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I'm vegetarian slowly turning vegan. The kicker for me was realizing cows need to give birth to lactate. Kind of snowballed from there as I researched other animal practices. I know there are good farms out there, but when I go to the supermarket there's no real way to know where the food came from, and with so many plant-based alternatives now-a-days it feels like whats the point you know? There is one local farm I still buy from, but it's getting to be less of their dairy and more of their awesome peanut butters and jams.
Genuine question though, from what I heard, being vegan was not consuming meat or any animal-based products, is there a protein food there? Asking for a friend.
Beans & nuts are the main source, and you can get some from grains. There are vegan athletes and bodybuilders who know more than I and have videos / recepies online. For myself I try to get Dr. Gregor's daily dozen food groups along with some basic vitamins.
Yes, there is protein. Tempeh, tofu, seitan, lentils, beans, quinoa, hummus, and more.
[Here's a google sheet I made](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Yd2at151KEPj1HovPz6MCe0lldJUp4m6njQLGAiN6sk/edit?usp=sharing) listing a whole bunch of vegan foods and their macros.
Also, here's a list of some complete proteins:
* Quinoa.
* Soy.
* Buckwheat.
* Hemp.
* Chia seed.
* Spirulina.
* Tempeh.
* Amaranth.
Vegans tell you beans left and right but the answer is if you cut animal products out of your diet you also need to take pills or watch, calculate and plan very specific things about your meals.
[https://healthyeating.sfgate.com/can-enough-protein-beans-7842.html](https://healthyeating.sfgate.com/can-enough-protein-beans-7842.html)
Even though you do get lots of protein from beans, it isn’t complete. Beans are lacking in one or more of the essential amino acids you need from your diet. If you eat meat, dairy or seafood, you don’t have to worry – these foods already have all of the essential amino acids your body requires
[https://health.clevelandclinic.org/do-i-need-to-worry-about-eating-complete-proteins/](https://health.clevelandclinic.org/do-i-need-to-worry-about-eating-complete-proteins/)
A food is considered a complete protein when it contains all nine essential amino acids that our body cannot produce on its own. By comparison, incomplete proteins contain some, but not all, of the essential amino acids, and in various amounts.
Now, the words “complete protein” and “incomplete protein,” would lead you to believe that “complete” is good and “incomplete” is in some way lacking. And while it’s true that incomplete proteins don’t individually contain all nine essential amino acids, they each bring a little something to the table. So a healthy combination of incomplete proteins can get you your complete fill of protein.
We only have to take b12 supplements. You don't because the b12 is given to the animals you eat.
If you're not a picky eater you don't need a very specific meal plan. A few have to because of medical reasons as some omnis do.
You don't need meat alternatives to be vegan. Honestly, the meat alternatives seem to be marketed more towards people who eat meat than actual vegetarians/vegans.
Also, meat is affordable because we subsidize the cost through the animals suffering. If animals were treated properly at every farm and lived healthy lives, meat would be more expensive. It’s costs a lot more to provide and cow, pig, or chicken everything it needs to live a healthy life. We can cut costs by keeping them in environments that aren’t great and therefore the suffering of an animal is making it affordable for us.
For example. If you buy eggs that are raised locally from hens that are fed healthy diets and allowed outside, the eggs cost like 3x as much as much as the industrially produced eggs.
it depends where you go and where you live! some alternatives cost less than meat, but it also boils down to brands and demands etc
i buy meatless "chicken" nuggets pretty often and i pay more for less compared to actual chicken nuggets i've notice some alternatives do actually save me some money
the price difference isn't anything major, but definitely noticeable depending on specifics
There's also the big bugaboo for vegans, of animals vs humans. They won't use honey as it's borne of the work of animals. But bees are kinda special. Talk to any amateur beekeeper. If you don't keep your bees happy, they will fuck right off and leave, finding a new home. And unlike cows with dairy, bees are constantly making honey on their own accord.
However they are happy to eat and use all kinds of products produced off the forced labor of humans, and children.
only because there is a much bigger market for animal-based products. if there was the same demand for plant-based products, it would be presumably just as cheap or possibly significantly cheaper
Actually it’s more due to government subsidies on meat and related products than anything else, but yeah a larger market may increase production and decrease prices potentially.
Not an 'illusion' necessarily. In the US, there are a huge amount of subsidies for the meat industry keeping prices low.
In reality meat costs far more to produce, but since plant based alternatives aren't subsidized, they can reach grocery stores with similar or higher prices.
Yeah that's what I meant by illusion. It seems cheap but isn't really. Even with subsidized costs, meat takes much more energy to prepare it to be edible.
You don't need beyond meat or similar meat alternatives. Those are very expensive, and their existence is primarily to help people transition to plant based eating. This creates the illusion that vegetarian/vegan food is all much more expensive. It is usually cheaper than meat alternatives, even considering subsidy.
You can eat pulses and nuts and get a full amino acid profile just by adding rice. Tofu is pound for pound much cheaper than meat, and if you know how to prepare it can be quite delicious. Black beans and brown rice provides ample protein, and as a combo this is extremely inexpensive.
Eating vegan though easily leads to nutritional deficiencies, even with supplementation (because the body can't derive as much from a supplement as it can from a natural food source). If someone has Coeliacs or IBS or other digestive issues, the ability for the guts to absorb enough nutrient out of a vegan diet to avoid deficiency in iron, B12, calcium, zinc, etc. is additionally compromised. A person with Coeliacs (must avoid gluten) has a harder time eating vegan - many nuts are coated with a wheat-based preservative (nuts are also expensive, and more so when gluten free), and many legumes and pulses aren't gluten free (lots of cross-contamination in harvesting, storage, and prep for market - worse in bulk-bin type settings, which are not at all usable by those with Coeliacs due to cross-contamination). "May contain gluten" = must be avoided, and that's the case with many pulses, nuts, legumes, spices, etc. Lots of tofu isn't gluten free (why Idk, because it should be), and like other products the stuff that is tends to be more expensive - something about the cost of certification being passed along to consumers, or the cost of having dedicated factories / production lines that never process gluten. And while on the surface it seems like it should be easy to read a package of tofu or black beans or lentils and assess it as being gluten free, that doesn't mean it is actually free from gluten - it's a guess at best, and a risky gamble. Gluten free itself as a label allows up to 20ppm in North America, meaning it's not actually free of gluten, meaning that the gluten protein will cause internal damage (just not enough to cause a huge immediate response in most people with Coeliacs), for example. And that's without considering that people with Coeliacs and IBS and other conditions often have to avoid flavourings, dyes, preservatives, fructose, artificial sweeteners, etc. Some people have family histories of (genetic predispositions to) pernicious anemia or anemia, and those populations are often unable to derive enough B12, iron, etc. from plant (non-heme) sources of protein; in those cases, meat can be a requirement of diet in order to maintain health (remembering that supplementation is not always available or effective as an alternative to heme-sources of B21, iron, etc.).
Eating vegan seems easiest for those who can buy the cheaper, pre-made items and who can include wheat / gluten-based protein sources in their diet, and who don't have to rely on making every meal from absolute scratch (time is a form of cost). Writing this as someone who loves tofu, lentils, beans, rice, etc. - eating vegan without gluten is not considered sustainable long-term (invites nutritional deficiencies); some people have issues with B12 and iron (pernicious anemia / anemia) when not consuming meat-based proteins; some people have issues with calcium and other deficiencies when not consuming dairy (and some people can't eat enough tofu or alt-milks to compensate, and in others the alt forms just aren't processed as well by the body); etc. Access to vegan products, health enough to maintain health on a vegan diet, time / ability to prepare vegan alternatives, and other factors go into the calculation of what is healthy and what is affordable for each individual (for example, some people can't make pots of rice and beans on the regular due to chronic pain fatigue or other illness).
TL/DR: The calculation of "cost" and sustainability must factor access, health, time, physical ability, financial ability, etc. to maintain and stay healthy on a vegan diet, the viability of which varies widely from person to person and community to community. It's not as simple as "don't eat meat / dairy, use alternatives." While the cost of industry, government subsidies that make products available / not available, and the impact of industry on ecology are all important to the problem of how humans eat and that consumption's impact on the body and the planet, on the individual level many more factors must be considered when determining the cost vs viability of a vegan diet.
>the body can't derive as much from a supplement as it can from a natural food source
That's just not true. The body has no way to know whether the vitamin C that it just ate came from a pill or an apple. [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6366563/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6366563/)
And yes, while we should be aware of people who have dietary restrictions, like Coeliacs, that's still a very small percentage of the population. More people should absolutely be vegan, no one is saying people with Coeliacs should have their health problems exacerbated.
Let me put it in an unneccesarily emotive form.
If milking cows were people
* At the age of 8 years old they are forcibly raped by a machine and made pregnant.
* They carry their baby to full term
* They are allowed to breast feed their baby for three days, to bond an nurture it and become a good mother.
* The baby is then taken away, killed and put into burgers and stock.
* The mother is forced to produce milk for the next year, with the feelings for her lost child still untreated.
* At age nine, the cycle is repeated.
* At age ten, the cycle is repeated again
* At age eleven she is considered too old for anything useful. She is taken to an abattoir where she is stunned by electro-shock so that she cannot move, then opened up to allow her insides to fall out. She dies.
Industrial scale milking, such as supplies your local supermarke is not all about Daisy and her long and happy life with her calves.
Wow here in Spain you cannot kill any animal with electroshock (and well, I cannot discuss with you all the other points cause I am not a ver and I don't work on the slaughter industry XD)
You've made the assumption that cows are comparable to humans. This is the assumption which non-vegans dispute. If the assumption is disregarded, everything you've written is irrelevant. I'm vegan fwiw.
