This crucially important caveat they snuck in there:
“Prof Scarborough said: “Cherry-picking data on high-impact, plant-based food or low-impact meat can obscure the clear relationship between animal-based foods and the environment.”
…which is an interesting way of saying that lines get blurry depending on the type of meat diet people had and/or the quantity vs the type of plant-based diet people had.
Takeaway from the article shouldn’t be meat=bad and vegan=good - the takeaway should be that meat can be an environmentally responsible part of a reasonable diet if done right and that it’s also possible for vegan diets to be more environmentally irresponsible.
Yeah I barely eat beef anymore, mostly chicken. I don't want to give up on eating animals, especially since I'm trying to get into shape right now and it would be hard to eat healthy and get enough protein to build up muscle mass.
I keep half a dozen of my own chickens in my backyard…which means about half my daily protein intake comes from eggs (which is a great source, btw). And my chickens free-range in my backyard and largely take care of and feed themselves (supplemented with chicken feed but they get most of their daily intake from the bugs/plants in the yard). I still do eat meat almost daily, but the quantities are a lot less than what I was doing a decade ago, and beef is less than a once-a-week thing for me. Like you, I’m trying to get back in shape and watching macronutrients (like protein) very carefully and trying to hit certain daily minimum numbers.
Do whatever you want but just so you know Arnold Schwarzenegger is a vegetarian now. It’s much less difficult than people think to get enough protein to bulk up without meat unless you’re doing hardcore body building. Beans and rice is a high protein dinner. Peanut butter is amazing for bulking.
I know and if everything goes as planned soon my dietary needs will change that this is a thing I will greatly reconsider. As of now I still have some fat reserves so I try to avoid too many carbs or fat. My theory is that I'm still capable to gain muscles while maintaining a small deficit as I have enough reserves to feed my muscles before my body decides it'd rather burn protein for energy. At the end of summer I'll go back to focus on weight loss until I'm forced to bulk because I won't be as much outside for weather and daylight reasons. I'll rethink my relationship with animal products at those points.
Yes, I think it’s vital to avoid thinking in absolutes over carbon footprints if we are to make real progress. We can argue endlessly over the “necessity” of consuming meat, but that becomes a distraction. Many things are not “necessary”, but most people are not realistically going to live in caves wearing carbon neutral hair shirts.
We need to continue increasing transparency on the impact of different animal products, so consumers can make informed choices. While also accepting they may not always be perfect.
yes. when you look at charts and such. Someone who exclusively ate meat for some reason who moved to chicken would have a greater impact than someone who exclusively ate chicken and went vegan. Sheep did not show up so well either so im guessing ruminants in general are not going to be so hot. Anyway I would encourage folk to keep it in mind and do what they can. I realize go vegan results in many. Well eff it all then but man just avoiding beef is big impact.
This and the article seem like a great breakdown, thank you very much. I would have guessed chocolate would be somewhere in the middle, and I've never really thought about cheese in this context at all. I was surprised to see both of them so high up there.
This would suggest my sweet tooth is my biggest problem, at least, since beef is too expensive to be a common occurrence anyway
Someone who exclusively ate meat for some reason who moved to chicken would have a greater impact than someone who exclusively ate chicken and went vegan.
But that first person could have an even bigger environmental impact by becoming Vegan instead of only eating chicken.
Sure, and if we could only do one, we should choose accordingly. We can do both, simultanously. Exactly like how we don’t have to choose between eating less meat and driving less cars.
This is true, however, not realistic in some parts of the world. For instance, in the United States, Republicans have waged a war on bodily autonomy, which includes the Roe v. Wade ruling and states creating departments to hunt down citizens who go out of state to have abortions. There are also countries where sex education is not prohibited. So, take these things into consideration while thinking about potential solutions. That being said, you are right, and you can do something about it by voting, if you are able to, wherever you live.
yes but if you actually convince someone who eats just chicken to go vegan it will have less of an effect if you actually convince a big red meat eater to limit to chicken.
Did you peel the lettuce off and slather some extra bacon on it lol? It’s not like you have to go out and eat moss off a tree. It’s more about just taking maybe one day a week to consider vegetarian options. That’s all it takes to help out. No one is saying don’t eat anything that casts a shadow.
I use to eat nothing but meat, it was really gross. I would go months without eating veggies or fruits. I started slowly trying impossible burgers then I started eating more veggies and now I can’t stop. I worked in food for so many years and cooked all kinds of meat now the smell makes me sick. I have to force my self to eat meat because of some health conditions however I eat much less and feel better than I once did. I guess its about balance and finding out what works for you but sometimes you get into a rut and don’t think too much about what you are doing to your body until its too late!
