I'm pretty perpetually broke, all my family and friends eat meat, and I live in good ol' purple state Pennsylvania (not Philly or Pittsburgh).
In my personal experience, being at the very least vegetarian IS easy, even in my far-from-ideal conditions. I want to take people at their word when they say it would be hard for them, but it's kind of incomprehensible to me. I even still eat at restaurants! Honestly I don't even really cook that much, 'cause I'm lazy and don't have a lot of free time. When eating out, you just try to do your due diligence to avoid getting any hidden meat, and if you wind up with some anyway, well at least you tried. I will admit it's somewhat harder when I'm visiting rural Alabama, but not even by that much really. More on the level of minor inconvenience than anything. It's not even more expensive, meat costs a fortune compared to like... beans.
Maybe I shouldn't post here because I'm not vegan, but I respect vegans for doing the obviously correct thing. Personally, I don't have the willpower to do it, but I HAVE tried to reduce my meat consumption. That said, I get annoyed with articles like this for reasons I will describe beneath relevant quotes. I offer these thoughts as a starting point for a better way to nudge omnivores towards less cruel consumption.
Imagine you knew a way to cut your carbon footprint by more than half; it was easy, required no real major sacrifice on your part...
Depending where you live, avoiding meat, eggs, dairy, honey, et cetera is NOT easy and IS a real sacrifice. If you live in California, you can find vegan options everywhere. If you live in Minnesota, Kansas, or various other places, you are effectively saying you will never eat out again, never sample the flavors of your Church potlucks, and bring all your own food to the family reunions. This is a hard social sacrifice to take and will be accompanied by eye rolls and some negative feedback. The authors surely know this, but act like it is nothing. At the very least, the requirement that you never ever eat out again -- even when you are sick or worked a double shift and now have to make your own dinner because the closest thing to vegan you can order is a sad meatless, cheeseless pizza is an effort.
“People quickly derail the topic,” she said, “and begin talking about other things, such as how they seek to avoid food waste and plastic packaging.”
Of course they do! Who doesn't try to change the topic when someone is trying to push you into something you don't want to do?
Cutting out meat entirely was seen as an absurd position – and one only taken by haughty stick-in-the-muds, Ditlevsen explained. “There was a tendency for them to […] scold vegans for being extremists,” she noted.
Well, yeah, when an article suggests that veganism is easy, requires no sacrifice, doesn't take time to learn new recipes and methods of cooking, intonates that there's something wrong with trying to talk about other things, and doesn't then see itself as haughty better-than-thou radicals, then it is time to call that article extremist.
For a lot of people -- myself included -- veganism is HARD. It would be easier if vegans could sympathize with that. There's a growing contingent of low-to-no-meat eaters that mostly cook without meat, but have things they aren't going to give up. For me, I'm not giving up cheese. I can try to get slightly more ethical cheese, but we all know cheese means calves aren't with their moms. It is cruel. I know. If I'd never had cheese, I'd never start eating it, and I am eagerly anticipating cheese made with lab-grown milk, but for now I know I'm contributing to animal abuse.
If you came up to me and said, "You know CHEESE is ABUSE" I would not be thankful for the information. I would be annoyed that I didn't have lab-grown cheese yet. I've got beyond burgers for my beef cravings, but all the vegan cheeses I've tried have failed me (I want something like a St. Andre triple creme).
I used to raise ducks for the eggs. We had freakin' happy ducks with their own pool, lots of space, and frequent treats. Most of our ducks died of old age, but we did lose some to animal attacks. We ate the remnants where we could. We are back to buying eggs maybe once a month or so, but only eggs from happy chickens we can visit.
If you tell me that isn't good enough, I have to tell you that sometimes I want eggs.
Heck, sometimes I want fast food and can't think of a vegan option. In fact, my company had a California/Indian Manager come visit and the first thing I was asking him was if he was vegan or vegetarian because that would matter for getting lunch. He assured us all that he'd have no problem finding lunch and to simply pick a place that could easily seat 12. Stupidly, we listened to him. He IS vegetarian and his only lunch option was off-menu buttered spaghetti because the place that is both close and has big tables is also mostly meat. They only serve spaghetti with meat sauce and the only vegan item is a side salad. The 'regular' salad has ham and cheese.