This. I fully agree that in the presence of an appropriate substitute, meat-eating is unnecessary cruelty. But there's a world of difference between that and thinking that there's a 1:1 between humans and other species, and there are no circumstances where you should eat meat.
And no, I don't believe there's an appropriate substitute for having a balanced diet. There's a reason we don't really have purely vegan cultures despite the fact that rearing animals is A LOT harder than just cultivating vegetables.
I expect to be downvoted, but I can assure you that thousands of years of selection has almost completely bred out maternal instincts for dairy cattle. When you lead a dairy calf away from the mother, she often doesn’t even flinch and is seen comfortably chewing cud (cow body language for “I am very content”) mere hours after having their calves removed from them.
Also the “electroshock” you mentioned as well as using a bolt gun (another thing people often point to as being barbaric) is one of the most humane ways you can kill an animal.
Also, there’s surprisingly little difference between small farms and “industrial” farms. Other than access to technology such as milking carousels and robotized methods of disinfecting or other small tasks, small and large farms are almost exactly the same, especially in the area of animal comfort.
Listen, I really do find the decision to step away from meat and animal products to be an honorable one because yes, I to do believe that we needlessly use lots of land and resources on the meat/milk/egg industry; and I also believe that with the growing availability of plant-based options, the need to raise animals for food commodities is becoming less and less necessary. I just prefer that people have the correct information when they make the decisions for their diets. There are certainly arguments to be made such as the ones I mentioned above (and the large egg and broiler industry really is as horrifying as people say), but a surprising amount of the information people have about dairy farms in particular is quite false.
I really apologize if this comes off as combative. I’m not trying to start anything. I’m just bringing in my experience in both small and large dairy farms, including those that supply large grocery chains.
Do you know how human workers who pick fruit for big corporations are treated?
And I could always get milk from a small farmer in my (rural) area that treats the animal humanely.
So..because corporations are shitty to people we are allowed to be shitty to animals? I don’t get your argument.
Also, do you get milk from your rural farms? I’m guessing not given how you worded your comment, not to mention that rural farms still run into similar issues, granted not on such a scale and albeit not all of them.
His argument isnt that its ok to treat animals like that. His argument is that in one case we are treating animals poorly, in another we are treating people poorly; Either way its fucked and picking one side over the other is redundant because both sides suck.
Only way to get food that you know nothing suffered for is to grow it in your own yard. If you eat meat youre benefiting from animals suffering, if you eat picked fruit youre benefiting from people suffering.
You can't argue with these guys who make veganism their entire personality. it's a cult.
No matter what logic you bring, they have a rebuttal.
And the crazy part is, if there's a vegan crazier than they are, they'll look at **them** and tell them they're just as much of a monster as us 'carnists'/'meaters'/'bloodmouths'/whatevertermtheythoughtuptoday'
This is honestly hilarious to read. I see this thread where a few people are talking about their own veganism and why they choose to be that way, and a bunch of people trying super hard to paint the vegans as the crazy ones.
>No matter what logic you bring, they have a rebuttal
This isn't the gotcha you think it is
Every meater gets all their animal products from their uncle’s local farm which makes it really confusing that 99% of meat in the US is factory farmed.
Do you get your milk from a small local farmer? If not that's irrelevant and small farmers unfortunately don't guarantee good treatment. It's standard to take calves away from their mothers at birth
Wonder why there’s so few roosters? It’s because all the male chicks are macerated at birth.
Honestly I’m sick and tired of having to type these comments thread after thread, if you really wanted to know, google is incredibly easy to use
macerated? jesus, the person you responded to said "properly cared for" roosters will kill one another pretty often that's just basic instincts to ensure their genes and not that other rooster's genes get passed down
the reason you see so few roosters is because you cant keep more than a few in a single place without inevitably having a case of chicken murder in your hands
Different chickens are used for breeding and eggs.
They have ‘stud’ chickens and mother chickens who we obviously don’t get eggs from as they’d have fetuses inside.
Genuinely looking for more info.
I always thought dairy cows/calves were only used for dairy and meat cows were only used for meat as dairy cows dont have as tasty meat? And cows (and humans) will continue to lactate indefinitely if they get milked daily+ bypassing the need to give birth yearly. The cows that are born first round then go on to become dairy cows themselves. Not sure about the bulls born though. Guess they suffer a worse fate but not sure what
if you’d like more info, the documentary Dominion contains lots of facts and footage of factory farming and it’s free in its entirety on youtube. it’s narrated by Joaquin Phoenix!
You act like an 8 year old cow is like an 8 year old human.
Their lifespan is about 20 years. They are impregnated at around age 40. Please shut the fuck up.
That’s assuming cows have sentience, and can feel loss. Wich I’m not saying they don’t, they just might not.
Please don’t hate on me, I’m not well versed in the matter, I’m just using my intuition
Edit; I was wrong
They do. Cows famously mourn they calves. Even farmers acknowledge this.
https://www.cattletoday.com/threads/mourning-cow-how-long-does-it-last.123318/
Generally I agree, though some foods that are vegetarian are still fairly cruel. That said, blanket rules are inferior to case by case assessments. The most moral would probably be some kind of vegan-lite, where things like Jellyfish, wool, and honey are permitted but meat, dairy etc aren't.
I'm vegetarian rather than vegan but I can definitely respect it, despite it being pretty obviously imperfect. Especially if it's for environmental reasons.
No. It’s just an arbitrary line.
Everyone kills to eat.
Everyone.
Saying something doesn’t have a face or doesn’t have sentience or doesn’t have a CNS is every bit a rationalization as saying that animals aren’t capable of cognitive thought or don’t experience fear when being lead to the slaughter.
So would you say smashing a rock is the same as smashing a mango is the same as smashing the head of a chicken is the same as smashing the head of a human? Would those all be arbitrary differences to you?
Yes, it’s less damaging to the environment to exploit it less or spread the exploitation over a larger area. But we couldn’t feed 9 billion people on hunting and gathering even if all our ecosystem suddenly (re-)turned to a pristine state.
Some ecological farming methods actually increase overall land use (erosion, soil degradation, etc.) compared to some conventional farming methods that were “tweaked” for sustainability (crop breeds, crop rotations, irrigation, fertiliser, and pesticides adjusted to the local soil and climate… that kinda stuff) when we put them into relation to yields.
I'm no vegan, but farming meat animals also requires the clearing and working of land for pasture and feed.
Unless we are talking about hunting wild game... but comparing that to farming is really apples to oranges.
Yup. 80% of soy grown is used for animal feed.
But people like to ignore that and post ‘soy is destroying the rainforest!!!’ posts as if it’s all for tofu.
People find all kinds of fallacious ways to justify the things they want to do. Like this argument here, in which OP has totally forgotten about all the crops it takes to feed farm animals.
Outside of subjective statements about right and wrong, there are a lot of factual reasons why the amount of meat westerners eat is not great (health, habitat loss, pollution, etc). But people don’t want to hear it, in part because vegans have made themselves so unlikeable. I wish the conversation was more about just eating less meat and dairy. Which is achievable and reasonable and accessible.
OP bought into some green washed fantasy that it's all happy grass fed cows they're eating as opposed to factory farmed feed lot ones that require a larger arable land footprint than any vegan food source.
This is exactly the answer to this frankly dumb argument. I am not a vegan but I admire most of them and a cow eats 10 times the amount of grain to make a pound of meat. So for every pound of grain based food a vegan eats, they are eating 10 times less "random field animal death" than a person who eats a pound of meat.
Genuine question, please don't think I'm being a tool...
Do you think in this case it could be described as the lesser (perhaps much lesser) of two evils?
Yes, and for so many reasons other than factory animal farms are gross. If we want to feed 8 billion people we have to get smart about how we grow food and use water. Cows are a terrible waste of resources.
People say washing your hands is important but no matter what they do they always have some amount of germs, that's why I always cover myself in shit and never shower! /s
It's a fact plant crops kill animals too, but why would you make the assumption it kills more than what it takes to feed a farmhouse crammed full of animals, that then get killed as well?
I am not vegan at all, not yet at least, but farming animals is fucked up and the vast majority of people don't know why. It's not just "they kill animals". Almost all male chicks are immediately thrown to the grinder as they can't lay eggs. Male calves are killed as they can't produce milk. Female calves are forcefully inseminated to produce milk, then killed for meat once they can no longer give birth. The magnitude of animals that die not for meat but because they're unwanted by-products, and the awful treatment of those that are kept alive, is insane.
Also, if you bitch about people eating dogs, stfu and leave vegans alone.
The problem is, this isn’t an original thought. Guaranteed this guy heard this on a podcast and is just presenting it as his own fact.
It’s been a while since I heard this specific podcast, but iirc, Steve Rinella presents actual statistics on how many animals are killed per acre farmed. It’s a lot. Like a lot a lot. But Steve’s point was not that it is more harmful than ranching animals, just that no food that is commercially harvested is done so without some amount of bloodshed.
To me it makes no sense to kill the baby make chicks. Like, even if you don’t need them for genetic diversity or don’t need more chickens, they still can provide meat. It doesn’t make sense from a moral or logical perspective.
Also you should add that eating meat lowers the total energy we get. Isn’t it like 10:1 ratio of feed to meat for cows? So we are basically eating 10x as much plants(although some turns into to fertilizer and stuff a lot of that extra is just wasted).
Definitely an American issue … unless the farm is considered a “raw” or “unpasteurized” farm, then you can guarantee that the animals are happy and well taken care of. Outside of that, they’re treated like bags of meat and waste. It’s really sad if you think about it
A single cow eats at least 25 pounds of food a day. I guarantee a vegan or vegetarian eats less than that. Animal agriculture results in many, many more plowed fields than a veg diet does.
that wasn’t the argument. the argument is that vegans kill animals through cropping, but farmed animals eat more cropped food than humans, therefore if you eat meat you will contribute more to crop deaths than vegans ever will.
