'On a vegan planet, Britain could feed 200M people’(theguardian.com) |
'On a vegan planet, Britain could feed 200M people’(theguardian.com) |
There is no sense in reducing the entire human experience to the lowest common denominator one in order to fit more people on the planet. If that's in your plans, you have a literal fight on your hands.
You could say, that the only way to have the entire human experience, is to eat carnivores (lions, anyone?).
With carnivore diet how many people you think the planet would support?
Would there be a place for yourself, now?
What about your children and children of your children? For wildlife? For nature?
Come on, grow up, people.
A line in the sand will be drawn somewhere, here's mine. I don't believe in infinite growth, it will result in us all drinking Soylent in cages.
The objective for me is to have a high quality of life for a reasonable number of people, not a low quality of life for the maximum amount possible.
Care to clarify what this means, if not a hyperbolic statement about how much you enjoy eating meat?
And yes, much fishing and aquaculture is presently unsustainable, but that can be said about agriculture too. It's not nearly an adequate argument for abandoning it entirely.
The argument for full veganism has to be that animals are people. Sustainability arguments won't cut it. If animals aren't people, you never get to full veganism, and if animals are people the sustainability argument is redundant anyway.
Eating fish is not sustainable. Overfishing and by-catch is a real problem (already more than 90% of sharks are exterminated), and in near future the seas could be totally devoid of life (except for jellyfish).
[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seaspiracy ]
> The argument for full veganism has to be that animals are people
I don't agree.
(1) We shouldn’t be cruel to animals, i.e. we shouldn’t harm animals unnecessarily.
(2) The consumption of animal products harms animals and Earth.
(3) The consumption of animal products is unnecessary.
(4) Therefore, we shouldn’t consume animal products.
Every time I see that title I ask myself why they didn't go for "conspirasea"
Again: No matter how bad harvesting of sea resources is, it can't be enough to abandon the oceans entirely, any more than the vast land-use impact of agriculture can be used as argument for abandoning agriculture.
- They are unnecessary. Humanity lived thousands of years without them.
- They harm billions of animals.
- But not using them would condemn us to a subsistence economy.
Edit: though for thought lmao
I don’t think I’ll ever be pure vegan but I’ll see how far I can get. Except for cheese as noted elsewhere, most meals are not lacking anything in terms of taste or satiation.
So - it's already true! We grow all the barley we need to sustain ourselves, and the rest is given over to other produce that provides the other nutrients we need, as well as some luxury. Yay vegan sustainability!
Instead it's the very wasteful food culture especially the west has, let's take steak as an example, for the around 5 steaks a family of 3 will eat you could easily make a stew for 4 with only 3 of those steaks.
Is it a waste for me to use a nice keyboard because a cheap 5 quid one will do?
Pretty sure the bigger problem is still the tons of food we throw away after going through everything to grow and ship it.
What's the current academic consensus on nutritional deficiencies of vegan / lacto-vegeterian diet?
I grew up on a lacto-vegeterian diet in India. I can't shake off the feeling that I would've had a better physique and growth if I had access to non-vegetarian food during my youth.
Regardless, the bigger problem is the lack of long term research we have on mindful omnivores vs mindful vegetarians vs mindful vegans, etc. Most comparisons are between mindful vegans and omnivores living off of incredibly poor diets.
You can't just leave meat and eat the rest and call it vegan diet. Most anti-vegans never had a real vegan meal. We all have an idea of vegan meals - but your mum's vegetable dish, which left you hungry after eating it, is not a real representative of vegan diet.
You'll just need to learn to cook differently - or better, what to substitute with what.
No need to invent new recipes. There is a lot of vegan meals in India, Mexico, Greece, Ethiopia, even your country for sure has some. Just make sure you eat diverse food and don't forget your B12 supplement (in vegan variant, because B12 is from earth bacteria or seaweed, not from meat).
When searching for a recipe (burger recipe) on the net, just add "vegan" (vegan burger recipe) and you'll certainly find something you'll enjoy.
