hey vegans, cool fact, plant based diets are vastly more efficient and effective at feeding people than meat based diets.
Meat consumes plants to exist, most of that energy is lost. Not so much with plants.
Just start telling people this shit lmao. Who cares about morality when you can pretend to be saving the environment instead.
You think they don’t? And environmentalism is also morality.
environmentalism is morality sure, but doesn’t it seem silly to use an appeal to morality to push for more morality.
Cool, but steak is my favorite animal.
true, cows are my favorite food.
Boobs are my favorite source of entertainment.
Wait… Nope, nothing to do with sustenance
nothing to do with sustenance
You think? I’m pretty sure that’s the purpose of boobs.
i thought it was for us to legislate female top wear?
I’m no vegan but that’s a common vegan talking point
It is, but many vegans also do really unhelpful things that are closer to trying to berate or shame people into not eating meat and it is obviously not effective.
Out of curiosity, how many people have you convinced to go vegan?
None. Why do I have to convince a single person to criticize an argument I don’t think is convincing?
Well, I guess I’m just not sure why you’re trying to give us advice about something you have zero experience with.
If I didn’t know better, I’d say that you don’t actually care what kind of approach is more convincing, and you’re just trying to tell us to shut up, or say things in a way that makes us easy to ignore.
You have no idea what you’re talking about at best, and realistically, you don’t even want us to be successful. So, thank you for your unsolicited advice on which tacts are unhelpful, but, just so you know, I will be promptly tossing it into the trash.
I have a lot of experience with people trying to convince me of things.
And you are welcome to take the advice I didn’t give to you in the first place and throw it in the trash.
I have a lot of experience with people trying to convince me of things.
how much experience do you have with people convincing you of things?
no arguments there
Hey non-vegan, fun fact: No one really cares when you tell them eating plants are more efficient.
Common responses include “bAc0Nnnnnn!” and “I’m gonna eat two times the amount of meat to make your efforts useless”.
hey non vegan vegan fun fact, you would be surprised at the sheer amount of consumption and productive the livestock sector of agriculture creates.
Likewise you could easily just respond to the last line with “you can’t take away my gas stove, i’m just going to burn gas lamps in my home now” and get a little bit eepy and sleepy due to all the buildup of combustion products inside your home.
Amazing strawman at the end there.
It really isn’t. I know plenty of anti-vegans who react in that manner.
Hi friend, I propose you try an experiment: post a small handful of anonymous comments on the Internet, try to make them benign as possible but casually slip in an acknowledgement that you are vegan. Something along the lines of “God that recipe looks amazing, but I think I might swap out the beef broth for veggie broth as I am vegan” like I said the point of this experiment is to say something completely as benign and inoffensive as possible.
Once you post sit back and wait for the responses to roll in. You will likely find that while not every time, it is incredibly common for people to send you pictures of bacon, and an abundant of angry responses to the mere offhand mention of the word.
I sincerely wish it was a straw man fallacy, but it unfortunately is a exceedingly common response to the word.
The animal industry feeds the plants as much as the plants feed the animals. I’m not sure how vegans feel about synthetic fertilizer like miracle grow, but that’s what will have to be used in place of manure if the meat industry goes away.
Many of the organic crops grown use animal manure to fertilize the plants. I know you can use seaweed and other plants for compost(weeds are already composted back in via tilling, seaweed requires harvesting from the ocean or long distance shipping from farms), as well as cycling crops to prevent nutrient deficiency…
BUT manure doesn’t just add nutrients. It adds beneficial bacteria that helps keep the soil healthy and make the nutrients bioavailable to plants. It conditions the soil for water retention, and helps break up clay soil and add organic matter to sandy soil.
Will vegans keep animals just for manure? Or will organic lables on food be less important? Are we going to start scraping the forests for leaves to chop up an add to farm soil? That can’t be good for forests though. I guess I’m just confused about how to maintain large farms without access to large amounts of manure.
Veganic agriculture is already a thing, and it works fine.
an interesting idea, but anything that decays and “composts” can be used as a fertilizer so.
This includes things like organic scraps, you don’t just have to use animal shit. Although it’s a pretty good one if you have access to it.
I think personally, we should move to a more decentralized food production system, to help alleviate some of the costs of industrial agriculture, which are pretty heavy.
The ideal answer is compost, regenerative agriculture, and (better treated) human-sources waste.
Organic crop yields will almost certainly reduce a bit without animal waste fertilizer, but that is fine since crop consumption will fall by a greater amount due to not needing to feed a bunch of extra animals.