I've gone on too long. I'm just saying that the article minimizes the difficulty and encourages an attitude that won't win anyone over. I hope the lemmy-verse is better than that and maybe we all can encourage more people to minimize animal consumption even if those people aren't ready to go... cold turkey? You know what I mean. Don't make Perfect the enemy of Good.
Frankly, I think your comment exemplifies how correct this article is.
"Cooking vegan is hard" - no, it isn't. 90% of non-vegan recipes can be made vegan by leaving out or substituting non-vegan ingredients. You don't need any different cooking methods to make pasta sauce without meat or fried rice without eggs. Dairy is slightly more complicated because milk does very particular things to the texture and chemistry of food but you can find guides to non-dairy replacements in literally 30 seconds on Google.
"I will be a social pariah/I can never eat out again" - that's catastrophizing. If you personally live in a food desert where no vegan food exists, or you personally have relatives who will emotionally abuse you for eating vegan food - I'm not saying this doesn't happen, in the age of Trump there are some conservatives who think eating tons of red meat (and smoking cigars and rolling coal) virtual signals their loyalty to conservatism, and I hope they enjoy the heart disease they're giving themselves - then eat non-vegan food in public. That's okay. Veganism is about avoiding animal products as far as is reasonable and practical.
But what I see a lot is people saying "I can't be vegan because there are no vegan restaurants in Kansas" when they live in California. I see people saying "I can't be vegan because people at church give vegans the stink eye" when they don't attend church. I see people saying "veganism is wrong because there's tons of land useless for agriculture that can only be used for grazing" when the meat they eat comes from soy fattened factory farm feed lots. I see people saying "veganism is wrong because hunting is a traditional lifeway of Native American people" when they are not Native American.
How does a lack of vegan restaurants keep you from cooking vegan at home? It doesn't.
Will you actually get criticized at family reunions if you bring a potluck dish without meat in it? As if there are food inspectors going through all the side dishes to make sure the required quantity of animal product is in it? Even for conservatives, that's ridiculous.
What I see over and over again is people bringing up reasons why other people can't go vegan in order to explain why they don't go vegan, even though the reasons that apply to those other people don't apply to them at all. And that is deflecting. And that's exactly what the article calls out.
If you came up to me and said, "You know CHEESE is ABUSE" I would not be thankful for the information. I would be annoyed that I didn't have lab-grown cheese yet.
I'm going to pick this sentence specifically to respond to, because. With all due respect.
If you said "I torture animals for pleasure and I'm not going to stop" we would consider you a sociopath.
But you're saying "I pay other people to torture animals for my pleasure and I'm not going to stop", and we're supposed to, what, smile and nod and agree how hard it is to not torture animals for pleasure?
Look. Torturing animals is wrong. You know it's wrong. You are admitting it's wrong. It hurts your feelings to be reminded that you are doing wrong.
That's a fair and understandable feeling and I don't care. Because you are torturing animals, and if you feel bad when someone reminds you, it's because you should.
There is value in gentle persuasion. And there's also value in ranting about the sheer fucking hypocrisy of carnists. This article is the latter.
False. I said BEING vegan is hard. It is morally correct, but it can be difficult. Later you compare eating cheese to being a sociopath. I'm pretty sure that even sociopaths can feign compassion in public when someone explains how they are having trouble achieving their goals.
You said:
90% of non-vegan recipes can be made vegan by leaving out or substituting non-vegan ingredients.
This is where I know you are not serious. 90%? Please. My mom visited from out of state a few weeks back. At restaurants and her friend's house where she stayed (she won't stay with us), she ate: eggs, bacon, buttered toast, coffee, lox and cream cheese on bagels with red onions and capers, oysters, lobster, calamari, moussaka, hummus, baklava, general tso's chicken, sushi, sashimi, gyoza, chicken tandoori, saag paneer, vegetable pakora, roast beef in aus jus, brussle sprouts with bacon, pepperoni pizza, deviled eggs, macaroni salad, a black and bleu burger with onion rings, and so on. I don't know how to make eggs and bacon without eggs and bacon. I don't know how to make lox without fish. I CAN make moussaka with veggie crumbles instead of meat, but I don't know how to get that eggy quality without the eggs in there. I do make vegan hummus. Baklava without honey? How? Sashimi? How? Gyoza? How? Saag is vegan. Paneer is not. I've never been able to make Indian food properly despite repeated tries, so while in theory I could make a Saag without paneer, the reality is it would be awful regardless of the animal content. I have to stick with whatever the restaurant has.
