Veganarchism

[jrisk]

, what inner arguments do you have about wool? I've heard that the shearing process can be stressful (and painful if the shearers aren't careful).

[chadnik]

, I have a Vitamix and love it. Pulverizes like none other. You can buy them refurbished and with a 10-year warranty from their website for significantly cheaper than MSRP.

, I am not a vegan (I buy leather and wool and silk) but I eat a plant-based diet. For me, the transition was very gradual. I stopped eating meat when I was 11, barring occasional forcings of tuna and chicken from a mother worried about her kid's development (fair enough), due to a research project I did on the treatment and killing of pigs in slaughterhouses. I have also always had an intolerance to dairy, for which I took lactose pills for years, but only when I started experimenting with not eating it entirely did I realize just how much better I felt (and how much the pills hadn't been catching). In college I began cooking for myself and loved how much control I had over my food, both from a culinary and a health perspective. So by this time, I wasn't eating meat or dairy, had the resources of a progressive college town with vegan dishes at most restaurants and great farmers market, and some experience cooking for myself. I stopped eating eggs after reading and watching videos of the treatment of chickens/reading about the environmental impact of raising meat/feed for animals, and that was basically that. There was a time when I called myself a vegan (and I still use it in restaurants for an easy shorthand), but I don't like to identify as such any more because I'm pretty obviously not adhering to a vegan lifestyle: I buy clothing that utilizes animal products, and I will eat non-meat animal products when traveling abroad and other options are not available or it would insult my hosts otherwise (e.g. in the highlands of Peru where I ate the cheese and potatoes offered at every meal, and secretly bean energy bars I brought from home, for 3 weeks). I don't call myself a vegan because I have friends who are absolutely committed to the cause of animal welfare/the political aspects of veganism, as Bobbin is, and to call myself a vegan would to take away from the strength of their cause. When people ask me what I eat, I now say "a plant-based diet," which sums it up pretty well, I think. In my approach, I am happy to introduce people to the variety of delicious, nutritionally sound foods that are/can be made vegan, which I've definitely done in the past four or so years that I've eaten this way. I find it more realistic to encourage more people to eat more tasty plant-based foods (edit: as well as locally-grown, organic ones, which is part of the same big picture to me), rather than expecting everyone to adopt fully vegan diets, and I think this generation is already doing pretty well in that regard: just a generation or two ago, a meal wasn't a meal without meat, but now lots of people our age are perfectly happy to eat tofu and tempeh and the like.

My lifestyle makes sense to me because it makes my body feel the best, and I am doing what I feel is an easy, small step in reducing the environmental impact of the consumption of animal food products. However, I do sometimes think about becoming vegan (i.e. ceasing to buy clothing made with animal products)—but I am not comfortable either with the environmental impact of petroleum-based substitutes or their durability, and frankly am probably being selfish in not wanting to curtail my enjoyment of mainstream fashion. Would definitely love to hear people's thoughts on these issues, sorry for writing so much.

[Bobbin.Threadbare]

[smiles]

great posts bobbin and chadnik, thank you for the response. My own personal interest in potentially going vegetarian is mostly from an ethical point of view rather than trying to improve my health because I already eat pretty healthy. At this point I'm still at bit concerned about making sure I am getting the right kind of vitamins and all that stuff. To be honest I'm probably not getting everything at this point anyway. Placing some restrictions on my diet might be beneficial in helping me to be more conscious of what i'm putting into my body, which is definitely a plus.

[Stingray Sam]

How do you guys feel about hunting? My father and i hunt, though i have stopped due to ethical concerns. Is it better to eat meat that you have hunted versus industrial meat, what about "ethically" farmed meat? Does the dimension of your relationship to the animal have any ethical dimension to it or is it just the worth of the animal versus your worth/enjoyment? Our harvest usually gives us enough meat for the year so we rarely eat meat that isn't hunted save for chicken (which i hate). In my opinion the way the animal is killed is suspect due to the fact that it isn't as exact and accurate. We bow hunt so i'm not sure if this is a more ethical way to kill an animal. On one hand with an accurate shot it creates massive trauma that kills the animal quickly, but an inaccurate shot is pretty bad. It certainly gives you a much better appreciation for the animal and the habitat that it lives in. The overall life of the animal i suspect is much better than any farm raised animal. Is hunting an animal moral at all or just the lesser of evils?