[https://www.peta.org/living/food/vegan-egg-replacer-guide/ - 24 Ways to Replace an Egg] [https://html.duckduckgo.com/html?q=vegan%20replace%20meat] [https://html.duckduckgo.com/html?q=vegan%20milk%20recipes]
Conversation might be a bit limited though. The need to tell everyone you meet, within 5 minutes of meeting them, that you're a vegan would be removed.
Most people don't eat a "normal >healthy< diet with animal products". It takes as much work to have a meat based healthy diet as a vegetarian based healthy diet.
Meat eating is a complex matter - no time & space to cover it extensively here.
As I'm convinced, without forests the water cycle gets disrupted and the climate won't be able to support life as we know it [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKL40aBg-7E - The Biotic Pump: How Forests Create Rain].
With cows, there is not enough land to even have forests.
And if we can agree that we don't need cows and dairy (plants can replace it easily), why not also remove all the suffering that's connected to the meat industry?
Sorry for the detour.
Most other vegan alternatives aren't good, but they are toleratable. The vegan cheeses i tried so far however were absolutely atrocious.
So I've been making my own. Better quality, better price, better taste compared to the supermarket stuff.
Cheese [https://thehiddenveggies.com/how-to-make-vegan-cheese-provol... - from coconut milk], yoghurt [https://www.spoonfulofkindness.com/how-to-make-vegan-yogurt/ - soya, cashew, almonds, coconut, oats, chickpea], and butter [https://veganheaven.org/recipe/vegan-butter/, https://lovingitvegan.com/homemade-vegan-butter/ - with olive oil, not canola].
But nobody likes to eat baked vegetables and porridge all the time. Just because we have meats, milks and cheeses, it does not mean we're after the taste. We're after variety in taste and structure. We also have favorite foods from our time not being vegans, and recreating them in plant-based version is satisfying. And no, it does not taste 100% like the "real" thing. If it would, some (I) would not eat it.
And plant-based meat does not have to be frankenfood [1] [2]. Take some plant-based protein (wheat, peas, what have you), marinate it in some vegetable broth and soya sauce, maybe color it with beet root, and you've got perfectly healthy meat replacement [3].
[1] https://www.peta.org/living/food/meat-contamination/ - Meat Contamination [2] https://sogoodsoyou.com/6-lessons-eating-plant-based-dr-greg... - The best way to minimize your exposure to industrial toxins may be to eat as low as possible on the food chain, a plant-based diet”. Pollutants that find their way into the soil will eventually work their way up the food chain. When you eat meat from an animal, you must consider the thousands of pounds of (potentially contaminated) plants it consumed before being slaughtered. Avoid these pollutants entirely by eating lower on the food chain [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yY2YN6krVtk - Washed Flour Seitan Recipe from Start to Finish
Solution is not to avoid fiber, but to add it to your diet progressively. There is a plethora of health problems connected to the lack of fiber in one's diet. I've found that's best to start adding it after few days of water fast, when the "bad bacteria" is weakened.
I don't feel satistied after rice too (and don't eat almost no pasta), I think that fiber & some proteins are necessary for satiety when on plant-based diet.
> soaking beans the proper way and changing the water at least 3 times (imagine the footprint!)
"The amount of water used for meat production in just 35 hours could provide drinking water for everyone on earth for a year." [0]
> I cannot imagine how these carb-heavy foods are better for the environment
Plant based food are. There is enough evidence and scientific consensus.
> what's better - to raise farm animals humanely and allow them to be alive or not allow them to ever exist
We've stolen living space from wild animals and decreesed their diversity - 100 years ago humans and cattle were 2% of weight of the total biomass of land mammals. Now it's about 96%. [0] In other words, we've destroyed the natural habitat and countless animal species, with tens of thousands more threatened by extincion, and replaced them with farm animals, just for our food preferences. [1]
> Even in nature, those animals would have been eaten by carnivores - I don't see myself eating a cat, but I do eat prey animals.
Without us there would not be so many farm animals (obviously). The lion has no other option than to eat other animals. We've got plenty options ourselves, just the will and/or knowledge is missing.
[0] https://www.theworldcounts.com/challenges/consumption/foods-... - Meat production water usage [1] https://xkcd.com/1338/ - Land mammals [2] https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets [3] https://ourworldindata.org/meat-production
I probably don't understand your point (sorry english is not my first or second language).
