It may not matter. I'd sooner give up heat, air conditioning, or having children than beef, and that's barely hyperbole. Pretty sure there's a large minority that feels similarly passionate about brisket and sausage.
Cooking nice vegetarian food is more time consuming and you do need to learn new techniques but they are just as delicious and fulfilling.
I will say there is a certain visceral feeling with eating meat off a bone which I do occasionally miss (I have been vegetarian, except when I travel, for 8 years).
My partner used to have the same complaints about vego food! The right recipes can be just as filling (a lot you come across incidentally may be designed to be “healthy” and therefore lower calorie). If you’re interested, “Flavour” by Yotam Ottolenghi is full of really excellent vegetarian food which is filling and isn’t very demanding on your cooking skills. But unavoidably, it does take more time to make a passable meal than a meat dish.
IDK a single telegraph cucumber here is $4-6, tomatoes anywhere from $8-16.
1kg of chicken is $12 and you get order of magnitude more calories.
Admittedly NZ had bad flooding recently hence the insane vegetable prices and you can find some cheap stuff, but it's hard. I've gone days without eating a single vegetable and feel my health going down the drain, but what can you do?
Our (2 person) grocery bill is around au$60-$70 per week which is less than half of what I hear from regular meat eaters.
https://fortune.com/2023/07/21/why-healthy-food-so-expensive...
The 2023 Farm Bill is projected to spend $700 billion over the next five years, with powerful industry lobbyists directing funds to enrich themselves at the expense of agricultural communities, human health, animal welfare, and environmental sustainability.
Most Americans have never heard of this massive omnibus bill, which Congress reauthorizes every five or so years, yet it impacts us every day. It shapes our food system–from subsidizing factory farms to funding food and nutrition programs, and it is why burgers are artificially cheap and salads cost more than they should.
This is honestly what turns me off about not eating meat the most. Dude literally said he would freeze in winter and sweat in the summer and give up his firstborn and you're like "it's cheaper yay !".
It feels like a telemarketer on my phone trying to sell me something after I told them a resounding no.
Put another way, have you ever gotten your water tested? Did it come up with lead in it? If it did have lead in it, what would you do?
Whether that is true or not, I think it's more important to keep in mind that it's not our place to judge that, unless you hold some biblical belief that animals were put on earth by god to feed us. The cost of freedom must be taken into account too, it's a value not only relevant to humans.
A lot of the suffering in the world comes about because humans have an inflated sense of moral agency over things outside their scope. We have the tools to affect many beings and many lands, but not the wisdom to see the immediate and long term effects. We just see our current behavior, and then employ all kinds of mental gymnastics in order to perpetuate it. We'll go to great trouble to change the world, just so we don't have to admit we need to change our selves.
In my mind sentience is a spectrum and cows aren't very far along it. I spent my childhood working with cows and I can tell you they're dumb as rocks. They have little memory of the past and zero concept of the future. They were always happy to see us and had no concept of their freedom being restricted or that we would eventually auction them and their offspring to the slaughterhouse. People that are worried about cow rights have usually never spent time with them. Goats are further down the spectrum, but still dumb. Certain other cattle like pigs are said to be quite intelligent so there's more of an argument to be made.
Well, dub? People who spend a lot of time with cows are presumably working in the meat or dairy industries. It's rare for a person to believe their own actions are wrong.
Factory farms are where most people get their meat in America.
Imagine how healthy you’d be if all you ate was oatmeal, a hormone cocktail (to make you grow faster), and some vitamins. Then imagine living in a cage with dozens of other people, having scarcely three feet between you and the next person. Would you be healthy?
That’s what people are eating.
Is the alternative breeding millions of cows and pitting them against their natural predators, or leaving them to starve? If not, then I'm not sure what relevance the comparison has.
if you had to make choice every day I'm sure you'd prefer vegetarian + aircon/heating