Do Indigenous and subsistence diets disprove veganism?

The objection

“Inuit hunters and other subsistence communities have to eat animals to survive. Doesn’t that disprove veganism?”

The answer

The premise is true of people who live by hunting or herding, and veganism, as the Vegan Society defines it, doesn’t ask them to go hungry. What excuses them is necessity, and necessity is the one thing the objection can’t hand on to someone buying dinner in a town with a supermarket.

Does veganism condemn people who hunt or herd to survive?

Veganism doesn’t condemn them, by its own definition. The Vegan Society, founded in Britain in 1944, defines veganism as excluding the exploitation of animals “as far as is possible and practicable”, a definition it says was in use by 1988, though its phrasing has shifted slightly since [1]. For many herders and Arctic hunters those limits are real. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) describes pastoralists as key to food security in drylands, mountains and shrublands, where crop production is challenging [2]. In Canada, Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, the national organisation representing Inuit, calls the country foods of the land “central to our culture and way of life” [3], and Statistics Canada, a government agency, found that 77% of Inuit children in Inuit Nunangat, the Inuit regions of northern Canada, lived in food-insecure households in 2022, a problem it puts down to poor access to food, high food costs and climate change [4]. An ethic that blamed people in that position for eating what the land provides would be a bad ethic, and veganism’s definition doesn’t.

Is veganism at odds with Indigenous traditions?

It need not be, argues Margaret Robinson, a Mi’kmaw academic at Dalhousie University in Canada who is herself vegan. She reads her nation’s legends as treating animals as persons whose deaths are regretted and justified only by need, and concludes that choosing not to ask for their sacrifice is “a legitimately Indigenous option” (2020) [5]. She also points out that few Mi’kmaw people can now live by traditional hunting, fishing or gathering, and that those on reserve usually depend on store-bought food [5]. Hers is one reading of one nation’s stories, and Indigenous peoples will settle for themselves what their traditions ask of them, but it shows how much the objection flattens when it treats every Indigenous person as a hunter on the sea ice.

Does the law treat subsistence hunting differently?

In the EU it does, for seals: under a 2009 regulation, seal products have been barred from the EU market since August 2010 [7], except those from hunts traditionally conducted by Inuit and other Indigenous communities, which can still be sold there with an official document attesting their origin [6]. The government bodies recognised to certify such products are in Greenland, Nunavut and Canada’s Northwest Territories [6]. The European Commission says those hunts contribute to the communities’ subsistence and so do not raise the same public moral concerns as hunts conducted primarily for commercial reasons [6]. European law already separates a hunt that helps a community subsist from one carried out mainly for profit, which is the separation this objection blurs.

Does a subsistence hunter’s necessity cover supermarket meat?

A subsistence hunter’s necessity doesn’t cover supermarket meat, because the shopper lacks the one thing that excuses the hunter. The British Dietetic Association says carefully planned plant-based diets can support healthy living at every age and life stage, with vitamin B12 from fortified foods or supplements [8], so for most people within reach of a supermarket, meat is a preference. Holding up people at the edge of food security to defend a factory-farmed sausage uses their hardest circumstances as cover for some of the easiest anywhere. The meat on those shelves comes from a different system, too. There is no specific definition of a factory farm, so for the US the Sentience Institute, an animal-advocacy research group, counts farms whose animal numbers in Department of Agriculture census data meet the Environmental Protection Agency’s thresholds for a concentrated animal feeding operation [9]. On that measure it estimates that 99% of farmed animals in the US were on factory farms in 2022, and it puts the share of the world’s farmed land animals at about 74%, though it warns that its global figures come with significant uncertainty (Our World in Data, 2023, updated 2024) [9]. In Britain the National Pig Association, an industry body, says half the sow herd is kept outdoors but only a very small proportion of pigs are reared outdoors for their entire lives [10]. Pig farms like the English one that investigators filmed undercover in 2012 are a long way from the sea ice, and so is the shopper reaching past the lentils for the bacon.