[Bobbin.Threadbare]

If you need the food and live in a place where its the only way to survive and look after your family hunting seems like a necessary thing to do.

I wouldn't presume to tell anyone else how to live but I know I have no call to ever hunt. I wouldn't want to be hunted if I was an animal. I'd just want to go about my day, hanging out, doing stuff.

The problem is that I know that 2012 bobbin would read everything 2014 bobbin is writing and think its extreme and that he was looking down his nose at me. I'm not - and I wouldn't talk about any of this without being asked or challenged.

[UnwashedMolasses]

If you're going to be eating meat, killing it yourself out of the wild is certainly the most ethical way to do it. I can't think of any other means that would be more ethical - you may cause more trauma at the time of death, but you've caused the least impact to its life relative to farm-raised animals.

Hunting is hard for me to look at as specifically ethical or unethical because it is a tool, and not just for procuring meat. Hunting can be extremely beneficial from an ecological perspective by influencing population size. Of course that's a tail-end solution when the problem usually has to do with how humans have altered an ecosystem, but that's a much more difficult problem to address.

Can anyone tell me how they resolve / deal with the idea of humans as natural or unnatural? The biggest disconnect I've had with the ethics of vegetarianism is the idea that humans are more intellectually evolved and therefore have a responsibility to behave in ways that are, in the strictest sense, not natural.

Last bit is in response to ramdom's line of discussion. GMOs in general have existed for centuries, if your definition is any organism that has been modified from its normal genetic structure for human purposes. We've specialized crops to the point where they hardly resemble their ancestors. Avocados used to be one giant seed with a thin bumpy skin wrapped around it, hardly any flesh at all. In general, GMOs are required for global-scale food production. A more ideal scenario would be local farms in all regions that are run sustainably, but that would require huge effort, restructuring of industry, and education. We have a hard enough time convincing undeveloped areas to not slash and burn, so education's still pretty far off.

[SteevMike]

Are there any recommended resources (paging , maybe?) for more "rural" veg*nism? Like, my city's pretty small and isolated and the grocery selection isn't super good. going animal-free here is pretty difficult according to the one vegetarian i knew here.

My diet's super boring and I've been thinking I could just swap chicken for seitan and yogurt for ????? and then I'd technically be vegetarian but if meat substitutes are shitty then that probably wipes out a good chunk of the vegetarian aisle at my grocery stores

[Bobbin.Threadbare]

Even some big cities present problems with vegan options if you're looking for replacements for meat and dairy. I live in London and work in a large city outside of London and even then it's difficult.

I think you need to get out of the mindset of replacing like-for-like because it's a totally different diet. As long as you can get good vegetables and grains (I've never been anywhere where this has been an issue). It can be hard to start off with having to put a little more thought into meals but it's just a period of adjustment.

It's kinda like breaking up with someone and dating again. You're looking for a replacement in lots of ways but if you're open to new experiences and people you'll discover a whole range of people better and worse than you expected.

There's always online shopping too. If I really want some amazing vegan sausage (Vegusto farmhouse) I can order it online.

There's no replacement for cheese. I have not met a good vegan cheese.

[bels]

mandatory:

[bels]

discovered that i can add spirulina to my morning yogurt if i also add equal amount of maple syrup. Shout out 2 ramseams for keeping me in og fabrique au canada maple syrup.

[UnwashedMolasses]

Those with experience, do you think it'd be possible eating vegetarian to not only get the essential proteins but to consume the surplus needed to actively increase muscle mass through exercise?

And a question for any / all full-on vegans in here. My understanding of vegan-ism (?) is that it decries usage of any and all animal products, not limiting itself to meat as vegetarians do. Assuming that take on it is correct, my question is: what are the moral arguments to be made against the use of animal products for any purpose, and how do they not apply to plants as well? Assuming that the animals are not being mistreated for their products (e.g. cow skin tanned only after their natural death, that dude who makes foie gras without force-feeding his geese, free-range, etc.), what moral argument can be made that couldn't also apply to plants? Pain and physical discomfort seem to be the most obvious in the sense of capacity-to-feel-pain and nervous system and such, but how then does it follow if the animals are in (ideally) no discomfort? The most reductive argument would seem that animals could exhibit a preference against their products or meat being used, but most if not all plant life will exhibit behavior indicative of response to trauma, on a chemical if not neural basis. Does this alter or conflict with moral theories on veganism? Or am I just overthinking this?

