Vegans are correct, people just don’t want to change their lifestyle. I am not a vegan (yet) for what it’s worth, but they are definitely correct.
Would you like to go vegan and need advice?
Not the same person, but I’m in a similar position, just further along. Getting meat out of my diet was actually really trivial. Cheese is the big problem.
Fully vegan when I cook at home, but vegan options in restaurants and fast food are non-existent where I live, so I have cheese whenever I eat out. I’ve also come to terms with the fact I can never be fully vegan because I have 2 cats who need their cat food.
That’s still a big improvement. Even if you don’t go full vegan, cutting out meat has massive benefits
If you’re offering, im always looking for good cheese, yogurt or dairy substitutes
Well milk is easy. Just get soy milk or almond milk as a drop-in replacement. There’s even weird ones like cashew milk. Depending on where you are at though that might be too expensive compared to dairy milk.
Where I live, soy milk is less than half the price of cow boob milk. Perks of living in East Asia, I guess.
I bought a 936 mL (1/4 gallons) carton of soy milk today, and it was only about US$1.1 (NT$35). Very affordable.
Why does Taiwan sell soy milk in gallons?
They don’t sell milk or soy milk in gallons. The soy milk I got was 936 mL. 936 mL is 0.2472 gallons, which just so happens to be close to a quarter gallon. A quarter gallon is closer to 946 mL.
When I wrote the previous comment, I actually thought that 936 mL was exactly 1/4 gallons, and it kind of surprised me. The tool I used to convert units rounded the result to 2 decimal places.
That’s even stranger! Do you have any idea why? Is there maybe a pre-metric system measurement that’s closer?
Or maybe soy milk is just 6.4% less dense than water and it’s a kilogram
I’m working my way towards it! Did a one month trial run, now I am back to my previous diet but increasing my vegan meals and decreasing my meals with animal products.
I would welcome tips, though!
A fair amount of vegans might say that their experiences made them change overnight. I was not one of those people, as addiction is significant in me. When I was transitioning, I would go all in and keep abstaining from animal products as long as I could. Then I would mess up, and fall back into bad habits for a while. But the key thing that made the difference is that I never gave up. I’d track how many days I went without animal products and count that as my high score. Then when I tried again I would gamify it by being determined to get an even higher score.
As time went on I became more skilled at cooking plant-based, which helped keep me going since the food I was eating was beginning to taste better. Likewise my palette was growing more accustomed to plant-based foods. Eventually I messed up one last time by eating some pepperoni, but the experience was different. Because I had gotten so used to eating more wholesome meals, the pepperoni was such an intense salt bomb that I found it inedible (and that’s coming from a salt-fiend).
But the other thing that changed was in my mind. Consciously I was already well aware that vegan diets are entirely adequate nutritionally. But a lifetime of unconscious carnist societal conditioning gave me this constant feeling as if I could not survive on plants alone. That was one of the things that always got in the way - this strange feeling like I was missing something and had to eat the stuff that was missing or I would die.
But when I bit into that pepperoni I suddenly had this calm recognition: “I don’t need this. In fact this isn’t food.”
And things have only gotten easier over time. Hopefully this helps?
Have any recipe sites or suggestions?
For more wholesome foods I like Dr Greger’s recipe books.
https://nutritionfacts.org/books/
I’ve had a few dishes from them as well, and they are really tasty.
There’s plenty of others too, particularly on YouTube. Sauce Stache, Cheap Lazy Vegan, the Whole Food Plant Based Cooking Show, etc.
Thanks 🙏🏻
Hope it goes well for you. 😁
Vegans can be annoying, but at the end of the day they’re right about a lot of things. It’s just that the ethics of consuming meat and animal products can be a delicate conversation, and requires a pretty big change in how one views not only themselves but life as a whole. A lot of online vegans like to approach it the with tact of a sledgehammer.
Trust me, irl vegans are usually way more chill in my experience.
Online vegan here. Just wanted to add that after a couple of years of the same jokes and arguments and demeaning comments that were forced upon you because you had to explain why you don’t want to eat what everyone else around you eats, you kinda lose your tact a bit.
