Billie Eilish's Vegan Blindspot: The Framework Behind 'Ethical Consumption'

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]We're playing with wigs today and we're going to talk about Billy Isish. Billy Isish just told the world that eating meat is inherently wrong and that you cannot both love animals and eat meat.

[00:00:12]What's one hill you die on? Y'all not going to like me for this one. Eating meat is inherently wrong. Two things cannot coincide. I love animals. I love all animals so much. And I eat meat. You just they're just You can't do both.

[00:00:24]Sorry. You can eat meat. Go for it. You can love animals, but you can't do both.

[00:00:30]Billy Isish, who has a net worth of over $50 million, a nutrition team, and access to every organic, sustainable, farmed, whole food on the planet. And her take is that you are morally wrong for eating meat. Um, what? Let me show you exactly what's happening here, because this is actually not a debate about veganism. Billy Isish gave an interview. She said eating meat is inherently wrong. And the internet did what the internet always does. It's split into two camps. Camp one says she's basically right. Factory farming is a moral catastrophe. And the discomfort people feel in hearing her statements is cognitive dissonance disguised as class critique. Meanwhile, Camp 2 says she's privileged and out of touch. And some people in camp 2 are going even further, arguing that veganism itself is a tool of white supremacy. That the mainstream vegan movement has always operated with white supremacist logic, co-opting anti-slavery rhetoric, dismissing indigenous food practices, and centering white normative bodies in every clean eating campaign you've ever seen. And what you need to know about Camp 2 is that they're not wrong. The food justice critique is real. It's documented. And it has been systematically ignored by the mainstream vegan movement for decades. But here's what that movement doesn't want to talk about either. The alternative has the same problem.

[00:01:52]Because the produce industry, the one that supplies every Whole Foods, every farmers market, every aesthetically lit vegan meal prep video, is built on the labor of farm workers who are disproportionately undocumented, disproportionately Latin American, and disproportionately female women who face some of the highest rates of workplace sexual violence of any industry in the United States, who have no union protections, who are excluded from the basic labor rights that cover almost every other American worker. So, let's be precise about what we're actually choosing between here. Meat, produce, both industries are extractive. Both externalize their costs onto the most vulnerable people in the supply chain.

[00:02:34]The suffering just happens in different zip codes. Billy isish either doesn't know that or doesn't care. And most vegans, including the ones with the most sophisticated food justice analysis, tend to go quiet when you bring that up.

[00:02:47]And that's because this conversation isn't really about morals or ethics. But I'm going to tell you what I think it's really about. Before we get started, you know what to do. Love or hate, like and share because the algorithm does not care.

[00:03:04]The real issue at hand is legibility.

[00:03:07]The quality or state of being legible, understandable, accessible, comprehensible. the ability to understand the argument of your movement. Sit with me here for a second because this the idea that some suffering counts and some suffering doesn't and that the counting is never random. Like everything, this is not new. The ethical consumer has a history and that history tells you everything.

[00:03:35]In the 1790s, a group of Quaker abolitionists in Britain created what they called the free produce movement.

[00:03:42]The idea was simple. If you buy sugar grown by enslaved people, you are complicit in slavery. So stop buying it.

[00:03:48]Instead, buy free produce. Produce grown without enslaved labor, slightly more expensive, and sold in dedicated shops.

[00:03:56]Sounds reasonable enough, right? This is functionally the first ethical consumer movement in the Western world. And it failed not because the moral argument was wrong. The moral argument was absolutely correct. It failed because ethical produce costs more. And the people who couldn't afford the premium, the working poor of Britain and America, were simply excluded from participating in the morality framework because they couldn't. Their poverty was treated as a personal failing, not a structural condition. The conversation was about privileged white consumers and their moral standing. It was always about that. Fast forward to 1935. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signs the National Labor Relations Act, the foundational document of American Workers Rights, union organizing, collective bargaining, protection from employer retaliation, all that. Agricultural workers were excluded. Not accidentally, not as an oversight, but as a deliberate concession to southern Democrats who needed to ensure that black workers, the majority of the agricultural laborers at the time, could not organize. their rights were deliberately stripped out of the National Labor Relations Act because Southern Democrats wanted to keep black agricultural workers unprotected. The exclusion was raceneutral on its face, but it was racial by design. And it was also gendered because domestic workers, overwhelmingly women, overwhelmingly black at the time, were also excluded at that same moment by the same logic and for the same reasons. That exclusion has never been fully corrected. Agricultural workers in the US still do not have the same federal organizing rights as other workers. They are still 90 years later outside the architecture of labor protection that covers almost everybody else. Who grows the produce in the clean eating movement? Of the estimated 3 million migrant and seasonal farm workers in the US, over half of them are undocumented. Approximately 20% are women and 80% 80% of Mexican and Mexican-American women farm workers report having experienced sexual harassment or assault in the fields in the specific fields where your organic kale comes from because organic farms also use migrant labor. These women grow the food that gets photographed for the wellness industrial complex. Their labor makes the Whole Foods aesthetic possible. They have no federal union protections. Many cannot report abuse without risking deportation. And the mainstream vegan movement, the one currently deploying its most sophisticated food justice language, has almost nothing to say about them.

