Possibly they are conflating veal production with the beef industry as a whole.
I also suspect they are seeing feedlots where cattle are fattened on grain and assuming (wrongly) that the cattle spend their entire lives in that situation.
Beef cattle spend the great majority of their lives roaming around pastures or rangeland grazing peacefully. Then they are sent to market. After being sold to a beef producer, they are put in feed lots and fattened on grain for a few weeks before slaughter. This is a small segment of their otherwise pleasant lives, but the propagandists either don’t understand this or are wilfully distorting the facts.
Veal is a different situation. I’ve never been around veal production, and none of the farmers I’ve known would have anything to do with it. My dad, who was as hard-boiled and unsentimental as they come, wouldn’t eat veal if it was offered to him. He hated the very idea of keeping calves penned up instead of roaming free.
Nuts! I was thinking the salt craving vegetarian thing had two culprits - and could only come up with chips. But nuts are horrible calorie wise, get put in a lot of vegetarian diets for the protein and have that salt craving thing going for them.
(and I didn’t include cheese because while I know a lot of vegetarians buy rennet free cheese, or ignore the rennet issue, I didn’t want to go there - but yeah, vegetarian can sometimes turn into meals that feature peanut/almond/cashew butter on white bread or cheese based omelets - or cheese based non-whole grain pasta so you get both the cheese and the empty carbs! While I’ve had great vegetarian meals - and have cooked some - I think particularly when you are doing the ‘young vegetarian’ thing where you still live with Mom and she isn’t going to start cooking with seitan just for you, your diet can be horrible).
Like just about everyone else in this thread, I’m mostly just annoyed by the smarmy, know-it-all, “I’m better than you” attitude that some vegetarians and vegans display. There’s also the accompanying willful ignorance of important aspects of their own diet, like B12 comes in non-meat forms besides supplements and that one really needs to work as hard as omnivores at eating a wide variety of foods to get all the nutrients they need from non-supplement sources. I generally don’t make friends with vegetarians/vegans who are preachy for the simple matter that they come across as assholes before their food choices get mentioned. However, I’ve had plenty of friends with dietary restrictions that did not cause a problem whatsoever with our relationships, including when eating out.
These days, I live across the street/next door (depending on where you’re looking from) to a farmer who raises cows and bulls. They get to play, hang out, eat grass, chew cud, and be happy cows with a LOT of land to roam around on until they get sold for meat. It’s nice to wake up in the morning and hear the cows lowing to let everyone know that they’re getting ready to move to a different part of the pasture.
I’ll go vegetarian ever so often to help trim my waistline, but otherwise, I find the whole vegetarianism/veganism for animal rights attitude somewhat silly. I share my love of animals with you, but if you really want to save them, then start a campaign for animal rights. Write letters. Contact your congressman/woman. Vegetarianism/veganism is lazy peoples’ advocacy, not unlike the “Gas Out” days people are trying to have to send the oil companies a message. Doing less is easier than doing more.
If animals weren’t cute and cuddly, would people still want to save them? If I’m strolling through the savannahs of Africa, would a hungry lion pause for a moment to consider my rights? If the terrorists attacked tomorrow, and all the survivors had to subsist on was a diet of canned tuna and SPAM, would the vegetarians/vegans throw it down, screaming, “I can’t eat this!” In our present day and age, we can afford to restrict our diets in the name of animal rights only because our food supply is abundant.
I will, however, be tolerant. I went out of my way to cook a vegan pasta dinner for a friend. If you don’t eat meat, I won’t shove it in your face. If you ask for a vegetarian dish at a get-together, I will try my best to accommodate you. But if I’m cooking for 25 people, don’t get shitty with me because I don’t have time to cater to your self-imposed dietary restrictions (yes, this has happened).
Adam
My favorite vegan quotes ever came from my chemistry TA. He was a total hippie, lived in the campus co-ops, the works. We asked him if he was vegan because he really liked animals.
His response: No, I actually hate animals so much that I won’t even eat them.
I liked that guy.
Unfortunately, there are people out there who won’t respect your food dislikes, because those are a “choice” to be a pain. Some of these people will even try to sneak the food you don’t like into a dish to “prove” to you that you do like it. Some of them do respect claims of food allergies, though, because they know that people can get very sick or die from those, even if you don’t know that the food you are allergic to is in a dish you eat.