We humans shit as well
but much of the plant matter that animals eat is grazed or waste from some other agricultural product.
that can be true, but we also grow a substantial amount of feed for agriculture usage, even if it’s not local to us. A lot of alf alfa being grown is exported.
It’s all dependent on whatevers cheapest at the end of the day. And regardless of this fact, a lot of energy is still lost in this process, cows are a significant contributor to climate change, ironically.
There was a good discussion of this on Reddit recently. Sorry to link to Reddit, but it’s a good, topical post worth perusal.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Agriculture/comments/1dv7fw9/how_much_good_land_is_used_to_grow_food_for/
ETA:
We recommend four widely applicable high-impact (i.e. low emissions) actions with the potential to contribute to systemic change and substantially reduce annual personal emissions: having one fewer child (an average for developed countries of 58.6 tonnes CO2-equivalent (tCO2e) emission reductions per year), living car-free (2.4 tCO2e saved per year), avoiding airplane travel (1.6 tCO2e saved per roundtrip transatlantic flight) and eating a plant-based diet (0.8 tCO2e saved per year). These actions have much greater potential to reduce emissions than commonly promoted strategies like comprehensive recycling (four times less effective than a plant-based diet) or changing household lightbulbs (eight times less).
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541/pdf
yeah that pretty much checks out. The best solution to climate change is to kill shit like private jets and yachts. But that’s unlikely to happen.
The best solution to climate change is to kill shit like private jets and yachts.
I severely doubt those emissions are anything but negligible because there are so few yachts and jets.
Edit: Yeah, just downvoting is cheap, so here’s just a single statistic for you: https://ourworldindata.org/global-aviation-emissions
Total aviation is responsible for about 2.5% of worldwide carbon emissions. That’s all air travel, private jets included. While it’s obviously very popular to focus on the luxuries of the rich, it just won’t be effective to focus on those when fighting climate change, let alone being a solution as you claimed.
What’s an easier solution, in your opinion? Getting the ultra wealthy to give up their yachts and jets (by getting rid of the ultra wealthy entirely, which also addresses the evils of capitalism), or convincing hundreds of millions of people to change just about everything about the diet they’ve been eating for tens of thousands of years?
That’s actually a good question. Considering the political power the ultra-rich wield, I’m not sure. But I think we should focus what brings the most bang for the buck.
all of agriculture is only about 20% of our GHG emissions. cows are a fraction of that… there are definitely bigger issues.
as for the alfalfa, it’s also a small fraction of global crops. 2/3 of all crop calories go to humans with only 1/3 going to livestock… this includes about 70% of the weight of the global soy crop (after we have pressed it for oil), as well as fodder like corn stalks. we basically fed livestock trash and get food. it’s a pretty good deal.
all of agriculture is only about 20% of our GHG emissions. cows are a fraction of that… there are definitely bigger issues.
obviously, but in terms of livestock, cows are pretty significant.
30% of all global stock going to feed is a pretty large percentage of global crop production.
I think it’s probably fine. it will work itself out when the workers of the world organize as a class, take possession of the means of production, abolish the wage system, and live in harmony with the Earth.
We don’t base policy on some chuds thoughts
I’m quoting the iww constitution, so I don’t know what chud you’re talking about
i think it’s a lot more likely to work out better in a highly decentralized system, i’m not much of a commie myself personally, as i prefer to live outside the bounds of normalcy, and unless i get a lot of say in the commie meetings i’m not sure i can justify existing in that society lol.
the iww encourages your autonomy
TBF land clearance for grazing land is a catastrophic issue for the environment and going on in places like the Amazon rainforest.
Some ecosystems are naturally evolved to supporting grazing species like the grasslands of North America which was once home to millions of Buffallo but that’s not true of most land currently used for grazing.
land clearance for grazing land is a catastrophic issue for the environment and going on in places like the Amazon rainforest.
absolutely. I have some ideas about what to do about it, but none of them involve buying beans
It’s at a point where I’m all for a UN resolution to end land clearance in locations like the Amazon Rainforest, to be enforced by lethal means if necessary.
Billions of lives may depend on securing such important ecosystems.
I don’t have any influence with the un.
The UN doesn’t even have any influence with the UN. Even if I supported lethal enforcement of environmental protections (which I do in many cases), the UN’s idea of enforcement is a kindly-worded letter. If the USA doesn’t back something the UN has no power. And the USA is one of literally only two countries in the entire world that don’t recognize access to healthy food as a human right.
Haha not saying you do but it’s what I would like to see happen
Carnivores eat animals that eat a lot more plants than humans could ever eat.
That’s why I only eat baby animals. They only drink milk, which hurts no one.
