Most Vegetarians and Vegans Eventually Return to Meat
fastcompany.com
fastcompany.com
This is not to dispute anything from the article. Just a reminder that if you sympathize or relate with any cause to reduce animal product usage, you don't have to be "vegan" or "vegetarian", just try to reduce your consumption to the point where it starts to inconvenient you.
If the end goal is less meat, then, for me, the results were clear: black and white thinking was far more effective.
I've been vegetarian for 9 years.
Most religious laws are absolute prohibitions or absolute mandates - no foods are mostly kosher or halal, no foods become haram or treif merely because of quantity. None of the ten commandments are quantitative or subjective. Being a frummer is burdensome and inconvenient, but it's also remarkably straightforward. Strict and absolutist behavioural rules are easy to understand and apply.
The heuristic I apply is I only eat antibiotic free meat. It has nothing to do with animals taking antibiotics per se, but rather that large farms abuse them as it's cheaper to pump a pig full of antibiotics than it is to provide remotely sanitary living conditions, nevermind the environmental issues around creating antibiotic resistant superbugs.
People are usually critical when I opt for vegetarian options, and then completely lighten up when I describe that I do eat meat. It's strange how defensive people get about eating meat, and how quickly they lighten up just because I eat meat 5 times a year.
Not so strange, when you have been the repeated recipient of either the "meat is murder" or "I'm obviously better than you because I don't eat meat" comments from militant vegetarians.
Basically, there's prejudice and justification on both sides of the divide, and it's too easy to respond to the constant hate with your own hate.
I can speak from the other side though. After someone realizes that I don't eat meat, I usually (as in way too often) get follow up questions about the reasons etc. I'm not sure if this is because of attempted "small talk" or other reasons, but after a while, I just got tired of it.
I generally try to avoid long follow-up discussions on the topic, because I simply don't think it's worthy of attention (at least in this context).
Whatever float your boat as long as you don't tell me what to do / what to eat / what to think.
Once a vegan asked me if I enjoyed eating "dead animals". I asked him if he preferred I'd eat them alive which put an end to the conversation.
Maybe it's not about eating meat but about sanctimonious folks that feel it necessary to call those around them names and denigrate them because they do not follow the person's favorite fad. Once people learn you are not one of those, nobody has a problem with your food choices per se.
That said, I've never felt defensive around people I know that choose to eat vegetarian or vegan (yes, I enjoy meat, if you didn't guess :). But they never felt the need to somehow make a debate out of it either. If people respect each other's choices and accept them without judgmental attitude, there's no place for contention and defensiveness does not arise.
I hope you stopped to appreciate the irony of that statement when you wrote it.
Today, literally an hour ago, long after I wrote the above comment, I've read a complaint from one of my friends online, that their online community was invaded by preachy vegans (the community has nothing to do with nutritional advice and didn't initiate the discussion on the topic) who proceeded to lecture everybody about how they should give up meat immediately and how they should feel bad if they don't do so. And from what she is saying, it's not the first time it happens in that community. That's exactly what I am talking about.
I think commenting on how this looks like is not the same as what those vegan activists were doing. Not even close.
After 6pm you eat what ever you want
>A third-of people abandoned their animal-free diets in three months or less, and more than half abandoned it within the first year.
Are you really a vegan or vegetarian if you break in 3 months? In 1 year? Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that 1 in 5 people who attempt to go vegan/vegetarian succeed?
I'm a vegan and I'm active in my local vegan/vegetarian community. There are two camps: people who do it for ethical reasons and people who do it for for health. People who do it for health usually give up and move on to whatever fad diet becomes popular. People who subscribe to the ethics rarely quit. We have a saying: there's no such thing as a former vegan. Just someone who tried the diet.
What difference does it make if someone who's been a vegan for 3 months calls themself a vegan? Are they "harming the movement" by doing so? If partaking in the diet doesn't require you to subscribe to the ethics, as you say, then the label should just be a label: someone who doesn't eat animal products. No time frame or reasoning attached.
I honestly think it's reasonable to attach a minimum time frame to a word like this, otherwise it gets a bit hard to know what people mean when they speak. Whether one year is a good choice I don't know, but a minimum is required.
Can you expand on this? If there are two people in front of you, one who has been a vegan for 20 years, the other for 2 weeks, what is the real difference between them, how does that time difference change your interaction with them?
To put it another way, why does one word have to apply to one and not the other because of some inherent time requirement? English, in particular, as a language is inherently vague, and we rarely make this time requirement distinction for other words that describe people.
If I just graduated from the police academy I'm a "cop", just like how the 30 year veteran detective sergeant is a "cop". No, we aren't the same, since the latter has far more experience, but that doesn't mean that only one deserves the title. It just means we use additional qualifiers ("30 year veteran detective sergeant") to elaborate on what type of cop he or she is.
Personally I'd set a minimum of a year.
I'm being pedantic on purpose here because the idea of some minimum time requirement to call yourself a vegan is one of the most pedantic things I've ever heard, and supports the stereotypical characterization of vegans being overall pains in the ass.
I wonder what proportion of the cohort here were in each group.
From what I understand, many people may make a religious vow or commitment to eat vegetarian for a specific period of time (for good luck or out of gratitude for a benefit they received) and then commonly eat meat again after that period of time has expired. I wouldn't be inclined to say that these people "are vegetarians" in my western sense, any more than I would say Eastern Orthodox Christians "are vegetarians" when meeting them during their fasting days or seasons.