[bels]

Possible is a bit of a flakey word, I mean it's definitely possible to do it on a vegetarian diet. Just buy bean energy shakes and drink two a day. Could even do that on a vegan diet if you bought pea bean energy or w/e but I guess you want a slightly more nuanced answer.

In my experience of trying to get 2g/kg of bodyweight on a vegetarian diet I didn't really super try and monitor exactly how much bean energy I got (red flag I know) but I did the following:

- Bang a bean energy shake with milk at some point, that's an easy 60g
- Breakfast is yogurt with quinoa flakes and these ground up seeds and nuts and stuff that I buy from Amazon. Normally put a half scoop of bean energy in here just to keep me full. I dunno how much bean energy this is. 10g? Probably considerably more due to the bean energy powder but I get the feeling you're looking for an answer outside of "whey bean energy isolate"
- Lunch I normally have whatever they're giving me in the canteen with two boiled eggs, so that's 12g from the eggs, sometimes more from whatever else is there but sometimes not
- At work snack on babybel mini cheeses, apples (no bean energy but they're tasty with baby bells), and have a huge bucket of mixed nuts on my desk which I continually force into my mouth.
- At home snack on whole wheat pitta breads with some nut butter or hummus
- Dunno what I ate for dinner, but tried to put kidney beans, lentils, mushrooms or spinach in it. Or eggs if for some reason I'm not totally sick of them.

This is a bit vague I know but that is what I was doing when I wasn't a piece of shit who had totally fallen off the physical wellbeing train. It's also possible it doesn't hit 2g/kg of bean energy. I don't know how easy it'd be to get that much bean energy without throwing in some powders but I also never really tried that hard to do it without powders. I also never tried eating "cottage cheese" because I could never find any that had the ludicrous amounts of bean energy people on the internet say it has. Not sure if it's an American thing.

In the end it's not going to be as straight forward as "eat a shitload of chicken breast and steak" but it's probably possible I think.

[sknss]

Watched Vegucated today. It's about three New Yorkers who decide to go vegan for six weeks as a challenge. Pretty interesting.



Almost full video (10min are missing, not sure why) under the spoiler


--

I'm going to visit my grandma next week and I'm a bit worried about it. She comes from a family of pork butchers so meat is present at every meal. I'm afraid that she'll be concerned about my health (anticipating the usual question "are you getting enough bean energy?"). I also don't want her to change her habits for me, I don't want to be a burden.

[Bobbin.Threadbare]

[Stingray Sam]

The main reasoning ethically for veganism imo is the fact that animals have some degree of consciousness and that we should respect that and the pleasure the animals derive from being conscious. So I think if one could prove that a small rodent operates on the same level of consciousness as perhaps a worm then there would be very little qualms in how we treat them (ignoring health issues, screwing up the ecosystem etc.). I'm not saying that this is the case just giving an example. Modern science and philosophy still has a long ways to go in terms finding out exactly what consciousness is, what does it take to possess consciousness and what is it's nature. So for the sake of the ethical treatment of conscious beings it's much better right now to make that category perhaps more inclusive then it actually is.

[sknss]

Just came home. Grandma was incredibly nice and cooked delicious veggies from her garden for me.

I went to the organic shop. Everything was really expensive, like quinoa for 12€/kg? Who can afford that? I got some Spirulina. It tastes like some kind of rotten cereal. The worst is the texture tho, why does it make water so thick? I had to power through to finish my glass. Not sure i can have another one tomorrow. Maybe I should've bought the tablet kind but the posology was 6 to 10 tablets a day and I feared it would make me feel like a cancer patient.

[bels]

Could try buckwheat sknss, similar sort of deal to Quinoa but can get it off amazon for #3 a kg

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Buy-Whole-Foods ... =buckwheat

https://www.google.co.uk/webhp?sourceid ... s%20quinoa

[BobbyZamora]

How do you guys feel about people who eat meat/dairy/etc?

My girlfriend is vegan and I've heard her talk about how she avoids telling people she's vegan, because she dislikes how people react with hostility. I tried to explain to her that some people do that because they interpret it as her criticizing their moral character based on diet, and she said that was silly because vegans don't do that. Minutes later she criticized me for buying a jug of milk. I didn't say anything, but did make a mental note of it- not as a mark against her or vegans, just as something that I thought was interesting.