[00:06:37]Because here's what the ethical consumer framework requires to function. It requires a visible harm and an invisible worker. The factory farm is visible. The suffering of animals is documentable, filmable, sharable. PETA built an entire media empire on it. The farm worker sexual assault, that's not visible. It happens in a field, reported to no one, absorbed by a body that cannot afford to refuse her shift tomorrow. Animal farming and produce farming, both industries are built on extracted labor.

[00:07:09]Both externalize their costs onto people with the least power to resist. But only one of them gets to be the ethical problem in this conversation. And that choice about which suffering is legible enough to anchor a moral framework, that's not neutral and it never has been. This is a 230year-old pattern and Billy Isish just participated in it, probably without even knowing that it exists. So, you've heard the argument.

[00:07:33]Both industries exploit marginalized workers. The ethical consumer framework makes certain bodies invisible. The suffering gets distributed by race, class, and immigration status, not by moral weight. Here's the question. You should be asking right now, why do we keep ending up here? Why does every serious conversation about food ethics, every documentary, every celebrity interview, every viral moment always collapse back down onto the individual consumer's choices. That collapse is not an accident. It was engineered, and I can date it pretty precisely, at least in the United States. In 1953, a coalition of American corporations, including Coca-Cola, the American Can Company, and several major beer producers, founded an organization called Keep America Beautiful. Their stated mission, reduce litter. Their actual mission, stop the environmental movement from targeting them. This was the first organized corporate greenwashing. Greenwashing is a form of advertising or marketing spin that deceptively uses green PR and green marketing to persuade the public that an organization's products, goals, or policies are actually environmentally friendly when they're not. Because at that moment, environmentalists were starting to do something genuinely threatening. They were going after producers, demanding that industries be held accountable for the waste that their products were generating. And so the industries created Keep America Beautiful, which introduced America to an entirely new concept. The litterbug, the individual who doesn't care, the personal moral failure, the you who didn't throw that can away properly. If they could make pollution a personal failure, they'd never have to answer for making pollution in the first place. And it worked. And they ran the same play 50 years later. In 2004, British Petroleum, one of the largest oil companies on Earth, popularized a concept that you've probably heard your entire life if you're a Gen Z person or a millennial.

[00:09:29]The individual carbon footprint coined by their advertising firm, promoted in a $250 million PR campaign, the idea that your individual choices, what you drive, what you eat, how you travel, are the primary levers of the climate crisis, not the company extracting the oil. No, no, no. You, the ethical consumer is not a natural moral development. It's a PR category that was invented by corporations to ensure that accountability lands on individuals and never on supply chains. Now, here's where it gets specific because there is an ethical consumer movement with a documented history. And it looks almost nothing like what Billy Isish is describing. Decades ago in Delano, California, a coalition of Filipino and Latin farm workers walk off of the grape fields demanding union contracts, better wages, and basic labor protections.

[00:10:21]Dolores Huerta, co-founder of the United Farm Workers, a woman who would become one of the most consequential labor organizers in American history, leads the National Consumer Boycott. The boycott is a consumer action, but it's not asking consumers to be moral. It's using consumer pressure as a lever, a mechanism to extract specific material concessions from specific employers. And it has an end point. When the growers sign the contracts, the boycott ends because the goal was never permanent individual moral vigilance. The goal was union recognition, legal protections, a structural change. In 1975, California passed the Agricultural Labor Relations Act, the first law in American history to guarantee collective bargaining rights to farm workers. And it happened because the UFW boycott made the political cost of an action too high.