Never went to somebody with a burger in hand and called him a murderer. Been called an emasculated pussy and wittle little rabbit for eating a salad so many times. Same people then complain about annoying vegans. It’s a bit infuriating.
Choosing what you eat is your own thing and right to do. But when that decision becomes what defines people they become very annoying. We live in a world of abundance which we created by exploiting people, animals and nature as a whole. So when someone comes without asking and calls you a murderer and animal abused for something they themselves did until recently and still rely on modern medicine and whole set of other animal products it’s annoying, hypocritical and most importantly dishonest.
It’s really not though, inability to do something perfectly does not invalidate the efforts people make.
Nor have I implied it does. But calling people names just because you do something less than others is dishonest and quite frankly disgusting.
Except we’re talking about a situation where enough people doing one of these things has the possibility of actually ending atrocities like factory farms, as well as possibly vivisection and other animal abuses in science. You’re acting as if vegans only think about diet, when in fact I’ve expressed that everything you’ve brought up is something that vegans do make efforts to improve.
In fact you’ve never moved away from factory farms and have been completely ignoring any facts and just quoting random stuff that suits your narrative. You are not making an argument for your position, you just yelling “lalalalal I can’t hear you #GoWegan”.
No, pretty sure you’re the one whose been making wild assertions with no supporting evidence.
it’s tiring to have to use tact around people in order to placate their sensibilities.
That’s what being a part of society entails.
the reality is that they will hang on to one thing they dislike and focus on that. because the alternative is the realise that they could be a better person. so easier to blame the horrible vegan.
If lab-grown meat becomes even half as good (and cheap) as slaughtered meat then I’d make the switch in a heartbeat. Not to mention, imagine being able to try out all sorts of exotic meats guilt-free, or being able to eat raw meat without risk of food-borne illness and parasites? Gimme some of that cruelty-free giant tortoise meat, lemme see what that gluttonous bitch Charles Darwin was on about.
There is no ethical consumption under capitalism.
“Buying meat is unethical because of how the animals are treated” ~ sent from my iPhone made by child slave labor
I’m not saying veganism is bad. What I am saying is that people who think veganism is a moral high ground are wrong. I also think that veganism is a luxury to be even able to follow.
Edit after downvotes into the negative and shitty asshole responses:
Here comes the self-righteous assholes who don’t want to have a discussion and instead throw around blame and shame at me. Congrats. Y’all are the reason people hate vegans which hurts your cause by pushing people away from reducing reliance on meat. Every downvote is proof that self-righteous vegans are assholes.The devil is in the details, but in most cases it’s eating animal products that’s the luxury.
https://www.veganeasy.org/discover/news/oxford-university-researchers-finds-vegan-diets-are-cheaper/
People who “are something”, in general are annoying as fuck. As soon as you make something your identity you’ve probably fucked up.
That said I’ve tried to reduce meat consumption as much as possible, for the environment and the animals.
If your goal is preserving the life of cows, everyone becoming vegan will not help; most farm animals can’t survive without human intervention.
Most farm animals have been selectively bred for traits that fit human needs, at the expense of the animal’s own quality of life. For example, chickens being bred to produce so many eggs that they become calcium deficient and their bones break under the weight of their own bodies. Sanctuaries provide safe spaces for these animals to live out the rest of their lives in the most comfort possible, while going vegan is important for a future where we’re no longer breeding these poor beings into an inherently hellish existence.
Yes, much better to have wild animals gutting each other and devouring live prey than to have any farm animals at all. Greatest plan.
Wild animal suffering is a hot debate in the vegan communities these days. There is no cut and dry answer for that. However, whatever we do or don’t do to alleviate or eliminate wild animal suffering says nothing about whether we also create and maintain our own system of animal suffering. We can end the human exploitation of animals, and doing so can teach us a lot about ending our exploitation of each other as well.
“I’m going to be a cunt to people who are making an effort”
You’re giving us a bad name. 80% of people eating 50% less meat is a lot better and easier to achieve than 20% of people eating eating no meat.
I’ve posted more in depth responses to ‘reducitarianism’ elsewhere. In one comment I made an analogy to quitting smoking, and how ‘reducing’ my cigarette count only led to a rebound where I smoked even more than before.
