The Dialectic of Veganism
I bought a vegan protein powder recently.
Not because I suddenly became vegan. I simply wanted to try it. The package looked clean, modern, vaguely rebellious in the way contemporary wellness branding always tries to look rebellious.
“Peak Punk.”
Which is already funny if you think about it for more than three seconds.
Punk once meant cigarettes, heroin, cheap beer and self-destruction.
Now it means organic sunflower protein optimized for gut health.
But what interested me was something else.
For years I had heard people talking about whey protein without ever thinking much about what whey actually was. Then I realized: whey is basically milk protein.
That’s all.
And suddenly I found myself thinking: wait a second. So the entire distinction here is about milk?
That small realization unexpectedly opened a much larger philosophical question.
Because veganism only looks simple if you isolate it from the gigantic civilizational machinery underneath it.
At the moral level, the vegan argument is understandable: reduce animal suffering, reduce cruelty, reduce industrial exploitation of living creatures.
Fine.
But then the Hegelian question begins.
What kind of historical world must exist before a person can stand inside a supermarket and morally select between: whey protein, pea protein, sunflower protein, soy isolate, almond milk, oat milk, coconut yogurt, vitamin-fortified vegan products, globally sourced plant substitutes?
The answer is: an unbelievably advanced industrial civilization.
A vegan standing in a Zürich supermarket is not living outside industrial modernity.
He is standing at its absolute peak.
That vegan protein powder exists only because of: global logistics, industrial agriculture, container shipping, chemical processing, advanced nutritional science, refrigeration systems, planetary extraction networks, stable energy infrastructures, sophisticated trade systems, and highly specialized labor distributed across the world.
This is where Hegel becomes important.
Hegel distrusted abstract morality detached from the concrete historical totality that produced the conditions for that morality in the first place.
The vegan sees the cow.
Hegel asks: what world had to exist before you could become the kind of person who morally objects to the cow while drinking industrially processed sunflower protein inside a hyper-developed technological civilization?
That is the dialectic.
Modern ethical consumption often psychologically presents itself as resistance against industrial civilization while simultaneously depending on industrial civilization absolutely.
And the contradiction deepens further.
Because the same civilization that allows highly refined moral sensitivity toward animals was built through: fossil fuels, colonial extraction, industrial exploitation, global labor asymmetries, resource wars, ecological destruction, mass technological acceleration, and immense human suffering.
Again: this does not invalidate concern for animals.
That would be too easy.
Hegel’s deeper warning is about forgetting the historical cost that made your moral choice possible.
You want to reject the cow? Fine.
But the grain feeding the monoculture still comes from fossil-fueled combines. The fertilizers still emerge from natural gas. The products still travel through container systems burning heavy fuel oil across planetary logistics routes.
You are not innocent.
No one is.
And that is not a cynical “gotcha.”
It is the truth of "Sittlichkeit": ethical life embedded inside actual history rather than abstract moral purity detached from material reality.
The supermarket shelf appears morally clean only because the underlying machinery remains invisible.
The consumer sees: “cruelty-free.”
He does not see: shipping routes, industrial ports, rare-earth extraction, migrant labor, agricultural systems, energy infrastructures, container fleets, global dependency chains.
And this creates a distinctly late-modern illusion: that moral purification can be achieved through optimized consumption choices inside systems that remain fundamentally industrial, extractive and planetary in scale.
The irony is almost perfect.
A person may reject milk as morally problematic while remaining completely dependent on one of the most technologically artificial and globally integrated systems ever created in human history.
And perhaps this reveals something larger about late modernity itself.
Modern people increasingly experience morality through consumption interfaces.
Ethics becomes shopping.
Identity becomes product selection.
The supermarket becomes a moral theater where individuals attempt to symbolically purify themselves from the civilization that simultaneously sustains them completely.
Hegel would probably smile darkly at this.
Because the contradiction is not accidental.
It is the structure of the age itself.
The vegan protein powder is not merely a food item.
It is condensed world history.