[00:11:15]This is what an ethical consumer movement looks like when it is working correctly. It ends in legislation, structural change. It uses individual action as pressure, not as a substitute for accountability. Now, what would that look like today? It would look like the Farm Workforce Modernization Act, a bill that passed the US House of Representatives with bipartisan support.

[00:11:37]It would have provided undocumented farm workers, the people growing your organic produce, with a path to legal status.

[00:11:45]More critically, it would have given them the right to sue over workplace violations. The American Farm Bureau Federation, the most powerful agriculture lobby in the country, killed the bill in the Senate. Their stated objection, the right to sue would expose farms to excessive litigation.

[00:12:03]Accountability was the dealbreaker. That bill is still dead. I don't think it's come up for a vote again since. So, here's what Eat Plants Not Meat does not do. It does not give a single farm worker the right to sue their employer.

[00:12:15]It does not restore the federal organizing rights that were stripped from agricultural workers in 1935. It does not pass the farm workforce modernization act. It does not touch the supply chain. It does not touch the lobby. It does not touch the architecture of all this. What it does do is it makes you feel like you did something, which is exactly what it was designed to do. Make people feel like they're doing something while actually doing nothing. And this right here is why don't eat meat is the easiest thing to ask. Not because it's wrong. Animal factory farming is a moral catastrophe.

[00:12:48]Everybody knows this. The environmental case for reducing meat consumption is real and documented. But it's easy because it leaves everything that matters completely intact. The much harder thing to ask, the thing that Dolores Huerta was actually asking is which specific institution is accountable and what specific change are you demanding from that institution?

[00:13:13]Billy Isish doesn't have an answer to that question. Neither does the vegan movement that's calling her a hero right now. Let me be precise about something before we go further. This is not about whether Billy Isish is a good person or not. Maybe she is. She clearly believes what she's saying. None of that is the problem. The problem is the word inherently. Eating meat is inherently wrong. inherently meaning by its nature in all cases for all people regardless of circumstance. That word is doing a lot of heavy lifting and it's doing it from a very specific position. Billy Isish was raised vegetarian. She went vegan when she was 12. She did not choose veganism as an adult, weighing her budget, her geography, her cultural food traditions, her family's economic circumstances. It was the default condition of her childhood in a household that could afford to make it the default and she is now worth somewhere between 50 and $70 million.

[00:14:14]She has never lived in a food desert.

[00:14:16]But 39 million Americans, they do. In 2024, 13.7% of American households were food insecure, meaning that they did not reliably have enough food at all. The question of whether that food was ethically sourced was not the operative concern. Now when someone in Billy Isish's position uses the word inherently, what they are doing is treating their own conditions as the standard, the conditions of someone who was raised vegetarian or vegan, who has never had to choose between organic kale and the only affordable protein in a 3m radius. Someone who has access to every option that most Americans do not. It's giving white feminism. In 2021, journalist and critic Ka Beck published a book called White Feminism in which she defined a specific and recurring pattern in feminist movements. White feminism is a specific way of viewing gender equality that is anchored in the accumulation of individual power rather than the redistribution of it. Beck was talking about feminism, but the mechanism she's describing applies here with near surgical precision because what Billy Isish is doing is not redistributing accountability. She's not asking who controls the supply chain.

[00:15:32]She's not naming the Farm Bureau lobby that killed the Farm Workforce Modernization Act. She's not calling for the restoration of the rights of agricultural workers. She is accumulating individual moral standing, individual social capital. She made the right choice and you are making the wrong one. And the framework she's using to make that judgment was built in conditions that most people cannot access. This is what privilege always does when it means well. It universalizes from an exempt position.

[00:16:03]And here's where it connects back to everything we've covered. The ethical consumer framework, the one invented by Coca-Cola and BP, the one with a 230year genealogy of making certain labor invisible, does not survive contact with COBEC's question. Because Beck's question is who accumulates power and who gets left holding the structural problem. The consumer who buys the right products, the consumer who is in the position to buy the right products accumulates moral standing. the farm worker who grew those products without union rights, without legal protection, without a path to citizenship. They're still in the field picking your strawberries. Is performing within this framework beautifully, consistently, and with seemingly genuine conviction, but the supply chain is still completely intact. The shitty conditions under which farm workers have to live still intact. That's not really talked about.