Many vegans/vegetarians would accept you to their "club" only after being on probation for a year or two.
It's analogous to saying "most martial artists quit in less than a year". For some definition of "martial artist" that may well be true, but it wouldn't be a definition acceptable to those who actually practice.
So, gatekeeping instead? "You're not a real X unless Y," where "Y" changes to keep out the undesirables.
"You're not a real programmer unless you can do Dijkstra's on a whiteboard from memory."
"You're not a real vegetarian unless you don't eat meat for at least as long as I have."
You will not be accepted as a programmer until you've written some code; or as an athlete until you've done some nontrivial athletic stuff. Why should othe categories be different?
That doesn't apply here.
We're starting and ending with the same definition.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQUo53o6QXg#t=0m30s (strawman opening skipiped) is clearly an exaggeration, but highlights the uncomfortable reality of being "the different one" at the dinner table.
However, I do think one reason vegetarians, especially vegans, get so much social flack is because they typically position themselves as morally superior to meat eaters. I know one incredibly toxic vegan whom I wish would just make the world a better place by kindly dropping dead. In addition to being high handed, she is inconsistent, hypocritical and generally assholish to the max. She is the vegan version of the hellfire-and-brimstone Christians I knew growing up in the Bible Belt who made me feel like "If my choice is to sit next to you in church or go to hell, I will take hell." On top of all her other BS, she isn't even a committed vegan. She is a convenient vegan who promptly adds cheese to her diet periodically for REASONS, all while looking down her morally superior nose at everyone around her.
If you want to be vegan, cool beans. Good for you. But you might get less social flack as a group if you took a different approach (as a group) to how you talk about that choice and how you treat other people who aren't vegan.
I wonder (now that I'm thinking back on instances of "the new and the loud" I've known in my decades) whether some adopt veganism /specifically/ to have an issue to be loud about. When that behaviour is rejected from both the in and out groups, they move on to some other issue. Certainly lines up with some I've seen... I dunno, just spit-balling here.
Anyway. I originally really liked the moral arguments for veganism as forwarded by Peter Singer, which of course is very similar to his argument in Famine, Affluence, and Morality - it's pretty much impossible to accept one but not the other. I have more problems with the consequences of the FAM argument - that we inexorably ought to use all our life for the benefit of others if we profess to care for others at all. This, to me, is such an absurd consequence as to throw the entire enterprise of morality as a chain of material implication following from axioms (very attractive to a computer scientist!) into doubt. Which, I've been told, casts me out into the great despair of postmodernism where we don't have access to any meaning or oughts at all. I'd love to talk about this with someone who knows more about it, since my philosophical education pretty much comprises a single ethics course in university, some existentialist literature, some SEP reading, and a whole lot of PEL episodes.
I'd dispute the characterization of these people as reasonable, but given how common it is, I suppose I'm descending into pedantry a bit here. It may seem enormously childish (and it is), but I know very few people who seem able to acknowledge that an action of theirs may not be the optimally moral one. Almost universally, this baseline of ethical maturity is replaced with twisted, desperate contortionate reasoning as to why their actions are actually in the morally superior one.
I personally still eat meat; I tried vegetarianism a few years ago but started weightlifting shortly after, which tends to have a pretty profound effect on my appetite and dietary needs. The difference is that I acknowledge that this is a moral failing of mine: I'm not a morally perfect being.
You have two options - change your morals (accept and embrace that your desire to lift weights outweighs your concern for other beings). Or change your behaviour (stop either lifting weights or eating meat).
Even when a better path is fairly clear, human beings rarely make lasting changes in behavior instantly; there tend to be a lot of details and that need to be worked out and new movement patterns to learn. It is not clear from a brief message on the internet what a person has or has not done to make such changes. Even without intentionally making changes over time, you can recognize things that other people do that are better than what you do and be more likely to copy them or otherwise be inspired from them.
I get where you're coming from philosophically, but have a couple major points of disagreement.
1) I don't consider willful ignorance and dishonesty to be preferable to honesty
2) I'm speaking specifically of people whose actions contradict their own stated moral preferences. An ethical system that's brittle enough to fall apart with a couple pointed questions barely meets the definition of an ethical system.
3) Consequentially speaking, lying to protect your own self-image has consequences beyond your own life. We're social animals and bullshit causes collateral damage.
For a quick 1-hour introduction, see this Dave Rubin interview with Yaron Brook:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=089xOB9bbhU
For fiction illustrating the principles, you could read The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged.
https://www.amazon.com/Atlas-Shrugged-Ayn-Rand/dp/0451191145...
https://www.amazon.com/Fountainhead-Ayn-Rand/dp/0451191153/
Or for non-fiction, try The Virtue of Selfishness.
https://www.amazon.com/Virtue-Selfishness-Fiftieth-Anniversa...
Or if you prefer podcasts addressing practical questions, try The Peikoff Podcasts:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/peikoff-com-q-a-on-ayn-r...
Or search for specific questions here
> I have more problems with the consequences of the FAM argument - that we inexorably ought to use all our life for the benefit of others if we profess to care for others at all. This, to me, is such an absurd consequence as to throw the entire enterprise of morality as a chain of material implication following from axioms (very attractive to a computer scientist!) into doubt.
This line of argument is called "the demandingness objection". There's a decent bit of philosophical literature under that heading.