I really don’t get people who get all upset about someone not wanting to eat a particular food. As long as they make reasonable accommodations so you can still eat it, what’s the big deal? Unless the person who won’t eat something is your child and is under 18, their diet is not your responsibility. Yes, they might be missing something really good, but nobody can experience all the good things the world has to offer anyway, just because life is finite.
I don’t think much of “would you eat X if you were starving” (or “People in the third world don’t have the choice to avoid X”) as an argument not to restrict one’s diet in normal times. The kosher laws contain an explicit exception for that case, and I think the rules of halal do too. You could use that argument to say you shouldn’t try to cut down on unhealthy foods in your diet- after all, if you were starving and the only thing to eat was something full of trans fats, you’d eat it. But that doesn’t mean you should eat it all the time in normal times. For that matter, there are many cases of survival cannibalism, where people eat human corpses because there is nothing else to eat. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t refrain from cannibalism when other food is available.
Given a choice, people don’t eat everything they possibly could. Pretty much all cultures have food taboos, or at least ideas of what constitutes “food” and what doesn’t. No matter how adventurous an eater you are, I guarantee you there’s something you could get nutritive value from but won’t eat unless the alternative is starvation (human flesh being one example for almost all people living in the modern world).
As a vegan, I’m mildly annoyed by the comments of defensive or superior-sounding nonvegans, much in the same way they’re annoyed by the comments of defensive or superior-sounding vegans.
One thing I’d like to comment on – there are certain shibboleths I see frequently repeated to dismiss or invalidate the vegan point of view. These are simply in error. While it’s not as bad as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, it does get tiresome to see thm on a board dedicated to fighting ignorance. I’ll address a few here.
I wish I was thin! I was recently at a vegan luncheon and people ranged from skinny-but-tanned to pear-shaped to fairly squat and broad. Self-delusion was no doubt present among us, just as it was among the nonvegans elsewhere in the restaurant.
Only a minor quibble – I’ve seen this argument, of course, and I think its proponents are misunderstanding (or willfully distorting) an emerging consensus that our digestive system and related biological functions are probably NOT adapted to digesting the vast amount of meat Americans typically pack in. I agree that we biologically can digest meat…I do think there’s evidence that we cannot consume the volumes we now do without some negative consequences for our health.
Heh. I’ve been tempted to call them scavengers or carrion-eaters. Carnivores eat what they themselves kill…a creature who eats what he finds already dead on the side of the road, or wrapped in plastic in the supermarket, is scavenging carrion.
I’m mostly playing with ya. Funny how our culture generally finds the idea of scavengers disgusting and carnivores admirable.
I think we’ve answered that question already, from our human perspective, anyway, and just don’t realize it. At a certain point, we put our beloved pets to sleep, when we perceive that they’re suffering, rather than extend their lives. So I think that (as a society) we’ve shown that we value the quality of an animal’s life over simply having a live animal. So the question we ask ourselves isn’t “is purely getting to live worthwhile, regardless?”, but “are food animals living lives we regard as being worthwhile?” That then folds into the debate about factory farming, humane treatment, and the slaughterhouse experience.
I don’t know any genuine vegans who think it’s okay to wear leather. Vegans don’t eat honey, or milk. They (we) don’t go to rodeos. It’s exploiting the animals, not just eating them, that we avoid, as much as is feasible. (It’s not always feasible – I have been told that the process for making car tires involves some minute amount of animal ingredient, but I drive a car with approved, inspected standard tires on it…when I’m not able to take public transit.)
Certainly there are poseurs and attention-seekers who claim to be vegan, just like there are for almost any claim.
Now I have been accused, and seen other vegans accused, of wearing leather, pretty frequently. It wasn’t actually true, but that didn’t stop the accuser from walking (or more typically, driving) away with an air of glee at exposing our supposed hypocrisy. It’s a pretty common accusation leveled against vegans, for some reason. Personally I tend to think the people who yell at us from cars are idiots, and perhaps they feel guilty, but I’m not going to accuse you of being one of them.
There is one circumstance where you’ll catch a genuine vegan in leather – a brand shiny new vegan convert. He or she probably has leather clothes/shoes/gear, and has not yet replaced it all with manmade materials. There’s a school of thought that one should wear the leather until it wears out normally, so as not to “waste” the life and death of the animal(s) from which it was taken, and then replace the item with manmade. The practical goal is not to spend money on industries/practices that exploit animals, now that one has made the commitment.
