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So I’m a vegan. The 2 types of vegans I see are these:
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The terror vegan: “Everyone who isn’t 100% vegan is a genocidal nazi and I’ll make sure to tell them constantly.” aka the ones that give veganism a bad name.
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The normal vegan: “When it comes to pollution, the mega corps are at failt. But when it comes to animal product consumption, the consumer is the driving factor. I can’t expect everyone to become a vegan, but it would already help a lot if everyone would start to consume a bit less. Like once or twice a week no meat. But if you won’t I wouldn’t hold it against you, we’re still friends after all.” aka the vegan I’d like to be.
Sadly there’s extremism in every field.
I don’t think I’ve met #1 in real life, besides knowing more than a few of #2. The first one just gets really loud on the Internet.
Oh I’ve met plenty. And I try to stay clear of them
I don’t think the consumer is primarily responsible for determining how animal agriculture operates. Even the demand for meat and dairy was and is coercively and artificially manufactured.
(Small example: a Tyson executive uses university ag programs to setup chicken farming in rural parts of Africa, and the locals there do not eat chicken and are forced to eat chickens under the contract as a condition to get access to the capital - the goal is to setup the whole market, generate both demand and supply for chicken meat in this rural part of Africa.)
The US government uses taxes to buy up dairy and meat that was not purchased based on demand, nullifying individual vegan boycotts and artificially propping up those industries.
Veganism is not primarily helpful by reducing the demand on the individual level, but instead has found the greatest successes from lobbying governments to pass animal welfare laws and organizing protests to generate pressure and support for those laws.
The US government uses taxes to buy up dairy and meat that was not purchased based on demand, nullifying individual vegan boycotts and artificially propping up those industries.
That’s taking a really short term view of it. As demand has stayed low enough for long enough, they have cut back on the amount and paid dairy farmers to not operate. These kinds of programs can only prop something up for so long
but instead has found the greatest successes from lobbying governments to pass animal welfare laws and organizing protests to generate pressure and support for those laws
Animal welfare laws do not fix the fundamental issue with these systems. As long as the industry exists in a large scale capacity, it will find the cruelest ways to operate. As long as meat, dairy, etc. are consumed in mass, factory farming will exist
For instance, US beef consumption cannot be supplied by a pasture-based system. There is only enough land to support 27% of the consumption, and that still raises methane emissions by 8% so we would need to be consuming even less if we wanted to avoid emission reductions from a move like that
Various laws and larger action can be effective though. Like putting plant-based options by default has been tested in some places, has substantially reduced demand and still kept satisfaction high. Or things like prohibiting the production of Fur, Foie Gras, etc.
I tend to agree, in the long term there has to be a cultural shift and my point is only that the hyper-individualist approach to American veganism is myopic and focused on the wrong actions and for the wrong reasons, treating the act of putting animal products in the body as the biggest sin when the harms are primarily systemic and not best tackled through individual lifestyle changes. This is like thinking you can end capitalism by just buying from cooperatives or fix climate change by not using plastic straws and recycling.
Even in terms of individual-scope action, you could make stronger arguments for engaging in workplace organizing in Tyson factories, tax resistance, and collaborating with local vegan activists to stage protests or direct actions.
Not that I’m down on veganism, just that I think the portrayal of responsibility primarily falling on you, the average consumer, is emphasized too much and makes a convenient scapegoat for the ag corporations that are making all the decisions that create the atrocities we know about. Ultimately that scapegoating is not veganism, it’s a strawman, but it is maybe how most people think about vegansim, including many vegans I know - it’s all about individual lifestyle choices and taking individual responsibility while not participating or engaging meaningfully in collective action or analyzing the problem structurally.
In addition to everything you mentioned it’s also heavily subsidized as a baseline with >38B in subsidies vs the 170.38B meat market and 74.16B dairy market. Direct subsidies alone account for 15% of the total market.
greatest successes from lobbying governments to pass animal welfare laws and organizing protests to generate pressure and support for those laws.
It’s worth noting that it’s more often the ‘type 1’ vegan which is generally more effective at this, and why they’re seen as ecoterrorists and why things like ag-gag laws “needed” to be passed.
I actually had a super chill vegan patient the other day who was aging remarkably gracefully into trailer-trash (my own cultural roots), complete with 40 pack-year smoker’s voice and skin that belongs in a cancer PSA. They told me they aren’t completely married to the idea but that they do their best and would like to be able to read the labels on what they get if possible. They pointed out that their breakfast tray arrived with biscuits and sugar and commented that the biscuits were almost certainly made with eggs and butter, and that the sugar was probably bleached using animal products (not sure about that one). I definitely didn’t have anything decent to say about the biscuit thing. For them it was definitely more about the animal welfare thing than the chemical thing. They were pretty frank about not being too fussy about the chemicals that went into their body.
To me it’s 3 things why I’m vegan (although I do eat cheese sometimes, there’s no proper substitute and I’m a Dutch cheese head).
- Animal cruelty
- Health
- Enviroment
So I prefer to substitute meat with beans for example, instead of heavily processed fake meat. Although sometimes a proper vegan burger, like the BeyondBurger, is nice (unhealthy) comfort food. Also on holiday to Cambodia I did eat some meat as I wanted to experience the original Cambodian cuisine. That was the first time in 12 years I ate meat and it got me food poisoning which resulted in a heavy stomach infection. Worth it though, the Cambodians know how to cook!
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I’m confused. I thought veganism was about animal welfare, what does it have to do with food being made out of chemicals?
Hi Vegan 1!
it is but it’s also hitched to “crunchy” culture, which has some weird braindead threads running through it about body purity and “nature = good”.