If one embraces the implications of FAM rather than rejecting them, that probably ends up looking something like "effective altruism". (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/22/extreme-altrui... is an article about effective altruism that seems relevant to your concerns)
Utilitarianism is fundamentally rooted in the human as a platonic ideal and not just some clever animal. Once you invite other animals on to the continuum, what do we do? Bulldoze all the natural habitat to prevent predation and cruelty (whilst softly euthanasing all the animals)? Do we want to live in a (totalitarian) world with zero suffering? Is there a value on genuine diversity of thought? Do we diversity of thought - to have a robust society? i.e. past a point does utilitarianism itself provide disutility?
Utilitarianism like all ethical systems isn't wrong, it is just a limited perspective more a rule of thumb or a model that only works between certain parameters. That is it is a good system for determining train ticket prices or infrastructure planning, but less useful as a complete life philosophy. The same could be said for libertarianism. Great idea ... but you still need property laws ... and police ... and so on.
Philosophy is in many cases just a kind of intellectual accessory. One version may be right in the same sense that a certain pair of jeans look great. I think if you truly care about the truth and not social status ... etc. the valid scope of philosophy is greatly reduced. The further you look at it our true norms come practical realities and from what we grow up believing.
The same lense can be applied to programming philosophies (Waterfall, Agile ... etc.). I think as programmers (at least the experienced ones amongst us) we do eventually learn that things are never as simple as just that and so we instinctively know to moderate our observance of platonic ways of thinking. This extends to ethical systems.
No, it really isn't. Peter Singer is both the leading utilitarian philosopher of our age and our most eloquent advocate for animal welfare. A utilitarian calculus that includes animal welfare really isn't very complex. You simply expand "the greatest good to the greatest number of people" to include all animals. That might lead to a lot of uncomfortable and counter-intuitive conclusions, but it's not some sort of moral alchemy.
Essentially the argument is problematic due to lack of omniscience. The typical solution to this is to adopt a stable yet flexible enough strategy (also known as a robust solution). It is almost never too simple a strategy if you start from a complex optimization problem like this.
(Compare expectation maximization to robust decision making. Or maximin to minimax to simple optimization approaches. None win.)
Currently there is no algorithm for solving general decision problems on a global scale. Even genetic algorithms (constrained innovation and permutation) can and do produce solutions too late to matter, especially when selective pressure is low. Human intelligence easily gets caught in local maxima too, not to mention its fallibility. (I'd call it lossy heuristic approach with memory. Heuristics are transmitted over generations in a strongly lossy way both in number and count. New ones take the place of the old ones with only relatively low bar of improvement to pass. Actor attempts to reconstruct the heuristic by observing behaviour of other actors given its capabilities.)
Emotionally it has the same feel as the drowning child argument[1] by Pete Singer. That argument engenders a feeling of hopelessness for me, because I can't assail its logic but it implies a vast array of suffering for which I am morally culpable.
I think meat eaters feel similarly. When faced with the cognitive dissonance, they shrink.
Now, I mostly shrug and say, "I'm doing the best I can."
Instead of this, people should try to design these dishes ground up, and look at vegetarian cuisines around the world (Indian would be a great place to start) for inspiration.
Edit: just reread, and I sound dickish. I, of course, am flattered by their attempt at accomidation. But veggie bacon is bad, and someone needs to tell you. We still love you.
Most vegans aren't really trying to distance themselves from non-vegan foods, just the unfortunate consequences of producing those foods. Most vegans don't have a problem with pepperoni pizza, for example. Just the source of the pepperoni (and cheese.)
One thing to keep in mind is that many vegan substitutes can vary greatly in quality / flavour. For example, discounting all vegan cheeses because you tried one doesn't really work because they are all using different methods to achieve the same end, so the result (flavour, taste, texture) is different.
It's not like dairy cheese which is all basically using the same method / ingredients (and therefore the results can be more consistently close together, even among variations on the theme).
That said - there are several brands of nut cheeses that I really enjoy, whether or not they taste like actual cheese. I would recommend Dr. Cow, Treeline, Punk Rawk Labs and Miyokos nut cheeses.
Well, I haven't checked all that many bands (maybe the majority is not as good as what I've listened to? ), but Switchfoot is good.
Some of the substitutes are absolutely horrible and folks tend to forget that they need to spice the food slightly differently and make up for some of the actual meat flavors.
All I am saying is that culinary traditions around the world have slowly evolved dishes around the ingredients and dietary constraints they had available to them, and it's useful to learn from them to see what all can be done with a particular set of ingredients.
This is more liberating (you have the whole world's culinary experience to pick from) rather than constraining yourself to eating regular meat dishes with the meat part subbed with tofu.
For instance, most American food just does not treat vegetables fairly. In a lot of cases, the meat is the center of the dish while veggies, well, they are just served boiled as a side or raw as a salad. If you go vegan and take the meat out of the dish, you are basically left with bland vegetables. No wonder 'recidivism' rates are high. Now go to any Indian or Thai or (even Chinese in some cases) restaurant and see what they do with vegetables.
I grew up on all kinds of cuisine (my mom really liked cooking), and I'm equally capable of enjoying vegetarian meals that are traditionally so as I am of enjoying well-made vegetarian modifications to non-veg dishes. Your suggestion of ignoring one a big part of the cuisine space seems like a much more surefire recipe for recidivism than keeping both options open.
