How can you continue to eat other animals if you feel the way you do about other animals?
https://impossiblefoods.com/ is onto that
Not to mention all the ingredients we'll have to engineer out of a vegan diet like the excess phytic acid (again just naming one example)
But you are correct about the other criticisms/concerns about vegan diets in your child comment (I responded to this one because HN apparently limits you to 4 or so levels' deep commenting)
EDIT: Now the ability to reply to that one has returned. Not sure why that happened, but whatever... leaving this here
https://medium.com/impossible-foods/how-we-know-youll-like-v...
I guess I am comfortable with my cognitive dissonance in this area. FOR NOW.
(But seemingly no other areas. I memorized just about all the informal fallacies mostly so I can Correct People's Bad Thinking On The Internet, sigh...)
I'm also waiting for companies like https://impossiblefoods.com/ to do their thing. I tried their impossible burger, and it was amazingly indistinguishable from the real thing. If they come up with impossible bacon and impossible chicken, I'd definitely be able to pull off vegetarianism or pescatarianism. In the meantime, I unfortunately love my chicken and eggs, milk, cheese, ice cream (all in moderation). Also, although I do eat eggs, I check this site to make sure they're ethically obtained: https://www.cornucopia.org/scorecard/eggs/ And I ONLY buy eggs from the highly-ranked producers. I pay extra for this, of course.
Also I think fish/clams/oysters/shellfish are sort of the exception for most people, all signs point to them being only dimly conscious with extremely tiny brains. Given their nutritional value, it's arguably ethical to kill them for food (but not unsustainably to the point of drastic population decrease, which I think we're currently doing with bluefin tuna...) This doesn't include octopi and whales/dolphins and other obviously-intelligent creatures, of course.
What is your position on humane painless animal death after living a full life? (given that every being has to die, anyway)? What about lab-grown muscle fiber?
Again, I honestly appreciate the fact that you have a low tolerance for hypocrisy/cognitive-dissonance (at least in this area), and I fully admit this is a dissonance I am actively maintaining. I'm... trying to get out of it.
Self-honesty turns out to be the most difficult honesty...
Using your reasoning, we should happily eat any animal (possibly including human, but animals also commit suicide sometimes) that suicided...
I think death is an inherently ugly thing no matter how you approach it, and given the existence of carnivores and omnivores who are not vultures waiting for food to die before consuming it, I don't think killing in nature for food is avoidable. Pain avoidance is much easier to reason about, however.
Like it or not, we are part of the natural world and its strange rules of engagement. Having just watched a hyena eat a wildebeest alive (someone in the comments here posted it), I have to wonder if humans are not the most "humane" killers-for-sustenance on the planet. The most ethical thing we can do (other than creating meat in a lab such as what Impossible Foods is doing... I'm a fan), IMHO, other than go vegan, is to be as humane as possible about the killing bit, give animals as full a life as we can, even if we intend to eat them towards the end of their lives.
I believe that one day (possibly in the far future), every human will be vegan. I can't say that it's reasonable to expect everyone to be vegan now, though. The French love their cheese, the Germans love their liverwurst and bratwurst, the Italians love their pizza, and the Japanese love their sushi. I am a huge fan of grilled chicken, eggs and sushi (and the VERY occasional burger or bratwurst... I'm ethnically German, btw) and the wide variety of cheeses out there... these things would be extremely hard for me to give up, so my fallback position, for now, is to obtain these things in as humane a way as is possible for me right now.
I commend your veganism, regardless. It is admirable and it is an ideal you have attained in this time and it should be emulated.
The highest rated egg producers have "truly pastured" chickens... which is probably as close as you can get to giving them a "natural life" while confining them. Note that there is a mutually-beneficial trade going on here- They do give up their eggs (and eventually themselves), and are (broadly) confined, but while alive they can eat as much as they want and they are secure from predation.
I am extremely impressed by Impossible burgers (Beyond is OK, but Impossible... wow.) I haven't tried vegan eggs but if they don't get the yolk almost exactly right I might not be able to switch, can you provide a link?
Also, what's your opinion on lab-grown muscle meat? Is it all about ethics for you?
> To me it seems incredibly cruel to continue to eat animals and their eggs and milk.
I believe at least the "eggs and milk" can be done in humane ways. Again, we provide an environment for them with unlimited food and minimized risk of predation. In the wild, food would be scarce and predation risk would be ever-present.
As far as eating animals... I consider it a near-necessary evil for now that will eventually go away. (I know you're arguing that it isn't necessary, and you're probably right... I'm talking about convincing EVERYONE of this RIGHT NOW tho)
> We don't need to do it anymore and to continue to do so is willfully supporting cruelty against animals.
I have an idea you might like. What if you took a few friends to do a field trip to the source of the meats/eggs/cheese they eat (after doing the homework to investigate where these are, of course)? Judgment-free. And also to observe treatment and (if you can stomach it, and if they permit it, which they may not) the slaughtering part. I'd go on that trip. Observed truth is the best argument...