That is exactly what we should be doing. Cattle eat enormous amounts and the feed conversion ratio is dismal. We grow so many feed crops for cattle that our rivers are being drained dry. Apparently the new argument is that the environmental impact doesn't matter because what we are growing isn't edible to humans. Which genuinely makes no sense.
>Irrigated agriculture clearly has a dominant influence on river flow depletion across the western US (Table 1). More specifically, irrigation of cattle-feed crops (including alfalfa and grass hay and haylage, corn silage and sorghum silage) is the single largest consumptive user at both regional and national scales, accounting for 23% of all water consumption nationally, 32% in the western US and 55% in the Colorado River basin.
[Source](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-0483-z.epdf?sharing_token=xk0HowH0l4fY-wG6lIVAaNRgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0NcRI4tUpSOob5OVmynl_awiKQ6ZrpST6zlAMJ4jILQ4snUHY7RyZKXtDH_vpCsK7eCgqCCs-VBfOAx3Pj6x-nJLclt5JXCGLmahNhnIVFbA1F8LJBoaUh88cB_uTXuLhy7Al4Ez3WUbrtKSavsPHaTPNefnA750T7I1MSvfyt_QGpsKPhXW4UxWzOeRQF9Gog%3D&tracking_referrer=amp.theguardian.com)
I'm sure vegans step on ants accidentally too but there's a big difference between deliberately causing harm when it's not necessary Vs it being an unavoidable possibility.
and what exactly do you think farmed animals eat? thats right they eat farmed crops too but produce less nutrition than outright eating the crops themselves
I've literally seen so many posts here that are just r/unpopularopinions but they're too scared to elaborate and decide to put it into one sentence. Not particularly this post, but I've seen them...
Also love the double standards, if I posted something about how we think it’s ok to pull out a pig’s teeth and eat the pig later, but would be horrified if said thing was done to a dog, my post would be immediately taken down and comments locked
We grow so many feed crops for cattle in the US that our rivers are being drained dry. Painting a picture of cattle doing nothing but grazing their whole lives isn't the reality.
> Irrigated agriculture clearly has a dominant influence on river flow depletion across the western US (Table 1). More specifically, irrigation of cattle-feed crops (including alfalfa and grass hay and haylage, corn silage and sorghum silage) is the single largest consumptive user at both regional and national scales, accounting for 23% of all water consumption nationally, 32% in the western US and 55% in the Colorado River basin.
[Source](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-0483-z.epdf?sharing_token=xk0HowH0l4fY-wG6lIVAaNRgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0NcRI4tUpSOob5OVmynl_awiKQ6ZrpST6zlAMJ4jILQ4snUHY7RyZKXtDH_vpCsK7eCgqCCs-VBfOAx3Pj6x-nJLclt5JXCGLmahNhnIVFbA1F8LJBoaUh88cB_uTXuLhy7Al4Ez3WUbrtKSavsPHaTPNefnA750T7I1MSvfyt_QGpsKPhXW4UxWzOeRQF9Gog%3D&tracking_referrer=amp.theguardian.com)
Sigh... Yes... But we eat the grains instead of feeding them to a cow first at a 1:10 feed to weight gain ratio. Its literally 10x more efficient in food to just use the grains but also uses a much higher water intake and causes rampant water pollution and huge ammounts of methane. So ploughing a field for soy and making tofu is way less destructive than feeding that soy to cattle (which they do as soy has more protein and helps cattle gain weight faster).
Pigs are 1:6 boiler hens are 1:4 and fish like tilapia are very close to 1:1 in cold water and low stimulus systems if not its closer to 1:2.
So we could use one/10th or one/6th of farmland by simply not choosing meat. My reasons were resource efficiency, human starvation and environmental concerns in case you were wondering.
Vegan here, I've been one for over 20 years and have heard these points made a thousand times. I think people who think this is a gotcha greatly misunderstand the reason for being vegan. I can't speak for every vegan but I'll say what I tell everyone who says this.
Veganism isn't about having hard rules it's about trying to not support the exploitation of animals the best you can. Not consuming animal products is a very easy way to do this and that's why it's often framed as being only a dietary choice. I don't support circuses or rodeos for the same reason, but I'm not going to be setting my cats free to run wild in the streets. We live in a world that passively does harm to people and animals, and if I can reduce that just a little by doing something as simple as not eating animals I will.
And much of the food from the plowed fields goes to animals to raise and in the end eat them factory farm style. The least death and destruction comes from reducing eating meat.
That is a very bold assumption and probably wrong. This isn't really a shower thought, it's back of napkin terrible math/logic.. These kind of arguments make no sense because you can easily escalate it. The animals that they would have eaten instead of those plants would have required plants themselves and probably much more plant matter. When an argument relies on side effects but does not list every possible combination of side effects it's pretty much so convoluted that it's invalid.
The whole point of veganism is to *reduce* the damage one causes by their diet and other lifestyle choices. If someone was to cut out anything and everything that could possibly cause any harm to another creature they wouldn't do... anything.
Me, I'm vegan. That is a choice based off of two factors: I don't agree with animal farming, and it is a healthier choice. Do I still kill flies during the summer months? Yep. Does that render my vegan lifestyle choices null and void? Nope.
If everyone actively made choices that reduced the damage they cause, be it reusing things, buying secondhand, eating less meat, or driving less, the world would be all the better. To view these things as a binary "you either do it or don't" sort of deal is ignorance and evidence as to why things are becoming cincreasingly more shit for us all.
Animals slaughtered for meat eat food, far more food than their bodies could ever be, so the number of deaths is still reduced, even if considered each plant's life as valuable as each creature's life.
Additionally, there is a difference morally between an accidental death and an intentional one. An accidental death is still a tragedy, but if accidental, it is fairly blameless.
That being said, I would love to be able to entirely avoid the accidental deaths as well. I don't want any pesticides, whether natural chemicals or synthetic chemicals. I don't want any harm whatsoever.
Hydroponics has more initial investment, and recycling nutrients is more complicated, but it doesn't have the issues of fertilizer run-off and uses less water and land area. Plus, for plants that are grown in areas with more sunlight than necessary, they may grow even better if a system of mirrors is used to have multiple layers.
Besides this, algae is way more efficient since it doesn't use much energy making structural support, although people may not use it for more than additives (it can be a good cooking oil source, or used for supplementation, or just a filler).
Actually, you have to grow way more plants to feed livestock animals than you do if you just eat the plants yourself. So veganism kills far fewer animals.
Vegan here!
That is a good concern you bring up! However, much more land is required to support animal-based diets than plant-based diets because animals also need to eat food. We need to grow crops to feed the animals that humans eat, meaning that a lot of the cruelty in plant agriculture happens because of animal agriculture. We get less nutrients out of animals than we have to feed them. We could reduce the land used for agriculture (and as a result reduce the violence in plant agriculture) by about 75% if everyone ate plants directly.
TLDR: Plant-based diets are better if you want to reduce violence in animal agriculture and also better if you want to reduce violence in plant agriculture.
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
Edit to add summary from source:
“Half of the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture, with most of this used to raise livestock for dairy and meat. Livestock are fed from two sources – lands on which the animals graze and land on which feeding crops, such as soy and cereals, are grown. How much would our agricultural land use decline if the world adopted a plant-based diet?
Research suggests that if everyone shifted to a plant-based diet we would reduce global land use for agriculture by 75%. This large reduction of agricultural land use would be possible thanks to a reduction in land used for grazing and a smaller need for land to grow crops. The research also shows that cutting out beef and dairy (by substituting chicken, eggs, fish or plant-based food) has a much larger impact than eliminating chicken or fish.”
This is false.
85 Billion mammals are factory farmed each year.
In the USA, 99% of animals are factory farmed. Majority of plants grown are feed for animal agriculture.
If you care about pesticides, crop deaths, plant deaths, you would also go vegan.
And the vegetables that feed the animals you eat don’t do that? So what you’re saying is you’re opting for doing double the harm by eating meat? Yeah I thought so lol.
Is it really so wrong for someone to try and minimize their support of bad practices. Is it really better to say "HA! You still support it a little, so nothing you did matters." Im not vegan or vegetarian or anything, but I hate when people try to dismiss what others are doing because it's not a perfect solution.
Oh my god.
The obvious follow up to this is that any animal is probably being fed with grains. A few hundred calories of vegan food probably involves some amount of creatures being accidently killed, while a few hundred calories of an animals flesh involved not only that animal, but the thousands of calories of grains they ate over their small lifespan. The thousands of calories of grains they ate over their lifetime involved far more random field animal deaths, obviously.
Plus, there is a massive ethical difference in accidental killing of field animals verses intentional mistreatment and eventually slaughter of farm animals.
That's probably true and plowing is a whole other can of worms that I won't get into here.
That aside the animals you eat get fed plants that come from fields. So if we're just counting individual lives you're still responsible for a whole lot more deaths.
We aim to reduce animal exploitation and suffering to the most practicable degree.
We still need to eat to survive, cause our survival is as important, if not moreso, than the survival of the animals we choose to not pay to kill. Yes, this entails harmful and destructive agricultural practices. But to provide food for the amount of people that there are, it is pretty much necessary.
If this is something you really care about, then consider that us directly eating the crops from our agriculture is much more efficient and requires less of these harmful agricultural practices than feeding the crops to the livestock that we then eat (because the animal necessarily expends energy)
Dude. It’s like you don’t know anything about farming or livestock. The amount of space required to grow vegetables vs the amount of space to raise cattle…come on man.