For me it's an ethical argument to be vegetarian, i still love the taste and smell of meat (but contrary to the cliché repeated in this thread have never lapsed) - why give up on it completely if i can get something similar that allows me to still enjoy a bbq or spaghetti Bolognese. Most veggie substitutes taste like crap though - but that's a matter of trial and error (my advice is to avoid any veggiemeat that's egg based, they all taste disgusting and probably come out of the horribly cruel egg mass production.)
I'd be vegan but with small kids, a non-veg partner and an area that's not very veggie friendly that will have to wait a bit longer.
When I started eating meat again it was under a vague condition to eat "good" meat, that is, either cooked fresh by my mother, or from a higher-end restaurant. This eroded a bit and after a year or so I was back to eating meat relatively unabashedly again.
A few days ago I spent my entire Saturday vomiting bile from food poisoning ($CMG is the top suspect), and now I'm back to my post-vegetarianism habits of being careful about the meat I consume. I'm aware of probability and statistics, so this is somewhat irrational in that sense, but I suppose my point is that I'm grateful for the experience I had of being vegetarian and I think everyone should try it for as long as they can.
EDIT: Oh, perhaps the most shocking part of the experience was how few people knew what the difference between being pescetarian, vegetarian, and vegan is, as well as dealing with all manner of assholes who couldn't fathom why anyone would do such a thing to themselves.
EDIT2: As for health, it bears mentioning that I knew a couple people who are/were vegetarians and had much worse diets than many non-vegetarians. Naively substituting a chicken breast for a block of cheese is _not_ healthy!
EDIT3: I made a point of almost never asking my friends to pick somewhere more vegetarian friendly. Almost anywhere, I could deal with. Notable exceptions were seafood restaurants and anywhere in the South of the USA. There's only so many onion rings one can stand!
Observationally, this seems to be a stage that many young people go through at that time of life. At least on the surface - I've seen far too many "vegetarians" and "vegans" wolfing down greasy pepperoni pizza, blacked out at 3AM in my college days.
Why is this still a trope? Being vegetarian or vegan does not require perfection. Think about how absurd this standard is. If you've ever done something unkind you are no longer a kind person. If you've ever written poor code, you are no longer a good programmer.
This kind of thinking is a huge deterrent to people being vegan or vegetarian. If they ever have a lapse in judgement or decision making they just give up completely because of this line of thinking.
I'm not saying that all veg*ans are hypocritical holier-than-thou assholes, but it's not a stereotype that was invented out of whole cloth.
Even you're falling into the trap of labeling people as X or Y or Z.
Why can't the goal be "eat less meat" ? If you want to quantify it, make the goal "eat ~50% less meat" than you used to.
Alternatively, bring down the meat consumption to the level of Norway or Switzerland or Japan, countries just as prosperous as the US, but with even better health outcomes.
Even something as simple as "order a mostly vegetarian dish every other time you eat out" would go a long way.
The pareto optimal curve is a real concept, and you don't need to go full vegetarian or vegan for you and the planet to reap the benefits.
In passing, anybody who eats a lot of salads also eats at least a few insects ;-)
The "vast majority" here are probably people who tried it and stuck around for a couple of months before quitting. Just like any other "fad" diet.
I have been vegetarian for 2+ years, occasionally cheat with sea food, but the idea of eating animal flesh grosses me out and i don't think I'll ever turn back.
I work in an industry where I see the side effects of the Standard American Diet, and if you saw the health effects I see you'd switch too.
Here in Austin we have several monthly potlucks based upon the Plant Pure Nation pods idea, which makes it easier to find like minded people and new recipes. Also, Facebook groups like McDougall Friends is great for support, if you need it.
We're all susceptible to being deluded by our naive realism. Like how I think anyone driving faster than me is a maniac and anyone driving slower is a moron. The objective reality is that everybody thinks that.
If the motorcycle were invented today, do you think it would ever be legal? In America, perhaps, but probably not in countries that are more heavy-handed with regulation and bear the costs of public healthcare. It's an insane and dangerous vehicle.
I have several friends who have survived nasty car crashes and fully recovered. The only one who had a nasty motorcycle accident... well, his heart's still beating, but I'd hardly call it life.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorcycle_safety
Findings from motorcycle safety study.
75% of accidents were found to involve a motorcycle and a passenger vehicle.
Almost half of the fatal accidents show alcohol involvement.
In the multiple vehicle accidents, the driver of the other vehicle violated the motorcycle right-of-way and caused the accident in two-thirds of those accidents.
The report's additional findings show that the wearing of appropriate gear, specifically, helmets and durable garment, mitigates crash injuries substantially
The failure of motorists to detect and recognize motorcycles in traffic is the predominating cause of motorcycle accidents.
Wow, that's even worse than I expected, relative to a baseline that isn't very safe to begin with. It's unconscionable to keep these on the road.
(And others, often involving pedestrians.)
I'd expect most of the accidents caused by motorcyclists to involve excessive speed.
From a completely callous perspective, we'd miss all the healthy young organs that enter the donor pool. They don't call them "donorcycles" for nothing.
TFA has this:
> health can be an effective “foot in the door” approach to increasing the number of vegetarians and vegans, but often not enough to keep people animal-free for the long-term.
I'm pretty sure most of the people who switched back felt like you do now. "Ever" is a long time.
When anyone I know decides to try being a vegetarian they usually ask me about it (or just tell me about it) and my observation has been that a lot of people decide they want to be vegan and will do it for a few months before they drop back to just being a normal vegetarian and maybe a few months of that they drop back to just a reduced meat diet.
