Are Avocados and Almonds Vegan?
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There's this bizarre, illogical trope that doing some good is pointless if you can't be absolutely, impeccably perfect in every way. Again, it's just obvious bullshit from people who don't even really believe what they're saying, they're just playing a stupid gotcha game.
I'd love to know if there is a handy word/term for this phenomenon where an odd amount of energy is spent opposing those people/views which are more similar than less similar.
People want strict rules that they can follow that gives them a measuring stick by which they can gauge their own (and others) "worthiness", "purity" or "success". If we set specific boundaries, then we can more easily judge ourselves if we succeeded/failed or others if they are in/out. This type of thinking is most commonly found in diets. We decide which foods are "bad" and which are "good" so we know whether or not we have achieved our goals. It's easier to know when you "fell off the horse" when you ate a food previously deemed "bad". It's not so easy to make judgements on ourselves and others when the rules are not so clear-cut.
I think many are afraid of looking to ourselves as the deciders of our own realities/moralities. We prefer to look outside to leaders/gurus/experts to tell us what the truth is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_difference...
I have never in real life heard of anyone contemplating nuts and avocados as 'vegan' or not, but I hear all the time from my vegan-leaning friends about GMO's, palm oil, and everything else.
Most of us just want a croissant made with butter and would like for it to work out in some reasonable way for everyone including the cow.
Vegans (I don't know what vegan-leaning means, but I'm referring to most actual vegans here) want this as well. The difference is that they recognize that this is largely untenable.
If it’s vegetable fat based butter or genetically modified yeast making milk from which butter can be made, that’s not an issue.
I maintain that the Vegan Police from Scott Pilgrim are one of the finest satirical concepts I've ever seen in fiction.
With the introduction of ethical meat riding on the back of GMO & science I bet we'll see an emergence of very different forms of veganism.
I've slowly reduced my meat & dairy consumption, but haven't eliminated it. This year I have almost entirely eliminated cow meat from my diet (probably ate ~100-200 grams this year for cultural reasons), but am highly anticipating the impossible burger 2 coming to local restaurants.
Good for you! More people need to realize this is an option. Too many in the vegan community and elsewhere push a "all or nothing" approach which is harmful to the movement overall. People don't do well with totally changing their lifestyle overnight. Slow and steady is the key to long term adoption.
...the loud, obnoxious ones you know about, perhaps. Most vegans and vegetarians in my experience (hopefully including myself) don't try to preach, lecture, or abuse...but you likely don't even know their eating habits as a result.
Likewise - are you even hearing from actual vegans/vegetarians? Or are you hearing repeated stories that curdle outrage?
When I was in high school I wrote an essay about how ridiculous it was that I could be insulted for daring to hold a door for a woman when I hold doors for everyone! It was a couple of years before I realized I never HAD been insulted, I had simply been told I could be. This has happened with any number of items in my life: the outrage far exceeds the actual experiences.
I won't deny there are _some_ smug and self-righteous vegans out there - there are annoying people everywhere. But have you actually encountered the "community" (to use the word from above poster)?
I'm de-facto a vegan every second day, without thinking about it.
I do dispute however the OP's point 'non-vegans' splitting hairs on vegans 'a thing' or 'the thing'.
The 'finger wagging and moral high ground posturing' is almost entirely a function of the vegan side of the equation.
For example: GMO's, as someone noted below, it's 'not a vegan issue' - of course not strictly, but it's the same crowd of 'food concerned people'.
'Organic, GMO, Vegan' overlap quite a bit - this is where the discussion and marketing (as a result of demand no doubt) is happening.
Other diets such as vegetarianism are much more clearly harm minimization based, which makes it easier to deal with issues like this.
In general, the ethical question of how to assign moral weight to different beings is an open one. Some people would argue that a human being has greater moral worth than an insect. Others argue that all animal lives carry equal weight with human lives (I don't know who these people are, but they worry me).
Moreover, when people (unprompted) claim to be vegans in the presence of non-vegans, they are morally distinguishing themselves. It is the unstated claim "you are in my out-group" that non-vegans find so offensive. But then, a lot of people are offended when anyone they might call a friend goes out of their way to make a moral distinction, and this is not specific to diet preference at all.
