abraxas @ abraxas @lemmy.ml

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2 yr. ago

Really? They have almost every hallmark of a bad-tasting meat. Highly muscular, non-herbivorous diet, etc.

I mean, I'd still try it.

In fairness, I've got too many emergency workers in my family not to draw the line at fully blocking thoroughfares. Can you look an EMT in the eye who has had a patient die while their ambulence couldn't get through protestors to the hospital and insist you're in the right? Happens more than you'd want to know. Can't find statistics, but googling it shows just page upon page of different incidents, and unfortunately most of the time shit like that happens it isn't published since it's all HIPAA-complicated to discuss that stuff.

You want to inconvenience someone walking into a Macdonalds? Go ahead. But keep the artery roads clear. It's not about convenience, it's about shutting down life-saving infrastructure. Those assholes that cemented themselves to 93N in Boston 5 years back didn't earn any sympathy from anyone, even their own cause.

To simplify, the only way to get me not to stand beside you in defending your human rights is if you're recklessly taking away someone else's.

Yeah, in my state when you win they have a picture of you holding a check that airs on rotation on every lottery machine for months.

My wife's best friend won $1M and everyone recognize her at all the bars because of it. She got the last laugh because she blew all that money and now nobody can get any of it out of her.

At this point, you're just trolling. You literally pretending me using a smiley appropriately disqualifies me to be taken seriously. I have no choice but to categorize you with the guy on the subway who tells me I'm going to hell for not accepting his god.

Currently 75% of the product grown is for animal food.

You're representing false data and I have already cited proof otherwise. Show me a study or reference that says more than 20% of cow food is edible, or please stop replying to me.

Grass fed is less than 10% even in the USA, and all give extra feed

Grass-fed is the implication that cow ONLY eats grass. Per my cited data, 46% of all food eaten by livestock is grass and leaves. But animals that eat 46% grass and leaves are not considered "grass-fed". The term "grass-fed" requires the cow eat 100% forage after milk-weaning.. There is an ocean between being "Grass-fed" and "eating human-edible products". A cow that eats 0% edible products is still not "grass-fed" if they consume crop-residue.

Now that I have shown you actual facts, I'm going to find out if you're spreading propaganda or actually care about saying true things. AT this point, you HAVE TO KNOW that the idea 75% of crops is grown solely for animal food is fabricated. Only 36% of TOTAL crop calories (not even just edible calories) go to livestock, and a massive majority of that is inedibles.

So please, stop repeating lies that I have shown are wrong. If you can't defend veganism with the truth, stop defending to me.

Um... That's bullshit. People who care about animals claiming veganism will kill animals is yet another valid reason to not be a vegan.

You seem to be taking a hard-right on topic. I'm not sure this next gishgallop is meaningful to me because I'm not sure what you are trying to get out of this.

If you're trying to convince me or anyone else to become a vegan, you really need to find reasons that are topical to why they reject veganism. As someone who is aware of people being injured in plant farm accidents and who buys local so doesn't contribute to any of the above, this really feels like a desperation move on your part. Just keep throwing things till something sticks? If you're really convinced you're right, maybe you should stick to your guns and a single topic?

You don’t have to see non human animals as living beeings, even it you think they are just things, you could care about the humans involved.

I do see the animals as living beings. I also care about the humans involved. I have put time and money into fighting for animal rights and safety in industry in general. But if I'm not going to convince you to stop eating vegetables based on unsafe and unfair labor/purchasing from farms in third world countries, you're not going to convince me to stop eating local meat because of a single kid dying in a massive factory-farm plant for a company that doesn't even serve my area.

Do you have studies that ALL plant farms are always safer than all animal farms? Because as far as I'm aware, plant farmers have one of the world's most dangerous jobs in terms of deaths and on-site accidents (8th most deadly, but who is counting? :) ). Yeah, they like to combine the numbers, but the #1 cause of injury and death (by a large margin) are tractors, which are used for plants and not animals.

By your logic, why exactly should I not be eating meat exclusively?

EDIT: Interestingly to my complaints about logistics, delivery drivers have a higher death toll than farmers. For everyone injured or killed in your articles linked above, there are several people dying delivering frozen tofu cross country to people who have been convinced they shouldn't be eating the local chicken.

The ACFA link you sent doesn't seem to say what you referenced, that I could find. In fact, I've never seen anyone say that cattle is fed decent corn in any stage of life except "finishing" (which reduced gaminess), and even then 80% is the high end.