That’s both absolutely true and a massive distraction from the point. An environmentally friendly diet that includes meat is going to involve sustainable hunting not factory farming. In comparison an environmentally friendly vegan diet is staples of meat replacements and not trying to get fancy with it. It’s shit like beans instead of meat, tofu and tempeh when you feel fancy. It means rejecting substitutes that are too environmentally costly such as agave nectar as a sweetener (you should probably use beet or cane based sweetener instead).
So in short eat vegan like a poor vegan not like a rich person who thinks veganism is trendy
If I source my beef or lamb from low-impact producers, could they have a lower footprint than plant-based alternatives? The evidence suggests, no: plant-based foods emit fewer greenhouse gases than meat and dairy, regardless of how they are produced.
[…]
Plant-based protein sources – tofu, beans, peas and nuts – have the lowest carbon footprint. This is certainly true when you compare average emissions. But it’s still true when you compare the extremes: there’s not much overlap in emissions between the worst producers of plant proteins, and the best producers of meat and dairy.
Plant-based foods have a significantly smaller footprint on the environment than animal-based foods. Even the least sustainable vegetables and cereals cause less environmental harm than the lowest impact meat and dairy products [9].
The richest countries have the lowest population growth. Eating the poor would reduce the total footprint much more efficiently. Having less people in the planet is the only real sustainable way to ensure everyone can live comfortably and eat whatever the heck they want.
Spoken like a true conservative, I agree with you, we also need to reduce tax for the rich and raise the retirement age to at least 97 years otherwise the economy will crumble.
Ok, are actively working on this? Is your work on it so horrendously demanding of all your attention of every single day, that you couldn’t ALSO go vegan, or vegetarian, or just eat less meat? Eat the rich is just a fun day dream and a lazy excuse to not do what you can (like going vegan).
Eating the rich would also vastly reduce racism, sexism, classism, and worker exploitation. Can I therefore ignore my negligible personal impact, and keep being racist, sexist, classist, and buy only the cheapest clothes crafted by the most exploited third world toddlers?
Hooker spit. Lol. Imagine Jeff Bezos paying you hundreds of thousands to spit on him while trying to hide the fact that, you would gladly do it for free.
You don’t need to cut meat out of your diet to make an impact!
Cut your meat intake down to just ONE meal a day. That’s it! If everyone did that, it would make an absolutely tremendous impact.
Start noticing how often you eat meat. Many people eat meat for literally every single meal and don’t even realize it, it’s so ubiquitous in most societies.
Done, I already intermittent fast and only eat a snack supper snack, and only the supper has meat (95% of the time 5% I might eat leftovers from night before as a snack).
I also buy my beef, pork and eggs from my buddy, who grows them locally. No need to boat my meat from Argentina or new Zealand, or drive it up from the US.
Now quit asking me to do fucking more. I’m done cutting back, spending more etc. This is as far as I need to go.
Very true, but vegans are still gonna shit on you for cutting out less that 100% of animal products from your life. Idk how they can be so desperate to be superior to others that they would actively discourage improving your lifestyle just because it could be even better
Vegans don't eat animals for the sake of the animals, because they believe killing them unnecessarily is morally wrong.
Saying you're only going to eat animals once a day is like saying you're going to halve the amount of violent crimes you commit and expecting praise for it.
It depends on wether you’re actually concerned about the animals, or about yourself.
If you’re concerned about the animals, 100 people reducing by 10% is exactly as good as 10 people reducing by 100%. The difference is, 10 people don’t have to feel guilty. But no animal benefits from that.
Sure, and if you could somehow demonstrate that advocating for 100% means those 100 people are definitely, totally not going to change their consumption at all, you’d have an actual point.
Those 100 people would still be eating 90% as many animals as they were before. People don't need to eat animals to live, so expecting praise for eating 10% less is pretty funny.
It'd be like a criminal deciding to decrease the amount of crimes he commits by 10% and expecting people to encourage and praise him.
Everything on the planet eats everything else on the planet.
I’m all for sustainable and ethical meat, but killing a cow for beef is not fucking murder, and doing so has the opposite effect you’re intending - it just dilutes definition of murder.
Animals are gonna die. We have so many fucking cows, chickens and pigs on this planet only because we’re gonna eat them. Most wouldn’t be alive anyway if they weren’t grown for food.
