feel and think as sensitively as infant children or severely disabled people. But most people would freak out if we suggested throwing babies into a meat grinder to stock our café breakfasts. Fair enough that you love animal products—they can be delicious—but there’s no ethical ground for consuming them. The fact that many more people are now thinking about this can be credited to Beyoncé. Instead, people are angry that Beyoncé didn’t give them a Destiny’s Child reunion. Meanwhile, every time she advocates for a brand that contributes nothing to the world—or even makes a negative impact—she gets a pass. Beyoncé’s reputation up to this point has been more or less unimpeachable and any criticism of her is met with the kind of vitriol usually reserved by GamerGate swarms. Only as soon as she ventures that her fans might need to do something difficult to share her values does she find herself on the receiving end. They sent the message loud and clear: just give us what we want from you and you’ll be fine. Just don’t make us think about our meat.

Jake Cleland is a Melbourne music writer - @jakecleland

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