Are Coconuts Vegan?

It seems like a silly question, since a coconut is a fruit (technically, it’s a drupe), but it’s a question that has me more and more upset. Over the last several years, we have watched with increasing alarm the prevalence coconut products have begun to play in the promotion of the vegan diet: in vegan cheese, butter, burgers, and more. It is in almost all shampoos and conditioners. In shaving creams and lotions. It is in non-dairy ice creams and other plant-based “milk” products. Coconuts and coconut products — oil, milk, and cream — are the “go to” vegan ingredient and they are in most of the new vegan product innovations.

In 2016, a new plant-based product was introduced almost every single day, 100 more than the year before, and growing at a rate of 11% per year. In fact, the staggering growth had Tyson’s CEO explain his company’s $150 million investment in meat-analogs. “The future,” he told Fox Business News, “might be meat-free.” Driving this growth is “Growing concern toward animal cruelty and welfare.” And yet, the majority of those products are coconut-based. And eating coconuts often supports terrible animal cruelty.

The vast majority of coconuts sold across the world come from Southeast Asia, from countries like Thailand, where they are picked by abused primates. Agile and adept climbers, pig-tailed macaques are acquired as infants by trainers who find them in the wild, shoot their mothers to steal the baby primates, chain them by the neck and train them to climb trees and pick coconuts through the use of terrible brutality. They are trained into submission with whips and beatings. This includes forcing the monkeys to develop strong back leg muscles so that they can stand upright, an unnatural position for these animals, by hanging them by their neck for hours, even overnight, to develop strength.

Using monkeys to harvest coconuts is profitable, as these animals work ten times as fast as humans with no ability to fight back against their exploitation. Monkeys are not only worked to the point of exhaustion — one trainer admits they faint during the course of the day — they are fed stimulants and caffeinated beverages to force them to work even harder.

They are forced to endure dangerous working conditions, including being forced to jump from tree to tree by grabbing unreliable palm fronds, which they are often frightened and reluctant to do because if the palms break, they could fall to their deaths. And they are deprived of socialization with their kind.

It is, in a word, slavery.

Recently, we came upon a video of a young man living in Thailand who has been working to bring global awareness to this issue. His excellent video explaining this issue can be viewed here.

His video capturing the abuse monkeys endure during training can be viewed here.

When we first found out about this, we began writing to companies that produce plant-based products to inquire about their coconuts. We were naive. Instead of asking them where they sourced their coconuts, we asked them if their suppliers used primate labor. Every company we reached out to, except Beyond Meat which simply did not respond to numerous requests, claimed they were primate-labor free. And yet, since Southeast Asia supplies 85% of the world’s coconuts and virtually all the plantations in Thailand use primate labor, the casual assurances became dubious. Coconut industry spokesmen admit that such a claim is “hard to believe” since monkeys pick 99 percent of the coconuts harvested in Thailand. So we stopped buying coconut products sourced from anywhere where macaques exist.

For a Washington Post article on the issue, click here.

For an NPR piece, click here.

For a UK Daily Mail piece, click here.

For a Bangkok Times piece, click here.

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© 2020 Nathan & Jennifer Winograd