The fact that cows must produce babies in order to produce milk was somehow lost on me. That’s unfortunate. I had assumed it was injected hormones that faked a pregnancy. But you did send me on a cow rabbit-hole.
> intense emotional pain for both
I did not find objective evidence that this is common, nor do I think it is easy to evaluate whether a cow is experiencing “intense emotional pain.”
> lonely terror
Yes, the worst milk producers do that. I buy organic and that means the cow absolutely must be pastured.
> video evidence available online
Yes, of the worst possible conditions, taken at the most offensive and least ethical milk producers, and posted to blogs with a clear vegan bias to rationalize. Surely. :P
> no way this demand could ever be met (unless ethics is sacrificed)
I would like to see evidence for this assertion
Today it feels more like depression based morality caused by the chaos of the last decades and the glooming collapse than empathy. At least that's how I feel when I see people talking about the subject (but tbh I don't see a lot of that group, mostly some known figure in mainstream medias.. probably not the best speakers).
Again, long ago, you had to survive, it was fair game. My cat doesn't refrain from stabbing a mice at night, a cat is highly skilled and potent compared to a mouse.. yet nature balances things out, mice hide, they live their existence. You know if you make it too comfy, a species will diverge and probably harm itself. Stress is part of life. And as humans, even when violently hunting.. I think we knew (pulling that out of my own theorizing arse) that it was a sad but needed act.
Now we're in an era where technology, knowledge will remove all these requirements from our lives (say we get synthetic food, etc etc) so we're shifting toward a purer existence. Something where you don't impact nature as much. But it's still early days in a way.
Cats are instinctively driven to hunt and kill, even when they have no need or desire for sustenance. They enjoy it.
I don't think it's a cognitive dissonance thing, at least where I've seen that picture. I think it's an us/them thing. Specifically, the kind where one group gets the idea that another is out to get them. (That "militant vegetarian" you mention is someone I have heard about my whole life yet never met.) If they don't have a lot of vegetarian friends, you may be their first chance to have a conversation about it, and that's probably the only one they rehearsed.
It may not be as crystallized as other areas, yet, but I think this is also one more field for cultural proxy wars, as we all get drafted into us/them camps. Again, at the individual level, you might notice the person doing the attacking always thinks they're defending. Complicated big picture stuff at play.
Don't project onto people you clearly don't understand. Creating mental models of people you disagree with that involves making them stupid or living in dissonance does a disservice to yourself (by making you ignorant), to them (by you spreading your ignorance), and to wider political debates in general (it's very difficult to come to an understanding when people are incapable of understanding the other side).
I carry that cognitive dissonance (I know animals feel; I believe they have souls; and yet I continue to eat meat); the difference is that I (through tons of introspection) have made peace with my (very few) dissonances and therefore, calling me out on it (as someone did further up the comment chain here) will result simply in me acknowledging their observation (without any emotional/anger element).
I think portion control would be a more effective approach. A little meat goes a long way. I think you'll get further convincing the public with a moderation message than a black and while moral argument.
A few ounces of meat/fish a day aren't going to cause any of those diseases and are packed with nutrients that a vegan diet has a very hard time providing at a similar cost, especially in poor countries. The Gates foundation isn't betting on chicken on a whim. I still think moderation is the way to go. If everyone cut their intake by 50% we'd have a healthier population, animal slaughter would be cut in half, and we wouldn't have to reinvent meat.
We probably could move away from meat, if everyone was well off (and took supplements). But that's not the case. And I never said 100s of millions were acceptable, merely that a 50% portion reduction is a LOT better than nothing, and probably a lot more than a morality strategy will achieve.
Case in point : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpQmJ7UUNFQ >> Warning, this is not for the faint of heart. <<
I've worked in a slaughterhouse, doing the night shift cleaning up the mess before a new day begins, I know what's it's like. Overcrowded boxes full of chicken shitting themselves, getting hanged by their legs on a factory line before getting their throat sliced by a fast spinning blade. Not a pretty sight for sure and a sad way to go.
It's very unfortunate how the mass consumption of meat creates terrible living conditions for the various animals we breed for that purpose. But if we measure the scale of suffering, I think we're doing a bit better than nature.
And yes, by going vegan you do not contribute to that, I get it. I have huge amount of respect for people that live by their moral standards and stick to it. Yet this doesn't mean that the wilderness is some Disney fantasy and yes, for all intent and purpose, most animals out there in the wild are bound to have a gruesome end.
I'm not implying that we're doing animals a favour by sending them to a slaughterhouse, simply that this is the natural order of things. If you feel strongly about that and choose to not consume meat and such, great. As for me, despite what I've seen, there's nothing wrong with eating meat. The only thing I wish is a more humane breeding, and I'm happy to pay more for that.
I'm aware that it's slightly hypocritical because would there be an alien specie doing the same to us, I'd probably would have a different perspective on that. As it stands, I enjoy being an apex predator. May it last forever.