A more accurate number is that 86% of a an animal's diet is human-inedible (see below), roughages and byproducts. That number CAN easily be moved closer to 100% at the cost of gaminess, but I have had beef that was not "finished" and it was ok. I'm definitely ok sacrificing a little corn to get the improved flavor.

Note the 86%? That's animals in general. If you focus on cows, that number crosses to 90%. And if we're talking all non-vegan products, MILK (for those not allergic to it like myself) is incredibly nitritious compared to the total potential human nutritional value of a dairy cow's intake.

Is the waste product of corn and soy included in these numbers?

Since I cannot seem to trace your references, I'm not sure. But it's covered in the numbers I linked. Every single reputable or researched reference I have ever seen on the topic (as well as the actual cattle ranches I've lived near) put a bare minimum of 85% of a cow's diet as inedibles. And why would it be anything else? Those inedibles are dramatically cheaper than buying edible corn.

...and stepping back, I'd like to point out that we're discussing the paltry percent of some of the least nutritionally valuable crops in the world are eaten by cows, who by any honest analysis produces one of the most nutrious staple foods known to man.

I think if you’re going to get PTSD from killing an animal then you shouldn’t eat meat

PTSD is a reaction to trauma, not a measurement for whether something is ethical. I have a MASSIVE problem with that idea. Sounds like this isn't about anything rational, just an excuse to discourage people from eating meat.

And PTSD is often about a situation and not just something in that situation. You can see a dead body without getting PTSD, but if it's your best friend hanging from a rafter, a little different. Ditto with animals. I know at least one person (alluded above or elsewhere) who got PTSD by being very impressionable and young and watching very specific documentaries about animals dying on a day she was also sick. I'm sure I could come up with an animal-kill scenario that would give most who experienced it PTSD. That doesn't mean you shouldn't eat meat if you can. There's almost certainly people out there who has gotten PTSD that relates or triggers by something plant-based.

And how exactly can you confirm which people do or do not already have PTSD? It's one of the most underreported disorders, and in certain circles (including those with a high rate of severe PTSD) stigmatized.

I don’t think people who are incapable of killing an animal (mentally not physically) should be allowed to eat said animals

Do you agree this extends to plants? I am incapable of growing plants because I have a common HFA symptom (despite not having HFA) that things like dirt and paint drive me into a panic. My wife does all the gardening in my family because I can't grow a tomato. By your logic, I should ONLY eat meat (as I do not have a problem killing an animal, though I'm not sure whether or not I could butcher one based on the same reasons I can't grow vegetables).

I’m a vegetarian and am perfectly healthy, on the higher side of BMI, regularly go to the gym and have above average muscle mass so the argument that you can’t get the nutrients you need is bullshit

I really wish you'd leave the reddit 'tude at the door. I'm trying to treat you like you're an intelligent person, but your reply to me pointing out that some vegetarians/vegans have irreperable nutrition issues is that it's bullshit. Is it your opinion taht anyone who even lazily tries a non-meat diet is automatically 100% healthy? Is it your opinion that you can prove ALL humans can be healthy on a vegan diet, even those who have intolerances to common staples of said diet?

Also, more directly, is it your opinion that every person with a high BMI that goes to the gym and has muscle mass is automatically healthy? That seems like a severe underrepresentation of health. There are real long-term risks of hair loss, weak bones, muscle wasting, skin rashes, hypothyroidism, and anemia in vegan diets as well as an elevated risk of severe strokes. Ask any honest nutritionist and the claim that we actually know enough about nutrition to zero out those risks is nonsense. Claims that veganism is 100% healthy is similar to claims that vaping is 100% safe. In both, there is an unspoken "if done right" AND an unspoken "we think, and except a few studies we don't personally accept yet".

Are you from a farm town?

A supermajority of animal feed comes from the waste product of crops we that were being grown anyway, or grass from a fallow field that needs to be harvested anyway (not enough the latter due to logistics, but my local farms all do). That whole "8 to 1" calorie to cow thing leaves out the part that it's 8 calories of landfill material to make 1 calorie of beef. Nobody has an "animal only" corn field. And nobody is using harsh animal-killing chemicals on the fallow fields.

And cows are still being fed things whether you eat them or not. We need their manure and it's overall better for the environment than synthetic fertilizer. Without some form of fertilizer, we need much more farmland, which means more animals killed per calorie. All compared to 700,000 calories in a cow.

Unfortunately, nobody has ever demonstrated in a defensible manner that a horticulture-only scenario would be anywhere near as efficient on animal lives as what we have now. It's one thing to cut animal intake 10%, entirely another to try to rebuild our farming industry without animals.

