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Comment by DoreenMichele | Hacker News Reader

I have long joked that vegetarianism is about hating plants, not loving animals.

Animals that peope eat eat far more plants than people who eat plants eat, so the joke is more "funny" than meaningful.

It's not even funny. It's an attempt to subvert the very legitimate premise of vegetarianism in order to not face the undeniable impacts of non-vegetarian diets.

No. It is mocking the idea that the food choices of vegetarians makes them morally superior and entitled to look down their noses at everyone else and be awful to them.

My dislike of the tendency for vegetarians to be all holier than thou was solidified while I was homeless and being harassed online by a holier than thou vegan* who claimed to be vegan because she couldn't tolerate the suffering of the farm raised animals. Meanwhile, she took glee in adding to my suffering, though I was extremely ill and desperately poor because of it.

I am a big fan of "go pray in your closet." Making food choices because you sincerely believe they are morally right is totes cool. Being an asshole to anyone who doesn't eat like you, not so much.

* To make matters worse, she wasn't really a committed vegan. In cold weather, she happily added cheese to her diet. She just preferred to call herself vegan for the virtue signaling associated with it.

Yes. Basically if your reason to not eat meat is because you want to minimize your carbon footprint then usually you won't attack people for what they eat, but because they have a larger carbon footprint.

Personally I fly a lot (I don't particularly want to), so therefore I could never use that argument. But I have met people who fly as much as I do who try to pull the morally superior diet card and I just move on because they have missed the point entirely.

Isn't it better to improve at least a little? It is better to save some emissions, and it is better to kill fewer animals.

I still find the vegetarian chism of the past incredible - how can there be a conflict about advocating for less meat consumption by everyone vs trying to convert them all the way to vegetarianism? If you get 50% of the population to eat half of what they had before, it beats converting the 2% you can optimistically get in the short-to-medium term vastly, so just do both.

It's the Copenhagen interpretation of Ethics again - if you interact with a problem in any way, eg by improving it a little, it is now your fault and responsibility to the end. Meanwhile, if you had no interaction, you are morally free not to do anything.

> It is mocking the idea that the food choices of vegetarians makes them morally superior and entitled to look down their noses at everyone else and be awful to them.

These people definitely exist, as you’ve illustrated, but in my experience they are a small minority.

What’s interesting to me is that vegetarians/vegans have this reputation for being in-your-face about it, yet in reality the experience reported by my veg friends, and later what I’ve witnessed myself, is that they don’t really advertise it or comment on other people’s choices, and when it does come up (e.g. while discussing where to go for lunch) it is all the meat eaters who predictably start in with the wisecracks and the pre-emptive defense of why they eat meat and why being vegetarian is stupid/weak/unnatural/unamerican/etc. You can see it in all the responses to this article!

This is remarkably consistent here up and down the east coast anyway, I don’t know if it’s different in other parts of the country. I’m just sort of bemused by the difference between reputation and reality.

I am well aware that vegetarians are often given a hard time for their choice to not eat meat. I grew up in a meat-and-potatoes family. I was a wannabe vegetarian for a time, but I have a serious medical condition and that simply doesn't work for me. Still, I eat a great deal less meat than is the norm for many of my relatives.

On visits home, I have been accused of being vegetarian because I don't necessarily have meat as part of Every. Single. Meal. For health reasons, it is not unusual for me to choose a vegetarian option. Even when I do eat meat, it is typically the smallest portion of anyone at the table.

I have thought very long and hard about food and ethics. I occasionally spell that out if it seems pertinent for some reason. Getting on my high horse about how my food choices are ethical or about the amount of time I have put into deciding my position on the matter as a means to piss on other people never strikes me as pertinent.

So it rather annoys me when a) I am equally given hell for my food choices by both vegetarians and by those who perceive me as a vegetarian and b) vegetarians inevitably assume that they have thought more on the matter and researched it more than I have simply because I don't agree with them.

Most of the world is raised on either a shame model or a guilt model. If you are choosing to not eat meat for ethical reasons, it isn't surprising that meat eaters will feel judged by you. Most vegetarians are, in fact, judgy about the diets of others. It isn't hard to convey that fact and meat eaters are not oblivious to it.

I rarely get hassled these days, in part because I mostly either eat alone or with my two adult sons. When I do attend a meal at a social function, if anyone comments on a lack of meat on my plate, I go out of my way to make it a non issue. I don't talk about food ethics. I usually avoid talking about my medical situation. I try to frame it as "Oh, the (vegetarian option) just looked scrumptious! I really love cheese dishes!"

Because I am a big believer in go pray in your closet and not interested in making my food choices a political issue between me and friends, family or acquaintances. So I go to great lengths to frame it as a personal choice that implies nothing at all about them.

I understand where you are coming from, but instead of judging veganism based on one vegan who harassed you, why not read about the fundamental concepts? Peter Singer or Tom Regan are a good start.

One way to understand why certain vegans act like this, is to learn about Secondary Traumatic Stress Disorder. This is more common than it looks and watching documentaries like Earthlings can definitely trigger it on people who are not well equipped to witness this level of violence.

I am not judging Veganism. I am certainly not doing it on the basis of one extreme example of assholery. But the specific example highlights what is wrong with running around and pissing on other people because you don't approve of their food choices. If vegetarians want to ascribe to themselves the role of moral leader, they need to up their game and figure out how to stop being gratuitous assholes to the millions, if not billions, of animals that are the same species as themselves but don't eat like them.

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