Vegans should just starve to death.

What if you lived where there were no animals (or at least none that for whatever reason, couldn’t be caught?) :slight_smile:

So can a vegan diet. I’ve known plenty of vegans who make a point of only consuming locally grown, seasonal foods. I mean, it’s not as if a vegan diet is so terribly complex it requires certain rare, exotic, and particular components compared to a non-vegan diet. (I know that’s a common myth…that it’s so complicated one needs a spread-sheet to map out one’s diet…nah. :rolleyes:)

Now, if everyone were told they had to start feeding themselves today, most would be unprepared to do so, regardless of their dietary preference. Man cannot live by meat alone, not for long anyway (ever read the book Alive, the story of the soccer players stranded on the mountain in a plane crash? They survived by eating their fellows, but barely…it did not take long for a diet of nothing but meat to reak havoc on their health) and humans who have adapted to a colder climate have always set aside plenty of plant-foods for the winter to form the core of their diet (root crops, squashes, cabbages, dried fruits/berries, nuts or nut meals, grains, legumes, etc…)
If given no warning or no ability to put aside such stores, even THEY would have starved before spring!

I imagine you wouldn’t live very long, or healthily. I can’t think of a single indigenous culture that does not make use of any animal protein.

Snip

Can I get a cite on this? It’s not that I disbelieve you, but I rather think that even those fortunate enough to live in a climate that allows for a wide range of plant proteins, fats, etc to grow must be making use of traded seeds or plant varieties that are technologically manipulated. I’m talking strictly about making due with indigenous plant species.

That, surely, is irrelevant. Veganism is a choice, beyond indigenous culture. You appear to be making the mistake that because we can be omnivorous we should be omnivorous.

I once dieted on rice and greens for 9 months as part of a detox. I felt extremely healthy on it, wasn’t anaemic, as I thought I would be, and most of my “ailments” disappeared.
Then my natural gluttony kicked in and I went back to a full vegetarian diet - you know cakes and biscuits and chocolate etc LOVELY:D

In what manner is it irrelevant? Humans are biologically able to digest, and the vast majority are programmed to enjoy fats and animal proteins.

Wait a minute – isn’t your scenario of a healthy omnivorous diet including non-indigenous animals and plants? Like cattle, wheat, corn, chickens?

And if you’re talking about truly indigenous meats (Arizonans living off chuckwallas, for example) are you seriously proposing it as a lifestyle model that’s equivalent to veganism? And that Americans will adopt your plan?

Because if neither of those apparently-untenable arguments is the one you’re making, can you be more explicit about what on earth you are trying to say? Otherwise it just comes across as some sort of tu quoque fallacy.

Eh. By that standard, “people shouldn’t kill people” is also just an appeal to emotion.

Right, I’m not sure what standard Acid Lamp is trying to hold up to here. Standard American diet makes use of a varied source of foods, the majority which are not indigenous. Because someone wants to have a vegan diet, they have to be held to a stricter “indigenous” standard? Please clarify that.

Sorry for not being clear.

I’m well aware that the standard American diet makes extensive use of both technological advantages as well as non-indigenous food animals. My points are as follows:

  1. Any traditional diet contains some form of animal protein as a portion of that diet. The amounts of animal based food sources range from quite substantial, to very minimal. Whether that comes from large or small game, or even insects it is omnipresent across cultures. As far as I know, there is no traditional culture that has a vegan diet.

  2. Modern diets allow us a greater access to a variety of foods to provide us with our required nourishment. Without that greatly expanded choice, a vegan diet would be nutritionally unsupportable in most climates. However, an equivalent Standard diet could be supported in most regions-(with the exceptions of processed sugars); utilizing nothing more than indigenous sources.

  3. Both Veganism and the American standard diet are products of modern extravagance, but because by utilizing a wider variety of sources, (animal based) an equivalent standard diet could be created; it is marginally less extravagant than a vegan diet which is far more difficult to maintain.

Edit: This was also my post. Spouse left the 'Dope logged in.

I thought this whole thing got started because someone said if fleshans had to kill their own protein, there’d be a lot fewer of them. The counterpoint was that if vegans had to kill their own protein, most of them would starve just as quickly.

I don’t think whether plants or animals are native or not is relevant.