I still have leather hiking boots in my closet that I haven’t gotten around to replacing, although I haven’t worn them in ages. In the interest of full disclosure, I am wearing a silk tie at the moment (they boil the silkworms to death) because I have some from my non-vegan past and it’s tough to find nice synthetic neckties, but I’m mildly uncomfortable about wearing it, wouldn’t buy a new one at this point, and look forward to replacing my entire tie collection with synthetics eventually.
Well, sure. But it’s not like meat-eaters have a perfect track record for remembering to feed their babies, or for feeding them nutritionally soundly, or even for not intentionally starving them abusively. The problem here was not veganism per se.
I don’t mean to include this in my list of shibboleths. Just wanted to say you’ve made a cogent point here.
Yeah. But modern cattle industrial-scale ranching involves intensive tilling (and so on) to produce grain to feed the cows…in addition to the deaths of the cows. So if planting is damaging, ranching as currently conducted is always more damaging than a vegetarian diet. Not to mention it’s unclear if he’s factored in the animals killed by ranching activities (prairie dogs being the most visible).
Now if your cite (which I didn’t bother to read beyond the abstract) is arguing that we shouldn’t mass-produce cattle on an industrial scale, that is, drastically change cattle ranching as we practice it, he might be onto something. But I’ve seen a more detailed version of this argument advanced (I think it was someone else, but don’t remember the name, so it could have been this guy) and generally I’m inclined to think it’s a rhetorical attack on vegans more than a serious proposal to reduce harm.
That “and if forage…decreased…” part – is there a basis for that number, or is that a pure thin-air hypothetical picked to make the math work? Why would cutting down feed corn kill fewer mice than cutting down sweet corn?
Uh…you’re right, this trend bothers me too. Sometimes I gently try to redirect a few of my vegan friends toward thinking more scientifically. “I heard about a new vet, and she’s homeopathic, which is great!” they’ll chirp, and I say “Uh…why is homeopathic great, again?” The usual response is that they’re not exactly sure what homeopathic means…heh.
I agree with many of you that whiny, preachy veg types who won’t eat what everyone else is having are a downer. But this works both ways – try serving tofu to a bunch of nonvegan folks. I’ve seen a hearty, six-foot-plus retired gentleman make a complete childish fuss over not getting meat. I’ve seen family members walk out rather than eat vegetables. I’ve seen college-age kids make endless snarky comments and go hungry rather than eat vegetarian food that has the same ingredients in it that their meat dish would have, minus the meat. Food whining, demands, and childishness is not limited to veggie types.
But you wouldn’t be “cutting down” feed corn - in that article, he’s proposing that cows be raised in a forage pasture model where they walk around and graze for food, instead of food being harvested and then fed to them.
So basically, if we changed to this system, less field animals would be killed because there wouldn’t be as much farm machinery required as their currently is - the cows “harvest” their own food and a bunch of cows wandering around kills less small animals than a harvester.
I’m sure some cattle are currently raised this way, and he’s saying it would be possible to change the system so they all are.
I think this is a good point; however, it seems to be more a commentary on the American diet rather than meat or animal products. The need for moderation in diet is something most people would agree on.
How shallow is this of me? My veggie friends can wreck a perfectly good pot luck, since those invited know there will be vegetarians there, they ALL make vegie dishes so everyone can enjoy what they brought. Then all that is on the buffet is a bunch of salad and cous cous. WAH!
I’ve known two - married folks - but it gets into “no true Scotsman” - these were people who choose not to eat animal products for health reasons that don’t extend to wearing animal products because (as I recall) that doesn’t impact their own health. They also weren’t the most consistant people in the world in many respects in their life - so take it for what its worth - but THEY defined themselves as vegan, she’d been vegan for years, they didn’t ingest dairy or eggs in addition to the meat/fish that “ordinary” vegetarians do (they did use honey, but not refined sugar for some reason that was once explained to me). These are the vegans I made the wedding cake for.
By the way “no true Scotsman” is another pet peeve of mine with vegetarians. I’ve known people who choose to identify themselves as vegetarians of all shades - some I admit do cross my bullshit meter as a self description (I don’t eat pork, but eat beef, doesn’t seem like the best definition of vegetarian to me) - but at some point the nitpicky line is crossed - rennet in cheese being a good example - and I hate the sort of “you don’t get to call yourself a vegetarian” reactions that seem to be common among vegetarians themselves.