At this moment we're seriously overfishing our oceans and killing it's population, that's what i have beef with (pun intended).
So your argument is - let's continue fishing?
> any more than the vast land-use impact of agriculture can be used as argument for abandoning agriculture
I'm arguing for changing agriculture (or better land management practices), not its abandonment.
Totally agree.
Cca 75% of pesticides/herbicides are used for meat & dairy production (we need 75% of agriculture land for it).
> They harm billions of animals.
And they harm people, too. Pesticide bioaccumulation in milk has been linked to Parkinson's disease, for example.
> But not using them would condemn us to a subsistence economy.
I'm not sure that's true.
There is a lot of regenerative agriculture styles not needing pesticides/herbicides. Current agriculture practices are oriented on mass scale and low prices - when you modify that need, you can have much greater yields, but have to change your way of thinking about it.
One example (sorry, have to return to work process). We've all seen the large fields of wheat, so large, you can see the earth curvature. And not a single tree in sight.
If you remove all the nature, tile it, seed large swaths of land with a monoculture, you remove a place for wildlife to live in.
Without predators (foxes, owls) your crop gets all eaten by mice, which overpopulate easily. So you have to use pesticides (which we then eat in our food & drink in our water).
If you have a monoculture, then bugs easily propagate and there is nothing to stop them and you'll have a large loses. But if you stop planting monoculture (maybe alternating rows of crops with rows of trees, and some bushes & flowers between them), bugs will have harder time to infect whole harvest and there is enough natural predators from the bug world to take care of them.
Biodiversity is the key.
[https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8969332/ - The Biggest Little Farm, sustainable farm on 200 acres outside of Los Angeles talks in some lengths about this] [https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/may/07/secret-w...] [https://www.agricology.co.uk/field/farmer-profiles/iain-tolh... - a single person from previous article]
But for the sake of the argument let's say you are right. I'm not as interested in the pesticides example as in knowing how much are you willing to sacrifice in order to follow that logic. Let me rephrase my question then.
- Having more than 2 kids per couple is unnecessary (even less than that for some time).
- Each extra human consumes resources necessarily damaging the animals and the earth.
Would you pass a law banning having children whenever the birth rate surpasses 2?
I've read a lot about alternative agriculture systems and methods. Maybe that's where my optimism comes from.
> the figure of 75% it is not that simple
I know that 75% is not so simple. But meat industry needs cca 75% of the agriculture land and meat is produced mostly by feeding the animals seeds and vegetable oils, so ... yes, it's a guess, but if we'll account for other stuff, like antibiotics ...
> conformed by not edible material that would have to be produced anyway
The ruminants supply a fraction of our nutritional needs, so I would argue, that we don't need them and that we can switch to more sustainable (less land expensive) sources of food. I would return that "non-edible" areas into forests for wildlife/biodiversity, which they were previously and which could even reverse our climate/extinction events currently happening.
Other non-consumable material could be composted and/or left in the fields as a mulch. Exposed soil kills microbes/fungi in the soil.
> Would you pass a law banning having children
No, I would not, because I now know that there is better way.
That population is still growing is a result of our exploitation of poor countries, poverty, a lack of education, and our religious and governmental practices. As we see in western countries, the developed and educated countries have a tendency to stabilize their population.
So the current growth will stop on its own, in time. But we have to make sure that we set the correct example for the new billions, or we'll together eat the Earth dry, till nothing than deserts will remain.
I said: you don't want to cut out ALL agriculture, even though a big part of present agriculture may be unsustainable.
So why do you want to cut out ALL fishing and fish farming? I know the answer is that you're a vegan, but that doesn't cut it if you want to convince those who care about sustainability.
So if there wasn't a better way you'll do it?
But I think that human civilizations does not have the right to live to the detriment of wild animals or that we have the right to destroy nature completely, just because we love our current food so much.
We don't even have enough room to supplement the current population on western version of meat-eating diet. We already use more land for beef production, than we have forests.