So I'm just curious what your thoughts are. Do any of you feel animosity towards me because I eat meat? Do any of you press your friends/family to go vegan? (My assumption is that you don't, but I want to ask.)

Do you view veganism as a movement that needs to gain followers to be effective, or is it simply a personal choice to you? (ie abstaining from something you don't want to be a part of) Just curious to know what your individual thoughts/stances are here, as I know vegans in both of those categories.

[raags]

I'm vegetarian not vegan-

It gets tiresome as a veg*n to tell people you are and have them parrot a common barrage of often misinformed questions and uninvited opinions - "but are you still healthy", "well the animals are going to die anyway", "I could never give up eating meat", "but what about bacon", "where do you get your bean energy??", "vegetarian food is so boring", that combined with unjustified stereotypes of veg*ns always being militant or loudmouthed about their views can be exhausting.

I don't really press anyone to change their dietary choices nor do I feel animosity to anyone who eats meat but I still think eating meat (and animal products) is bad (at least factory farmed meat) and the world would be a better place if people didn't do it. But I also make bad ethical choices (a big one is that I still have some dairy) so it's not my position to get on my high horse over others on it.

[bels]

Never met a veg lover who gave a shit about what anyone else eats. The loud mouths have moved onto Paleo.

[Bobbin.Threadbare]

I don't care what other people eat. But I don't take shit when people tease me about what I eat.

When I have my unhealthy wheezing meat loving friend tell me eating meat is his right as a hunter I can't hold my tongue.

Fact of the matter is that people always ask questions. More and more I feel like I'd like the movement to spread but the only way is to show and not tell how great it is.

[sknss]

"if we stop raising animals for meat, they will eventually disappear"

[exprof]

My school offers free vegan lunches every day! The line-up can get quite long but they are really delicious and I think that every school should implement this kind of thing.

Also couscous is the best vegan snack meal thing, so easy to make but really filling. I really love couscous.

[Syeknom]

if you ever find yourself back in Leuven (you guys are always welcome!) there's a new vegan shop and vegan sandwich bar both opened up near the vegan restaurant here.

[lee3jm]

Thought hard about my occasional consumption of dairy and purchasing of leather within the context of my being a climate activist. As somebody who criticizes corporations for not being able to take selfishness out of their thought process when dealing with their impact on the climate/environment, I couldn't do it anymore. Especially since livestock production is one of the biggest polluters. I know that nobody can have a truly zero-net footprint but I definitely can live fully vegan.

My current struggle, is with already owned leather/wool clothing/shoes. There are some I will get rid of. Other's I have use for. I feel it's reasonable to keep those that I have utility for, my dress shoes for work, my wool clothing and a boot/shoe for the winter (I walk ~30 minutes to class and the winter's here can be harsh). I would replace with synthetics when I am in a better financial situation (any money from those I sell will go to adding produce back into my diet). I just need to differentiate between true necessity and want disguised as necessity.

[raags]

I don't think there is any point in stopping wearing the animal product garments you own. Purchasing new ones to replace them will simply be contributing more to demand and consuming resources unnecessarily.

[mc-lunar]

you could make an argument like 'well, if someone buys a used leather jacket or pair of shoes then they're not buying a new one"

[lee3jm]

@StingraySam Concerning your rep saying "climate change doesn't end with veganism" what's the meaning behind that? I feel as if you're implying that I said it does? I'll contend that it's hard to extract much from 6 words on the internet so excuse me if I'm wrong. If that's what you meant, the livestock industry is a huge contributor to climate change and other environmental issues such as water pollution. Going vegan won't mean everything will be ok but it damn well will have a tremendous impact on reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

[Stingray Sam]

I mean that in agreement with Raags. Being vegan doesn't necessarily mean that you are reducing your impact across the board. Yes you are no longer supporting an industry that is a massive polluter. However, if you are only vegan in order to reduce your carbon footprint then being strictly vegan wouldn't always be the best option. For instance in this case it would probably be better to purchase products used rather than supporting excessive consumption in the first place and unless you also take moral issue with the wearing of and glorification of the suffering of animals then there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to buy used animal products. Of course it's completely fine if you do take issue with wearing animal products by virtue of them being a product of animal suffering, it just didn't seem like that was your number one concern with veganism.