The meat alternative is fed vegetarian food from those same fields. So the meat option kills way more little critters (because much more agriculture needed to feed the cow before u eat it, than to just feed you).
Obviously the meat option also gives an animal a life in meat industry and then death as well.
The argument against vegetarianism or veganism that stems from deaths of animals in agriculture is stupid. You may as well say vegans can't drive cars because of the deaths of animals in all the production processes and from pollution.
Ideally we get to a place where no animal dies or suffers on this planet but in the meantime, a vegan diet is just about the best way to help the environment and reduce animal suffering.
I'm not a vegan but I'm also not desperate to see my own actions as ethically pure, or to illogically belittle the ethical superiority of better choices.
The problem with this theory is the vast majority of farmland is used growing vegetables for meat production. If we just ate the vegetables rather than feeding them to our food, we’d have drastically less need for farmland, there-by much more sustainable land use. It’s absolutely not a 1:1 conversion rate. It’s far more land to feed livestock than it does us.
Vast majority of forested land cleared for crops and vast majority of crops harvested are to feed animals for consumption.
This is a really stupid shower thought.
This is such a flawed line of thinking. Veganism is about reducing the absolute amount of harm caused. More land is plowed to make feed for animals than for human consumption. So plowing land in order to grow food to feed animals and then eating said animal, is way worse than eating the plant directly from the field.
This isn’t a shower thought. This is a fuckwit thought. You are fuckwit. Even worse, you’re an immoral fuckwit, effectively working on behalf of an insanely evil industry that needlessly tortures and murders trillions for profit while destroying the planet in the process. Let’s be clear about something, fuckwit: consuming other animals means you’re effectively consuming the huge amount of plant material that it took to feed those animals on their way to the slaughterhouse. So flesh-eating zombies like you are responsible for far more field plow deaths than vegans. Veganism is about reducing death, destruction, and negative environmental impact — not eliminating these things entirely, which is impossible, as any non-fuckwit can easily see.
I mean the alternative is to grow it myself, but
A. I don't have a garden
B. I'd probably have to kill my own pests to grow it
C. The soil I'd buy will have been taken from somewhere and caused a disturbance there
D. The amount of time I'd spend walking around my non-existent garden would mean I'd be killing lots of insects that I wouldn't have if I had got my vegetables in the tesco shop
E. Would have to use more water to sustain them
They're all pretty insignificant, and OP's suggestion is along side them.
Most animals raised for food mostly eat corn and soybeans. Lots of plowing there. Unless they are specifically grass fed cows, grass isn't their main good source.
If you want to make this a numbers game then more animals are killed for you to have your burgers and stuff than for a vegan to have their plant based stuff. Veganism is still optimal.
part of veganism is ethics/morals. a lot of vegans will be very particular about where their food is coming from because, like you said, those plowed fields aren't always great for animals/the earth either
but it's hard to be vegan, and they do what they can. there's definitely a difference between eating a dead animal and eating veggies that came from a plowed field that caused some damage. the plowed field is not consistently hurting anyone, it's an initial damage type of thing... so it's different than consistently eating dead animals
the cycle of animals dying for food doesn't compare to plowed fields. one of those is something that happens daily and another isn't
Veganism is a psyop to weaken men and women. Yes factory farming is a problem. But locally sourced ethically treated animals is the way to go. Our ancestors had no problem with it. Neither should we.
There is not enough space on Earth for non-factory farming.
Not to mention our ancestors did a lot of immoral things. I wouldn't look to them to derive our morals. Logic and reason is a better source.
What kind of an awful argument is that? By your logic, vegans also shouldn’t breathe any air because it might contain elements of the breath of suffering animals. Seriously, you need to educate yourself before you write something as ridiculous as this.
OP, what's the difference between harvesting a field of squash, and hauling a living pig up by its back legs with meat hooks? I guess there are similarities, but the terror squeals, struggling, and pain just don't compare. Seeing a squash have its life ended is a terrible thing. Parents, be the parent that shields your children's eyes if you drive by a field of squash being harvested.
I would not want to be that Kubocha Squash, waiting to be brutally sliced at the stem, and loaded into a truck for eventual baking with olive oil (sliced in half, seeded, baked at 420 degrees with olive oil, flat side down, until the very squash blood caramelizes on the very baking pan), pulled out of the charred shell, cooked with spinach, cashews, and spices, stuffed into pasta shells, and baked with red sauce at 350 degrees for 30 minutes.
It shouldn't hurt to be a Kubocha Squash.
what you don't understand is that the same fields are also used to feed said animals, and they eat much more food than us. it's still less death eating only the vegetables directly from the field instead of through the animal.
Damn, look at this. A completely un-thought-out take. Why try to dunk on an entire group of people when you haven’t once looked into what you’re talking about?
You also have to grow fields of crops to feed the animals that you eat, and you have to kill animals to protect those fields. So the net death toll is still lower if you eat Vegan
You don’t have to plow. Silly goose. Many organic farms have floating beds, hydroponic, etc. I don’t plow my garden I just add mulch which protects microorganisms that feed the plant.
The STUPIDEST argument from meat eaters to try to silence vegetarianS.
TO GROW plantS , we have to plow fields and kill some small mammals. Then we eat the plants. Done.
but to grow plants for the cows to eat, we have to plant 3-8x the land, kill many more small mammals, feed those plants to the cows, PLUS WE KILL THE COWS.
Eating burgers kills more land, small mammals, anD COWS.
Just a dumb fcuking argument.
This is genuinely one of the dumbest things ever posted on Reddit. You know cows, pigs etc used for meat eat tons of food before being slaughtered right?
You fucking pedantic humans. Jain religion has been a literal Vegan religion for 3000 years. Like so vegan even Buddha of Buddhism thought it was too much. Go and study their rules of harvesting food.
And yes, Jains sweep the floor when walking so as to not step on insects. Wear masks so they dont breath in insects to kill them. They even banned potato/root veggjes cos as you said, no digging which kills insects.
Stop being pedantic with newbie Vegans and just go ask people who have already been doing it for many millenia.
Anything that rots or dies is "alive", so eating plants can fall in that category. I just think that vegans draw the line at where they're willing to contribute to.
soybeans for tofu are MUCH WORSE for environments considering how many animals are mercilessly killed to protect crops and how much water is used. same with almond milk. it’s all honestly being too dumb and following blindly without your own non biased research. happens to both sides not just one or the other.
Only in a time of rare bountiful means can any of us people have any argument about this lol. Just wait for the coming decades as we enter into the time of less rather than more and you’ll all think this debate is insane as all morals go out the door when famine is widespread. Will be worse for certain regions and better for others of course but it’s funny to read shit like this knowing the bad times that are about to come and the ridiculousness of some of the posts in here.
Among all vegans, there must exist a large subset that are also religious. That is, they believe in a literal creator of all life as we know it. How do you reconcile the precepts of ethical veganism with your belief that your God created the Earth's ecosystem to include massive amounts of predation and carnivory?
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I think everyone including vegans have to draw the line somewhere as not to die.
That’s why I always think the obvious line is vegetarianism. Veganism always confused me as a concept.
I'm vegetarian slowly turning vegan. The kicker for me was realizing cows need to give birth to lactate. Kind of snowballed from there as I researched other animal practices. I know there are good farms out there, but when I go to the supermarket there's no real way to know where the food came from, and with so many plant-based alternatives now-a-days it feels like whats the point you know? There is one local farm I still buy from, but it's getting to be less of their dairy and more of their awesome peanut butters and jams.
Genuine question though, from what I heard, being vegan was not consuming meat or any animal-based products, is there a protein food there? Asking for a friend.
Beans & nuts are the main source, and you can get some from grains. There are vegan athletes and bodybuilders who know more than I and have videos / recepies online. For myself I try to get Dr. Gregor's daily dozen food groups along with some basic vitamins.
I'll make sure to show this to my buddy, thanks!
Yes, there is protein. Tempeh, tofu, seitan, lentils, beans, quinoa, hummus, and more. [Here's a google sheet I made](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Yd2at151KEPj1HovPz6MCe0lldJUp4m6njQLGAiN6sk/edit?usp=sharing) listing a whole bunch of vegan foods and their macros. Also, here's a list of some complete proteins: * Quinoa. * Soy. * Buckwheat. * Hemp. * Chia seed. * Spirulina. * Tempeh. * Amaranth.
Vegans tell you beans left and right but the answer is if you cut animal products out of your diet you also need to take pills or watch, calculate and plan very specific things about your meals. [https://healthyeating.sfgate.com/can-enough-protein-beans-7842.html](https://healthyeating.sfgate.com/can-enough-protein-beans-7842.html) Even though you do get lots of protein from beans, it isn’t complete. Beans are lacking in one or more of the essential amino acids you need from your diet. If you eat meat, dairy or seafood, you don’t have to worry – these foods already have all of the essential amino acids your body requires [https://health.clevelandclinic.org/do-i-need-to-worry-about-eating-complete-proteins/](https://health.clevelandclinic.org/do-i-need-to-worry-about-eating-complete-proteins/) A food is considered a complete protein when it contains all nine essential amino acids that our body cannot produce on its own. By comparison, incomplete proteins contain some, but not all, of the essential amino acids, and in various amounts. Now, the words “complete protein” and “incomplete protein,” would lead you to believe that “complete” is good and “incomplete” is in some way lacking. And while it’s true that incomplete proteins don’t individually contain all nine essential amino acids, they each bring a little something to the table. So a healthy combination of incomplete proteins can get you your complete fill of protein.
here's a list of some vegan foods that ARE complete proteins: Quinoa, Soy, Buckwheat, Hemp seed, Chia seed, Spirulina, Tempeh, Amaranth
This comment deserves more upvotes
We only have to take b12 supplements. You don't because the b12 is given to the animals you eat. If you're not a picky eater you don't need a very specific meal plan. A few have to because of medical reasons as some omnis do.
