Veganism as a Colonial Construct: Stolen Hummus and the Moral Theater of Whiteness

Let’s be clear: veganism, as it circulates in the global North today, is rarely talked about as a colonial artifact. But that’s exactly what it is a practice ripped from its ancestral roots, scrubbed clean of history, and sold back as a shiny new ethical innovation. And like so many things branded “progressive” by white Westerners, it’s been weaponized not for liberation, but for moral superiority.
To see veganism not as a neutral lifestyle choice but as a colonial construct, we have to dig into the violent past: how empires systematically dismantled Indigenous food systems, how plant-centered lifeways practiced for millennia across the Global South were erased, and how their fragments were later stolen, sanitized, and rebranded as if they’d just been invented in a Portland café. This isn’t just cultural appropriation. It’s epistemicide the deliberate destruction of Indigenous knowledge followed by its resurrection as a marketable trend, stripped of land, community, and justice.

The Theft Begins with the Land: How Colonialism Shattered Indigenous Diets
Long before Donald Watson coined the word “vegan” in a London basement in 1944, entire civilizations thrived on plant-centered ways of life grounded in reciprocity, ecological wisdom, and spiritual cosmology. These weren’t “diets” in the modern sense individualized regimens chosen for health or ethics. They were ways of being, inseparable from territory, ceremony, and collective survival.
In the Americas, the Haudenosaunee nurtured the Three Sisters : corn, beans, and squash. grown together in a symbiotic relationship that fed nations without relying on animal products. For the Maya, the milpa wasn’t just a farming system; maize was kin, the flesh of the Earth Mother herself. In the arid highlands of North Africa, Amazigh communities sustained themselves on barley, lentils, wild greens, olives, and dates, reserving meat for rare ceremonial occasions not out of rigid moral dogma, but out of deep ecological respect for a fragile landscape. In West Africa, yams, millet, and leafy stews formed the backbone of Yoruba and Akan life, with animal protein used sparingly and always with reverence. Across the Pacific, taro and breadfruit weren’t just crops they were ancestors. In Hawai‘i, kalo was believed to be humanity’s elder sibling.
These systems weren’t “vegan” by Western definition many included insects, fish, or occasional hunting but they were overwhelmingly plant-centered, guided by restraint, zero-waste, and relational accountability. Animals weren’t “resources.” They were relatives honored if taken, never commodified.

Then came the colonizers.
With rifles, Bibles, and ledgers, European empires launched a deliberate war on Indigenous food sovereignty. In North America, the U.S. government slaughtered 30 million bison not for food, but to starve Plains nations into submission. At the same time, they banned corn ceremonies, outlawed seed-saving, and forced children into boarding schools where traditional foods were punished as “savage.” In Mexico, the Spanish executed people for growing amaranth, a sacred grain tied to pre-Hispanic deities. In North Africa, French colonists seized agdal communal grazing lands and replaced barley fields with vineyards for export, criminalizing Amazigh foraging as trespassing. Across Africa, cash-crop economies destroyed yam and millet polycultures, replacing them with monocrops for European markets while importing lard, salted meat, and sugar as “civilizing” rations.
The result wasn’t just hunger. It was epistemological rupture. When you sever a people from their seeds, their soil, and their food stories, you sever them from memory itself.