I try to warn people to not go from a high meat diet to vegan because a) afaik its not good for the body and b) its much harder that way but people rarely listen. The end result is OK in that they reduce their meat consumption but its much easier to do if you have realistic goals. You are not going to decide to run a marathon and just immediately do it, you need attainable goals along the way and that is what I think a lot of people miss. That and the more restrictive you are the harder it is socially (going out to eat, parties, etc) although that has gotten a LOT better in the last 10 years.
Vegetarian/vegan dieting is a bit like this. There are lots of people that try going vegan and then they only last so long at it, probably boring everyone to death with their 'meat is murder' views.
Meanwhile, in India and plenty of other places, are those that actually are vegetarian, having grown up that way and not indoctrinated at a young age into the meat eating cult. For these people the logic of suddenly starting to eat meat makes as much sense as taking up smoking, after an impressionable teenage this does not happen.
Disclosure: yes I am vegetarian and I own a leather belt!!!
On the other hand, they are indoctrinated at a young age to not eat meat (and to look down upon those that do).
Meat eating is expensive (comparatively) and hence it's an another great barrier for many people to try.
I'm so pro veggie food even after consuming dairy products, chicken,eggs and occasional beef and pork. That's primarily because I grew up in India and I believe veggie food in India is way better than any other non meat cuisine.
I once read it estimated that the average Jew in first-century Palestine would have probably eaten less than a pound of beef per year.
What's the source on that? And there are of course other kinds of meat you can eat besides beef.
Which makes sense, in a region that was profoundly ill-suited for cattle farming...
If you want to talk about staggering quantities of low-quality meat, look at European military/naval rations from the early modern period. At least a pound a day of salt beef, pork, or fish.
https://csphistorical.com/2016/01/24/salt-pork-ships-biscuit...
It seems to me that this type of attitude is a big part of why people don't stick with being vegetarian or vegan. There's a lot of direct and indirect pressure to conform and people freely make fun of vegetarians (especially vegans), turning their lives into demoralizing memes.
If only we could "live and let live". Then maybe people would feel free to make (and stick with) the choices that make sense to them.
Isn't vegetarianism in India at least originally a... religious thing?
But I think it's more to do with India being blessed with enough sunshine water and land to sustain non meat cuisines 365 days a year.
I am under the impression that anywhere you can raise animals, you can grow vegetables for fewer resources. There isn't anywhere that can sustain raising animals for slaughter but cannot be vegetarian instead.
Consider it this way: the animals you're raising for slaughter still need something to eat. Work your way down the food chain and you have to hit plants at some point.
1) The words "vegetarian" and "zoophile" used to be synonymous (because literally "animal lover"); but 2) the modern group of that name (animal fanciers) are vegetarian or vegan with exactly the same frequency as the general population, to within the margin of error of the survey.
I'm a vegetarian. You might be surprised how often this comes up when people try to convince me to eat meat. Completely fails to convince anyone, of course.
The main, major issue being plant based full time is eating out with others: if you are plant based every single meal there will be comments and discussions about how you eat, why you eat something vs something else, how your interlocutor could be eating better but they don't have time/money/... to do so and on and on.
Some former plant-based people will tell you that one of the best side-effects of not being plant based anymore is that during means you can talk about "something else".
This is magnified if you have to regularly eat out for work / with clients, where you can easily be put in the situation that you have to decide if you want to be plant based full time or plant based in private only.
To me this is the main difficulty with transitioning to a full time plant based diet: unless your circle of friends is ok with that (even better if they are plant based themselves) and unless your work situation is compatible with that and unless your coworkers are ok with that, it is very likely that in the long run you will fail due to having to decide between eating how you want, and having an easy time in your social/work life.
In my opinion this is why health-based plant based folks stick with the diet less, because unless you truly have a deep belief in what you are doing, it is really easy to say "it's not worth it" and it's a lot more likely you can have a strong belief in the ethics of being plant based than in an abstract concept of healthy eating
I started (and ended) being vegetarian for health reasons. Somewhere along the way I concluded it was morally wrong to eat meat esp mammals. No one convinced me, it just arose from mental and physical changes. I was / am kind of shocked I feel that way.
After 12-14 years being vegetarian I started eating meat again. I still believe it is morally wrong. I actually went to aqurium to tell fish that I was sorry that I was going to start eating them. Guess I was resolving guilt i felt. I struggle a lot with depression. After trying many things with no success, I decided I needed meat. Can't be sure correlation, but health is better now. I feel guilty eating animals, but I'm selfish enough/depression sucks enough for me to put my health before (some of) my morals.
That's me, YMMV.
Morally, my views have not changed at all. In my moral framework, my own needs always must come first. So nothing has changed morally and therefore, it hasn't been an actual problem. I'm not saying it was totally easy and that I didn't think a lot about it both before and after, but it has been quite beneficial to both my mind set and waistline so accepting it has been easy.
I enjoy meat and eat it but do so less now. Actually harvesting my own meat sometimes keeps the sobering practice in mind and also keeps me very cognizant of their lives etc. I dont take the practice for granted at all and I find it helps my perspective.
Also I find I want to use every part of the animal when I do that. Keep skin if applicable for leather etc, learn to cook the organs that you may not buy from store. Even cook marrow and carve bones etc. I find it sort of the respectful thing to do if I am going to kill something so I can eat.