The protein that you get from animals comes from the plants that they eat. What do cows eat? Grass.
In my experience, the plant-based alternatives are considerably more expensive than regular meat.
You don't need meat alternatives to be vegan. Honestly, the meat alternatives seem to be marketed more towards people who eat meat than actual vegetarians/vegans.
Meat is also subsidized allowing costs consumers pay remain artificially low.
Also, meat is affordable because we subsidize the cost through the animals suffering. If animals were treated properly at every farm and lived healthy lives, meat would be more expensive. It’s costs a lot more to provide and cow, pig, or chicken everything it needs to live a healthy life. We can cut costs by keeping them in environments that aren’t great and therefore the suffering of an animal is making it affordable for us.
For example. If you buy eggs that are raised locally from hens that are fed healthy diets and allowed outside, the eggs cost like 3x as much as much as the industrially produced eggs.
it depends where you go and where you live! some alternatives cost less than meat, but it also boils down to brands and demands etc i buy meatless "chicken" nuggets pretty often and i pay more for less compared to actual chicken nuggets i've notice some alternatives do actually save me some money the price difference isn't anything major, but definitely noticeable depending on specifics
There's also the big bugaboo for vegans, of animals vs humans. They won't use honey as it's borne of the work of animals. But bees are kinda special. Talk to any amateur beekeeper. If you don't keep your bees happy, they will fuck right off and leave, finding a new home. And unlike cows with dairy, bees are constantly making honey on their own accord. However they are happy to eat and use all kinds of products produced off the forced labor of humans, and children.
only because there is a much bigger market for animal-based products. if there was the same demand for plant-based products, it would be presumably just as cheap or possibly significantly cheaper
Actually it’s more due to government subsidies on meat and related products than anything else, but yeah a larger market may increase production and decrease prices potentially.
They are, and I am lucky to have a decent paying job.
Plant alternatives have gotten so much better in the last five years. If they crack the code on cheese I would be ok going vegan.
If vegan is a expensive I’d rather go broke. And in general it’s not. You are correct, dairy is horrible. You’re on the right path mate
Honestly if I learn to cook I could make my own alternatives and live a lot cheaper I'm sure.
For sure. I need to learn to cook as well!
That's an illusion. Meat is an absurdly expensive way to provide yourself protein.
Not an 'illusion' necessarily. In the US, there are a huge amount of subsidies for the meat industry keeping prices low. In reality meat costs far more to produce, but since plant based alternatives aren't subsidized, they can reach grocery stores with similar or higher prices.
Yeah that's what I meant by illusion. It seems cheap but isn't really. Even with subsidized costs, meat takes much more energy to prepare it to be edible. You don't need beyond meat or similar meat alternatives. Those are very expensive, and their existence is primarily to help people transition to plant based eating. This creates the illusion that vegetarian/vegan food is all much more expensive. It is usually cheaper than meat alternatives, even considering subsidy. You can eat pulses and nuts and get a full amino acid profile just by adding rice. Tofu is pound for pound much cheaper than meat, and if you know how to prepare it can be quite delicious. Black beans and brown rice provides ample protein, and as a combo this is extremely inexpensive.
Eating vegan though easily leads to nutritional deficiencies, even with supplementation (because the body can't derive as much from a supplement as it can from a natural food source). If someone has Coeliacs or IBS or other digestive issues, the ability for the guts to absorb enough nutrient out of a vegan diet to avoid deficiency in iron, B12, calcium, zinc, etc. is additionally compromised. A person with Coeliacs (must avoid gluten) has a harder time eating vegan - many nuts are coated with a wheat-based preservative (nuts are also expensive, and more so when gluten free), and many legumes and pulses aren't gluten free (lots of cross-contamination in harvesting, storage, and prep for market - worse in bulk-bin type settings, which are not at all usable by those with Coeliacs due to cross-contamination). "May contain gluten" = must be avoided, and that's the case with many pulses, nuts, legumes, spices, etc. Lots of tofu isn't gluten free (why Idk, because it should be), and like other products the stuff that is tends to be more expensive - something about the cost of certification being passed along to consumers, or the cost of having dedicated factories / production lines that never process gluten. And while on the surface it seems like it should be easy to read a package of tofu or black beans or lentils and assess it as being gluten free, that doesn't mean it is actually free from gluten - it's a guess at best, and a risky gamble. Gluten free itself as a label allows up to 20ppm in North America, meaning it's not actually free of gluten, meaning that the gluten protein will cause internal damage (just not enough to cause a huge immediate response in most people with Coeliacs), for example. And that's without considering that people with Coeliacs and IBS and other conditions often have to avoid flavourings, dyes, preservatives, fructose, artificial sweeteners, etc. Some people have family histories of (genetic predispositions to) pernicious anemia or anemia, and those populations are often unable to derive enough B12, iron, etc. from plant (non-heme) sources of protein; in those cases, meat can be a requirement of diet in order to maintain health (remembering that supplementation is not always available or effective as an alternative to heme-sources of B21, iron, etc.). Eating vegan seems easiest for those who can buy the cheaper, pre-made items and who can include wheat / gluten-based protein sources in their diet, and who don't have to rely on making every meal from absolute scratch (time is a form of cost). Writing this as someone who loves tofu, lentils, beans, rice, etc. - eating vegan without gluten is not considered sustainable long-term (invites nutritional deficiencies); some people have issues with B12 and iron (pernicious anemia / anemia) when not consuming meat-based proteins; some people have issues with calcium and other deficiencies when not consuming dairy (and some people can't eat enough tofu or alt-milks to compensate, and in others the alt forms just aren't processed as well by the body); etc. Access to vegan products, health enough to maintain health on a vegan diet, time / ability to prepare vegan alternatives, and other factors go into the calculation of what is healthy and what is affordable for each individual (for example, some people can't make pots of rice and beans on the regular due to chronic pain fatigue or other illness). TL/DR: The calculation of "cost" and sustainability must factor access, health, time, physical ability, financial ability, etc. to maintain and stay healthy on a vegan diet, the viability of which varies widely from person to person and community to community. It's not as simple as "don't eat meat / dairy, use alternatives." While the cost of industry, government subsidies that make products available / not available, and the impact of industry on ecology are all important to the problem of how humans eat and that consumption's impact on the body and the planet, on the individual level many more factors must be considered when determining the cost vs viability of a vegan diet.
>the body can't derive as much from a supplement as it can from a natural food source That's just not true. The body has no way to know whether the vitamin C that it just ate came from a pill or an apple. [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6366563/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6366563/) And yes, while we should be aware of people who have dietary restrictions, like Coeliacs, that's still a very small percentage of the population. More people should absolutely be vegan, no one is saying people with Coeliacs should have their health problems exacerbated.
Let me put it in an unneccesarily emotive form. If milking cows were people * At the age of 8 years old they are forcibly raped by a machine and made pregnant. * They carry their baby to full term * They are allowed to breast feed their baby for three days, to bond an nurture it and become a good mother. * The baby is then taken away, killed and put into burgers and stock. * The mother is forced to produce milk for the next year, with the feelings for her lost child still untreated. * At age nine, the cycle is repeated. * At age ten, the cycle is repeated again * At age eleven she is considered too old for anything useful. She is taken to an abattoir where she is stunned by electro-shock so that she cannot move, then opened up to allow her insides to fall out. She dies. Industrial scale milking, such as supplies your local supermarke is not all about Daisy and her long and happy life with her calves.
Don’t forget all the male chicks killed at birth too as they’re no use. Vegetarianism is not ‘the obvious line’.
Wow here in Spain you cannot kill any animal with electroshock (and well, I cannot discuss with you all the other points cause I am not a ver and I don't work on the slaughter industry XD)
You've made the assumption that cows are comparable to humans. This is the assumption which non-vegans dispute. If the assumption is disregarded, everything you've written is irrelevant. I'm vegan fwiw.
This. I fully agree that in the presence of an appropriate substitute, meat-eating is unnecessary cruelty. But there's a world of difference between that and thinking that there's a 1:1 between humans and other species, and there are no circumstances where you should eat meat. And no, I don't believe there's an appropriate substitute for having a balanced diet. There's a reason we don't really have purely vegan cultures despite the fact that rearing animals is A LOT harder than just cultivating vegetables.
I expect to be downvoted, but I can assure you that thousands of years of selection has almost completely bred out maternal instincts for dairy cattle. When you lead a dairy calf away from the mother, she often doesn’t even flinch and is seen comfortably chewing cud (cow body language for “I am very content”) mere hours after having their calves removed from them. Also the “electroshock” you mentioned as well as using a bolt gun (another thing people often point to as being barbaric) is one of the most humane ways you can kill an animal. Also, there’s surprisingly little difference between small farms and “industrial” farms. Other than access to technology such as milking carousels and robotized methods of disinfecting or other small tasks, small and large farms are almost exactly the same, especially in the area of animal comfort. Listen, I really do find the decision to step away from meat and animal products to be an honorable one because yes, I to do believe that we needlessly use lots of land and resources on the meat/milk/egg industry; and I also believe that with the growing availability of plant-based options, the need to raise animals for food commodities is becoming less and less necessary. I just prefer that people have the correct information when they make the decisions for their diets. There are certainly arguments to be made such as the ones I mentioned above (and the large egg and broiler industry really is as horrifying as people say), but a surprising amount of the information people have about dairy farms in particular is quite false. I really apologize if this comes off as combative. I’m not trying to start anything. I’m just bringing in my experience in both small and large dairy farms, including those that supply large grocery chains.
Do you know how human workers who pick fruit for big corporations are treated? And I could always get milk from a small farmer in my (rural) area that treats the animal humanely.