Maybe try adjusting your expectations to be in line with fucking reality – my 4 year old still wishes for a unicorn when she blows out my candles but my 7 year old now wishes for things that might or could actually happen. In other words! Grow up.
Everything on the planet eats everything else on the planet.
I believe that's called the appeal to nature fallacy. Something happening in nature doesn't mean it's morally right. Lions often commit infanticide, but that obviously doesn't make it okay for humans to do.
Most wouldn’t be alive anyway if they weren’t grown for food.
That would be much better than breeding billions of animals and putting them under the conditions we do, just because people like how they taste.
Your 7 year old probably also wishes for world peace, better stop working for a better world!
Everything on this world dies, therefore it’s morally totally fine to artificially create, imprison, and then kill billions for no other reason than taste. Every dog dies, therefore shooting them for fun is morally totally fine!
Appeal to nature, seriously, for your 7 year olds sake, look it up.
See, I don’t care about the praise or the feeling of purity or whatever. I care about the actual effect in what is arguably the actual concern, in this case greenhouse gas emissions. And for that, it does not matter if many reduce or few abstain.
I’m killing half as many creatures for my transient pleasure as I was last year.
Oh, why not just stop murdering entirely?
Sorry, it does not work that way. Each way of doing agriculture kills creatures. There are insects, rodents, snails and birds harmed in any landscaping operation, wether the end product is meat or plant.
All you can do by changing your diet from meat to plant is a gradual change. You kill less and do less harm, which is great. But you still kill and do harm, that’s just how these things are.
Maybe a kill-free diet is possible with food synthesized in sterile labs, but the resources for that also have to come from somewhere.
We know that we have a Impact on others but shouldn’t the goal be to keep it a minimum?
Animal industry is the intentional killing and abusing of animals. Animal feed is the biggest part of crops grown, for those crops all kind of animals are killed on a big scale. Veganism is about reducing the impact, stopping the intentional killing and reducing the unavoidable impact as much as possible. There is no delusion of a “zero impact vegan” it is just a construct for people who want to justify not changing them self.
We know that we have a Impact on others but shouldn’t the goal be to keep it a minimum?
Yes, completely agreed.
There is no delusion of a “zero impact vegan”
Maybe I misunderstood the person I was initially responding to, but I understood them as exactly that, when they said what I already quoted two times.
It’s also not the first time I encountered this attitude. Maybe they don’t actually believe what they say, but then my critique is directed at the wording. There is no zero kill diet (although plant based diets are clearly much less harmful than other diets).
Occasionally, some vegans bring up this idea and react very sensitive when confronted with how it’s false. Maybe that defensiveness is fueled by cognitive dissonance which we mostly know from the other side.
Occasionally, some vegans bring up this idea and react very sensitive when confronted with how it’s false.
Maybe they have a hard time to explain the difference between intentional raising, raping and killing versus the death of critters, which meat carries many times more because feed production uses more plants than eating plants directly. But unless you are a monk and care about every step you take and grow your own no impact is delusional. Everything we use has a impact, every metal, every plastic end every car drive. But we can stop the intentional killing. Maybe a “zero murder” philosophy and not a “zero deaths” way.
the difference between intentional raising, raping and killing versus the death of critters, which meat carries many times more because feed production uses more plants than eating plants directly. But unless you are a monk and care about every step you take and grow your own no impact is delusional. Everything we use has a impact, every metal, every plastic end every car drive.
Yes.
But we can stop the intentional killing.
Can we? I mean, agriculture is intentional. The land use alone causes killing or even worse, habitat loss. Yes, vastly more if used for milk or cheese, but I consider this point settled by now.
Maybe a “zero murder” philosophy and not a “zero deaths” way.
I’m afraid the only honest option is to not summon “zero”. Every diet causes death and suffering, but the amount can vary a lot. Also animals considered pests are killed intentionally.
That is like saying the intention of driving is killing kids on the street because it happens. Is the intention of wearing cloth to slave others? Is the intention of buying meat to kill children?
Animal industry is paying for murder and abuse, there is no way about it. It is what you pay for. That is the deal, your money their lives.
That is like saying the intention of driving is killing kids on the street because it happens.
I feel misrepresented. The harm caused by road construction and driving is not intended, but accepted. It’s part of the whole package, which is the part which is intended.
Animal industry is paying for murder and abuse
I feel we’re running in circles. I thought that part was settled, while it was never disputed in the first place. Let’s stop here.