It's when I go out that I eat meat/dairy to fit into my social circles. It sounds sad, but it's my reality: I've moved to a new city and I need friends.
I've had moments in the past when I've attempted to dive into full vegan and failed, mostly because I (a) had no idea how to cook food in the first place, and (b) didn't know the first thing about nutrition.
I feel like what I'm doing now is a good first step. Whether I become a full-time vegan or not is left to be seen.
After reading the article, the title feels really click-baity. The actual national trend discussed in the article is in the direction of more meat-eaters trying out a vegetarian diet. To summarize this as veg diets failing is to mischaracterize the trend.
Personally I just find the thought of eating meat disgusting, Though I could care less if anyone else around me eats it.
Got to love the anti veg propoganda though by the food industry heavily lobbying (and worried) about their profits.
I'm eating dramatically less meat because of this, but it made me realise that I could not ever be a vegetarian or --gasp-- a vegan. I'm not dumb, I understand the ethical implications but I had to accept that I'm a selfish bastard in this regard. I have no vices, I can't already eat sweets or cakes, I don't want to give up meat too.
It's pure selfishness.
I don't eat meat. It's an ethical thing. And I really, really do not need to box myself into some defined ideology.
1. the constant hunger 2. need for b12 supplements 3. oh, you enjoy traveling the world, good luck finding vegan food in villages of Philippines, or Bratislava. Personally, suffered in these cities among others 4. better start liking those salads and bland pastas and pizzas without cheese, either that or fries in some restaurants here in Sweden
It is not a easy life, so I understand why some give up, quite surprised that I haven't (yet!).
P.S : Bratislava does have one awesome vegan kiosk
Well, aren't they?
If you have a moral conviction for abstaining from meat, shouldn't that be enough to keep you coming back to your straight and narrow?
Humans have eaten meat for so long that it's engrained into our biochemistry. I imagine that trying to adjust to a diet that isn't based in our evolutionary framework requires some form of personal conviction and a social structure that reinforces it.
I don't believe that we have any instincts for eating meat like you suggest. It's not like a human is even capable of ripping fur and skin apart with our mouth, crushing bones with our teeth and tearing fresh meat off an animal and eating it. Well, not without getting sore in the jaw, broken teeth and probably a lot of sicknesses leading to death from the uncooked (or handled in any way) meat. If you put a baby in front of a animal, the baby won't think of it as food. We are not carnivores. We have simply learned to also eat meat. There's nothing about us requiring us to eat meat as long as we can get food from another sources.
I've been vegan for 3 years. The only hard thing about it is other peoples comments and not as many vegan friendly restaurant, although already in 2017, two new places have opened in my town, and it looks like it's a trend that will continue.
On a personal note, I was a vegetarian and later a vegan for a decade and I am familiar with the sort of "I feel it must have been this way" appeals to emotion (like referencing a baby and a presumably cute little animal) of the sort you're making. Arguments like yours are simply not supported by science.
I feel like you should post some links to all that evidence. As far as I'm aware, we've been eating plants a lot longer than we've eaten animals, and the human body also suggests that being that we look (appearance and anatomically) much more like frugivores than carnivores.
> On a personal note, I was a vegetarian and later a vegan for a decade and I am familiar with the sort of "I feel it must have been this way" appeals to emotion (like referencing a baby and a presumably cute little animal) of the sort you're making. Arguments like yours are simply not supported by science.
It's a logical as well as scientifically agreed upon conclusion as far as I'm aware. Humans don't have an instinct for eating animals like carnivores do. A lion cub has the instinct, a human baby doesn't, it has to learn it. If you have relevant science, please link it.
This is pretty standard anthropological knowledge. A quick google search returned this Time article that lays it out nicely: http://time.com/4252373/meat-eating-veganism-evolution/
> As far as I'm aware, we've been eating plants a lot longer than we've eaten animals
Of course we started off eating plants, and we still do to this day. But the evolution of humans really kicked off when we started consuming meat, and even more so when we were able to start leveraging fire to make accessing those calories and nutrients even easier.
> Humans don't have an instinct for eating animals like carnivores do.
If you're under no selection pressure, that becomes the case--especially when you have Oreos (which are vegan, of course) conveniently available at a super market.
But when you're a hunter gatherer, or simply starving, you fathom ways to get energy. Hunting has the highest ROI, and you can find endless examples of this in the form of modern day tribes.
Hunting is ritual. It's not instinct, but it's part of what humans are.
You can choose to not partake in meat, and that's purely your choice, but to damn it as something that unnatural is purely, scientifically wrong.
I don't believe that article contradicts anything I said.
> Of course we started off eating plants, and we still do to this day. But the evolution of humans really kicked off when we started consuming meat, and even more so when we were able to start leveraging fire to make accessing those calories and nutrients even easier.
Indeed, more carbs were able to go to the brain instead of other parts of our body, which enabled the brain to develop.
> You can choose to not partake in meat, and that's purely your choice, but to damn it as something that unnatural is purely, scientifically wrong.
I didn't say it was unnatural. I said we have no instincts to do it. It made sense when we needed to, so we learned to, and taught our children the ways and so on to be better at survival. Today, we neither need to and it's also the single biggest contributor to climate change, animal suffering and the heart disease, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and (partly) cancer epidemic thats the number one human killer globally.