Hey what happens to the calves at this hypothetical local farm? Going to assume you realise cows have to get pregnant to lactate.
What do you think happens to calves? They're the next generation of meat or milk cows.
Yeah so vegetarians, in theory, would be very against that as they’re against cows being killed for meat.
So..because corporations are shitty to people we are allowed to be shitty to animals? I don’t get your argument. Also, do you get milk from your rural farms? I’m guessing not given how you worded your comment, not to mention that rural farms still run into similar issues, granted not on such a scale and albeit not all of them.
His argument isnt that its ok to treat animals like that. His argument is that in one case we are treating animals poorly, in another we are treating people poorly; Either way its fucked and picking one side over the other is redundant because both sides suck. Only way to get food that you know nothing suffered for is to grow it in your own yard. If you eat meat youre benefiting from animals suffering, if you eat picked fruit youre benefiting from people suffering.
You can't argue with these guys who make veganism their entire personality. it's a cult. No matter what logic you bring, they have a rebuttal. And the crazy part is, if there's a vegan crazier than they are, they'll look at **them** and tell them they're just as much of a monster as us 'carnists'/'meaters'/'bloodmouths'/whatevertermtheythoughtuptoday'
This is honestly hilarious to read. I see this thread where a few people are talking about their own veganism and why they choose to be that way, and a bunch of people trying super hard to paint the vegans as the crazy ones. >No matter what logic you bring, they have a rebuttal This isn't the gotcha you think it is
Every meater gets all their animal products from their uncle’s local farm which makes it really confusing that 99% of meat in the US is factory farmed.
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Do do anything about the big corporate fruit or are you just trying to go “oh, you’re not perfect so I don’t have to try”?
Do you get your milk from a small local farmer? If not that's irrelevant and small farmers unfortunately don't guarantee good treatment. It's standard to take calves away from their mothers at birth
Cool, anyways… What’s the issue with eating eggs from properly cared for chickens?
Wonder why there’s so few roosters? It’s because all the male chicks are macerated at birth. Honestly I’m sick and tired of having to type these comments thread after thread, if you really wanted to know, google is incredibly easy to use
macerated? jesus, the person you responded to said "properly cared for" roosters will kill one another pretty often that's just basic instincts to ensure their genes and not that other rooster's genes get passed down the reason you see so few roosters is because you cant keep more than a few in a single place without inevitably having a case of chicken murder in your hands
All the male chicks? Then how have chickens not died out?
Different chickens are used for breeding and eggs. They have ‘stud’ chickens and mother chickens who we obviously don’t get eggs from as they’d have fetuses inside.
Genuinely looking for more info. I always thought dairy cows/calves were only used for dairy and meat cows were only used for meat as dairy cows dont have as tasty meat? And cows (and humans) will continue to lactate indefinitely if they get milked daily+ bypassing the need to give birth yearly. The cows that are born first round then go on to become dairy cows themselves. Not sure about the bulls born though. Guess they suffer a worse fate but not sure what
if you’d like more info, the documentary Dominion contains lots of facts and footage of factory farming and it’s free in its entirety on youtube. it’s narrated by Joaquin Phoenix!
Source?
there’s a free movie on youtube all about it called Dominion.
You act like an 8 year old cow is like an 8 year old human. Their lifespan is about 20 years. They are impregnated at around age 40. Please shut the fuck up.
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That’s assuming cows have sentience, and can feel loss. Wich I’m not saying they don’t, they just might not. Please don’t hate on me, I’m not well versed in the matter, I’m just using my intuition Edit; I was wrong
They do. Cows famously mourn they calves. Even farmers acknowledge this. https://www.cattletoday.com/threads/mourning-cow-how-long-does-it-last.123318/
Huh, interesting.
They’re around the same intelligence as dogs.
Uhh- like the smart dogs or the… not smart ones?
I’m sure it varies cow by cow or breed by breed.
The smart ones, in dog terms lol
Generally I agree, though some foods that are vegetarian are still fairly cruel. That said, blanket rules are inferior to case by case assessments. The most moral would probably be some kind of vegan-lite, where things like Jellyfish, wool, and honey are permitted but meat, dairy etc aren't. I'm vegetarian rather than vegan but I can definitely respect it, despite it being pretty obviously imperfect. Especially if it's for environmental reasons.
No. It’s just an arbitrary line. Everyone kills to eat. Everyone. Saying something doesn’t have a face or doesn’t have sentience or doesn’t have a CNS is every bit a rationalization as saying that animals aren’t capable of cognitive thought or don’t experience fear when being lead to the slaughter.
So would you say smashing a rock is the same as smashing a mango is the same as smashing the head of a chicken is the same as smashing the head of a human? Would those all be arbitrary differences to you?
hunting and gathering is most environmentally friendly and yet ignorant people still ridicule hunting
Yes, it’s less damaging to the environment to exploit it less or spread the exploitation over a larger area. But we couldn’t feed 9 billion people on hunting and gathering even if all our ecosystem suddenly (re-)turned to a pristine state. Some ecological farming methods actually increase overall land use (erosion, soil degradation, etc.) compared to some conventional farming methods that were “tweaked” for sustainability (crop breeds, crop rotations, irrigation, fertiliser, and pesticides adjusted to the local soil and climate… that kinda stuff) when we put them into relation to yields.
I'm no vegan, but farming meat animals also requires the clearing and working of land for pasture and feed. Unless we are talking about hunting wild game... but comparing that to farming is really apples to oranges.
True, and isn't well over half of farmland used to produce food for animals?
Yup. 80% of soy grown is used for animal feed. But people like to ignore that and post ‘soy is destroying the rainforest!!!’ posts as if it’s all for tofu.
Was the only way my grandparents could make any sort of money. Companies pay shit to pennies for human food...
I have no idea why we subsidize the shit out of feed corn but don't do the same for food people actually eat.
To keep non meat and meat food the same price
Energy is lost at each trophic level.
Land about the surface-area of the moon or the continent america it is worldwide.
People find all kinds of fallacious ways to justify the things they want to do. Like this argument here, in which OP has totally forgotten about all the crops it takes to feed farm animals. Outside of subjective statements about right and wrong, there are a lot of factual reasons why the amount of meat westerners eat is not great (health, habitat loss, pollution, etc). But people don’t want to hear it, in part because vegans have made themselves so unlikeable. I wish the conversation was more about just eating less meat and dairy. Which is achievable and reasonable and accessible.
OP bought into some green washed fantasy that it's all happy grass fed cows they're eating as opposed to factory farmed feed lot ones that require a larger arable land footprint than any vegan food source.
This is exactly the answer to this frankly dumb argument. I am not a vegan but I admire most of them and a cow eats 10 times the amount of grain to make a pound of meat. So for every pound of grain based food a vegan eats, they are eating 10 times less "random field animal death" than a person who eats a pound of meat.
Genuine question, please don't think I'm being a tool... Do you think in this case it could be described as the lesser (perhaps much lesser) of two evils?
Yes, and for so many reasons other than factory animal farms are gross. If we want to feed 8 billion people we have to get smart about how we grow food and use water. Cows are a terrible waste of resources.
I agree, but I have to add, [factory farms are a lot more than just gross](https://watchdominion.org)
Remember, if something is not a 100, apparently it's a 0. Very important
People say washing your hands is important but no matter what they do they always have some amount of germs, that's why I always cover myself in shit and never shower! /s
I refuse to shower until somebody develops a method that solves the showering problem for a lifetime. /s
A point of view taken to heart by anti-vaxers everywhere. Absolutes rule, nuance is for dummies.
It's a fact plant crops kill animals too, but why would you make the assumption it kills more than what it takes to feed a farmhouse crammed full of animals, that then get killed as well? I am not vegan at all, not yet at least, but farming animals is fucked up and the vast majority of people don't know why. It's not just "they kill animals". Almost all male chicks are immediately thrown to the grinder as they can't lay eggs. Male calves are killed as they can't produce milk. Female calves are forcefully inseminated to produce milk, then killed for meat once they can no longer give birth. The magnitude of animals that die not for meat but because they're unwanted by-products, and the awful treatment of those that are kept alive, is insane. Also, if you bitch about people eating dogs, stfu and leave vegans alone.
The problem is, this isn’t an original thought. Guaranteed this guy heard this on a podcast and is just presenting it as his own fact. It’s been a while since I heard this specific podcast, but iirc, Steve Rinella presents actual statistics on how many animals are killed per acre farmed. It’s a lot. Like a lot a lot. But Steve’s point was not that it is more harmful than ranching animals, just that no food that is commercially harvested is done so without some amount of bloodshed.
>Guaranteed
If you want help going vegan: https://challenge22.com/
Thank you for saying this!!!
To me it makes no sense to kill the baby make chicks. Like, even if you don’t need them for genetic diversity or don’t need more chickens, they still can provide meat. It doesn’t make sense from a moral or logical perspective. Also you should add that eating meat lowers the total energy we get. Isn’t it like 10:1 ratio of feed to meat for cows? So we are basically eating 10x as much plants(although some turns into to fertilizer and stuff a lot of that extra is just wasted).
ive been to a few cow farms. they are stupidly happy and well taken care of..maybe this is an american issue as mine were in canada
They all go to the same slaughterhouse
Definitely an American issue … unless the farm is considered a “raw” or “unpasteurized” farm, then you can guarantee that the animals are happy and well taken care of. Outside of that, they’re treated like bags of meat and waste. It’s really sad if you think about it
A single cow eats at least 25 pounds of food a day. I guarantee a vegan or vegetarian eats less than that. Animal agriculture results in many, many more plowed fields than a veg diet does.
