Using someone else’s body so you can steal and eat the eggs that they would eat is wrong. I mean, idk why I have to explain why USING someone else as an object for food is wrong tbh.
Not everyone feels that way. Many people who keep chickens feed them a balanced diet to keep them happy and healthy, and also work to protect them from predators. You could say that it’s a symbiotic relationship in that way, much like humans and dogs, or even the way wolves and crows work together.
If the animals are stressed and unhappy then that’s different, and most people would agree that’s exploitative.
But to say that it’s impossible for humans and animals to ever make meaningful trades seems a little unfair to both sides, really.
One way or another, it is impossible to survive in this universe without consuming resources that could have gone to something else, and until we can photosynthesise and live purely off sunlight there are going to be tricky choices.
What you said:^
What I read: I like abusing animals and I’m too fucking lazy and drowned in my own selfishness and entitlement to change anything to help animals.
I’m gonna leave you with this:
You have to choices. Both give you all the nutrients you need, so health isn’t an issue.
Choice 1: Non violence, minimal pain, minimal misery, minimal oppression and minimal environmental destruction with huge health benefits.
Choice 2: Violence, pain, misery, oppression, environmental destruction and health epidemics.
Which do you choose? If it’s number 1, you should go vegan.
This is tangential, but it’s worth considering whether you are trying to reach out to non-vegans or just act tough in front of other vegans, to demonstrate your commitment to the cause. You know, Mormons struggle to make converts, and they greet everyone with a smile and only ask them to give up coffee! :)
A lot of people make the mistake of assuming that all good things go together and all bad things go together, and that’s exactly what you’re doing here. It sure would be nice if we could make choices without any awkward tradeoffs or compromises, but that appears not to be the case.
Many people cannot maintain a vegan diet for health reasons. Some end up eating eggs or dairy but not meat, some avoid eggs and dairy and eat fish; it all depends on their particular digestive issues and what is available to them.
Some people would suggest that tiling the entire world with wheat and soy is not the optimal choice from an environmental point of view, but opinions do differ on this particular issue.
I think you may want to reconsider your approach before you talk to other people about veganism. If encouraging people to switch could reduce oppression etc. and is so important, then you want to succeed in convincing people, and your current method is just going to make people angry, and more set in their ways.
Consider how you would react if people from other philosophies approached you in this manner, eg. pushing a political or religious worldview as a stark choice and insisting that if you choose wrong it must be because you are lazy and selfish. (Even better, imagine if two people offer you mutually contradictory ultimatums like this! You can’t possibly win!)
They say you catch more flies with honey than vinegar, and you can always substitute rice malt or maple syrup (tasty!) if honey is not politically correct where you come from :)
I am vegan the same way someone might be christian; haha omfglol not even trying to do it properly but basically thinking I support the idea, just being too lazy and poor (YGM) and caring too much about other goals to really try. But still thinking that it’s a (slight) personal sub-optimality that I haven’t decoupled myself from the parts of the food industry that do things I’d rather not have the world contain.
And I am here to tell you that if you want to actually help animals, you don’t become a vegan, you optimize your food for cheapness and your money for effective animal rights advocacy, not the other way around. If you don’t do that, and instead buy vegan product X for $2 more than non-vegan product Y, you aren’t actually caring about animal rights, you are just doing æsthetics and purity.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not against æsthetics and purity, I hacked my brain to think animals don’t food and am very happy mostly avoiding them. (To be specific, my brain thinks that plants do food very much, minerals do food sometimes even though that’s kind of funny when you think of it, and animals don’t food as much as minerals. So a package of instant ramen containing 1% salt and 0,7% meat is food enough for me.) I just mean that one shouldn’t pretend to be helping animals when one is optimizing for purity, because that is incorrect and helps animals less than actually, uncompromisingly, helping animals no matter what it entails.
(Also, tiling the world with soy tends to be an outcome of industrial meat production, as plant-based diets require a lot less land to provide the same nutrition. Grazing on non-farmable land is an exception, but otherwise processing plant matter directly for human consumption without an intermediate animal step tends to be more efficient.)
ACE’s numbers are incredibly over-optimistic about how much they get people to be vegan, everyone agrees with this, they don’t know how much over-optimistic they are and are starting to do research to figure out how much, the research is pretty fucking dispiriting. (Leafleting doesn’t work, online ads don’t work…)
So this is a nice essay about buying warm fuzzies and utilons separately, except that it is not true and for people who get a normal level of utilons from meat you can reduce animal consumption more effectively by not eating them yourself than you can by purchasing online ads convincing people to do so.