It’s just the principal of least harm, isn’t it? Some people won’t eat factory-farmed meat, some people won’t eat meat from stocks that are at risk (like NA cod), some people won’t eat meat at all, some people won’t eat any meat products, and a few people won’t eat anything that requires killing another thing (fruitarians). Everyone knows that, whatever they eat, something has to die for it and some harm is inflicted - you just choose where on that scale of harm you want to be.

So, saying that eating a plant is like eating an animal is like saying that eating a panda is the same as eating a cow.

But it’s not always that easy to decide to stop eating meat or only eat factory-farmed meat or whatever, and there are lots of other things you can do to reduce harm to the wider world, so it’s not the be-all-and-end-all. I’m not vegan because I love cheese too much. Milk is not terribly ethical, even organic milk. Like I said, we all choose where we can stand to be on that scale of harm.

Indian Jains only use animal protein in the form of milk. In the West, that usually requires killing newborn calves, and I don’t know what Jains do with those newborn calves, but killing them would be against their beliefs. This is a really, really old religion.

It certainly is easier to be vegan in a society that has the ability to grow a wide variety of vegetables well. That’s no more extravagant than being able to stay up after sundown because we have the ability to make light.

@levdrakon: Acid Lamp said ‘I’m talking strictly about making due with indigenous plant species.’ Hence that part of the discussion. I presume he/she actually meant plant species which aren’t imported now, rather than plants which started out by being imported but can be home-grown now. Otherwise the UK would not have potatoes, and that would be terrible.

Excuse me, I’ve kinda got some questions or possibly nitpicks for you…

  • When you say “animal based food sources”, are you including milk products? Otherwise there would be examples of such a diet. Such as the diet of the Mysians, whose only animal products were milk, cheese, and honey. And the traditional diet of Jains, which allows milk, but is otherwise more restrictive than a vegan diet. Apparently the Jains have been doing as such for something like 3000 years. Though I suppose by culture you mean it in a way like an entire civilization?

  • I find it questionable that a vegan would not be able to maintain their diet with local agriculture. Is the issue that too much agriculture land is being used inefficiently to raise livestock? I’m not a vegan (or vegetarian even) so I wouldn’t know, but I was not under the impression that there was some ridiculously unattainable variety neccesarily to live on. I find it difficult to imagine unless you talking about some kind of marginal land like in the middle of the Sahara.

  • Also, what is an “indigenous food source”? I doubt modern populations could actually survive on indigenous food sources. Most crops and livestock are not native to the places they are grown, and that is not just true of modern agriculture. It’s true unless we’re talking about the beginning of the Neolithic or something. There would be a lot of starvation in various places I think. Can you give like some kind of outline or something to explain how these people aren’t able to feed themselves? What are they going to be missing that they absolutely have to have?

-With your talk of increased food variety, I can’t quite tell if you mean by use of this non-native stuff (in which case you are applying a double standard which causes the vegan diet to fail - when the same would happen for a non vegan diet under the same circumstances. If you mean instead that food imports allow it, I don’t get what the issue is either, for the same reasons - I don’t see how it’s any more unsustainable.

I’m a bit confused on some of your arguments. Please note that I’m not trying to be argumentative really, I’m just curious. Thank you.

Do vegans have less impact and cause less suffering due to their diet? I’ve heard that claim a lot, but what’s the yardstick they are using to make it?

Plants are not self aware, sentient creatures with nervous systems that make them capable of suffering. They have defense mechanisms, but that is not the same thing.

This is going back a few posts, but my point was simply that I don’t see any relevance to this argument in looking back at what used to be the norm. The world has changed, those indigenous societies would find it difficult to maintain their diet today, not least because a huge amount of their land would be taken up for livestock farming:p

I find the sharp distinction made by most people between the ethics of veganism and carnivorousness artificial. I have six words for you all: Meat Eaters For Eating Less Meat. Watch the video.

Hey Mosier, I don’t think many vegans or vegetarians make claims at all.
Having been a veggie for 42 years I got used to being under attack for what I thought was a purely personal decision. It was a lot harder to find sympathetic or understanding people way back then.
Yes, numbers have grown, but it’s not due to any socio-political movement as I see it. It’s still for most of us a strictly personal choice.
I do feel that after many years of not being part of the daily animal slaughter, I may have in some small way helped to lessen the suffering. Can’t measure it though - that would be a waste of effort and achieve little.
A more important point being debated now is whether by choosing an animal free diet we can actually help to ameliorate our (devastating) effect on the planet.

Thank you Strain, you’ve just helped me make my argument;)