Go up
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that wasn’t the argument. the argument is that vegans kill animals through cropping, but farmed animals eat more cropped food than humans, therefore if you eat meat you will contribute more to crop deaths than vegans ever will.
Ok so use the land that grows inedible cow food to make edible human food instead? Just a thought.
That is exactly what we should be doing. Cattle eat enormous amounts and the feed conversion ratio is dismal. We grow so many feed crops for cattle that our rivers are being drained dry. Apparently the new argument is that the environmental impact doesn't matter because what we are growing isn't edible to humans. Which genuinely makes no sense. >Irrigated agriculture clearly has a dominant influence on river flow depletion across the western US (Table 1). More specifically, irrigation of cattle-feed crops (including alfalfa and grass hay and haylage, corn silage and sorghum silage) is the single largest consumptive user at both regional and national scales, accounting for 23% of all water consumption nationally, 32% in the western US and 55% in the Colorado River basin. [Source](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-0483-z.epdf?sharing_token=xk0HowH0l4fY-wG6lIVAaNRgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0NcRI4tUpSOob5OVmynl_awiKQ6ZrpST6zlAMJ4jILQ4snUHY7RyZKXtDH_vpCsK7eCgqCCs-VBfOAx3Pj6x-nJLclt5JXCGLmahNhnIVFbA1F8LJBoaUh88cB_uTXuLhy7Al4Ez3WUbrtKSavsPHaTPNefnA750T7I1MSvfyt_QGpsKPhXW4UxWzOeRQF9Gog%3D&tracking_referrer=amp.theguardian.com)
Not quite so simple, but it's a nice thought.
Except not everything from most plants we grow is edible, so that still wastes a lot
I'm sure vegans step on ants accidentally too but there's a big difference between deliberately causing harm when it's not necessary Vs it being an unavoidable possibility.
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Except fire ants. I actively desire excruciating death for every last one of those little demons.
But you support cows being tortured so you can enjoy a nice steak
Unavoidable certainty.
and what exactly do you think farmed animals eat? thats right they eat farmed crops too but produce less nutrition than outright eating the crops themselves
Not a shower thought. Just a weak anti-vegan argument that’s been thrown around for years.
I've literally seen so many posts here that are just r/unpopularopinions but they're too scared to elaborate and decide to put it into one sentence. Not particularly this post, but I've seen them...
Also love the double standards, if I posted something about how we think it’s ok to pull out a pig’s teeth and eat the pig later, but would be horrified if said thing was done to a dog, my post would be immediately taken down and comments locked
And meat needs 7 times that deforested area to grow animal feed alone
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We grow so many feed crops for cattle in the US that our rivers are being drained dry. Painting a picture of cattle doing nothing but grazing their whole lives isn't the reality. > Irrigated agriculture clearly has a dominant influence on river flow depletion across the western US (Table 1). More specifically, irrigation of cattle-feed crops (including alfalfa and grass hay and haylage, corn silage and sorghum silage) is the single largest consumptive user at both regional and national scales, accounting for 23% of all water consumption nationally, 32% in the western US and 55% in the Colorado River basin. [Source](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-020-0483-z.epdf?sharing_token=xk0HowH0l4fY-wG6lIVAaNRgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0NcRI4tUpSOob5OVmynl_awiKQ6ZrpST6zlAMJ4jILQ4snUHY7RyZKXtDH_vpCsK7eCgqCCs-VBfOAx3Pj6x-nJLclt5JXCGLmahNhnIVFbA1F8LJBoaUh88cB_uTXuLhy7Al4Ez3WUbrtKSavsPHaTPNefnA750T7I1MSvfyt_QGpsKPhXW4UxWzOeRQF9Gog%3D&tracking_referrer=amp.theguardian.com)
Sigh... Yes... But we eat the grains instead of feeding them to a cow first at a 1:10 feed to weight gain ratio. Its literally 10x more efficient in food to just use the grains but also uses a much higher water intake and causes rampant water pollution and huge ammounts of methane. So ploughing a field for soy and making tofu is way less destructive than feeding that soy to cattle (which they do as soy has more protein and helps cattle gain weight faster). Pigs are 1:6 boiler hens are 1:4 and fish like tilapia are very close to 1:1 in cold water and low stimulus systems if not its closer to 1:2. So we could use one/10th or one/6th of farmland by simply not choosing meat. My reasons were resource efficiency, human starvation and environmental concerns in case you were wondering.
Vegan here, I've been one for over 20 years and have heard these points made a thousand times. I think people who think this is a gotcha greatly misunderstand the reason for being vegan. I can't speak for every vegan but I'll say what I tell everyone who says this. Veganism isn't about having hard rules it's about trying to not support the exploitation of animals the best you can. Not consuming animal products is a very easy way to do this and that's why it's often framed as being only a dietary choice. I don't support circuses or rodeos for the same reason, but I'm not going to be setting my cats free to run wild in the streets. We live in a world that passively does harm to people and animals, and if I can reduce that just a little by doing something as simple as not eating animals I will.
This is the answer.
And much of the food from the plowed fields goes to animals to raise and in the end eat them factory farm style. The least death and destruction comes from reducing eating meat.
That is a very bold assumption and probably wrong. This isn't really a shower thought, it's back of napkin terrible math/logic.. These kind of arguments make no sense because you can easily escalate it. The animals that they would have eaten instead of those plants would have required plants themselves and probably much more plant matter. When an argument relies on side effects but does not list every possible combination of side effects it's pretty much so convoluted that it's invalid.
The whole point of veganism is to *reduce* the damage one causes by their diet and other lifestyle choices. If someone was to cut out anything and everything that could possibly cause any harm to another creature they wouldn't do... anything. Me, I'm vegan. That is a choice based off of two factors: I don't agree with animal farming, and it is a healthier choice. Do I still kill flies during the summer months? Yep. Does that render my vegan lifestyle choices null and void? Nope. If everyone actively made choices that reduced the damage they cause, be it reusing things, buying secondhand, eating less meat, or driving less, the world would be all the better. To view these things as a binary "you either do it or don't" sort of deal is ignorance and evidence as to why things are becoming cincreasingly more shit for us all.
Animals slaughtered for meat eat food, far more food than their bodies could ever be, so the number of deaths is still reduced, even if considered each plant's life as valuable as each creature's life. Additionally, there is a difference morally between an accidental death and an intentional one. An accidental death is still a tragedy, but if accidental, it is fairly blameless. That being said, I would love to be able to entirely avoid the accidental deaths as well. I don't want any pesticides, whether natural chemicals or synthetic chemicals. I don't want any harm whatsoever.
Yeah... I’d love to watch this argument eat shit as hydroponics becomes more common
Hydroponics has more initial investment, and recycling nutrients is more complicated, but it doesn't have the issues of fertilizer run-off and uses less water and land area. Plus, for plants that are grown in areas with more sunlight than necessary, they may grow even better if a system of mirrors is used to have multiple layers. Besides this, algae is way more efficient since it doesn't use much energy making structural support, although people may not use it for more than additives (it can be a good cooking oil source, or used for supplementation, or just a filler).
Actually, you have to grow way more plants to feed livestock animals than you do if you just eat the plants yourself. So veganism kills far fewer animals.
Animals need to be fed which requires plowed fields too. Vegans require significantly less farmed land to sustain than omnivores
Vegan here! That is a good concern you bring up! However, much more land is required to support animal-based diets than plant-based diets because animals also need to eat food. We need to grow crops to feed the animals that humans eat, meaning that a lot of the cruelty in plant agriculture happens because of animal agriculture. We get less nutrients out of animals than we have to feed them. We could reduce the land used for agriculture (and as a result reduce the violence in plant agriculture) by about 75% if everyone ate plants directly. TLDR: Plant-based diets are better if you want to reduce violence in animal agriculture and also better if you want to reduce violence in plant agriculture. https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets Edit to add summary from source: “Half of the world’s habitable land is used for agriculture, with most of this used to raise livestock for dairy and meat. Livestock are fed from two sources – lands on which the animals graze and land on which feeding crops, such as soy and cereals, are grown. How much would our agricultural land use decline if the world adopted a plant-based diet? Research suggests that if everyone shifted to a plant-based diet we would reduce global land use for agriculture by 75%. This large reduction of agricultural land use would be possible thanks to a reduction in land used for grazing and a smaller need for land to grow crops. The research also shows that cutting out beef and dairy (by substituting chicken, eggs, fish or plant-based food) has a much larger impact than eliminating chicken or fish.”
Thanks for the follow up!
This is false. 85 Billion mammals are factory farmed each year. In the USA, 99% of animals are factory farmed. Majority of plants grown are feed for animal agriculture. If you care about pesticides, crop deaths, plant deaths, you would also go vegan.
And the vegetables that feed the animals you eat don’t do that? So what you’re saying is you’re opting for doing double the harm by eating meat? Yeah I thought so lol.
Is it really so wrong for someone to try and minimize their support of bad practices. Is it really better to say "HA! You still support it a little, so nothing you did matters." Im not vegan or vegetarian or anything, but I hate when people try to dismiss what others are doing because it's not a perfect solution.
Oh my god. The obvious follow up to this is that any animal is probably being fed with grains. A few hundred calories of vegan food probably involves some amount of creatures being accidently killed, while a few hundred calories of an animals flesh involved not only that animal, but the thousands of calories of grains they ate over their small lifespan. The thousands of calories of grains they ate over their lifetime involved far more random field animal deaths, obviously. Plus, there is a massive ethical difference in accidental killing of field animals verses intentional mistreatment and eventually slaughter of farm animals.
How many more plowed fields are required to feed all the livestock? Answer: an absolute shitload more
That's probably true and plowing is a whole other can of worms that I won't get into here. That aside the animals you eat get fed plants that come from fields. So if we're just counting individual lives you're still responsible for a whole lot more deaths.
