I have a friend who’s vegan and knows that I’m not. I’ve told them that I just wouldn’t be able to muster the kind of self-discipline necessary for that lifestyle but I respect anyone who does.
They’re cool with that.
In my experience - I was vegan for two years because I lived with one - there are 3 types: health nuts, environmentalists, and sentimentalists.
My gf was personal trainer and thought it was the healthiest way to live, and she saw no need to advocate for it beyond a wardrobe that displayed her abs.
The environmentalists feel animal products are a lousy bang-for-the-ecological buck, and they’re right. I’ve never had one of them initiate a discussion about it, though if you ask why they’re vegan you’ll hear about it.
The most vocal are the sentimental vegans that think animals are basically furry people and eating them ranks up there with cannibalism on the objectionable scale. It’s not the majority, and we could reduce their numbers if we eliminated petting zoos, but they tend to be the more militant, emotional, passionate, whatever.
Of the three, only the enviros are right by any rational metric.
This topic reminds me of a joke I heard. “I went to a party last night and there were no Vegans there. I know that because after 14 minutes no one had approached me and announced that they were vegan”
Personally, I have no issues with people eating whatever the fuck they want, just don’t preach to me about it. I like Vegan food as a side dish to a steak, but I couldn’t live on a Vegan diet.
People who choose to go Vegan, more power to you. Those who want to run into restaurants and protest/preach about not eating animal products, piss off idiot.
Yeah I do question how common this particular stereotype actually is.
I’ve been on both “sides” of this.
Most of my life I’ve been a meat-eater to the extent that I basically never had a lunch or dinner without some kind of meat in it, it would have felt incomplete.
I don’t recall any veggie or vegan criticizing my diet choices.
Now I have been vegan for about a year and a half.
Not only do I not bring it up, I actually don’t know how to answer the question “Why are you vegan?”. Because for me, the answer is purely for ethical reasons and I don’t want to sound like I am judging them. So I usually mutter something about “I don’t like how animals are farmed” and try to immediately change the topic (I wonder if, in the retelling, some of those people would say I was a “preachy vegan”).
I think you may be understating the ‘sentimentalist’ position. As I understand it, a huge proportion of meat is produced horrifically cruelly. A quiet vegan once explained to me that he became vegan after working a summer job during college at a slaughterhouse. He managed one and a half days and had not used any animal products since. We all know how chicken farms work and how they kill octopus.
I chose not to think much about this myself. I like eating meat. A lot. But equally I’m not going to condemn any vegan for being ‘preachy’ as if I’m the one with the superior moral values.
I’ve known several vegetarians / vegans over the years, and none of them were vociferous or judgemental about it. Maybe I’ve just been lucky in my associations, or maybe it’s because I live in the Midwest, where veganism is not as widely accepted a choice as it is in, say, SoCal.
I really like the taxonomy outlined by @epbrown as tweaked by @Sandwich just above. The sentimentalists ought to be renamed / subdivided into “factory cruelty is unacceptable in a civilized society” and “every animal of every species is exactly as important as you are”. I don’t have trite code words for those ideas, but I think they are very distinct motivations. As to me personally, I find the former is valid morality and the latter is stupid Disney nature show sentimentality. (FTR I am an unrepentant meat eater)
As to e.g. @Beckdawrek’s various comments about the resource intensiveness of switching to an all vegan diet …
She is right that a lot of current ag resources would need to be deployed differently. Leading to local shortages, overages, and disruptions while the industry settled into the “new normal”.
But she’s dead wrong that the total impact of a vegan changeover in e.g. US agriculture on the US ecological balance would be negative. There is plenty of solid science that we would vastly reduce the total impact of US food production if we didn’t feed 90% of our primary production through an animal before eating it ourselves. This is true worldwide.
My bottom line:
Ultimately the OP is asking questions at several levels:
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Is it ever socially appropriate to proselytize for anything to strangers and acquantances? To friends? To extended family? To immediate family? To yourself?
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Is any of that prosletizing ever effective? Which persuasive techniques separate effective from ineffective? Which sorts of topics even can be prosletized effectively? Is veganism one of those topics?
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Is this (meat eating vs veganism) truly a situation where mainstream opinion is so wrong / evil in a neutral moral and/or economic analysis that militant methods are justified to move the needle public opinion? Do the ends justify the means? If so, how militant?