I'd consider myself one of these. All living things are equally fair game to be eaten. Obviously some carry social and legal consequences that make it not worthwhile, but ethically, we're all organic matter. Life consumes other life to keep itself going. That's how it works. I don't know why I should be concerned about a cow but not a stalk of celery. They're equally alive.
I guess if you only care about the most primitive, baseline definition of "alive". I would think we had evolved beyond believing killing is killing no matter the circumstance. Do we not wish to distinguish ourselves from primal, purely survival-driven animals?
If you're not survival-driven, you will eventually be out-competed by something that is. If we don't survive, everything else is pointless.
A lot of caring from the vegan community is feeling-based. What this means is that one _feels_ that one cares about living species while not _actually_ caring about them. Furthermore, when one strongly feels in this manner they tend to hold strong beliefs as well. Much like religion, this results in people fighting over their cherished feelings and beliefs.
In the end, nobody seems to _actually_ care about the animals.
Think about it.
Even from a completely amoral perspective where nothing is preferable to anything else, do you not see the social benefits of a community which has the socially-enforced value of "suffering is bad"?
In general I prefer life should go on living and creating more life in a sustainable fashion, but generally that does involve some amount of suffering for some life somewhere.
An amoral framework has no basis whatsoever to argue that any value system is wrong. Why would a moral person care about the material reasons why society is altruistic? There's nothing you can argue at the object level that will change someone's moral values.
If you take scientific materialism to it's extreme 'we are all just particles' ergo, none of intelligence/life/love/wisdom/creation even really exist, it's all just how we perceive randomness.
'Sociopaths' and 'Psychopaths' cannot exist in materialism after all: we're just mounds of atoms.
But once you accept the life principle, which is not so well defined but nevertheless evident to us all at least due to the fact we are conscious ... well then you can start to arrive at why we might think we are 'more important' than rocks.
Then things like 'community' etc. make sense.
But one's metaphysical view needs to have something more transcendent that e=mc2 at the root of it in order for it to work.
The OP's comments are actually reasonable in the context of materialism, and that they are a little 'shocking' to someone normally engaged in life is only evidence of the hollowness of our current rational regimes at explaining the most basic question, which is 'who/what are we'. Knowing how 'dark matter' works will be nice, but it's still secondary to understanding the nature of life itself, I think.
I thought as well that human lives are more important than animal lives, but the question is that when AI gets smarter than us and concious, do you want AI to have the moral value of human life having lesser importance than AI life?
As for "some good", you might really want to get off your high horse and objectively look into the catastrophic environmental damage that a vegan diet causes. Not to mention the long term harm it does to the human body.
You literally cannot survive in nature on a vegan diet. You'd starve to death. You literally cannot have a vegan diet without fossil fuel ( good luck growing avocados in alaska or NY ). You literally cannot have a vegan diet without killing nearly infinite number of bugs, worms, vermin, etc. I know truth can be triggering to a cult member, but this is agricultural and economic reality of a vegan diet.
Personally, I'd love to society move to a "hunter gatherer diet" as that's the most natural, healthy and environmentally friendly diet possible. Rather the elites want to put us on a diet akin to the "vegan diet" livestock on industrial farms are fed. It's funny how industrialization is turning humans more and more into livestock. Maybe the UN will recommend troughs filled with vegetables for human beings.
But "har har, vegans are all crazy toxic assholes, amiright?" is a popular trope, no matter the factuality.
How many billions of people can earth supported wih a hunter gatherer diet? Veganism is one of the least CO2-intensive diets possible in a modern society (https://i1.wp.com/shrinkthatfootprint.com/wp-content/uploads...), and if you knew any vegans personally I think they'd agree with measures to reduce the CO2 intensiveness of agriculture. I'm not exactly sure who or what you're arguing against.
With regards to insects, plenty of people are interested in insect and wildlife suffering, including vegans - https://reducing-suffering.org/why-vegans-should-care-about-.... Under some assumptions, by reducing land & water use, veganism does reduce insect suffering somewhat. Clearly, it also reduces livestock suffering.
As with most labels, the word vegan has a fluid, rough definition which varies slightly over time and person-to-person. If someone tells me they are a vegan, I know they are trying to tell me that they avoid foods that use animal parts or their byproducts. It's not some fucking contract they entered into prohibiting them from eating whatever foods society decides to impose the vegan label on via mental gymnastics. If they are cool with eating the butter made from Betsy, my happy cow, then whatever, let them eat the butter.