Those poor cats. Vegans shouldn’t be allowed to own meat.
I am mostly vegan and my cat and dog eat mostly meat 🖕
Vegan is a philosophy, not a diet. The word you’re looking for is plant-based, not vegan.
A vegan wouldn’t buy leather shoes or woolen sweaters. Someone on a plant-based diet would.
Sure, but the average person does not know or care about the distinction. It’s much easier to explain this way. I’ll see if I can incorporate this terminology instead next time though
That you for being reasonable and not insane.
vegans care about animals. I assure you it is the norm
Yep. My vegan brother has two dogs and three cats and has no problem giving them meat (or meat-based food anyway) as part of their diet.
It’s not some universal idea that vegans will be okay with keeping meat-eating pets but refuse to give them that meat.
No it’s not a universal idea, but it does happen and it is animal abuse when it does.
I agree with you, but this is definitely not an argument you want to go into because it caused an absolute massive shitshow. Check out the top pinned post on Lemmy.world.
I did see that shitshow you refer to.
I realized that was likely true, but the ones who aren’t are just so damn loud about it.
I have met far more people complaining loudly about vegans than I have loud vegans
Great idea, let’s stop re-homing rescue animals shall we?
Dogs taste better anyways. Can’t beat a good Elwood’s steak!
That website is confusing, it doesn’t let you order any dog meat. It also seems to assume I would have a problem with the product? Is that a strategy to make me want it more?
Yeah that’s an obvious troll response you vеgаn’s use
People are well aware of it
Doing this sort of “eating a cow is no more ethical than eating a dog” thing isn’t necessarily untrue (although ethics are, of course, a subjective thing) but it does not really convince people not to eat meat. If you are going to argue from an ethics of killing and eating an animal angle, talk about why it is cruel to kill and eat animals that most people who eat meat are used to eating.
I always fall back on the concept of graphing how delicious the animal is vs how much of an asshole it is. Ducks? Absolutely delicious and raging assholes; they are the perfect meal. Dogs? Too sweet to ever try and on the negative side of the asshole graph. Cats? Rather asshole but not sure how they taste…
Maybe you’re joking but I have seen people say this seriously so I’ll respond seriously. Determining which conscious beings to inflict pain and suffering onto based on characteristics they were born with through no choice of their own is pretty shitty.
I’m all for the most humane and ethical means of getting meat and the day I can get a steak that didn’t require a cow to die but is indistinguishable from the real thing I will absolutely switch over, but until then I’m going to enjoy delicious, delicious duck and not feel bad about. Wouldn’t eat a dog even in an apocalypse though.
Different people react to different things. It takes many approaches to reach multiple types of humans.
I personally reacted after months of being shown hypocrisy, with the tipping point being when I said there’s no problem with eggs and dairy before I was shown what the egg and dairy industries do.
Part of that process was really realizing, not just knowing but consciously thinking about and considering the fact that humans are also meat. I am meat. The cats I loved were meat. My human family is meat. It’s not okay to eat them in a sandwich. Why is it okay to eat strangers in a sandwich?
No one approach will work on every human, and many people take a lot of different approaches over time to really understand.
There’s a type of person that thinks Joe Rogan is clever because they agree with him.
Everything that is, is alive.
Yeah, that’s what most people don’t understand… People should do some shrooms/LSD to get out of their head and back to their heart.
This would solve most if not all the cognitive dissonance we strugle with every day…
Let’s assume for a moment that somehow your salad was conscious. That’s an even bigger reason not to eat an animal that has to be fed on plants for a long time.
Well a salad is made of cells that have responses to certain stimuli
The brain if you where to go and simplify it down to its most very basic layer is just responses to stimili
The brain is a collection of responses to stimuli that together create a kind of network that can respond to stimuli in complex ways
Plants are a collection of cells that respond to stimuli
So they very well will likely to be conscious on some level
The above comment is made of glyphs arranged to convey meaning. The Code of Hammurabi is made of glyphs arranged to convey meaning.
So the comment will very well be likely a significant contribution to human culture.
So the comment will very well be likely a significant contribution to human culture.
i think statistically it would be insignificant based on the sheer amount of written material out there, so it should actually be a function of how long the work is, plus how long it’s been around for, the longer it is, and the longer its been around for, the more complete of a historical document we have.
Or maybe its just a fundamental fact of life that something has to die in order for you to live and virtue signaling about the degree to which you participate in that death is a pointless exercise.
We as humans are blessed with the ability to choose how we interact with these “facts of life”.
Or maybe there’s happy middle where everyone can live comfortably while keeping the harm we cause at a minimum.