It’s well known in the scientific literature that people are so inaccurate at self-reporting what, and how much of what, they eat, that questionnaire-based studies are specifically designed to compensate for these inaccuracies. So anecdotal claims of people reducing their animal consumption mean very little, particularly when data seems to indicate the opposite.
And like Ed Winter’s post gets into, you need to put the concept of reduction within the concept of justice. Fewer animals being bred and slaughtered sounds nice, but what about for the animals still being abused and murdered? Do you find it acceptable when corporations promise only to reduce carbon emissions by about 10% by 2035? Or how would you feel if police unions claimed they would disproportionately arrest black people 20% less than they used to?
Sorry but ‘reduction’ is nothing but a self-soothe to make people feel like they’re doing something good, when in reality they are just continuing their injustice while assuaging their own guilt. Just another form of cognitive dissonance.
I agree. Militant meat eaters are just as annoying as cliché vegans but there seem to be more of the former.
Reducing meat consumption is probably the best way to go for most people (I’ve reduced mine because of my vegetarian wife and don’t feel like I miss anything) but eating strictly vegan doesn’t seem right to me. Anything that requires supplementation in the long run cannot be the final answer.
Meat eaters don’t come in your face and call you weed whacker or tree huger whenever there’s food being mentioned.
They do in my experience. I’ve never once criticized someone else for eating meat, but I get made fun of a lot for looking for vegetarian/vegan options.
If you just order food without going all “am actually vegan” just to let everyone know and people still make fun of you… then those people are assholes. No one should be judged on their own choices.
Are you saying people should hide the fact that they’re vegan?
Literally the only strictly necessary supplement for vegans is b12, and if you understand the science of b12, then you know that you either should be supplementing it anyway, or you’re just rolling the dice.
By contrast there are entire whole-food plant-based communities who routinely report the near-miraculous benefits they gain after adopting the diet, such as cholesterol levels that aren’t deadly.
there are entire whole-food plant-based communities who routinely report the near-miraculous benefits they gain after adopting the diet, such as cholesterol levels that aren’t deadly.
That is a far more complex topic than just meat consumption though. People don’t just go vegan but completely change their diet and actually look at what they consume.
I’ve never had high cholesterol even back when I ate meat daily. Always ate lots of salads and veggies though and didn’t snack sugary shit all day.
The thing I want to be clear about here is that a vegan diet is nutritionally adequate for all our needs, and at every stage of life.
Be careful OP. There are angry meateaters among us using Lemmy.
I would hope that most people who have seen much of anything about industrial ranching would have a hard time not showing a bit of empathy.
Some descriptions of hell aren’t as upsetting as seeing how those animals are kept and handled.
I only ever see meat eaters argue about what the body needs or how our teeth are meant for meat. There is no way to argue that the modern meat industry isn’t horrific, I think some carnists that react strongly to vegans unconsciously know this and react with anger because of guilt and shame.
Become vegetarian
And then become vegan.
Step one. Stop taking medicine, as lots of pills use lactose and all the vaccines are tested using horseshoe crab blood and are tested on animals.
https://www.vegansociety.com/go-vegan/definition-veganism
Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—
One step ahead of you.
Edit: You really think this is a gotcha, eh? Given that you’ve posted the same thing at least six times?
practicable
There’s the rub. One mans practicable is another mans impossible. So it just becomes people judging other people’s choices without any real understanding of their circumstances.
It’s literally baked into the quote that that’s not the idea. I really don’t see how you’ve arrived at that conclusion and I suspect you’re just trying to finagle a counterpoint.
vegans have noble intentions but they are fighting the wrong battle: the root evil is not meat consumption per se but capitalism and the resource exploitation that it implies
The root evil is your meat consumption. If theres nothing wrong, then go to your local slaughter house and stand in line. If you dont like to do that you know what they feel. The feel the same fucking way about it as you do. And they dont get any sedation as they get during an execution. They get the first row experience to fucked up death.
Fuck your dumb ideas and go eat some fucking beans and shut the fuck up.
Damn, you need to get some meat pie.
Too much soy clogging up the brain.
I would gladly go to a local slaughterhouse but alas all I have is factory meat around me.