FWIW, I'm a carnivore and object to the consumption of almonds because of their harmful impact to the environment. That might make me a hypocrite to someone because I'm totally okay with eating a banana or something. But I don't care, I'm free to decide my own arbitrary moral compass for whatever reason I choose.
I guess I'm aggravated by society's needless pedantry over language. Not every word needs a rigid legal or technical definition that should be adhered to. And the people guilty of this are largely doing so because they don't agree with you and are attempting to make you look stupid to justify their position.
"Veganism is a way of living which seeks to exclude, as far as is possible and practicable, all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose."[1]
1. https://www.vegansociety.com/go-vegan/definition-veganism
> Vegans avoid animal products. For strict vegans this means avoiding honey because of the exploitation of bees. That seems to imply that vegans should also avoid vegetables like avocados that involve exploiting bees in their production.
It seems like there are some vegans who consider it. If exploiting bees for honey is non-vegan, why would exploiting bees for other purposes be acceptable?
If you are vegan except honey, good for you. If you decide that doesn't fit your worldview/morals, then good for you. If all you care about is meeting some other persons very specific standard of veganism, then you are probably doing it for the wrong reasons to begin with.
There's even a qualifier in your quote, "strict" vegans.
I personally would eat (local/trusted) honey even if I were 100% vegan, because to me that makes more sense then not consuming it at all when we very much need bees to stick around, and supporting a local farm cultivating colonies is something possible for me to do, as opposed to taking up beekeeping myself.
I'm sure farmers and vegans alike would prefer if the world was bee friendly enough to not have to import bees, but meanwhile, are they really being exploited if you drive them around to new feeding grounds and otherwise leave them to themselves?
Bees make honey for themselves, not humans. Humans disrupt their hive to take the honey bees worked to create and store. Merely moving them around to different feeding grounds doesn't take anything from them.
(to be honest though, they probably(?) harvest the honey that the migrant bees make...so...?)
Everyone has their own morals and comforts and taken to the extreme almost nothing would be vegan.
For example, I'm lacto-ovo vegetarian, if I was served meat in a restaurant on accident I'd send it back. Some vegetarians consider eating it instead to be the ethical thing in this situation, because the animal is already dead, its already prepared, and sending it back would be wasteful. I personally couldn't stomach that, but I can tolerate some very minor cross contamination, especially if I don't personally see it happening! Otherwise I'd never eat food I didn't personally prepare and that would reduce my quality of life. I also don't think I'd be able to stomach lab grown meat either even though there isn't an ethical or environmental concern with it.
(and honestly, even being lacto-ovo in the first place isn't a perfect position.)
Another example, I know some people who are otherwise vegan but will eat eggs from backyard chickens because they know the owners and know the chickens are well cared for and live a good life. So they consider it ethical.
Many vegans have pets.
Disclaimer: I do NOT personally see honey as "exploiting bees."
Pointing out the truth and informing people about the consequences of their choices can be done without silly titles that make many people roll their eyes.
https://old.danwatch.dk/en/undersogelseskapitel/how-much-wat...
Beef is ~1800 gal/lb ~= 15,021 liters / kg, vs 283 liters / kg for avocados, as per your link...
There was a pile of scaremongering press about this a couple years ago, which somehow always left out meat production comparisons... You get most of the benefit by eating low on the food chain. Additionally cutting out important sources of vegetable fat + protein seems a bit dangerous to me.
Beef in particular consumes a lot of water, but a lot of it is green, which is much more environmentally friendly than blue water.
https://waterfootprint.org/en/resources/interactive-tools/pr...
Beef lists there also at 15,415 liters/kg, with a 4% 'blue' (filtered/treated) component, which works out to 616.6 liters/kg - still double the total water kg/liter for the avocados (which, themselves, will have a green/blue/grey breakdown).
(It's also not obvious to me that one should consider 'green' water as a completely free resource. Plants bred for fast growth with constant replacement will consume more water, which in turn won't find its way into aquifers.)
On the discussion of green water, that depends on location and animal husbandry technique. It does appear that some places we let pasture raised cattle roam can help with the replenishment of soil layers and also sequester carbon to boot. Managed intensive rotational grazing in particular is very promising.