I'm grateful that you say that (not OP). So many vegetarians/vegans are convinced anyone who isn't vegan hates animals, or is at least "worse" than them on some magical scale they came up with.

I fought for my state's free range chicken law, but I wouldn't fight for bans of consuming chicken or eggs. I would love a law that banned chick-killing (the practice of immediately killing all newborn chickens of the "wrong gender" when reselling chickens to farms or growing egg breeds). I'm sure they'd find a way around that. Despite that, I'll still eat chicken.

So you're an anti-natalist? I try to avoid arguing with anti-natalist vegans because as morally disgusted as I am of their position, there is no way to convince them to change it.

But manure is not created from thin air. You need to feed animals a lot feed until you get something to eat back. It wastes 20 times more crop compared to plant based diet. Manure will not save us, it destroys nature, water and air.

What exactly do you think we should plan to do with all the grass and waste product currently being used in feeding animals? There's a complex web of dependency between plant and animal farming that I have seen firsthand, and all I ever hear is that cutting half that web off entirely will magically "Just word" and be better than what we have no. Most importantly, I'm convinced I eat carbon neutral even with eat, or at least as close to that as reasonably possible. And I've never seen a plan to scale to a world where meat eating is ended, and the massive inefficiencies that would introduce.

The IPCC 2022 states even giving up every form of fossile fuel animal industry would push us over 3° increase.

This is not preciately how I took it. Instead, I took it as more "we need to do everything we can, and the whole world going vegan is more likely than the other major sources". Ultimately, we would already be in a good place if 7 businesses became carbon neutral. IPCC 2022 cited a LOWER number than most do for methane, only 14% of world methane, only 1/3 of human caused methane. The one or two "experts" I found who specifically pushed for sudden international veganism have also failed to account for the above issues I mentioned. I argue it's easier to find technologies that can mitigate and reverse emissions than it is to find technologies to let the world cut out meat entirely.

I do not eat any animal products, but the main reason for it that I do not want to kill others if I can avoid it.

Which is absolutely your right. I have become convinced that my mixed diet leads to ultimately less death than a plant-based diet would (trolley problem), but it is not the foundation of my mixed-diet choice. I'm not an anti-natalist, and I'm perfectly fine with the quality of life a typical farm cow lives when compared to a cow in the wild when the alternative is to not be born at all. I know plenty of people who suffer in their lives more than a farm animal will, and yet never once think those people should never have been born.

don’t want you to import any fancy exotic food for a plant based diet. I don’t, I get my potatoes from my neighbor and mostly buy local foods anyway. Don’t act like you can’t eat local plants and are therefore forced to eat others.

Huh? I DO eat local plants. I have a farm down the road and buy almost all the produce we don't grow there. When we do have to buy from retail establishments, we buy 99% of our produce locally. Yes, about once a year I buy a dragonfruit because it's a guilty pleasure. So sue me.

But I also get eggs from my neighbor, and occasionally chicken. We have a deer overpopulation problem in my area. When I can, I pick up locally hunted deer from the butcher. My wife has PTSD and it triggers her regarding hunting, so I don't hunt my own despite the fact she and I are morally on the same page as that. I support that because I consider it ethically better than being vegan because I believe pulling the lever on the trolley is always the right choice, and because I am convinced "what we have is ethical because it is better than the real world alternatives". There is no trolley track without any bodies on it, in this world.

I kinda hoped moving away from reddit would lead to less "you hold a different view than me so you must be an absolute idiot". I suppose I'm sorely disappointed.

Lucky! I unfortunately do not.

I don't agree with Hannah, in this case. Specifically, I challenge anyone who leaves cow methane on a chart or in an argument without covering the CO2 production by non-manure fertilizer or the fact that only depopulation will stop cows from pooping. And unfortunately, a plethora of studies are showing that synethetic fertilizer production creates massive amounts of methane gas as well. I'm fairly convinced she is (perhaps inadvertantly) including that under "cow farm" when it should be under "plant farm".

She also just handwaves saying transport costs are low despite studies she opted not to cite or rebut that place them at 20%. But here's the funny part. That was the first link. The second agrees with the 20% figure for logistics (though she uses the term "Supply Chain" and separates physical transport from processing, packaging, and retail storage (all of which are cut out or down from local). Digging into supply chain figures in the left article's graph, she just disagrees with herself (and, to be honest, other experts).

In fact, the numbers on her second article suggest bias to me in her first article. She blames land use for 1/3 of beef GHG production. But in the second article, only 2/3 of Land Use GHG goes to animal, with the other 1/3 going to "land use for human food". I'm sure you can see the next line. If Land Use is such a large part of meat GHG production and crops are so good at everything else, then Land Use should be dominant and in-your-face on the crop chart in the first article. Instead, apparently she's undecided about that?