I stand corrected on the specific case, although I still suspect that there must be *some* way to leverage that stuff more effectively. I would be extremely surprised that buying not!cheese for 20€/kg instead of cheese for 8€/kg, or soy yoghurt for 3€ instead of animal yoghurt for 1,4€ would be the best marginal use for that money from an animal rights perspective. (in case you’re wondering, Finland is expensive)
At the very least one could pay someone else (such as school lunches etc.) to substitute more cost-efficient animal product replacements (such as adding some fraction of soy protein to meat products) after picking the lowest-hanging fruit oneself, or possibly investing in research to speed up the introduction of affordable and popular replacements.
The fact that one way of doing it doesn’t work doesn’t mean that purity veganism (the person being argued against doesn’t sound like one of the moderates who are happy with people reducing their burden if they don’t go all the way to scrutinizing the smallest details of ingredient lists) deserves praise and thus I want to signal against purity veganism pretending to be effective.
Why are you assuming that being vegan is more expensive than not being vegan? You’re ignoring the possibility of just not eating yogurt at all (which most vegans I know do, because vegan yogurt is awful) and instead eating Oriental-flavor Top Ramen, pasta with tomato sauce, baked potatoes, cabbage, lentils and rice, or any number of other inexpensive vegan options. I expect that most vegans spend less on food than non-vegans do.
The cost of veganism is in time, pleasure, and health, all of which matter.
You seem to me to be taking a sort of arguments-are-soldiers mindset. Deontologist veganism is silly, but there’s no reason to descend to their level.
I’m addressing price when the rest are held constant, because simplicity. Getting the same time, pleasure, and health with a vegan diet tends to take more money in most circumstances (I for one am certainly sacrificing veganism because I have neither the money nor the effort to spare; that’s why I talk about things like expensive cheese substitutes instead of the cheapest way of nourishing oneself). I believe it’s not rational from an animal rights perspective to be deontologically vegan, and in fact now my brain can even output the calculation for believing it in the general case:
Let’s assume that the suffering caused by 1kg of cheese is equivalent to a single meal with meat, because simplicity. Let’s also assume that everything else being constant I’d buy either that kilogram of cheese, or a kilogram of nutritious cheese substitute, with a difference of 12€. Now this means that I can alleviate more suffering if I can get someone else to switch to a meatless meal at a price of 11,99€ or less. That shouldn’t be too hard.
Take school lunches, for example. In Finland schools provide free food for everyone. It’s as predictably cheap and not-always-as-appealing-as-it-could-be as one would expect, but it’s free food even for the children of the families where their only warm meal is in school. A typical cost is (iirc) 1-2€ a meal.
Assume a school system which feeds 1000 children every day. If you get them to have the first friday of every month be a meatfreiday, it’s a net win of 10 000 kilograms of cheese a year, or equivalent to 119 900€ in marginal cost. With this money you can afford to hire a full-time lobbyist (we’re talking about not!rich activists here, not expensive people in suits) for an entire year, *and* pay the meat-free lunches for everyone at a higher price than the regular ones, thus making them more appealing to the students, *and* still have a lot left for
briberyadministrative expenses.Thus, instead of buying not!cheese, if I care about animal suffering I should just buy the damn cheese and use the difference for political lobbying. Leafleting and ads might not work, but political lobbying in high-leverage targets probably does. The Arkea company in Turku serves 10 million meals a year, and upping the vegetarian days from one to two a week would have an impact of over a million meals, or 12 million euros when translated to cheese. Would it cost 12 million annually to successfully lobby it through? In a country where even the head of the drug police is a small-timer whose corruptedness doesn’t exceed six digits of graft money? Yeah. Buy the damn cheese, and advocate others to pick the low-hanging fruit as well.
Arguments aren’t soldiers, they are fighting robots and one is supposed to design the best fighting robot, enthusiastically copying design patterns from the strongest ones, and even if that one robot using this weapon was defeated doesn’t mean that my robot having an improved version of the same weapon would be just as vulnerable.
Getting the same time, pleasure, and health with a vegan diet tends to take more money in most circumstances.
This point I disagree with. For the vast majority of diets, given a healthy and not abnormally picky person who doesn’t live in a food desert, there exists a diet that costs the same amount or less, is just as tasty, takes just as much time, and is equally nutritious, except for the deficiencies that are present in all vegan diets (e.g. whole food sources of B vitamins) and thus cannot be solved with money. The process of finding that diet is time-consuming, however.
Like… what if instead of saying “let’s replace cheese with fake cheese!” we said “let’s replace milk with orange juice!” Milk in America is about $3/gallon, orange juice is about $5/gallon, there’s 16 cups in a gallon, and therefore you would have to find someone willing to have a meatless meal for twelve cents for it to work out even. Turns out most people should be vegan! My point is not that this is a good calculation (it’s not), it’s that your methodology doesn’t make any sense.