The Great Erasure: From Ancestral Wisdom to “Discovery”
With Indigenous food systems fractured or driven underground, the stage was set for historical amnesia. By the 19th and 20th centuries, European and American reformers began promoting vegetarianism not as a continuation of global traditions, but as a new, rational, scientific breakthrough. Figures like Sylvester Graham or John Harvey Kellogg preached plant-based eating as a tool to control “base instincts,” often wrapped in eugenicist and racist logic framing meat as the food of “savage” races, while white purity demanded grains and temperance.
Then, in 1944, Donald Watson and a small group in England declared themselves “vegans,” defining their practice as the complete rejection of animal exploitation. Noble in intent, maybe but utterly silent on the fact that millions of non-white people had lived plant-centered lives for centuries, not as protest against “exploitation,” but as a mode of coexistence with the living world.
That silence wasn’t accidental. It was colonial logic in action: the belief that only the West produces “ethics,” while the rest of the world merely “subsists.” The plant-based wisdom of the Amazigh, the Maya, the Yoruba, the Māori was rendered invisible, folkloric, or “primitive.” Their practices weren’t seen as philosophy. They were seen as lack as if they avoided meat only because they were too poor or backward to afford it.
So when veganism entered mainstream consciousness in the late 20th century, it arrived as a white invention a lifestyle choice for the privileged, sold through oat milk, Instagram aesthetics, and celebrity endorsements. The global roots were airbrushed out. Hummus became a “vegan discovery,” though Levantine communities had eaten it for millennia. Tofu, developed in Buddhist monasteries, was rebranded as a Western health food. The very idea that plant-centered eating could be ancient, sophisticated, and decolonial was erased.
The Moral Superiority Playbook: What Colonizers Always Do
This pattern isn’t unique to food. Colonizers have always followed the same script:

Destroy Indigenous systems.
Steal the pieces that serve their interests.
Repurpose them as proof of their own superiority.
They did it with spirituality (yoga stripped of caste critique), with medicine (herbal knowledge turned into Big Pharma patents), with art (African masks displayed in museums while their creators were called “savages”). And they did it with food.
Today, white veganism often functions as moral theater. Armed with graphic videos and absolutist rhetoric, some white activists confront Black, Brown, and Indigenous people for eating chicken, fish, or goat as if these communities are oblivious to violence, as if their food choices exist outside the cage of food apartheid, historical trauma, and capitalist necessity. This isn’t solidarity. It’s missionary logic dressed in lentils.
Worse, it echoes the exact rhetoric of the colonizer: “We are civilized because we do not kill. You are backward because you do.” Never mind that the white vegan’s avocado toast depends on the exploited labor of Indigenous Mexican farmworkers. Never mind that their “ethical” soy comes from deforested Amazon lands stolen from Guarani communities. Never mind that their moral purity is only possible because someone else bears the cost.
This is the ultimate colonial move: to extract the symbol while abandoning the struggle. Take the plant-based part of Indigenous life the part that looks “clean” and “enlightened” and discard the messy, radical core: land rematriation, anti-capitalism, communal care, and resistance to empire.
Toward a Decolonial Food Ethic: Beyond the Vegan Label
The answer isn’t to abandon concern for animals. It’s to reject the colonial framing that pits “ethical eating” against “ignorant consumption.” True food justice doesn’t start with what we refuse to eat. It starts with who controls the land, who owns the seeds, and who gets to define what “ethics” even mean.
Indigenous food sovereignty movements : like the Indigenous Seed Keepers Network, Soul Fire Farm, or Amazigh women’s argan cooperatives show us another way. They don’t call themselves “vegan,” yet their practices are profoundly anti-exploitative: they grow food without pesticides, share harvests communally, honor the more-than-human world, and reject industrial agriculture in all its forms including factory-farmed plants.
This is the opposite of white vegan moralism. It’s relational, not individualistic. It’s rooted, not portable. It’s liberatory, not performative.
To decolonize food is to understand that you can’t heal your relationship with animals while your relationship with land remains colonial. It’s to recognize that the Amazigh grandmother foraging bakoula in the Atlas Mountains, the Maya farmer tending milpa in Guatemala, and the Black urban gardener growing collards in Detroit aren’t “potential vegans.” They’re keepers of the very wisdom that veganism claims to have invented.

Conclusion: Return the Seeds, Not the Shame
Veganism, as a colonial construct, thrives on erasure. But liberation thrives on remembrance.
The decolonial task isn’t to adopt a new diet. It’s to return what was stolen: land, seeds, stories, and the right to define ethics on our own terms. It’s to stop asking marginalized communities, “Why don’t you go vegan?” and start asking the powerful, “Why do you still own the land?”
For those of us committed to anti-colonial struggle as you are the path forward is clear: stand with food sovereignty movements, support Land Back, reject moral purity, and honor the ancient truth that plant-centered life was never invented by the West it was defended, despite the West.
And in that defense lies not just survival, but revolution.