Look. I can see why you might decide that eating less meat might be the wrong choice for you. But when there are studies that say eating local is important and studies saying eating less meat is important, one article is not going to get me to change my entire life, and risk the environment, just to feel good about myself.

...well, I did audit a culinary program when my wife took it. I have restauranteers in my family. I could probably survive in a small restaurant kitchen. But I guess I don't know how to cook :)

(fixed that part of my reply was to the wrong comment)

As for umami, it is the most stable flavor profile. You can get umami outside of meat, but like the protein you get out of meat, it requires a tremendous amount of effort and processing. And even then, my favorite way of making tofu involves just a little bit of bacon fat. And after I eat an incredible plate of falafal, I still want a nice cut of beef on the main plate.

I've probably eaten a well-above-average variety of meals from almost every culture (in some cases, blessed with the chance to eat in the country in question)... and yet, as enjoyable as the vegan ones are they are at best a shadow of themselves. The "not fake meat" ones are far better, but I rate food on quality. If "A+B" is simply a better meal than "A", then that speaks volumes. Most vegan or meatless meals are "A", and adding "B" elevates them. "B" usually happens to be an animal product.

Now IF I had some sort of moral or religious requirement to avoid meat, there are "A"s that would be good enough. I've had some Indian coworkers wow me with some of their meat-free food. But I ethically feel that eating meat is a good thing, so I have to admit that the best Samosa I've had was lamb and not veggie.

I've watched animals die in nature. Unless I'm talking to an anti-natalist, I cannot fathom how they think the life of a farm animal is worse than the life of a wild animal. To me, it comes back to a colorblind view of the trolley problem: "It only matters if we're part of decision that leads to pulling the trigger"

I really feel like the preachy vegans have crossed some line and cannot be reasoned with. And the non-preachy vegans don't go out of their way to have the discussion (more's the pity, since they'd probabliy have a more balanced view before turning preachy)

I'm in New England. Beef prices have more than doubled in the last 5 years, and Pork went from cheaper than chicken to almost as expensive as beef, with most local restaurants having larger price hikes on their pork dishes than any other dish.

Scallops on the other hand are down 50% wholesale. If only I weren't allergic to them (and I have Scallopers in my family, so I can get them for free). I remember local seafood places when the scallops were the only non-lobster dish over $20. Now, I can get a scallop plate for $14 at a restaurant where the swordfish is $27.

Understand that you don't get to pen the ethical frameworks for the world, only for yourself. Even in ethical frameworks where "consent" and "killing" are given extreme weight, there are always other factors... And under most of the foundational ethical frameworks (Utilitarianism and Natural Law Theory come to mind), the argument for necessary-veganism is unsupportable.

So if you want to hate meat eating, say "I think it's wrong to eat animals" or "my morals don't allow it". Don't tell people who eat meat they don't care about ethics, because that statement is simply dead wrong.

Particularly when the “sacrifice” is for the trivial reason to satisfy the killer’s taste buds

My biggest complaint about proselytizing vegans is the way they oversimplify the equation. Like every single person who ever eats meat for any reason stops with a fork in their hand saying "Is this bite of food more important to me than murder? YES IT IS".

To violently take another’s life “because it tastes good” and then go through such convuluted reasoning to justify it is very puzzling to me.

With all due respect, reality is not as simple as you're making it out to be. If you cannot see that there's more to the discussion than "meat tastes good" and "animals don't want to die", then nobody can help you. But pretending that people use convoluted reasoning to justify it is an ignorant take, whether willful or out of being blinded by your own zealous position on the matter.

It suggests a lack of empathy that seems to be endemic in our society

You do understand that from a psychological point of view, human empathy and animal empathy are different factors and rationally exist in different amounts. Honestly, my personal take is that zealous vegans show less empathy towards fellow man than other people. LOOK at the way you're thinking about supermajority of humanity? Why should I not see that as a lack of empathy as well?

And for that matter, there are several empathy-related disorders where a person's mispaced empathy goes so far as to affect their relationships and quality of life. And again, that's only for that rare person staring at meat on a fork commenting about how murder tastes good. The ones who simply categorize animals or plants or insects differently from you in their empathy don't suggest anything of the sort.

Serial killers love to kill, don’t they?

Tell it to me straight. Are you so far gone that you cannot understand the moral, ethical, or psychological difference between being an actual serial killer and simply not being vegan?