Or, at the most selfish, we could make sure we don’t kill ourselves this decade or the next.
This logic doesn’t make sense in any other context. Like, if I say we should try to reduce CO2 levels in the atmosphere, you could point out that emitting CO2 is a fundamental part of human life, so something something virtue signaling blah blah blah. Just because something is unavoidable to a certain degree doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to minimize it.
Ah yes, the old “I accidentally stepped on a fly, might as well exterminate the whole biosphere” defense
These arguments are exactly why people hate vegans. It’s nonsense.
Not only do you jump to an insane straw man. You showcase that you ignore a clear increasing contradiction around your world view and choose reactionary nothing.
If you care about life realize the harder question. If you care about the environment realize clear inefficiencues. Currently, you showcase nothing more than crude thoughtlessness.
I’m not a vegan but it’s foolish to think that vegans aren’t objectively correct. Let’s even say that plants are conscious beings on the level of cows or pigs. The conditions these plants are grown in are a million times better than that of the average factory farm animal. Additionally, in order to sustain ourselves on cows and pigs, exponentially more of these conscious plants need to be killed to fatten the conscious animals we are eating.
If we just ate the plants instead there would be several orders of magnitude less suffering in the word, antibiotic resistant bacteria would be a less immediate issue, a significant amount of our greenhouse gas emissions would disappear, and we’d all probably be healthier to boot.
Yes, something has to die in order for any organism to continue it’s existence. Let’s not pretend that only plants dying aren’t a better alternative in every way to animals dying in order to further our collective existence. You accuse vegans of being reactionary but your comment smacks of knee-jerky defensiveness for something you seem to understand is wrong
Devil’s advocate: are they a million times better?
Monocultures, moldboard plowing destroying soil structure and creating an Ap horizon, organics depletion and excessive application of synthetic fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides…
Suspending any personal beliefs in the matter, it is truly easier to empathize with people, mammals, then others animals because we better understand their experience. We cannot understand the abstractions of a plant’s lived experience. Humans are only just starting to examine the intricacies of plant familial systems through root and mycorrhizal networks.
Fair enough. I’m not going to sit here and claim that out current agricultural structure is perfect or even ideal. I personally think a decentralized and highly local system of food production and distribution would be better for the products themselves as well as the environment, human health, and community strength. A million times better is hyperbole but I think it’s fair to say industrial agriculture is better for the plant than it’s equivalent for livestock.
Fertilizers aren’t great, pesticides aren’t great, soil erosion isn’t great. If we waved a magic wand and turned everyone vegan we would still see a net decrease in these harmful agricultural practices simply because people need less food than cows or pigs (among others), especially in the numbers were raising these animals in. If we’re going to care for the wellbeing of the plants we eat, it would still be better to stop raising animals for food from a purely mathematical perspective.
I also agree that animals are easier to empathize with, and as such, we may overlook other (possibly intelligent) forms of life as a consequence. Perhaps one day we will achieve a thorough understanding on the lived experiences of plants and that knowledge may create another paradigm shift. But we need a planet that is capable of sustaining life for that to happen. Reducing our collective meat consumption is one of the myriad tools we have to ensure that end. Sorry if I’m coming off as confrontational or anything. I’m sick and my brain is foggy so I wasn’t paying much mind to tone in this comment haha. Not trying to start shit or anything, just too lazy to edit
Not only do you jump to an insane straw man.
It wasn’t an insane strawman though? It was literally the argument they made. Something has to die for you to eat, therefore it doesn’t matter how many things you kill or how necessary those deaths are. The fact that you must kill something absolves you of any guilt for any amount of killing, is the ridiculous argument the person made (and which carnists often make) which we are making fun of for being obviously evil and wrong.
It is - it’s a super affirmative position. It takes an extreme position within the sphere it’s trying to criticize to make an exaggerated point to attack. It’s literally a classic strawman.
Your follow up is in the same vein. Its empty rhetoric
Lol I despise people not knowing what a strawman is. Go back to english class.
That’s called Reductio Ad Absurdum and is a valid, classic form of argumentation. If you take their premises to their logical conclusion, the result is absurd, so their premises must be false.
You don’t get to arbitrarily limit where a premise gets applied in order to pick and choose which conclusions to stand by. It isn’t a strawman to show that someone’s premises lead to conclusions that they would disagree with, that’s literally the point.
I’m not a vegan. Their argument was literally that morally there is no difference in the amount of death caused by any person for the purposes of consumption.
“our new cancer drug is 99% effective!”
“So it doesn’t work in 1% of cases? Then what’s the point, throw it away, we just have to accept that cancer is going to happen”
unless the point is that consciousness is not a disqualifying trait to become food
It wasn’t for the donner party.