You could reduce meat intake and buy higher quality meat whenever financially feasible. Then you help fight the problem but can still look down on vegans
Or you could just not support abuse and murder. Also an option.
Small incremental changes are easier to make than big ones. It is also better to have many people reducing meat than just a few full vegans.
True, but my point still stands. Most people don’t go vegan overnight.
In my experience they often do go vegan overnight though. The key tends to be actually connecting the food on your plate with where it came from and accepting that animals are capable of suffering. Once that connection is made, animal products simply aren’t seen as food anymore and going vegan overnight is the only logical conclusion.
Some people may be further along the spectrum towards being vegan when this connection is actually made but regardless of if you are vegetarian, “only eat free range meat”, or an unapologetic meat eater, once the connection is made they are vegan.
You will get more people to join your cause with a positive message: i.g. “Do these small steps to start” than a negative one, I.g. “If you don’t go fully vegan, you are still part of the problem.”
“Perfect is the enemy of good.”
So it is easier to convince people to reduce meat consumption, which than makes it more likely that people will go vegetarian or vegan later
And i actually feel like vegans on the internet can be too aggressive, alienating people they could get on their side
It’s kind of hard to approach this in a tactful way. I think a lot of why vegans don’t appreciate this approach is because it often doesn’t work in actual practice. I’ll give a personal example as an analogy - I used to be a smoker. I tried quitting at least 50 times over the time period I was addicted to nicotine. One of the tricks I would use was to reduce the amount I would smoke each day. It would help briefly, but what would always happen is that I would get to a point where it was too hard to reduce any further, and then after plateauing for a few days, I would rebound and smoke even more than I used to.
Reduction still played a role in my effort to quit, but there were a lot of other tricks I had to employ to make it stick, and the overarching point is that reduction as a goal went nowhere, but reduction combined with the intent to stop all together did eventually work.
And that’s what also happens with dietary changes. Reduction starts with halfway good intentions, but when it’s the goal it becomes a temporary self-soothe that simply ends up rebounding in the end. In fact the people who run wfpb health coaching clinics have stated in interviews that people are most successful when they go all in with the dietary changes - because it turns out that people often feel dramatic positive changes to their health within only days of going plant-based, and those positive changes reinforce their motivation to keep going.
And as this article points out, reducitarianism can never achieve justice. It’s like when suits-wearers promise to reduce their carbon emissions by 10% by 2035 or something. It’s better than nothing, but will never solve the problems that need to be solved.
Or vegans can just mind their own business and leave the rest alone. Claiming abuse and murder and yet still buy smartphones whose materials are sourced by abuse of the poor, drive around on liquefied animals and use plastics.
Or animal abusers can just mind their own business and stop abusing and murdering innocent animals?
Stop using medicine and vaccines. K? Thank you. Those rely on horse shoe crabs donating blood and that’s animal abuse. Not to mention other medicine testing. Oh also, stop buying organic, since you know that’s exploitation of animals. Only veggies with good old artificial fertilizer are to be used. We don’t want you looking like a hypocrite while criticizing others.
I’d rather be a hypocrite one out of ten days, than to systematically support animal abuse and murder to feed me - which can be done perfectly fine in harmless ways.
10 out of 10. You just think you are not.
No, the data definitely doesn’t support your position. Going vegan absolutely makes a hell of a lot of difference, even from just one person doing it.
https://thehumaneleague.org.uk/article/how-many-animals-can-you-save-by-going-vegan
Some vegans are against organic agriculture, and there currently is a huge problem where the various regenerative agricultural movements have been astroturfed by the animal ag industry with the whole free range thing.
But it ignores that conventional industrial agriculture also appears to be sending almost the entire arthropod phylum into extinction, which is still worse than organic ag.
There are a lot of reforms that need to be made to the agricultural sector, and veganic farming/gardening is one of those needed changes.
There are a lot of things that are not perfect in this world. But convenience trumps all, which is why diets reflect country’s policies and climate for the most part. USA shoves corn syrup into everything simply because of its abundance and everyone loves sweet stuff. But in the long run it’s creating a huge problem with obesity and diabetes. Meat is on the same level.