I think we desperately need to be having a discussion about better animal husbandry and land management (see: Brazil). But whenever I hear that all we need to do is “just” do one thing, my bullshit detector goes wild, and the idea that we can fix global warming by reducing meat consumption falls well into that category for me.
It's certainly the case that there's no magic bullet - no one here (that I've noticed) has claimed that reducing meat consumption will 'fix' global warming. Conversely, people tend to become vegans for a range of reasons, in which environmental impact is just one facet... Many times a problem will require a range of solutions, and sometimes a solution helps with a range of problems.
We all want it to be better. Vegans are trying. People are trying. What good does this discourse serve?
That's a thing.[0] Not literally starvation, but the "earth would be better without us" part.
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntary_Human_Extinction_Mov...
To your point though, it doesn’t directly relate to the GP’s point. Voluntary Human Extinction Movement requires breeding to reduce and stop and make humans extinct. It doesn’t require those who are living to just kill themselves.
I'm curious, what ethical box would I fit in if I'm more worried about maximising my sustained access to high quality avocados and honey? So that it is the balance optimum between being healthy and safe to eat, produced sustainably, delicious, varied in flavors, and available for me to buy year round?
> Vegans avoid animal products. For strict vegans this means avoiding honey because of the exploitation of bees. That seems to imply that vegans should also avoid vegetables like avocados that involve exploiting bees in their production.
I'm not vegan, so I don't know how deep they are involved in "not animal exploitation" even is not obvius nor direct
How about "vegan"?
I strive to be vegan, though sometimes I am unsuccessful. I also strive not to lie, though sometimes my friend wants to know if this whatever looks good on him or her.
I strive to be a person who eats only plant and plant-derived food, for several personal reasons (including some ethical!), though I don't really care about whether a bee was transported from one field to another to pollinate something. If that makes me not a Vegan, then I don't care. But I still try to eat plant-based foods.
But I also don't call myself a vegan or even an aspiring-vegan. I am almost certainly a vegetarian since I don't eat any meat, though I don't call myself a vegetarian.
Personally, I am satisfied letting the person who wants to or is trying to be vegan decide for themselves whether they are comfortable eating avocados or whatever.
People would be happier in life if they weren't so concerned about absolutes, I think. Just try to be who you want to be. If you want to try to be the best capital-V Vegan as defined by someone else's standards (and adopt them as your own or w/e) that you can be, then maybe don't eat avocados.
By this quiz rationale, your average vegetable wouldn't be vegan because it may rely on animal fertilizer...
Heck, this could be extended to the use of oxygen to breathe. It's another byproduct of a plant process that has animal waste (CO2) as an input.
What you eat is a personal choice.
If the whole world ate dogs routinely, I would choose carrots.
Some would say "Ah, stupid carrot eater doesn't know the root bacteria he's killing is also sentient!" Dogs, bacteria: all under the living tree.
See, eat anything and shut up you stupid carrot eating zealot.
Then there's the Corgi burger macs for $2.5 and the corporate lunches where I ask for any menu exception and get the carrot soup entree for $25.
Never mind the free range German Shepherd steaks or bulldog sausage, that shit is everywhere.
But taste is not everything my friends,
sometimes it takes real cognitive effort to be aware of factory farming, government subsidies, nutritional health, environmental downstream effects and other considerations before you open your big mouth.
A little impulse control goes a long way.
That said, I still wear my 7 year old dog leather shoes from China and don't subscribe to any CarrotPower YouTuber channels.
What's up, doc?
Avocados are a fruit...
At least in the USA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nix_v._Hedden
No, it doesn't, and it's not a word used in botany. Vegetable isn't commonly used to refer to all plants as a whole, but parts of plants consumed for food. The word "vegetation" has more botanical history to it, but even that term has been long superseded by the word "flora".
> 2. A plant raised for some edible part of it, such as the leaves, roots, fruit or flowers, but excluding any plant considered to be a fruit, grain, or spice in the culinary sense.
> 3. The edible part of such a plant.
The culinary sense of fruit referred to above is:
> a sweet, edible part of a plant that resembles seed-bearing fruit, even if it does not develop from a floral ovary
Note that avocados are not sweet, so they are not fruit in the culinary sense, and therefore are vegetables in the culinary sense.