Hashy posted:

I've been vegan for nearly a year now and it's the easiest thing ever now but then I can afford $9 vegan cheese occasionally and oat/soy milk that costs double what cow milk does here (don't buy almond it uses an absurd amount of water to produce and it tastes like almonds).

If you can't afford vegan luxuries the best thing you can do is scale back your consumption and do even a little to increase demand for vegan products. It will be more affordable in our lifetimes.

Escaping the cognitive dissonance of carnism has been incredibly freeing and has taught me to cook better and enjoy food more than ever before.

Hashy posted:

You definitely don't but I do like a lot of vegan alternatives every so often (meat-likes, cheeses, ice-cream etc).

Most carnists actually spend a load on food and still balk at the prices of vegan alternatives. Those people will probably find they don't spend any more to be a moderately indulgent vegan

Bot 02 posted:

Not to be "that vegan", but veganism is more than just eating plants. It's a philosophy which acknowledges animals' rights not to be harmed and exploited, and eating a plant based diet is a subset of that philosophy, but it also means that you're not necessarily vegan just based on your diet if you don't also subscribe to the philosophy in other aspects of your life.

endlessmonotony posted:

B12 is not produced by bacteria in the soil.

Unless you mean nightsoil.

It's produced in the gut microbiome of a lot of herbivores, especially ruminants. Their poo poo gets mixed with the soil and thus soil contains B12.

It's also naturally present in certain types of seaweed.

We can now just ferment it up, we don't need a cow stomach, but figuring out if the process works or not was only possible in 1955, thus marking us being able to solve the deficiency with better answer than "guessing" or "eat cow liver".

Accretionist posted:

Bot 02 posted:

So this is something I've been struggling with ever since I first became a vegan and I'd like some input

Hummus: food of the gods or overrated?

Troutful posted:

I wouldn't say it's our burden, exactly, but I think you can make a convincing utilitarian argument for (limited) animal agriculture and hunting. Like, I think backyard chickens can pretty easily lead better lives than wild chickens, even after you factor in egg stealing and slaughter. This is kind of an academic discussion given the current hideous reality of industrial farming, though, and I'm sorry if it comes off as concern-trolly. In the real world, for most people, veganism is the right choice.

Do people have any thoughts about the social elements of veganism? It was really easy for me to eat vegetarian before the COVID pandemic because 80% of my social group was vegetarian/vegan, so we'd all just cook vegan meals for each other with dairy add-ins. I struggle with not eating meat on my own and I really miss the (mild) social pressure of those communal meals.

FacelessVoid posted:

Cats and dogs will sometimes abandon their litters. Is is safe to say they don't care about their young? No, that would be silly.

Chickens do not want they're young stolen. That's why they attempt to hide their eggs and will brood if you keep taking them. They only eat them if their starving or something. I do not have to raised chickens personally to know this.


Only if you're also keeping a rooster around and allowing them to breed. I don't understand what you mean by "outsourcing". You choose to keep animals on your farm or not. There will be animals in the wild regardless.


I don't think you're a bad person who has no empathy. If I thought you were I wouldn't bother arguing with you at all.

However, you're missing the point. It doesn't matter than you're treating them better than the wild. You are inflicting suffering that is unnecessarily just for the sake of your taste buds. You could let them live on the farm without killing them or eating their young. Or just not raise them at all as other posters have mentioned.

Do it ironically posted:

I would imagine the chicken assumes the eggs will have babies and treat every egg like that though I am no expert in chickens and whether they know if an egg has been fertilized or not

FacelessVoid posted:

This is also arguably inflicting suffering since wild chickens only lay a dozen or so eggs a year. They've been bread to produce that many eggs. It's similar to the way people can rationalize dairy because dairy cows have been bread to produce so much milk they want to be milk so it must be okay!

Do it ironically posted:

Don't chickens only lay eggs for a couple of years consistently but can live for potentially 10 years, you could accumulate a lot of chickens if you were feeding a family of 5 or 6 if you weren't getting rid of them when they were done producing

Also, dogs can live completely fine on vegan dog food heck I've been feeding my rescue dog natural balance vegetarian dog food (it's vegan) for years and every vet check up he's perfectly healthy and he has energy for days. I have no idea about cats I doubt they could be fed a vegan diet

endlessmonotony posted:

In 2020 it shouldn't be hard to understand that Strong Moral Stances which, when taken to their extreme, require us to cull a significant amount of human population are natural (heh) fertile grounds for fascism and ecofascists are real, not my friend, and sometimes super about veganism.

The plan where we all move to all-vegan diets isn't possible right now without first declaring a whole lot of disabled people unworthy of life and also putting a hell of a lot of time and effort into genetic engineering - as well as regular engineering - of perfect crops and farms. Funnily, the technology that would allow us to go full vegan without murdering anyone would also enable 3D printing replacement organs and that's research a lot of money is being poured into. So it's not a question of "we don't want to", it's a case of "we can't yet".

Which means that if you're not an ecofascist you make compromises. Invertebrates are inevitable sources of animal labor and also allow us to convert human-inedible resources far more efficiently than any other method we have right now. Forage fish (anchovies, sardines, herrings) are a special case because the ocean's ecosystem is poorly suited for plants.

And one of the compromises you make should be stopping calling yourself vegan so you don't give the fascists a place to hide.

endlessmonotony posted:

Veganism involves not killing animals for our food, including insects.

It doesn't take any soybeans at all to produce beef, but that's irrelevant either way, because a primarily plant-based diet is still less resource-intensive than factory farming meat.

However the way we produce plants involves a lot of death of things that would also rather like to eat our food, as well as the insects that help produce that food. Things bigger than insects can be dealt with humanely in most cases. Bugs? Not so much. We need to kill bugs. We need to kill a lot of bugs.

Also it's not just pure calories there's a lot of cases where we need animal parts and byproducts to manufacture food and medication. Byproducts-only diet is possible. Synthetic diet allows us to go all animal sources free for healthy people. But there's a lot of work to be done.

endlessmonotony posted:

Then you're not very aware.

I mean I get it's probably like lesbians in the UK on trans issues, but jesus loving almighty are the ecofash out there.

endlessmonotony posted:

This is just lazy, the flip is obvious.

You're using an undefined "possible and practicable" that means whatever you want for it to as your arguments, and by that argument it's trivial to justify ruminant consumption - they eat grasses we don't and produce milk that's rich in b12 which otherwise creates a bottleneck easy to exploit for both profit and warfare.

So, vegans eat beef. And by that standard, I was wrong all along.

endlessmonotony posted:

Now, do they understand these behaviors are abnormal and are they unhappy or just behaving according to instinctive patterns?