As someone who makes a living out of making animals uncomfortable and then dead in the vegan/vegetarian littered city of san francisco I definitely have to go up against these people more often than the average joe. I work in medical research more specifically the governing body of laboratories that uses animals. Some of you may know it but I’m just going to leave it out. I swear to god once a week some hyper vegan asks me how I can sleep at night. As far as I know these vegans aren’t refusing western medicine so to me, its very hypocritical.
I saw PETA brought up earlier in a thread and oh man do I have issues with THEM. They show up at my work, have covered my car in stickers, made idle threats to liberate our animals and/or take down the whole building. They find worst case scenarios and use them to manipulate, disturb, and convert the public They end up turning normal vegetarians into eco-terrorists. I used to be vegetarian because the thought of eating flesh creeped me out. I’ve since gotten over it. Food chain.
I feel for the person who has the friends with the upcoming wedding. It sounds like that whole thing was set into motion by a PETA video and this is such a common tale. Sometimes people just really want to be zealots. People love to be passionate. All it takes is a suggestion to start the whole snowball effect. Eat meat. Don’t eat meat. Just please know what you’re talking about.
This is precisely the sort of nonsense that drives me up the wall. Cattle graze. They eat grass. It is only in the last few weeks of their lives that they are switched to a grain diet to fatten them up (and thereby tenderize their meat) before slaughter. So no, the modern cattle industry does not require “intensive tilling,” since the great majority of weight on any given cow was acquired by eating good old grass.
But if you know of an actual factory farm, where cattle are raised from birth on grain, please point me to it.
I think some of it might be that people see cattle are fed with bales, but they don’t realize that the bales are just for winter and when the cattle can’t get to grass. But yeah, I’m totally with you on how people are ignorant of how most farms are run. Seriously, my farming relatives don’t show up with a chainsaw and laugh menacingly when butchering, and no, I wasn’t indoctrinated into it - they didn’t exactly drag us kids out to watch.
I get irritated about people (not necessarily vegans/vegetarians, but this reminded me of it) that are really adamantly against any animal testing. Sometimes people talk about it at my work. Do they realize that their pets are being treated, this very moment, at a research facility? The faculty here are doing research, probably not on that patient as they’d need permission, but they do it. Without that funding, we’d be closed. Not only that, but they never consider animal research done for the sake of the animals. We aren’t making human medicines or anything. A lot of the research at this university is done to improve knowledge of how animal systems work, and those species gain the benefit of it. Seriously, if you’re that against research that you have to talk about it every five minutes, you’ll have to take your cat home. No kidney transplants for hypocrites.
I don’t know about this. I read that most cattle are slaughtered at 12 to 18 months of age. They’re usually kept in feedlots for 90- 120 days. Except for “grain-fed” beef, the most widely produced kind. They’re kept in a feedlot for 4 to six months. And, “Traditional feeder-cattle enterprises grow weaned calves (450 to 600 pounds) and yearling steers or heifers (550 to 800 pounds) to slaughter weights of 1,100 to 1,400 pounds.” It seems they are fed enough to gain more than 3 pounds a day in the feedlot.
Amen. I have an uncle like that. He just doesn’t like beef. I dislike a lot of meat tastes myself, but I have a voracious appetite for chicken and fish. And I do eat hamburgers, but beef in most other forms (steak and the like) is unpalatable to me. It’s mostly the texture–the taste is mostly bland and ignorable, but I dislike the way it feels on my tongue. That’s why I love fish so much–it’s soft and almost “fluffy” in certain species (mostly whitefish), and it turns into delicious protein goo on your tongue (provided it’s not all dry). It’s like meaty cotton candy!
(Sorry if that mental image was a bit much.)
Anyway… well, gee, most of what I would’ve said has been said. It’s not vegetarianism that bugs me, it’s the–OK, I can’t spell this word, and all my mangled attempts at it are giving me no hits on my spell checker. It’s that “p” word that means to preach. Prostheylize? Prosythize? Help me here. I’m floundering.–well, you know, THAT stuff. The preachiness. Preachiness in general is just kind of annoying. But if you don’t want to eat meat, I’m fine with that. If it’s one of the odd occasions where I’m called upon to cook, I can even deal with it. I can make delicious veggie soups. (Well, theoretically delicious, anyway. With my hand in it, you never know.)
I don’t quite “get” true veganism, but I’m OK with it as well, so long as, again, one doesn’t try to chew my ear off for enjoying a glass of strawberry milk.
The usual response is that they’re not exactly sure what homeopathic means…heh.