Really? In Asia Tofu and Tempeh is well established in the cuisine so ...
At the end it's a matter of getting used to new tastes.
Try to not eat meat in Asian countries. My wife gave up being vegetarian while we were over there.
Whether it's Japan, Korea, Philippines, or otherwise, they love meat, in many forms. Especially chicken.
As do I.
you can even go to any mcdonalds there and get the most delicious, juicy white meat chicken you've ever had. not nuggets, full fried breasts.
literally every place serves fried chicken and it's amazing, every place also has spaghetti which I found... odd.
When you see their very tiny cages in animal shops, or eating octopus alive (“but they don’t feel anything”).
It is a bit like if they still live in the 90s (though it’s an amazing place! Like the 90s were).
But my point was that pretty much all asian countries love meat.
I mean, food in South Korea and the Philippines is 90% chicken.
Meat consumption is everywhere, because it provides the calories people need, easily, and tastes delicious.
People don't want to (and sometimes can't!) eat the stuff we feed to cows and chicken, anywhere.
I agree that it's not necessarily easy to find dishes with no meat at all in Asian countries, though.
It's probably a better strategy to try to convince people to eat less meat per dish (as in many Asian preparations) than to go vegetarian, anyway. At least it would be easier to convince me, that's for sure... if my country had the hawker stalls that they have in Singapore, I would already be eating less meat.
In Japan many dishes are what you describe.
In Korea and the Philippines, many dishes are pure meat.
I have no strategy or intent to control peoples diet though.
Eh, some Asian countries are easier than others.
I've had no issues avoiding meat/dairy in when living in Japan[1]/Taiwan/Singapore, and these are all cases where you can find a vegetarian or vegan version of a local dish so you're not missing out on the culture. I know many over there who make it work without issue too.
Korea and the Philippines though... for sure an example of higher difficulty.
[1] Okinawa is slightly harder than mainline Japan due to regional cuisine differences, but even then it's not the end of the world.
What i will do is eat both meat _and_ tofu.
The idea that people would voluntarily stop eating meat and switch to a vegitarian diet is just wishful thinking.
Similar, if you can get a population to reduce their consumption by x%, it doesn't matter if that's because x% went totally without (and the rest didn't change anything), or whether you could a more uniform, mild change.
Convincing people to give up some meat is pretty straightforward: one proven way is for meat to become more expensive. People react to economic incentives on the margin after all. Other ways might be to make the alternatives more appealing.
(About the margins: meat would have to get extremely expensive for many people to completely give up on it. But if sometimes you are deciding between going to a steak place and a pasta place, and then price can sway your decision fairly easily. The meal at the pasta place can still have meat in it for this example to work, just less of it.)
I feel like shit after eating pasta, so I never eat it. I feel great after eating meat, so I always eat it.
But we don't eat out, that's more wasteful and expensive than anything else. fires up the grill
> But we don't eat out, that's more wasteful and expensive than anything else. fires up the grill
That might be true for you. But there are also people who eg want to eat stuff from the grill perhaps once a year, and storing their own idle grill the other 364 days would be wasteful.
And yes, I'm constantly deciding between different amounts of meat I can eat, it usually depends on how hungry I am.
I decide the amounts, what meat protein, then pick veggies that go with it, and add a small amount of carbs.
In terms of overall utilitarian impact, I mean. Not in terms of some moral systems.
I think people around here would charge too much to go vegan.
It might be cheaper use people on the West Coast.
In the grand scheme of things, Americans are very expensive people. For example, Argentinians both eat a lot of meat, and are currently in dire need for some hard currency.
I don't know if there's an app for this. However, you could do the next best thing and find a charity that works on promoting eating-less-meat in Argentina.
(Argentina is just an example, I have no clue whether it's the best value for money for this very specific. I'm just fairly sure that they are better value for money than spending money in the US.)
https://blog.givewell.org/2010/12/27/animal-welfare-charitie... might be an interesting read.
Is it? I know many people who have done this.
and how many people do you know, out of all of the people in the world?
And how many of those won't do it?
What you have as evidence of it happening is merely sampling bias.
This is the level of strawman we show to small children as examples of terrible strawman arguments. I haven't seen anyone in this thread asking for involuntarily forcing people to give up meat. There isn't a single significant politician in the USA or Europe who is talking about forcing people to give up meat.
I can only hope you were deliberately trying to make a shitty argument for some reason, otherwise it seems likely that the BGH, HFC and antibiotics in your diet have addled your brain.
The most radically environmentalist thing people are arguing for is for you to take a modicum of responsibility for the negative impacts of your choices. If you love beef for some reason then just plant a couple of trees when you eat it or do some other actions that offset the carbon.
When you look at the diets by age group it's also pretty telling: https://www.statista.com/forecasts/1313072/vegan-by-age-grou...
and I wouldn't compare slavery to meat consumption.
Marjorie Spiegal wrote about it in length in her book "The Dreaded Comparison"
https://archive.org/details/dreadedcompariso0000spie_o7y4/pa...
You can attempt to argue for the merits of the comparison, in your own words, if you'd like.
Not saying that it was 100% economic and moral/ethical awakening didn't play an important role, but the economic changes definitely helped. And this kind of favorable factors aren't apparent in the case of convincing everyone to go vegetarian.
This is like saying Americans like corn chips. Sure... but they would probably prefer beef patties. (lol)
I absolutely love tofu and lived in East Asia. But it doesn't replace meat.