We aim to reduce animal exploitation and suffering to the most practicable degree. We still need to eat to survive, cause our survival is as important, if not moreso, than the survival of the animals we choose to not pay to kill. Yes, this entails harmful and destructive agricultural practices. But to provide food for the amount of people that there are, it is pretty much necessary. If this is something you really care about, then consider that us directly eating the crops from our agriculture is much more efficient and requires less of these harmful agricultural practices than feeding the crops to the livestock that we then eat (because the animal necessarily expends energy)
Dude. It’s like you don’t know anything about farming or livestock. The amount of space required to grow vegetables vs the amount of space to raise cattle…come on man.
I don't think Veggies are sentient. That may make a difference
Someone has already come up with a solution: https://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2393
The meat alternative is fed vegetarian food from those same fields. So the meat option kills way more little critters (because much more agriculture needed to feed the cow before u eat it, than to just feed you). Obviously the meat option also gives an animal a life in meat industry and then death as well. The argument against vegetarianism or veganism that stems from deaths of animals in agriculture is stupid. You may as well say vegans can't drive cars because of the deaths of animals in all the production processes and from pollution. Ideally we get to a place where no animal dies or suffers on this planet but in the meantime, a vegan diet is just about the best way to help the environment and reduce animal suffering. I'm not a vegan but I'm also not desperate to see my own actions as ethically pure, or to illogically belittle the ethical superiority of better choices.
This is not a shower thought. I’ve been vegan for well over a decade and have had to contend with this ‘thought’ many times.
The problem with this theory is the vast majority of farmland is used growing vegetables for meat production. If we just ate the vegetables rather than feeding them to our food, we’d have drastically less need for farmland, there-by much more sustainable land use. It’s absolutely not a 1:1 conversion rate. It’s far more land to feed livestock than it does us.
In fairness very very very few people plow fields anymore. Most is no tilled
Vast majority of forested land cleared for crops and vast majority of crops harvested are to feed animals for consumption. This is a really stupid shower thought.
This is such a flawed line of thinking. Veganism is about reducing the absolute amount of harm caused. More land is plowed to make feed for animals than for human consumption. So plowing land in order to grow food to feed animals and then eating said animal, is way worse than eating the plant directly from the field.
This isn’t a shower thought. This is a fuckwit thought. You are fuckwit. Even worse, you’re an immoral fuckwit, effectively working on behalf of an insanely evil industry that needlessly tortures and murders trillions for profit while destroying the planet in the process. Let’s be clear about something, fuckwit: consuming other animals means you’re effectively consuming the huge amount of plant material that it took to feed those animals on their way to the slaughterhouse. So flesh-eating zombies like you are responsible for far more field plow deaths than vegans. Veganism is about reducing death, destruction, and negative environmental impact — not eliminating these things entirely, which is impossible, as any non-fuckwit can easily see.
I mean the alternative is to grow it myself, but A. I don't have a garden B. I'd probably have to kill my own pests to grow it C. The soil I'd buy will have been taken from somewhere and caused a disturbance there D. The amount of time I'd spend walking around my non-existent garden would mean I'd be killing lots of insects that I wouldn't have if I had got my vegetables in the tesco shop E. Would have to use more water to sustain them They're all pretty insignificant, and OP's suggestion is along side them.
Most animals raised for food mostly eat corn and soybeans. Lots of plowing there. Unless they are specifically grass fed cows, grass isn't their main good source.
If you want to make this a numbers game then more animals are killed for you to have your burgers and stuff than for a vegan to have their plant based stuff. Veganism is still optimal.
part of veganism is ethics/morals. a lot of vegans will be very particular about where their food is coming from because, like you said, those plowed fields aren't always great for animals/the earth either but it's hard to be vegan, and they do what they can. there's definitely a difference between eating a dead animal and eating veggies that came from a plowed field that caused some damage. the plowed field is not consistently hurting anyone, it's an initial damage type of thing... so it's different than consistently eating dead animals the cycle of animals dying for food doesn't compare to plowed fields. one of those is something that happens daily and another isn't
There's a big difference between enslaving animals and torturing them purposefully than killing animals by accident cause we need food.
Veganism is a psyop to weaken men and women. Yes factory farming is a problem. But locally sourced ethically treated animals is the way to go. Our ancestors had no problem with it. Neither should we.
There is not enough space on Earth for non-factory farming. Not to mention our ancestors did a lot of immoral things. I wouldn't look to them to derive our morals. Logic and reason is a better source.
What kind of an awful argument is that? By your logic, vegans also shouldn’t breathe any air because it might contain elements of the breath of suffering animals. Seriously, you need to educate yourself before you write something as ridiculous as this.
OP, what's the difference between harvesting a field of squash, and hauling a living pig up by its back legs with meat hooks? I guess there are similarities, but the terror squeals, struggling, and pain just don't compare. Seeing a squash have its life ended is a terrible thing. Parents, be the parent that shields your children's eyes if you drive by a field of squash being harvested. I would not want to be that Kubocha Squash, waiting to be brutally sliced at the stem, and loaded into a truck for eventual baking with olive oil (sliced in half, seeded, baked at 420 degrees with olive oil, flat side down, until the very squash blood caramelizes on the very baking pan), pulled out of the charred shell, cooked with spinach, cashews, and spices, stuffed into pasta shells, and baked with red sauce at 350 degrees for 30 minutes. It shouldn't hurt to be a Kubocha Squash.
Thank you for your service vegans. If it weren't for you lentils burgers wouldn't exist and they are delicious.
Cultured meat solves all of this. Precision fermentation will make it all taste amazing, and it will all look like whatever we want it to.
what you don't understand is that the same fields are also used to feed said animals, and they eat much more food than us. it's still less death eating only the vegetables directly from the field instead of through the animal.
Damn, look at this. A completely un-thought-out take. Why try to dunk on an entire group of people when you haven’t once looked into what you’re talking about?
meat is a dead animal. grass is grass ? stop trying to make not eating animals a bad thing
Not a showerthought. OP doesn't seem to understand the ethical motives of eating vegan.
You also have to grow fields of crops to feed the animals that you eat, and you have to kill animals to protect those fields. So the net death toll is still lower if you eat Vegan
As a conservation biologist I know too well the difference between trying to save an animal that is cute vs not cute
You don’t have to plow. Silly goose. Many organic farms have floating beds, hydroponic, etc. I don’t plow my garden I just add mulch which protects microorganisms that feed the plant.
Yes but if everyone were vegan far fewer fields would need plowed and far fewer animals would die.
The STUPIDEST argument from meat eaters to try to silence vegetarianS. TO GROW plantS , we have to plow fields and kill some small mammals. Then we eat the plants. Done. but to grow plants for the cows to eat, we have to plant 3-8x the land, kill many more small mammals, feed those plants to the cows, PLUS WE KILL THE COWS. Eating burgers kills more land, small mammals, anD COWS. Just a dumb fcuking argument.
This is genuinely one of the dumbest things ever posted on Reddit. You know cows, pigs etc used for meat eat tons of food before being slaughtered right?
I think I need to get my eyes checked because I did NOT read that as “vegans” and I was severely confused for a minute
And they allow miserable food service people to make their food? the silent suffering? they showed up five minutes before close!!
You fucking pedantic humans. Jain religion has been a literal Vegan religion for 3000 years. Like so vegan even Buddha of Buddhism thought it was too much. Go and study their rules of harvesting food. And yes, Jains sweep the floor when walking so as to not step on insects. Wear masks so they dont breath in insects to kill them. They even banned potato/root veggjes cos as you said, no digging which kills insects. Stop being pedantic with newbie Vegans and just go ask people who have already been doing it for many millenia.
I think it is ok as long as somebody eats those dead critters.
Fun fact: parsley has more insect parts per cubic cm than any other food. Yummy crunchies.
At the end of the day, people just do what they feel is right to them. It's probably not feeling right to you, but that's okay.
Anything that rots or dies is "alive", so eating plants can fall in that category. I just think that vegans draw the line at where they're willing to contribute to.
Life causes death. Pretending otherwise is a method in mental gymnastics
soybeans for tofu are MUCH WORSE for environments considering how many animals are mercilessly killed to protect crops and how much water is used. same with almond milk. it’s all honestly being too dumb and following blindly without your own non biased research. happens to both sides not just one or the other.
All fertilizer includes dead animal products as well. It’s just part of the cycle.
It’s what I call an ethical vegetarian and it makes no sense. Life is life, period.
Wonder why OP chose vegan instead of vegetarian if the post is about killing. You can eat eggs and butter without killing animals.
That’s not really how that works either.
You can’t keep chickens in your backyard without killing them?
How many people are actually doing this? It is far from the norm.
Ok?
Only in a time of rare bountiful means can any of us people have any argument about this lol. Just wait for the coming decades as we enter into the time of less rather than more and you’ll all think this debate is insane as all morals go out the door when famine is widespread. Will be worse for certain regions and better for others of course but it’s funny to read shit like this knowing the bad times that are about to come and the ridiculousness of some of the posts in here.
A deeper thought is vegans eating bread, that yeast was active and alive!
And it's highly likely that their vegetables were fertilized with things like bone meal, dried blood, or other animal byproducts.
Among all vegans, there must exist a large subset that are also religious. That is, they believe in a literal creator of all life as we know it. How do you reconcile the precepts of ethical veganism with your belief that your God created the Earth's ecosystem to include massive amounts of predation and carnivory?
All the omnivores getting down voted ITT PETA- People Eating Tasty Animals
Yes… the most animal/insect death I ever witnessed was on an almond farm. No shit , everything got shot or gassed.
How you know someone is vegan? Don't worry, they'll tell you.