For all the talk about how meat helped us develop our brain and become intelligent, it seems exceedingly unintelligent that we have not yet stopped when it's so damning to our existence.
You were asking for evidence of this:
> animals and "stuff you pick up" (seeds and so forth) are the original human diet
That article directly supports the importance of meat as a foundation to the modern humans diet: "It was about 2.6 million years ago that meat first became a significant part of the pre-human diet."
> Indeed, more carbs were able to go to the brain instead of other parts of our body, which enabled the brain to develop.
No, not just carbs. Energy and nutrition are the prerequisites to the human brain--and saturated fats play a HUGE role in the health of mitochondria. Without an energy and nutritionally rich diet that is both diverse in micro and macro nutrients, the human brain wouldn't have developed.
Not to mention how carbs were rare, and how the human brain can run on both glucose and ketones for a reason.
> Today, we neither need to and it's also the single biggest contributor to [...] heart disease, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and (partly) cancer epidemic thats the number one human killer globally.
This is just flat out wrong and based on outdated science. It's well known that stress, inflammation and insulin resistance due to our modern primarily processed diet are the culprits here. Blaming meat is ill informed and just not factual.
> it seems exceedingly unintelligent that we have not yet stopped when it's so damning to our existence.
If we're talking factory farming, yes, I agree with you. But to blame meat for the methods of supporting a ballooning population is not the solution.
No.
If you stick to what the Bible/Jesus say.
You can be a former bad person, but to get the approval of God you must repent and stop doing terrible things.
Being both is being hypocrite, and that is probably the worse of all, ie: Jesus dislike more the hypocrite than the honest sinner that acknowledge his own faults.
It was extremely unhealthy for me, personally. Over a period of time I developed allergies to both soy protein and gluten that I never had in my early twenties, allergies that never went away after I returned to eating meat. YMMV
From an ethical perspective too, I no longer believe the hype that diets should be "more efficient." I believe humans are too efficient already, and what more efficiency provides us, practically speaking, is simply more humans and more over-population, with worse living conditions long-term for most of those new people.
India is often touted as a very vegetarian country, but I can't believe that sort of population density is a good thing. I'd prefer everyone eat a rather "inefficient" diet with lots of open space for animals to graze.
In any case, I hardly see how going back to an animal-including diet changes anything on that front. Soy is not vegan-only, and neither is gluten. You can easily live on a vegan diet without those things, and you can easily live on a non-vegan diet including those things. Seems more like a weak excuse if you ask me.
This is another aspect of veganism that really turns me off, the pervasive self-righteousness within the community at large.
Please tell me what restaurants I could visit with those dietary restrictions? And what quick lunches / fast food I can buy on that diet, on say a 30 minute lunch break, for instance...?
People don't really realize what they eat, especially when it comes to gluten and soy. I developed a wheat allergy after college (which my doctor said was caused by stress and working in a pizzaria full of wheat) which caused me to have to switch to a gluten free diet. That means your prepared meal options are massively reduced, more of your time is spend cooking (which imo is a good thing, I'm conscious about what I eat now), and if you do eat out, take on a "gluten-free tax".
People who go on these holier-than-though fad diets don't understand what people who actually have dietary needs go through. There is no wiggle room for us. If we don't follow our diets there are real and serious medical consequences. We don't just "feel down on ourselves" for not following the diet and the strictness with which we must follow our diets cause real inconveniences.
Though I admit there is nothing inherently healthy about eating vegan (oreos are vegan and I've gained weight while still being vegan while learning how to bake) I'd argue that choosing a diet on the availability of fast food choices is an indicator of an unhealthy decision.
Why can't it be both? A diet can be both medically necessary and inconveniencing. See my own example or a diabetic diet.
Yes I do. I'm a vegan and have been for 3 years. In Denmark at least, it's easy to avoid gluten when you buy bread. If it isn't in your country, bake your own. Soy? Also easy. There are thousands of other plants.
> Please tell me what restaurants I could visit with those dietary restrictions?
Any vegan(-friendly) restaurant.
> And what quick lunches / fast food I can buy on that diet, on say a 30 minute lunch break, for instance...?
I eat pizzas, burgers, sandwiches, salats, pasta salats, cold pasta dishes, rice and curry (heated up) and so on for lunch. Anything really. If you can't buy it as take-away, cook your own.
I've seen an increase in gluten-free products in the last years though, and also heard that it's been happening in the US and UK among other places too. Even in candy. Is that not true?
I guess that's one of the benefits of not living in "processed or manufactured everything" America. We have the benefit of not having to cook as much, you have the benefit of having more control over what you put into your food.
I like to think that I choose to cook my own food because it's healthier than (most) take-away (except if it's incredibly fancy and expensive) and mass-produced food sold in supermarkets, and because I can't afford to go to expensive restaurants for every meal :D
That's not true. The vast majority of convenient off-the-shelf meat substitutes use soy or seitan to replace meat protein.
Staying vegan while giving up soy and gluten means committing to a massive amount of meal-prep, and vegan food is already more labour-intensive in meal prep than the corresponding omnivore meals. It would mean basically giving up on all restaurant eating everywhere.
I'm not saying it can't be done, but you should not downplay that with "easily".
Indeed. I've seen a trend in new products using other stuff though. It's getting easier. But lets not forgot you can just buy proper whole food instead like fruit, beans, grains, vegetables, legumes and so on.
> Staying vegan while giving up soy and gluten means committing to a massive amount of meal-prep, and vegan food is already more labour-intensive in meal prep than the corresponding omnivore meals.