[00:16:55]So, let's ask the question this whole video has been circling. What would it actually look like to care about those things? To care about the structure, the supply chain, not performatively, not in a way that leaves the supply chain intact and hands the accountability to the individual consumer. What would it look like to actually care? And we already have a model. We've already met her in this video, Dolores Huerta. She didn't tell consumers that their food choices were inherently wrong. She named the specific actors, the companies, the employers who were paying poverty wages and exposing workers to toxic pesticides. She organized a boycott not as a permanent moral lifestyle, but as a temporary lever, a mechanism to extract specific material concessions from specific institutions. There's also Dr. A. Breeze Harper, scholar and founder of Sister Vegan Project, the person who spent years documenting exactly what mainstream veganism refuses to look at.

[00:17:52]That food ethics cannot be separated from race, from class, from who controls the food system, and whose labor makes it run. Neither Huerta or Harper was asking consumers to be moral. They're asking the movement to be honest about whose ethics are centered and whose were not. But as far as I know, the mainstream vegan movement has not made Harper famous. But they're praising Billy Isish right now on Instagram.

[00:18:18]Here's what actually caring looks like in 2026. It looks like calling your senator and demanding a vote for the Farm Workforce Modernization Act, a bill that passed with bipartisan support that would have given undocumented farm workers a path to legal status and the right to sue over workplace conditions.

[00:18:37]Now, I know we got a lot going on politically in America right now, right?

[00:18:40]I get that this might not be top of priority, but it should have been top of priority for these vegan movements forever. And as and as far as I know, it hasn't been. Actually caring looks like supporting the coalition of emoil workers, the farm worker organization that has done more to reduce sexual violence and wage theft in the Florida tomato industry than any ethical consumer campaign in American history by going directly after Taco Bell, McDonald's, and Whole Foods at the supply chain level until they signed enforcable agreements. It looks like asking every time someone hands you an individual moral choice, who benefits from this being my problem? This all clicked for me when they started passing bills requiring paper straws. Remember that? I was like, wait a minute here.

[00:19:26]Never mind the oil and farm industries.

[00:19:28]Oh, no. It's my straw that's destroying the environment, right? Billy Isish has 124 million Instagram followers. She's worth over $50 million. And that's a low estimate, by the way. She has a platform that most of the people growing her food will never see and will never have. If she used that platform to demand passage of things like the Farm Workforce Modernization Act specifically, publicly and persistently, that would be food ethics because all of these things are part of the same system. You cannot expect people to not eat meat when you have all these other interconnecting things going on that prevent them from making those choices. if she used that platform to name the American Farm Bureau Federation, which killed that bill, and explain what it would cost them to face a consumer backlash at scale. That would be food ethics. Has she done these things? Did I miss that news story? If she has, please let me know in the comments. But as far as I know, she has not done those things. And most mainstream white-led vegan organizations haven't really focused on those things either. What Billy Isish did instead was tell people whose food choices are constrained by poverty, geography, and a supply chain designed to keep agricultural workers invisible that their choices are inherently wrong.

[00:20:47]That is not ethics. The food system in this country is broken at the structural level. Both industries, meat and produce, are built on extracted labor.

[00:20:55]Both externalize their costs onto the most vulnerable people. Both are protected by lobbies that have spent decades ensuring that the blame lands on individual consumers and never on institutions. The question is never just what do you eat? The question is whose suffering is clear enough, noticeable enough to matter. And until we're willing to ask that question about the farm worker, the same way that we ask the question about the animal, until the 80% sexual violence statistic in the field triggers the same moral response as a factory farm documentary, we're not having a conversation about ethics.

[00:21:33]We're having a conversation about aesthetics. And Billy Isish, like most celebrities, is very good at aesthetics.

[00:21:41]Thanks for watching. See you next time.

[00:21:43]If you enjoy this kind of content, I invite you to watch my series, Witches, Horse, and Rebels: A Feminist History of Patriarchal Capitalism and How to Burn It Down. It's a three-part series with a 90page companion guide that gives you the history of how we got here, centering the witch hunts, women's resistance, and providing a framework for how we move forward from here. The link is in the description when you're