Why thanks. I feel very sentimental about my home planet’s preservation, really. Don’t I wish everyone had an equal interest.
Quite. We all know it would be impossible for someone to abstain from eating meat to reduce suffering and for environmental reasons. The former is childish irrelevance.
I don’t limit my regard for a being(animal or human) on this planet by the depth of their intelligence. There are different levels of importance and need.
So, if everyone becomes vegan/vegetarian or are only gonna eat lab grown meat what happens to the cattle? Are they just gonna walk around, starving to death, spreading brucellosis to people’s pet horses.
Dying on a ditch. Or walking out in the road and cars hitting them?
Or …after a few years the whole species goes into extinction.
What about Wisconsin?We can’t eat them but we can crowd them in cramped milking barns hooked up to a machine, twice a day. Or is milk and cheese a no-no too?
All the fodder will go to human food. All the nice green grass will be plowed under to grow, again human food. What are the milk cows gonna eat?
So you figure out, after a learning period(2+ growing seasons), how to grow a few veggies. A starving, unvaccinated, sick stray cow’s gonna wander in your kitchen patch and eat them all. Eh, maybe he’ll leave you a bit of fertilizer.
The greater part of the South is dealing with feral hogs. Caused by lost, let loose formerly domesticated pigs. They are ruthless voracious eaters. Causing all manner of trouble to big farming outfits and the lowly homeowner. They have every disease and pestilence an animal can carry. Not to mention they’re mean as hell. You don’t want stray livestock wandering around. Believe me.
Just stop eating meat? For whatever your reason is. Not gonna work.
Will be a long period of hunger for people who have little access to the varied veggies you need to get a healthy diet.
I’m totally sure I’ll be dead way before most of the average Americans will give up meat entirely. Even with lab meat.
I can’t even imagine what that will taste like. I have no knowledge of it. I just can’t imagine. I bet it’s very expensive, for many years after coming on the market. Just like all those varied veggies.
Again the poorest people suffer.
How about this. If you want good karma, if you want to help the world if the generic militant Vegan who wants to do good and needs veggies to be a part of it, join a food pantry for the poor. Feed poor kids. Instead of buying 5 different kinds of fancy lettuce at your upscale Grocery store, donate that $ to the veggies for school lunch programs.
We’re gonna need 1000s more produce cultivators and pickers. Tomatoes don’t just jump off vines into your grocery cart.
Guess who’s gonna do that?
Won’t be average Americans.
Never mind.
I’ll thank you to NOT eat Wisconsinites. Not without basting us with beer or deep frying us.
Chicken fried cheese heads!
Yummy
Broadly speaking I’ve known two kinds of vegans. Those who are vegan for health reasons and those who are vegan for ethical reasons. The health reason vegans are usually pretty chill about it and don’t mind showing up to a BBQ or sitting down to have a meal with you even if you’re eating meat. The ethical vegans not so much.
But to be fair, a lot of people insist on giving vegans crap and they probably get sick of hearing it. So they might be cranky for good reason.
Fewer of them will be bred, I presume. My husband was asking the extinction question too. If you asked me if I’d rather live like the average cow or have my entire species become extinct I think I’d choose the latter. I don’t think they would ever go extinct. There will always be people who eat beef, and small farms and things. But in general I doubt enough people would switch to veganism to make that a really big issue. Still, if we could knock beef consumption back by, say, 25%, that would probably do the world some good. And it wouldn’t happen all at once, so the market would have plenty of time to adjust.
Vegans don’t eat dairy, so yes. In fact one of the biggest differences between a vegetarian and a vegan is that vegans don’t eat dairy. Personally, at this point, it’s hard to imagine my life without it, which doesn’t mean I won’t ever consider it, but any dietary change should generally be gradual anyhow.
Poor people don’t generally have the bandwidth to micromanage their own diet, what with working three jobs and all, and they may be limited in what they can buy with SNAP, but there are a lot of privileged people in a position to be more thoughtful about what they eat, who can afford a varied diet, who can buy lab-grown meat, etc. Meat consumption has not always been as high as it is now, there’s no real reason it needs to be this high. You’d be surprised how much protein you can get in a small amount of meat a couple times a week.