> until we have tens of billions of humans
Agree, we have to abandon our current notions of growth, if we want to preserve life for future generations. On our current path we're going to hell (too many things to enumerate here).
> a high quality of life for a reasonable number of people
Plant-based diet means a higher quality of life for everyone - people, animals, wildlife.
I for one would rather have more forests, than beef burger packaged in plastic.
If you think that we handle animals humanly, please see Dominion (2018) movie [https://www.dominionmovement.com/watch]. If you can watch it till the end and still have the same opinion about putting meat above your taste buds, please, let me know. You'd be the first.
I believe your debating partner is presenting false dichotomies regarding resource consumption and distribution.
That's why they create throwaways. They know they're wrong.
Where is the evidence that vegan/vegetarian diet is beneficial? I've never been more depressed and tired then when I've tried to go all vegan.
Of course if there's zero benefit then we should expend no cost on something. You may as well argue that we don't need literature, art, friends and family, freedom, sex, etc. It's just your brain cells and neurotransmitters, right.
If you don't care about eating meat, that's cool. I'm glad - genuinely - it's scarce, so the more of you there are, the better off I am.
Cheers.
I watched it and it didn't change a thing. I used to behead chickens to help grandma back in the days. Thinking that a video will suddenly make me a soylent chugging vegan is nothing short of religious zealotry.
As a city boy I was chasing my screaming village nephews with a rabbit eye all over the grounds.
I've spent few summers around cowhouse and young calfs, "helping" my aunt take care of them.
I've killed and cleaned few fish for christmas.
The animals I watched killed were living good life and there was no suffering at the end.
So I always had an image in my mind of animals living in green fields, and then miraculously and humanly killed in an instant.
But I've never been around slaughterhouse or in a highly industrialized meat production facility. Even now many people in cities don't know where milk comes from (yes, they know it's from cows, but they don't know that you have to artificially inseminate the cow and take away the calves, and they never heard them crying for days).
The amount of suffering, brutality and aggression of slaughterhouse staff, the supposedly human ways of killing our food, the long, painful and stressful process of killing, the amount of screaming of distressed animals, skinning of alive animals - documented in the Dominion (2018) movie - I was not prepared for that.
But that's not what made me vegan. I've seen it long after I've become vegan.
I'm not advocating for soylent (soylent green is people, anyhow).
But it is an argument for changing our practices, because it shows that propaganda of meat industry (happy cows & meals in burger joints, pictures of cows grazing in the fields on supermarket shelves, etc.) is just a big lie. And that we simply don't know how to kill painlessly.
Few quotes:
If you visit the killing floor of a slaughterhouse, it will brand your soul for life. [Howard Lyman]
If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be a vegetarian. [Paul McCartney]
Those who purchase meat, fur, and leather have no right to be shielded from the sights and sounds of the slaughterhouses from which these products were produced. [Peter Singer]
I reject that. I've spent my life outcompeting others in order to ensure that this is not the case - if you want to eat bugs, crack on. Meat could cost 10x what it does and I'd still smash it on the daily.
Collectivism results in a world I and many people I know don't want to live in, so we reject it.
And yeah, we have to resist it quite harshly, because there are a lot of you guys who'll try and impose it on us via force. Good luck.
>So I always had an image in my mind of animals living in green fields, and then miraculously and humanly killed in an instant.
Now this is something I haven't heard before from a vegan. Does this mean that in principle, you'd have no problems eating an animal you are 100% sure died in a dignified, painless way because you killed it that way?
The idea of animals happily living on the farm somewhere and their painless/swift death is a part of the lie. The reality ... is of course much, much worse.
I've become vegan because of other people (not enough space for everybody to eat same amount of meat as westerners do), because of the loss of biodiversity (such shame to erase so many "cumulative billions of years of dna code generation") and because of meat production's adverse effects on the environment.
Health and moral aspects came later, for me.
Now that I know (and verified it myself) that we the people in fact don't need animal products to be healthy, that quite the opposite is true, that we don't need to cause unnecessary suffering for our own livehood, I'm not interested in eating animal products anymore.
It may change if our civilization collapses. For now ... with the plants available ... no, thank you.