For some climates meat comes off as a byproduct almost. Remaining plant matter from plants used for human consumption are normally used to feed cattle and other animals. Without animals all that would have been most likely burned. Even if there was a different way to repurpose that burning is the fastest and easiest thing and us humans love easy.
Take for example countries in which sheep herding is a dominant form of farming because pastures can’t be used for anything else. You can’t expect those countries to ignore local food source which would be mutton and not use wool as byproduct, and rely solely on imported goods so they can go vegan. It’s impossible combined with stupidity. Look at Mongolia. Short grass as far as eye can see. Tell them not to rely on reindeer and meat.
I highly doubt this argument about the agricultural suitability of different lands holds up under scrutiny. I’ve seen someone grow a small food forest on top of a layer of manure that was spread on an abandoned parking lot, in midwest climate conditions. We don’t need the ‘viability’ of what can be grown where, being dictated by modern industrialized monoculture agribusinesses, since those practices are part of the problem.
And again it comes down to the possible and practical part of the vegan definition. I don’t live in Mongolia, so I’ll leave it to Mongolian vegans to determine what is and isn’t feasible.
This is just basic whataboutism.
Put simply, promoting veganism won’t stop people from reducing, but promoting reducetarianism will stop people from going vegan
This is either brain rot written by someone who doesn’t understand propaganda or a psy-op and I can’t tell which. So if it is a psy-op, congratulations on making an effective one.
Except it’s not? Half-measures get half-results.
There’s a difference between eating meat and condoning animal abuse. For most vegetarians this is impossible to comprehend it seems. But they will happily drive cars on liquefied dinosaurs, use plastics and buy phones which were made by exploiting children and poor people. While at the same time claiming fish is not meat.
No, there isn’t. But people don’t want to be confronted with this fact.
Neither do vegetarians want to face the fact most medications and almost all vaccines you take were tested on animals, if not produced by animals. So if you don’t want to be a hypocrite and don’t want to stop acting smug, I suggest stopping all medication and medicine use. I mean we don’t want to condone animal abuse.
There is a difference between not doing something that is purely done for enjoyment (eating meat, you can live perfectly fine and be healthy without) and not taking medication. Additionally, vegans want to stop exploiting animals for human benefit, so they are in favor of not doing animal testing anyways.
That’s the problem with your assumptions then. You assume people only eat meat because of joy. Not because it’s cheap and highly nutritious part of the diet. It’s significantly easier to be a soy latte sipping hipster in first world country living in temperate climate where due to good economy choice is abundant. Try moving more north where growing seasons as short or non-existent. Or living in a third world country where choice of food is not as rich.
Geography is a very strong influence on local diet. In northern places where farming is limited people breed sheep and mutton is a staple food. Go south and fruits and vegetables become more dominant. You can’t go to Mongolia and tell them not to eat meat when their entire country consists of dirt covered rock barely enough deep to grow grass.
Yeah, where I live, pork and beef are the dominant meats because pigs and cows consume parts of the plants humans don’t eat, be it corn or wheat stalks. It’s cheap way to produce more food without requiring any more land. Without animals, we’d have to burn that remainder and throw it away.
As for stopping exploitation of animals, that will never happen. It’s wishful thinking. Abuse should be abolished and punished by all means, but exploitation is here to stay. You can try and reduce your dependency on it, but never get rid of it. We are higher in the food chain and pretty much everyone, and I literally mean everyone, would rather some animal testing goes on if it means saving their ass sometime in the future. Claiming anything otherwise means being a hypocrite because at the end of the day we all care about ourselves the most.
Again you’re being factually incorrect about agriculture. The plants and plant parts that humans can’t eat are important sources of nutrients for composting and building soil fertility. And animals do have a place in agriculture, and that place is a free-living association where humans and animals mutually benefit from each other.
What would I know, being born in a family who works in agriculture, especially compared to someone who probably never held farm utensil in their hands. Ever heard of bales of hay? You think those are left on the land for composting? Haha.
I mean, there exists many options between the extremes of veganism and rampant factory farming. This isn’t a dichotomy; we can have meat consumption without the need for industrialized meat production.
We may have to eat less meat though, I will concede.
