Hacker News Reader

Comment by derbOac | Hacker News Reader

It's good to see skeptical criticism of some of these claims, which often oversimplify and exaggerate, but I think misinformation goes both ways. The amount of unsupported claims about going on a plant-based diet is amazing to me. It seems as if there's a defensiveness about diet in general, and meat or lack thereof especially. Like a lot of things now I shouldn't be surprised, as it intersects with a lot of cultural issues and politically charged topics like climate.

The term "con" should raise red flags — a more neutral approach to the topic would be more helpful but then that wouldnt increase sales.

View on HN

To be honest I don't know if a lot of vegans would like to even argue that the diet is healthier. Most vegans I've met would argue that its morally important to eat vegan even if its less healthy than eating meat. YMMV though.

This is an important comment. Vegans would tell you that veganism isn’t a diet, it’s a lifestyle choice. I’ve been vegan for over 10 years and it’s never been about health for me, it’s been about not exploiting animals.

Another angle on your and GP's comment is environmental. The most environmentally friendly meats come from the most mistreated animals, particularly broiler chickens in warehouses, but most veg*ns aren't going to say, well, if you absolutely have to eat meat, you should eat those.

The whole meat vs plant-based thing has become just as polarized as the rest of politics. Actually, it's super weird how actually political partisan diets have become.

Make a list of left/democrat foods and a list of right/republican foods. It's not hard. It's super weird that this is not hard.

This is because veganism is an extreme and the argument thus goes into 'meat' versus 'no animal product at all' (veganism).

In the West we probably eat too much meat (from a health perspective at least) so we should probably try to eat less of it, which can be as simple as not eating meat every day or at every meal. That's it, not very controversial and, yes, you can still eat 'proper' burgers when you go out.

In the West, we used to believe in individual liberty, which meant that there was no amount of meat that you should be able to tell me is enough or too much, because what I eat is not your business.

Could it be someone else's business if you, say, killed a dog or cat every day, or are saying that you should be able to do literally anything you like to any animal in the privacy of your home?

Whose dog or cat is it?

You raise an interesting point -- which you may not have intended, I don't want to put words in your mouth -- that once you treat sentient animals as disposable property, it becomes difficult to draw ethical lines. Surely a chicken and a cat have approximately the same moral worth, and in the U.S. you can buy whole cooked chickens at the store for $5. Buying a chicken and throwing away the meat is just as pointless as killing a cat, and a factory chicken's life is torture from beginning to end. So any difference between the chicken and the cat is sentimental at best.

[citation needed] on "sentient". Insofar as that word actually has a concrete, specific meaning, it does not seem to apply to any of the animals we're discussing.

But regardless, it has always seemed weird to me that our society applies such radically different moral standards to the treatment of livestock versus the treatment of pets, and how that even varies from creature to creature. Leather is fine, but fur is "murder" and killing cats/dogs is actually a crime.

I think that they take the argument the wrong direction, but at least the fully vegan no-animal-products-in-my-life folks are being consistent.

Sentience as in "the capacity to experience feelings and sensations": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentience. I don't want to be too philosophical, just consider that both chickens and cats will complain if you poke them with a stick. I'm allowing for something like cricket powder.

I think we agree about pets. Many people treat pets like people but when it comes down to it, they're not, and people won't treat them that way when it counts. Most people won't starve their family to pay for medical care for a pet. The pretense bothers me and feels hypocritical to an animal that trusts its owner so much.

I'm vegetarian in a one-animal-at-a-time sense. I sometimes think of it in terms of killing squirrels, since I see a lot of squirrels every day. For every burger you eat, imagine you have to go out and stomp a squirrel to death. I don't particularly care about squirrels but doing that would be pretty gross and traumatic, so if it's all the same I'll just eat some beans. The benefit to the environment is similarly incremental.

Sometimes I think that those who want humanity to be forced to return to subsistence farming should get their way.

They'd learn so much about what life actually is.

But I don't actually want to live in that world, because I know enough to hope it never returns.

We used to believe ... but the world got smaller.

There is not enough space to feed everyone same amount of meat/dairy we westerners eat, because we would need several Earths, which we simply don't have. It's not sustainable.

If someone's diet preferences are destroying the Earth, should not we limit their liberty to do so?

P.S. See this graph and weep. https://climatehealers.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Slide0... (from https://climatehealers.org/the-science/animal-agriculture-po...)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com