About vegans

[Minimalist]

[robvalue]

Y'know, I was vegan before it was cool. I was there back when it was actually difficult. I was getting verbal abuse from everyone, including teachers, since about the age of 10 for not eating meat. Now there's all these fucking hipsters who want to give it a try, once everywhere has soya milk and "vegan options" are on menus!

(I’m just kidding, of course! I’m extremely happy about the growing number of vegans. I read it’s about 600k in the UK now. We’re took big to ignore anymore.)

[The Grand Nudger]

Maybe your food will stop tasting like the box it came in now that there's a competitively sized market! 

[Minimalist]

[Aegon]

For me, the sentience of the animal is a big deal. Cows are basically big dogs. If I dont need to eat mammal meat I won't.

I was never a huge fan of lobster. Too expensive. Too much work, honestly. Ever order a whole lobster? I feel like I was on a demolition project.

Keeping in mind that I'm vegetarian, with leanings toward veganism, there's one thing to consider in regard to this argument: where do vegetable foodstuffs come from, and where does cattle feed come from?

I'm quite sure that big farms use huge machinery that will mulch the ground and almost anything in it-- ground-nesting birds, voles and mice, snakes, and so on.  And then you introduce the idea of pesticides.  So it seems to me that even eating vegetables involves the likely suffering and deaths of many animals.

The best case scenario would be hand-grown organic crops, though even then I'm not sure that tilling your land once a year wouldn't harm ground animals.  So I change my mind-- the best scenario would be industrial food factories using algae grown in hydroponic solutions designed for optimum nutrition-- textured to feel enough like food to be palatable.  In fact, I think this is really the only way to really protect animals from harm while still providing sufficient nutrition.  Or you could grow plants in an artificial environment-- big 50-floor food factories sufficiently sealed to prevent even mice from getting in there and being inadvertently harmed (good luck with that).

Given these two options are impossible (and they are right now, if you intend to feed an entire population), then I'd say free-grazing animals like deer are likely to reduce suffering.  If you kill a very large deer or elk, your family will eat for quite a long time.  Because you are not feeding it grain (which would involve killing the same voles and so on as if you ate the grain yourself), then the mortal cost of the meat is relatively small.

The other side of things would be to decide that animals under a certain level of sentience don't matter.  Then, we live on clams, maybe cockroaches, stuff like that.

I guess we can go in circles all day talking about how our actions and diet impact animals of varying intelligence. . It's hard to feed people without damaging it, I suppose. But 39 million cows, 115 million pigs, and 9 billion chickens die every year for US meat consumption. General factory farming practices, in addition to the level of sentience and feeling these animals enjoy, dwarfs my concerns about those ground animals. Especially considering there is a big difference, mentally, between eating vegetables or grain where animals might've been killed in the process VS actually eating meat from the animal itself. 

I also recall reading somewhere that grass-fed cattle in the Amazonian region is the number one cause of deforestation.

[Catholic_Lady]

I want to make an argument for vegetarianism that I call "pet extension."

I've bonded with my dogs.  I had them as puppies, brought them home in a beanie in the car, pulled them out to the cooing of my family.  I've seen people like cats-- selfish little pricks, really, not social in a way that matters much to me.

I reckon almost all mammals will fall somewhere in there.  If I brought a baby deer home, my family would coo over it.  I'd give it a name, realize it had a personality, shed a little tear over it.

So that's how we should think of animals-- not "rats with antlers," that's so bigoted.  Think of them as pets who haven't been given a name yet!

I feel the same way. Every mammal (at least) has their own unique personality and emotions and cute/quirky things they do. Some people see a dead raccoon on the side of the road and think nothing of it. But it makes me sad because I think of that raccoon's life... what he was like when he was a baby, what his personality was like, all the cute things he did, etc. No different from my cats, I am sure. Makes me sad. If food wasnt my passion, or if I was an otherwise better, stronger person, I would be pescetarian.

[robvalue]

Maybe your food will stop tasting like the box it came in now that there's a competitively sized market! 

Yeah, when I started being vegan, a lot of the "fake" foods were pretty gross. They’ve come on in leaps and bounds. Sadly some people still remember the gross times and don’t want to try them again now.

Some of the fake meat is getting so realistic that I have a physical reaction and can’t eat it. That’s awesome for people who are thinking of crossing over.

[Aroura]

I don't think I can ever go vegan, but every meal I eat that is vegetarian is a pleasure.
Lots of things are wrong in my life. One thing I feel good about is coming home with shopping bags full of fresh fruits and veggies, very little processed food, and no dead animals.

I just can't eat even chicken anymore without thinking about the thing as a creature with feelings that suffered just so I could indulge.

Ironically, it wasn't us that started this, but our daughter. She went through a period a few years back where she refused to eat any meat because it was a dead animal, and she said that was wrong. Out of the mouths of babes.

[onlinebiker]

Vegans are wonderful.


They leave all the real food alone for us hungry carnivores.

[The Valkyrie]

Would a pie made from vegans be considered a meat pie or a vegetable pie?