Vegetarianism hurts and damages regional diets

The argument

Popular foods such as the avocado and quinoa can only be grown in certain parts of the world. That is the fact the whole problem turns on: demand for them can rise anywhere, but supply is fixed to particular regions, and the people who live in those regions are buying from the same limited supply as everyone else. When global demand for such a crop rises steeply, the price rises with it, and the growers sell into whichever market pays most. Local buyers are then bidding against distant consumers with far greater purchasing power for food that was grown next to them. Their immense demand has pushed prices up so high that locals who relied on these foods as a staple for years are now unable to afford them. The figures show what that means in practice. In places that export avocados, such as Mexico, a kilogram of avocados costs the equivalent of a day's minimum wage — putting a locally grown food out of reach of the people who grow it. In the Andes, where quinoa is cultivated and exported, the grain has become too expensive for local people to buy, despite having been a staple of the region's diet for years. In both cases what changed was not the harvest but who else is competing for it. Vegetarianism has driven this by putting certain foods on a pedestal — the avocado and quinoa among them — as substitutes prized for their protein or their versatility, and demand concentrated on a small number of crops is what produces price spikes of this kind. The harm therefore falls on the very people who grow these foods and have always relied on them, and who can no longer obtain them.

Premises

Counter-arguments

It is unfair to place the blame on vegans for food scarcity caused by influencers, since food trends apply to all sorts of people, not only people who dont eat meat. It also misses the point that most vegans primerally change their diet so that they are not complicit in animal suffering. It is simple enough to do this without resorting to exotic foods. Many dishes, like curries, pasta, pies and much more, can be made with any plant based food easily and there is the ultimate vegan food, the potato. Not all vegans are aspiring to be middle class, potato waffles are VEGAN.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] That these crops are regional staples is not in dispute and supports nothing on its own about vegetarianism. [Rejecting P2] Export demand for avocados and quinoa comes from consumers generally rather than from vegetarians specifically, and the premise offers no figure separating the two. Higher export prices also raise incomes for the growers, an effect the argument does not weigh at all. [Rejecting P3] The link runs through a food fashion, not through the diet. As the counter-argument notes, a plant-based diet is served perfectly well by staples grown almost everywhere, so the harm described attaches to particular sought-after products rather than to vegetarianism as such.