The same exact compounds found in food and other products can either originate from an animal or a non-animal source. Veganism is about avoiding the animal sources. The compound itself is mostly irrelevant.
The whole ‘duh, everything is made of chemicals’ argument is a corporate attempt at downplaying the prevalence of unnecessary and even harmful additives in US foods that have long been banned in the EU.
Next time you see a meme about a woman asking ‘is this ham processed?’ with a response ridiculing her about it, look up Ractopmine.
This terminology people use without knowing anything about anything is actually corporate thing. It might originated from uneducated scared hippies, but it became popular and prevalent after corpos discovered that this kind of language allows them to greenwash the shit out of their products for free. “Other ham is made of chemicals, but ours is organic!” is technically correct phrase that is insidiously lying right to your chemistry-101-failed-face.
All this bullshit just stops the conversation about corporate accountability, or about actual implications of a specific diet, this conversations are impossible to have when your starting point is “chemicals bad”.Next time you ask “if this ham processed”, remember that the only correct answer to this is yes, otherwise the ham os oinking and tries to run away when you’re trying to bite it.
Oreos are technically vegan. You’re welcome.
I read last year that they were changing the recipe to include fucking powdered milk (the most annoying ingredient). I don’t know if that was planned for the future or just incorrect speculation, because I can’t find anything about it now.
We used to call them “accidentally vegan”
Whey powder is the fucking worst ingredients list spoiler. So fucking arbitrary, literally never actually needs to be there.
Why the “technically” qualifier. They’re positively vegan!
People don’t seem to understand that even chemicals are made of something. They’re not synthesized out of thin air. It is not stupid to ask what they’re made of. The resources can be very diverse.
Literally everything is made out of chemicals. Naturaphiles are loonyburgers.
Also: botulinum toxin, ricin, lead, uranium, ebola, rabies, the fucking sun… The list of completely natural things that can kill us in the most horrific ways imaginable is almost endless.
I think it helps to understand that when some people say “chemicals” in the context of highly processed foods, they mean “industrial additives”.
Or maybe layman shouldn’t try to hijack scientifically precise words?
Me, crushing up blood-cruelty cocaine in a tiny one-cent plastic baggie: “I really hope this baggie doesn’t have PFAS in it…”
A better question is “is this ultra processed”
Like, is this a product comprised mostly highly refined and modified ingredients? And thus is it likely to have had important nutritional components removed?
In all likelihood, none of the actual ingredients are actively bad for you in moderation, but, it’ll be nutritionally lacking.
Chemicals can also be non vegan. Side note: for a long time (might still be) camera film wasn’t vegan, since it used bovine gelatin. Kodak Eastman even had their own cow ranch to supply all the bones. (Goes to show chemicals don’t have to be vegan)
Everything is made of chemicals
So we were talking in the car the other day about how yeast is alive (until it isn’t). How do vegans feel about yeast? Honestly asking; I don’t know any vegans irl that I can ask.
Well it’s a fungus, and we eat fungi the same as we eat plants. We’re more concerned with undue human-driven suffering, which generally requires a central nervous system, and only animals have that.
Vegans on the whole recognize the biological complexity of life (i.e. multi-cellular organisms with the capacity to experience pain and pleasure through a nervous system and beyond, compared with uni-cellular or even multi-cellular organisms that don’t have such a system) and balance it with the quantity of pain and suffering throughout the world.
Basically, vegans by and large care about reducing the greatest amount of suffering for the most complex life on the planet (especially animals on the brink of extinction).
Usually we direct this goal towards rescuing farm animals, fighting elephant or lion poachers, saving rainforests, banning fishing in sea sanctuaries (or at least the use of purse seines that dredge the ocean floor), etc.
Yeast isn’t the biggest concern because 1) it isn’t considered towards the complex end of the spectrum of life as we know it on this planet, 2) we don’t have good evidence to show that yeast experiences pain, and 3) there are closer goals to achieve, like advocating for reduced animal consumption, alternative clothing to leather or fur, increased organic farming to offset nitrogen runoff in oceans, etc.
Achieving policy paradigms is one of the most impactful ways to improve animal suffering the world over, whether that’s increasing taxes on animal based products, reducing incentives for producers to make those products, capturing externalities and embedding them into businesses’ bottom lines, or straight up refusing permits and zoning to allow these kinds of economic activities.
Welcome to the world of veganism, where nuance is your best friend, and yeast is fine to eat
You always gotta check the chemicals to make sure they didn’t sneak dairy in for some reason.
Everything is made of chemicals.
I saw a bumper sticker that said “Do you eat GMO food?” me being smart ass and liking history said yes. Damned near all food humans eat at scale has been modified through artificial selection, at least if it’s in a lab we are less likely to inbred the plant so badly that they are effectively a clone species. Also I thought of cows when I read that sticker a notable downgrade from the might aurochs.
But nobody means selective breeding when they say GMO. That term emerged specifically to describe the products of genetic engineering. There a plenty of legitimate concerns.
Sure but I’ve legit heard people call selectively breed things GMO because it was exceptionally specific and broad in its effects. Also I am not going to take some of these bumper sticker types seriously until I stop seeing non-GMO stickers on inorganic products like salt or water.
Be aware, “those” people are corporate shills intentionally trying to confuse and distract from concerns about GMO foods.
I don’t think stupid is necessarily equal to corporate shill. Frankly speaking anyone who is vaguely in the anti GMO block is being labeled as stupid possibly conspiracy theorist until they start to bring up cross pollenation risks and corporate parents.
Ehhh, I’ve heard people say the covid vaccine was genetic modification. It’s just too vague a term to be actually useful.