And on a theoretical level: there isn’t that much variance among the preferences of Healthy And Not Abnormally Picky People Who Don’t Live In Food Deserts. By becoming vegan yourself you are eliminating all the transaction costs involved in trying to persuade other people to become vegan (you’ve already done the expensive “convince person that being vegan is a good idea” part). We should expect vegan activism to be cheaper for very unusual people, those who would pay an unusually high price by becoming vegan.
(And that is ignoring the fact that meat is, pound for pound, significantly more expensive than plant-based food, and deciding not to buy an expensive thing is going to reduce your budget unless you decide to do it in the stupidest way possible.)
The process of finding that diet is time-consuming, however.
I think this addresses my “most circumstances” comment at least partially. There are transaction costs, and especially at the lower regions of the income spectrum (also I’m probably going to end up calling Finland a food desert because we don’t have all the freshies for a reasonable price unlike you not-only-intermittently-californians) some things tend to be “affordable, easy, vegan, choose two”. I’m noticing that I’m probably slightly overreaching from my personal experiences of preachy vegans telling me to peel and boil some fucking potatoes (waste of time: massive; edibility: not that impressive) instead of eating a frozen pizza with cheese on it (waste of time: minimal; edibility: sufficient) if I can’t afford the bourgie-ass rich people food which is both vegan and convenient, so I’ll roll back the claim a bit.
The things where non-vegan foods are cheaper are obvious low-hanging fruit and I’m not talking about them; I’m assuming someone is at least 60-80% vegan already and deciding between going full purity or efficiency.
The cheese vs. school lunches comparison is relevant because they end up being close enough with some not-totally-unreasonable assumptions about animal suffering (for example, a milk animal produces a lot more “food” than a meat animal despite producing more suffering as well, so milk is more animal-welfare-efficient than meat), and some milk products are the few things that I’m personally failing my veganism in because I haven’t found acceptable substitutes. Going for the same conversion rates, 10l of milk should be around 1kg of cheese, and soy milk is the obvious replacement instead of orange juice because protein content etc. and with local prices that’s 13€ instead of 7€ for the same benefit, for a difference of 6€/Approximate Unit of Suffering, suggesting that my preference to not use animal milk is more economically justifiable than using bourgie fake cheese would be, but still possibly less efficient than lobbying to make other people who don’t get to choose what they eat to not eat meat. I’m using soy milk because animals don’t food, not because I believe it’s optimal for animal welfare.
But if I wanted to optimize for animal welfare, there would probably be some point where the diminishing returns of veganism kick in when compared to trying to make others reduce their animal welfare impacts instead, and thus going for 100% full purity veganism, while maintaining that it’s solely because of animal welfare concerns instead of purity æsthetics (which I personally *do* share with my “animals don’t food” and am not judging at all), is inconsistent (and also annoyingly preachy when applied towards others). That’s the claim I’m actually trying to make and my brain is just bad at formatting it.
(via ozymandias271)
3 months ago · tagged #scrupulosity cw #food cw · 106 notes · source: argumate · .permalink
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avacadontfuckwithme reblogged this from osberend and added:Pro tip: Do research before making a statement you don’t know whether to be true or not. Because infact what I said is...
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dingo-inna-domino-mask reblogged this from ozymandias271 and added:“The cost of veganism is in time, pleasure, and health, all of which matter.” Reblogging for this, those are the reasons...
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theinternetcrab reblogged this from argumate and added:let us consider the way in which trees attempt to outcompete each other for sunlight and realize that becoming...
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osberend reblogged this from theduckofawkward and added:Okay, I may have stated that too strongly, but a little poking around the internet seems to suggest that this is … not...
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theduckofawkward reblogged this from osberend and added:Um, pro-tip, hens eat their own eggs. I should know. My family had hens for about ten years. BUT that doesn’t mean...
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socialjusticemunchkin reblogged this from ozymandias271 and added:I think this addresses my “most circumstances” comment at least partially. There are transaction costs, and especially...
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goddygaudess reblogged this from ozymandias271 and added:this seems very not true. if you spent the same amount of time trying to find a cheap, nutritious, tasty, non-vegan...
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ozymandias271 reblogged this from socialjusticemunchkin and added:This point I disagree with. For the vast majority of diets, given a healthy and not abnormally picky person who doesn’t...
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tartapplesauce reblogged this from ozymandias271 and added:Gimme Number Two all the way! Yeah, I relish that sweet, sweet animal suffering. I only wish I could eat every single...
ilzolende reblogged this from avacadontfuckwithme and added:You don’t have to, but the reason I don’t think it’s wrong is because I don’t think of animals as “someone” but rather...
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