I think it depends on what culture you are from. In Denmark, it's normal to prepare food yourself. Sure, some buy ready-made food in stores, but I've never grown up seeing my parents do it, and I rarely do it myself.
> It would mean basically giving up on all restaurant eating everywhere.
All vegan-friendly restaurants I've been at have also had non-gluten bread and dishes not containing soy at all.
> I'm not saying it can't be done, but you should not downplay that with "easily".
I think that's subjective. If you're used to buy food that's already made, well, then, it probably isn't. If you are used to cooking yourself then it is.
>>It was extremely unhealthy for me, personally.
Agreed. It was the worst decision of my life. I lost considerable muscle mass and power and it wasn't until I had blood work done that I found I was low in creatine, B12 and so forth, the usual things only found in animals. I was told by my vegan "friends" to just take supplements and that's when the alarm bells should have rung: an optimal diet for a strictly amateur athlete shouldn't need such things. I also had alarmingly low testosterone, which I later learned was because I ate so little cholesterol. But stupidly, I stuck with it for years.
Eventually I dumped it, started eating animals of all sorts like crazy, regained my muscle mass, power (a function of creatine) and healthy test levels and life became good again.
I did not make this choice lightly. For several weeks and months I got hung up on the "but you need vegetables and fiber" argument. I read and thoroughly did my research over a period of many months. My parents and I have tried many of the popular fad diets out there, including raw vegan where we would make "healthy" smoothies out of kale/spinach and some fruits (never mind that raw spinach is rather toxic with oxalates and other anti-nutrients, and the sugar content (especially fructose) from the fruits will lead us towards diabetes).
My parents are now so pre-diabetic that they cannot eat fruit anymore. A simple serving of pineapple will push my father's blood pressure over 200. Two servings and he will black out. Waking glucose level is about a 100 for both of my parents.
Then, we switched to paleo, and a few months later to zerocarb. It has now been several months eating nothing but meat, eggs, and cheese, and the results were night-and-day different to the raw vegan diet high in carbs and sugar. Now, we are keto adapted. Insulin sensitivity is slowly returning to normal. Waking glucose is improving for them (mine is normal). Lipid panels are improving. We all lost excess weight as well.
By following zerocarb, you automatically eat a FODMAP diet. You don't damage your intestines anymore from all that bulky high-fiber diets. You really don't need fiber--I have not eaten any fiber in months.
In the end, I experimented, my parents experimented, and we settled on zerocarb. There's an excellent book on this called the Fat of the Land by Vilhjalmur Stefansson. Read it with a bag of salt, but perhaps try a 60 day experiment.
> In other words, from the advocacy group’s perspective, health can be an effective “foot in the door” approach to increasing the number of vegetarians and vegans, but often not enough to keep people animal-free for the long-term.
Not even their own health is a big enough factor for them to control their lust.
> “The latest findings once again show that a message focused on reduction instead of elimination of animal products may be more effective to create an overall decline in animal product consumption,” the report says. “Advocates would be well advised to soften their appeals to avoid suggesting the choice is all or nothing.”
I wonder if those vegetarians/vegans that returned to eating animal products returned 100%, or in a reduced manner. That's the really interesting bit unfortunately missing from the article. If people reduce their animal products usage with, say, 50% vs someone going vegan for a few months and then returns to animal products with a 50% reduction, they will ultimately have had a bigger impact than people "only" doing the reduction. Personally, all the vegetarians/vegans I know that have gone back have done it because it was too hard in social settings, but the experience have resulted in them reducing their use of animal products to "rarely" or "at social occasions" or "when it's not hard to skip on it", and that's a pretty big reduction.
I'm one of those people you mention who went back because it was hard in social settings. For context, I stopped being vegetarian because I wanted to be more free to eat with my friends and family. It was incredibly hard growing up, as I could rarely have dinner at a friends house or eat meals in Boy Scouts. People didn't want to eat food that I cooked because there wasn't meat in it, so no one ate at my house. Even going out to restaurants was hard. Telling people I didn't want to go to their favorite burger joint on a road trip is challenging when you do it all the time. I had to either bow out of social situations and do my own thing, bring my own food, or not eat.
Going through that for my entire childhood definitely changed me. You have to fight against the ingrained American mentality that meat always belongs at the table. You have to make people leave their comfort zones or do extra work in order to accommodate your needs. You have to be comfortable being "that person" who isn't normal. It wears on you over time, and at some point it just wasn't worth it any more.
Now, I eat meat occasionally when I go out and I cook it for special occasions at home. Otherwise my meals are vegetarian most of the time. I enjoy meat in a limited capacity, and I personally want to keep it that way. I wish those who advocated for vegetarianism and veganism had some more capacity to see consumption reduction as aligned their cause. Black and white views exist on both sides here, and I think the solution is somewhere in the middle. Eat meat when its special. In my opinion it tastes better and you appreciate it more!
I see from your comment history that you are a vegan yourself, and your behavior is exactly what turns people away from it. What's right for you isn't right for everyone. Take your arrogance elsewhere, and learn some compassion.
And to that extend, it's universally agreed upon by science and all mayor and respected health organizations that a vegan diet is at least as healthy (and quite possibly healthier) as any non-vegan diet, and that animal agriculture is the single biggest contributor to climate change, and it's obviously better for the animals, so objectively, it's the superior choice.