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Comment by sbmthakur | Hacker News Reader

Back in my ancestral village the practice was to let cow nurse her calf and get the remaining for the owner's family. This kinda ensured co-existence. The modern dairy industry has all evil practices baked into its operations. It is the thing that keeps me from going vegetarian. Even with going off meat, I would still harm the livestock by consuming dairy. A lot of vegetarians (at least those who virtue signal) do not understand this.

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One way to reduce that practice is to simply reduce one consumption of meat/milk, no need to be fully gandhi to improve some cow’s life. You anyway can’t save the world alone.

There’s a ton of mushrooms and fabaceae, very cheap nutritious and as much delicious if you learn to cook them well (like meat). My favorite is Tempeh which combine both! And quite cheap if you make it yourself.

http://tempeh.info/

I like the stuff, but interestingly, I found it easiest to buy in Indonesia, Australia and the USA. Outside of that, it's hard to get or very expensive.

You can make your own! It’s deleicious and very cheap if you make it yourself.

Plenty of tofu dishes in Korea and part of China. Almost never vegan, but often vegetarian.

In the US, almost every broth or dish at an East/southeast restaurant uses shrimp/fish sauce or other animal product like beef/chicken stock.

They usually prep it in advance, so it’s rare to find one that has an actually vegan dish they don’t custom make even if it says tofu.

> It is the thing that keeps me from going vegetarian. Even with going off meat, I would still harm the livestock by consuming dairy.

You could go vegan.

What if no one was strictly vegan or vegetarian but everyone refused to buy food created by inhumane suffering and tortured conditions. Can't make it illegal but can make it very unfashionable. Just need more people to see things people see on a farm, then you gotta be a psycho to not care. Just no one properly lived on a farm next to animals these days when most people move to megapolises...

> Just need more people to see things people see on a farm

There's many "educational farms" to show kids live farms animals and sometimes pick the eggs and milk a cow. I'm very confused about them: it's good to let urban kids see-smell-touch real farms animals. However they have nothing in common with modern farming, even the not-inhumane ones.

BUT telling a 6yo toddler "look that cute cow, this is where your morning milk is from" will engrave it deep in the way they see farming. One day or another they will learn about factory farming but what you learn at 16yo doesn't "engrave" as easy and deep as at 6. I mean yes you quickly understand that education farms are not the reality but it require a big mental shift to overcome the feeling that the milk you drink in the morning is from an inhumane famr, especially when everyone around keeps doing it (I don't blame them, it's cheap, easy, convenient, traditional, delicious, practical...).

Some schools or parents brings their child in real farms which is a bit better, but it still doesn't depict the reality for 99% of consumption (think gelatin candies, croissants, cakes, ice creams...).

For the courageous -- DONT SHOW THAT TO YOUR TODDLER (yet) -- 8 hours of pigs in a typical/normal gas chamber that probably will end up in soap/jelly/bacon. : https://www.farmtransparency.org/videos?id=hg8cyu393v

When I was a small child in a rural environment, my uncle slaughtered a lamb for eating. It was a bloody messy hell. It was an eye opener but it didn't have the impact you think it had, if anything it desensitizes you. My uncle also showed respect and gratefulness to the animals and I also understood why we don't waste animal products.

Ok I admit all I write is only guess... in fact what you said makes me relate to some of my mother stories about her childhood. Thanks for remind me that.

I grew up doing a lot of diving, I'd put myself into the ocean, there were sharks and other dangers, but I caught my own fish and I never ever felt bad about it. I could selective take what I needed, I'd never take a mother / pregnant fish if I could help it. I could tell most of the time.

You also get to see how the wild world works, and most fish would prefer to be taken by a skilled spear fisherman than have their face mauled off by a squid, at least as far as I could tell.

Unfortunately we live in a world with 9 billion people on it, which means we don't have the room to grow and harvest all our own food. In my opinion, that's the issue. Sourcing all our food "ethically" is basically not possible.

I'd much prefer to be producing and hunting my own food.

I know someone who is hard core vegetarian because of impression from childhood, it all depends.

Maybe you see a normal farm and get to know the animals then see an actual factory where it is industrialized...

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