Everybody needs to eat stuff. And if it is about reducing pain and having a better climate impact, you should plants all the way. A cow eats 50 times the amount of plants that it gives back in meat.
But it tastes better
Then raise a cow and kill it.
So the choice is meat or division of labor?
I don’t have the space for it, though I’d really like to have a little farm of my own.
Can’t, don’t really have the space for it, but you want to see my chickens and my ducks? Heck, you can have a picture of my dog, but I ain’t eating that.
but I ain’t eating that
Well, now I’m just disappointed that that’s just a vegan anti meat page.
I was more disappointed by the inconsistency of their claims.
On the front page, they said that, they gave their livestock the highest quality feed and kept them happy in an open environment.
Upon reading further, they changed their tone to keeping them in small cages, followed with stuff like, “don’t worry, you won’t taste it”.They, as a company, lost credibility. Definitely not buying from them.
I’m sure there’s poison that tastes good. Go eat that, Mr. Bigot.
I’m afraid I’m going to need a better argument than “I support killing animals because it makes me feel good.”
The cow meat is already there, in the store. Individual choices do not affect the climate. It is disrespectful to not consume it.
demand and supply are a thing
Do y’all not eat vegetables too?
Lemmyworld admins be like
Finally we have one thing to pin on like 3 weird vegans.
There’s no way this won’t restart the same argument with someone, huh? Top-tier shitpost, well done.
Thanks, I saw it come across my FB feed and knew what had to be done.
Let’s go to the extremes here: let’s say I’m a vegan, and love snakes and want my snake to not eat live mouse, do you think I can feed the snake vegan snake food?
This is all hypothetical as I dislike snakes and love bacon.
Let’s go to the extremes here: let’s say I’m a vegan, and love snakes and want my snake to not eat live mouse, do you think I can feed the snake vegan snake food?
well i mean, snakes are pretty fucking stupid. assuming the snake can digest it properly, and gets the required nutrients, it should be fine.
However we can also consider that mayhaps you live in NYC which has a rat problem, perhaps you should just feed your snake rats instead.
For no particular reason I’m heading to new York with my van of 1000 snakes.
whatever you do, don’t hold on to them, NYC has a snake under population, they desperately need more snakes. For uhhhh…
Snaking.
Veganism is a philosophy that calls for reducing harm to animals where practical and possible. You can conjure up whatever hypothetical you like, and if you specifically look for situations where harm to animals is unavoidable, then harm to animals will be… unavoidable, in those situations.
However, the vast majority of choices you’ll make that affect the lives of animals don’t happen within the context of these sorts of thoughts experiments. You don’t have to eat rats or bacon in order to survive. So it’s not really relevant, unless you’re actually in that sort of situation.
Personally, I simply wouldn’t keep a snake as a pet, and if I had one, I’d give it away. The delimma you’ve presented pits my feeling of wanting a snake against my ethical beliefs about not harming animals, and I consider that ethical belief to be more important. I could always just watch videos of snakes or go see them at the zoo or whatever. But if you did one of those, “You’re stranded on a deserted island with nothing to eat but a crate full of frozen steaks that washed ashore,” then sure, I’d prioritize my survival because it wouldn’t be practical to avoid them in that situation.
Well sure, but it was all a shit-post comment not actually meant to be taken seriously. I chose a snake for that very reason. Though your comment gave me a ton to think about and was well thought out! Bravo!
You can tweak this metaphor and get plenty of real life examples. Cats are obligate carnivores. There’s been lots of morons who went vegan and decided their cats could be vegan, too. I’ll leave guessing the outcome of that as an exercise to the reader.
I believe cats can’t properly digest the plants right? Probably kills them slowly.
I guess vegan cat owners are doing their Job and eradicating meat eaters from the world. /s
But for real, crazy that some did that to their pets.
“Plants rights activists” out in full force in this thread lol
Imo, the person in red looks much healthier.
Oh yeah, you fucking mouth breathers figured out Lemmy now?
Low effort
So were your female family members.
Lower effort.
^^ Lowest Effort.
That’s your highest effort one yet.
it’s not that they want to reduce plant suffering. it’s that they don’t care if plants suffer.
Siding with alt right trash like Joe Roegan to own the
libsvegans 😎Even a broken clock is right twice a day 😎
Not a digital one.
On the scale of clock tech, you think Rogan is a digital clock?
Excuse me while I scoff lmao, dude is a turd and ¾
Rogan would know. He has sucking down his own air biscuits so long he thinks they taste great.