So no, middle class and rich people reducing their meat consumption is not likely to make things worse for poor people. Remember, I cut back on meat because it was so danged expensive, so people of means eating less meat means more money to donate to food pantries, if you want to think that way.
Some people who are vegan spend money on twenty different kinds of lettuce and that’s one thing, but my vegan meals tend to consist of rice and beans and some common vegetables. It doesn’t have to be fancy and expensive.
My feeling is that there is a middle ground between never touching an animal product and consuming animal products willy-nilly. We Americans do everything to excess. Do you know how many kinds of cheese are in my refrigerator right now? Would the world really end if I subtracted one cheese product a week? I feel like people would find this message easier to swallow if it was framed this way, and would maybe start to adopt some healthier habits.
It’s the all or nothing thinking that many people find so difficult. I know I did. I’ve tried and failed to be vegan so many times. I never really had success until I began to think in moderation.
In the spirit of this thread I got a veggie sub at Jimmy John’s today instead of the usual ham and cheese. It tasted basically the same. Jimmy John’s taste is really about the bread anyhow.
I know exactly the protein amount I’m allowed every week. I know exactly how much food I can have. I know exactly how much fluid I cannot have.
It’s fine balance I’m trying to walk here.
The best way for me to get protein with the least things I can’t have is meat.
I’m not a meat connoisseur. I couldn’t tell you the difference in Japanese beef against Angus beef. But I must get my protein percentages every week.
While on a starvation diet and in near-dehydration at all times.
I realize the percentage of people like me are miniscule. With diabetes on the rise I bet more are coming.
Militants if you wanna raise heck, go scream at those Mom stuffing their already overweight 7yo with a 20pack of Chicken McPinksludge.
That’s the bigger problem. IMO
No one in this thread is saying you can’t eat meat. 
It’s not about you.
Granted. But I am a human in the world who eats. And I’m sick of fake rage and assholery in the world.
People get bent out of shape over crap no one else cares about. They can stay in their lane and I’ll stay in mine.
I have just as much right to voice my opinion as anyone else.
No Vegan, vegetarian has ever been mean to me. I’ve had 1000s tell me, “oh, it’s ok, have a piece of pie, it won’t kill you”
I deal with a dialysis tech tell me 3 times a week, “Here have a coke to sip on” My freakin’ caregiver who’s supposed to know why I’m there. I SAY nothing.
So I’m saying it here.
Sorry if it disturbs.
…so why are you being so defensive?
I’m a little astounded with how some people in here have been acting. It’s as if some are like; “I’m judging you for being empathetic.”
Ok, bro. That’s not the dig on them I think you were hoping for.
I believe there are a lot of injustices (to fellow humans as well) done to support our ways of life. We can’t dwell over things we’re unable to control, but we can work on the shit we can control. No one’s legislating that being vegan in mandatory. If you’re diet requires meat for some reason, no one’s going to tell you that you have to be unhealthy so we can save the pigs. This, “what about the cows” seems silly. As if overnight, people would stop eating meat, and cows were all evicted from the farms, and were forced to get a 9 to 5, just to barely make ends meet. Do people think before they express themselves?
Yes. I started off this thread because of an ex who’s posted that meat eaters should be glad there’s probably no hell, and stuff like that, but it’s more clear to me that she’s in the minority and meat eaters can be just as big assholes. And probably in bigger numbers, percentage wise relative to the number of people in each group.
Those who say, “I agree with the efforts for environmental reasons, but the one’s that care about the anguish of animals are so vocal and pushy”. That’s CLEARLY most often not true, and a dumb generalization.
I’m not defensive at all.
I seriously don’t care what anyone chooses to eat or not eat. Their choice entirely.
I’m just saying it’s not as simple as eating less or no meat or not farming livestock, at all. Farmers have a living to make too.