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There are many things about the current economic, political, and social systems of this planet that many of us think are so unsustainable and so unfair that true civilization-altering crisis is all but certain to occur within the lifetime of current children, and maybe even within the remaining lifetime of current old(er) people such as most Dopers. In a prioritized long list of those impending disasters where does the mass cultivating, harvesting and eating of meat fall? Should whatever level of effort you’re willing to put in towards change be directed elsewhere?
Bottom line, this is a completely ordinary question of moral imperatives versus personal opinion in the context of ordinary human affairs on a crowded planet approaching ecological and social limits.
My own view on all proseletizing is “just don’t”. Lead by example, not by whining. If asked, offer a rational argument for your actions, supported by actual facts, not feelings or instructions from an invisible sky fairy. And accept that the entire rest of the planet, all 8 billion of them, do not give a shit what you think or do. That includes the person you’re talking to. So don’t piss them off to no good effect.
I drastically cut back my meat consumption years ago, for that exact reason. I’m not opposed to eating meat, but I am horrified at the rampant cruelty and inhumane conditions on factory farms. I haven’t given up meat altogether, but when I do eat it, it’s usually chicken or fish.
I don’t fuss about what’s being served if someone is cooking a meal for me, but if I’m making a meal for myself, and dining alone, I’m often happy with mostly veggies.
Not particularly in my experience. I live in an area with what I suspect is a rather larger than average proportion of vegans and it’s pretty rare for me to run across a loudly self-righteous sort. I’ve known a couple (over many years), but IMHO it was more personality than creed that made them so. If they had eaten meat they’d be the sort to self-righteous about that.
Nope, sorry, but it’s nowhere near as efficient. Most livestock in wealthy countries are mainly fed on grains/soy. These crops are grown in basically the same method as those used to feed humans directly. In the case of the USA around 90% of cereal crops grown are fed to animals, rather than directly to humans. Globally this is around 43%.
While meat is energy dense, it’s also very energy intensive to produce; the conversion rate from the animal feed to meat- the ratio between calories you feed a cow and calories you get back from the beef- is around 100:2. So for every 100 calories the cow eats, it produces only 2 calories of usable meat.
While livestock can be grassfed in areas which aren’t suitable for crop production, so it’s not as straighforward as all that to work out the impacts, most meat in wealthy countries is primarily fed with the animal feed mentioned above, and the grazing land, which takes up far more land than is used for all other crops, is also generally heavily managed to produce the right grasses and nutrients to maximise animal growth.
Any shift towards eating grains and legumes directly, away from animal production, would result in a reduction of land used- including reducing the amount of crop land, due to the proportion that currently goes to animal feed- and a reduction of energy and chemical inputs.
cite
(edited as I mixed up the global and US stats)
I probably know a dozen or more vegans among my family, friends and coworkers. I would characterize them as predominantly apologetic rather than preachy. Like they apologize for not eating the food you prepared for the party. And trying to get other people to stop trying to choose restaurants based on whether or not they have vegetarian/vegan options.
I see 10X more preaching going the other way, where non-veg folks are going on and on about how unhealthy a vegan/vegetarian diet is. How the production of soybeans etc. kills trillions of insects and grubs. How it’s not evolutionarily appropriate, etc.
But even this I see maybe 2-3 times a year. And I’m sure I know a lot more vegetarians and vegans than most people (I’m South Asian and know lots of Hindu vegetarians/vegans and am married to someone who practices a form of Buddhism that is very prescriptive of at least vegetarianism if not veganism)
I do know one preachy vegan. He’s an odd duck. He’s supposedly a pacifist but has made a fortune in the “defense” contracting business specifically in Iraq and Afghanistan. He believes that meat and dairy production is unacceptably cruel, but is militantly opposed to any regulation of industries. The only way to reduce suffering is for consumers to not consume animal products, so he’s prepared to harangue everyone to be vegan. This makes him sound like an asshole, but he lives his values in many ways that I can’t manage. His carbon footprint is tiny compared with mine. He gets around by bike and motorcycle 90% of the time. But politically he works against any kind of climate change intervention because he’s an extreme libertarian-capitalist. All reductions in greenhouse gas emissions should come from personal decisions. I think he’s extremely naive. Extreme
Yeah, I’m pretty much going to condemn preachiness in all its varieties. It’s not about feeling superior morally or otherwise - it just violates my whole “live and let live” policy; I try to respect everyone’s choices regardless of my feelings, and expect the same.