But you’re saying “I pay other people to torture animals for my pleasure and I’m not going to stop”, and we’re supposed to, what, smile and nod and agree how hard it is to not torture animals for pleasure?
Yes to both counts. I am saying, "I pay people to torture animals for me and despite my regrets about that, I am not going to stop until there is another way to get a similar joy-of-food experience." AND I am saying that YOU should say, "I know it is hard for you to stop paying people to torture animals for you."
Do you also yell at depressed people for bringing everyone down? Do you think people are unaware of their failings? What sort of juvenile ego tripper gets off on yelling at people during their confessions?
I deleted most of this comment because it wasn't as civil and understanding as I wanted it to be and it's probably better off lost to history 😆
But let me summarize my thoughts: your mother, and presumably you, eat a lot more meat than the average person. The 10% of human foods that aren't plant-based and can't easily be made plant-based are overrepresented in your meat heavy diet.
And meat heavy diets are bad for your personal health and for the health of the planet, for reasons we both know very well.
Which is to say: you are universalizing your personal experiences. It's not difficult to go vegan. It's difficult for you to go vegan, because your diet and lifestyle are so heavily focused on animal products. That's not an indictment of veganism; it's an indictment of the Western diet, and big agriculture, and capitalist food science that studied what flavors and textures trigger dopamine release so they could pack food with them and sell more product, and the whole vicious capitalist PR mechanism that convinced Westerners to eat a meat heavy, highly processed, unhealthy diet and convinced Western governments to subsidize it. And, to a much lesser extent, it is an indictment of your personal choices.
It's difficult for you to go vegan. But that's not on veganism. That's on you.
And we're back to my complaint about the article. For some people, veganism is hard. Obviously it isn't hard for everyone, and I never said everyone, but for some people it is.
Articles like the one posted created a divide and encourage the belittlement of people trying to do better rather than suggesting anyone try to help people get closer to veganism.
First, people eat meat because it tastes good and is widely available. You can't make it not taste good, but we can insist on better regulatory requirements that might make meat more expensive or less ubiquitous. Every person seeks validation for the behaviors they choose every day. That's human nature, and that's why it's easy to false equivalences like avocados are worse than beef. People want to believe it because it's easier than changing. We're not going to save the planet by changing everybody. People need to be forced to change by law or by circumstance.
Second, this is terrible journalism. The author probably wanted to be a novelist, but nobody wanted to publish a young adult series about a girl who discovers she can talk to farm animals and is whisked away to a private school for animal talkers.
News articles, even editorials, don't require suspense. You don't build tension by slowly revealing information. This article is five paragraphs in before they get to anything resembling a point, and it's several more paragraphs of slowly revealing the findings of the study like a detective walking through the crime scene, discovering new clues along the way.
Third, the author is exactly the sort of smarmy, "told-ya-so" douchebag that carnists assume of all vegans. "... have you considered that vegans are annoying?" Yes. You are very annoying, and it undercuts the points you're trying to make.
We should be looking at the results of this study and trying to determine how to overcome the daily hurdles people face and disinformation campaigns of the meat industry. Calling people stupid for being fallible in ways all humans are is just mean-spirited and counterproductive.
From what I can surmise, most vocal vegans aren't really interested in changing minds so much as they want to put others down for not making their same choices. They're bitter and jaded, and globally harmful dietary choices are a really easy lightning rod for all the pent up scorn. I'm sure they're great IRL, but this space is for smug self satisfaction and out group shaming, not for civil discourse with the enemy.
I wouldn't say "most." I just think the loudest voices are the assholes, and that applies to every group across all ideologies. That's not unique to vegans, but so much industry is built on suffering and has deficated time and effort to painting all vegans with the same brush. And it's not just animal suffering. Every capitalist knows, and fears, that if consumers begin caring about animal rights, human rights are a natural extension.