I don’t like the giant farming concerns. They are awful. This is chicken house country. I can see the filthy water on the side of the road when they’re washing them out between chicks coming. I’ve seen the dead birds and feathers falling off the trucks coming from the houses to the factories. Truly disgusting.
People are not gonna quit buying chicken because of it. Because it’s cheaper now I imagine their stock is way up.
Being assy to someone eating chicken in a restaurant is just not the way to fight this.
The dude eating his #3 chicken sandwich is not the person at fault.
I haven’t seen a loud mouth vegan or vegetarian in the wild.
If I did I’d probably get up and leave the restaurant. But I’ll judge them for choosing the wrong soapbox to get up on.
I stopped making review videos of vegan ‘transition’ food products (products designed to mimic or stand in for meat, cheese, milk, etc), just because I found myself caught in the crossfire between two angry sets of commentary.
My interest in these products was primarily from a food technology and aesthetics perspective - how good a substitute can even be made for various things? How do they stack up nutritionally? What are they actually like to eat when prepared according to the directions? As an omnivore with relatively broad and tolerant tastes, I think I’m in a reasonably good position to express my own subjective judgment on products in this market sector.
It was always clear to me that a lot of ‘real’ vegan cooking doesn’t try to mimic meat at all, but rather, just celebrates whole ingredients in dishes that aren’t even trying to be meat - they’re just trying to be good to eat - and that these substitute products are therefore not necessarily for everyday consumption by vegans, but are maybe just for people trying to cut back on their meat consumption, or people who are trying a phased approach to going vegan, or whatever - and of course it should be obvious to everyone that commercial products aren’t necessarily made by the people they are trying to target as a market.
but there was a whole lot of angry, and I believe quite uninformed ranting from both sides (or ostensibly, anyway - I can’t be sure people on the internet are who they say they are)
From the non-vegan (maybe anti-vegan) side, there was a lot of ‘if vegans want to eat meat, why don’t they just eat meat?’, ‘so hypocritical’, as well as insults directed at me personally, based on the hasty and incorrect assumption that I was a vegan, promoting these products.
From the vegan side, there was criticism that I wasn’t giving it a fair go, that I was a horrible person for not just going all out vegan (including some calls to action to try to ‘cancel’ me), and also that I was promoting products that encourage conservation of an appetite for meat, or that are in some cases, manufactured by companies whose main product range was actually meat, and of course that it wasn’t fair because these products aren’t the only thing vegans eat.
Of course I wasn’t surprised these viewpoints exist, or that angry idiots exist on the internet, but the noise to signal ratio just got intolerable and I decided to try to stop attracting those portions of the audience.
Why are you creating hypotheticals, and then judging vegans based on what you think they’d say?
I’m a vegetarian who minds my own business. But I keep getting aggressive meat eaters getting in my face: they inspect what’s on my plate, don’t see any meat, and start cracking the same tired old joke at the expense of vegetarians. This happens over and over at any sort of gathering where food is served. They are not shy about enforcing social conformity on me, although I wasn’t bothering them. So don’t even try telling me that vegetarians are judgmental and vocal. It’s totally the other way around.
Small-minded people want a small, simple world where everyone conforms to their notion of normal.
I open pull tab cans with a can opener (because pull tab c. And suck and because can openers are magnificent) and I constantly have people ‘correcting’ me or telling me that I shouldn’t buy pull tab cans unless I’m going to open them properly.
Idiots think everyone else is an idiot.
Yeah. I’m trying to sympathize with you as much as I can without being able to walk in your shoes, but it seems to me (and I could always be wrong) that both sides have their “extreme” members. You’re probably right that there are more meat-heads that are jerks.
I don’t know. What do you think?
Nobody expects to get protein from greens. Of all the strawman arguments I’ve seen around here, that’s the strawiest.
@Johanna, I’ve been a vegetarian for almost 30 years, and yours are exactly my experiences. I have never, ever scolded anyone for eating meat, but I’ve heard all those tired jokes and snipes from omnivores a thousand times.