My vegan ex and I never had a conflict about it - much to her surprise, as she was expecting pushback - precisely because she didn’t try and convert me in the two years we lived together; I was accommodating someone I cared about, not adopting a foreign philosophy. And it was an interesting experience. One thing I loathed was people who try to slip meat or dairy to people they hear are vegan - it’s a shitty and rude thing to do, and I wasn’t really vegan when it happened to me.
Edit: weird coincidence, I recently re-watch Scott Pilgrim, which has the bit about being vegan giving you super powers; one of the funniest scenes in a very funny film.
I’m not sure, but like I said; this person I use to know posts memes all the time about how it’s wrong to eat animals. They are really harsh with their language about carnism. So there’s at least one, and whoever made the memes, which I suspect they gets from vegan groups on FB.
this is where I am: omnivore, but trying to eat less factory farmed meat. I say less because getting meat that is humanely raised/slaughtered is expensive. I am working on learning how to use what I can buy from local producers.
I know many vegans and none of them are judgmental about it.
Cool beans, but you said ‘No one would eat a bean off a soy plant.’ Lots of people eat soy beans as beans. Japan exists. They’re pretty good roasted and seasoned as a crunchy snack too.
It really just isn’t. This is not a true statement.
Is again simply not a true statement. Getting a complete amino profile from one singular plant source is difficult, but it becomes trivial if you grow and eat a few different things.
I’m not against eating meat; I eat meat, but there’s no point supporting a meat-inclusive diet by making arguments that are simply untrue. IMO, you and I are members of a species of animal that eats other animals. We don’t require an argument to justify eating what is natural for us to eat.
Non-animal sources of Vitamin B12 are tricky - there you go - you can have that one for free, and it’s true to boot.
I think in my 41 years of life I have never met a vegan who tried to shame me for eating meat.
I’ve cut down on my meat consumption significantly in the last few years, but every time I have tried to go vegan completely I ended up feeling sick.
I’m a Buddhist considering taking the precepts next year (to become a formal member of a Zen Buddhist community) and while some would argue it’s not strictly necessary to be vegetarian when you’re a Buddhist, there is a do not kill precept and there is a long history of many Buddhists refusing to consume meat, including the Buddha himself. I suspect I’m going to have to look more closely at how I’m consuming animal products. That might include backing off on eating the more complex ones. I’ve been trying to cut out beef, as I imagine a cow suffers more than a chicken, and so on and so forth. I don’t eat beef a lot but I love going out for a good steak. It would be hard to give that up completely.
This is a case where I do not want perfect to be an enemy of the good. I’ve already reduced my meat consumption down to maybe three meals a week.
My teacher advocates a middle path kind of approach, consuming meat more mindfully and taking time to express gratitude to those who died. But if some more advanced alien race put me through the hell that we put animals through and took some time to be grateful for our deaths, I’m not sure I would think, “that’s okay, then.”
The cruelty really does get to me. If we were all hunting our meat I would have no problem.
That is a really interesting question. I would say sometimes, with the huge majority of those sometimes being cases where the thing you’re telling them about is awesome or of immediate and unequivocal, or at least highly-likely benefit to them - the only example I can draw to mind right now would be if you discover some amazing bargain with time-limited availability and you want your friends not to miss out. Not a great example, I know, but perhaps illustrative of the point.
The obvious flaw in what I’ve said is that a lot of people who poselytize, do actually believe they are doing people a favour - saving them from hellfire or some such, for example.
I’m looking forward to lab-grown meat, if it’s available to me.
Handle it? I’d chuckle and walk away. Ain’t got time or energy to participate in the discussion.
As for vegetarians, my daughter and SIL are vegetarians. When we have a meal together we usually eat Indian food, which I love, but they’re also totally cool with me eating a burger as well.
I would absolutely take that option.
And by the way, the reasons I cut down on meat are twofold:
- To reduce grocery bills
- To eat more plants. Vegan recipes have a lot more plants.
It’s only recently I’ve been thinking about the ethics of it and whether that’s going to impact what I do.
I can barely change my own behavior, I don’t have the energy to try to change anyone else’s. And if it’s for religious reasons, Buddhism isn’t too keen on prostyletizing. I would also almost certainly continue to eat meat when served by someone else. The animal is already dead at that point.