I feel misrepresented. The harm caused by road construction and driving is not intended, but accepted. It’s part of the whole package, which is the part which is intended.
Do you think we could say the same if kill a worm by tiling the soil for plants? as not intended but accepted? That is the hole point, it is accepted side effect. But the killing of a cow is the main goal in the animal industry, not a side effect.
All you can do by changing your diet from meat to plant is a gradual change. You kill less and do less harm, which is great. But you still kill and do harm, that’s just how these things are.
True. The difference is between calling it good enough halfway or going as far as possible though. So they do have a point, although I agree that (like in every other group of people) there are some that are a little over enthusiastic and in danger or turning people away instead of encouraging them.
A couple of people have spoken to me before about wanting to cut back on, or completely cut meat from their diets, but didn’t know where to start. If anyone reading this feels the same way, here’s some fairly basic recipies that I usually recommend (Bosh’s tofu curry is straight up one of the best currys i’ve ever had - even my non-vegan family members love it)
Tofu is also super versatile and is pretty climate-friendly. there’s a bazillion different ways to do tofu, but simply seasoning and pan frying some extra/super firm tofu (like you do with chicken) with some peppers and onions, for fajitas, is an easy way to introduce yourself. Here’s a little guide for tofu newbies: A Guide to Cooking Tofu for Beginners - The Kitchn. If you wanna level up your tofu game with some marinades here’s six.
Lentils and beans are also super planet friendly, super cheap, and super versatile! You’ll be able to find recipies all over that are based around lentils and beans so feel free to do a quick internet search.
Sorry for the huge, intimidating wall of text! I do hope someone interested in cutting back on meat found this useful though :)
simply seasoning and pan frying some extra/super firm tofu (like you do with chicken) with some peppers and onions, for fajitas, is an easy way to introduce yourself
More like an easy way to convince yourself tofu is terrible. It has its uses, but a direct replacement for meat is not one of them. It has almost no flavor, and if you don’t cook it just right, it has all the texture of undercooked scrambled eggs.
There’s a lot of food that is not meat-based that people can eat. For instance, Thai food is generally vegetarian.
The problem is that Americans tried to substitute meat dishes with meat-like vegetarian dishes, which generally don’t taste all that great. In fact, one could argue that many traditional American dishes don’t taste all that great to begin with which is why the lots of meat.
A simple dish of spaghetti or pasta with a tomato, pesto or aglio e olio are great options.
Also, one needing necessarily 100% remove the meat. Is 75 or 80% reduction in meat intake allows one to continue to eat meat, while still vastly reducing the amount of meat you’re eating. Since one’s impact on the global economy and meet consumption as a totality is infinitesimal, the reduction itself is significant even if you don’t completely eliminate the meat from your diet.
I think most people would find this a hell of a lot more palatable than going cold turkey vegan and even banning honey from your diet, which many of my vegan friends have done. As well as not eating any sugar because they claim that sugar is made from animals somehow…
There is a lot of misinformation in grandstanding when it comes to diet politics which just borderlines on the silly.
People should do what they can from a realistic perspective, well not killing themselves or making themselves miserable from their political driven lifestyle choices. I know quite a few vegans and vegetarians who have decided to quit being a vegan or vegetarian simply because over the long haul it made them unhappy and eventually they wanted to eat meat again. Now they eat more meat than I do who I would consider myself a light meat eater.
I’m no veg(etari)an by any measure, but I have this to say to people who are exclusively meat-eaters: you’re missing out on a world of interesting flavours and textures.
Next time you make chicken curry, replace half the chicken with tofu. Bolognese - do half lentils & kidney beans. Beans and legumes are cheap as, great for the current economic climate (and the real climate, I guess…)
PS: mushrooms are the food of gods. There’s just so many varieties, you can use them for nearly anything.
One of the things that annoys me about vegans… is they always try to convince me [this recipe] always tastes like the real thing.
And I think any one who eats meat on a regular basis is going to know an impossible burger is not beef- it might be the closest, sure.
Probably the best way to “convert” people- or encourage reductions- is to be less apologetic. Tofu is wonderful and delicious as it’s own thing- but as tofu-chicken or tofurky or anything of that sort, it sets expectations that can never be met.
Forgetting to mention a dish that stands in its own happens to be meatless… well, my parents were halfway through the second bowl of a tofu stir fry before they realized it.
One of the things that annoys me about vegans… is they always …
And one thing that annoys me about non-vegans is that they always tend to stereotype vegans. There are nearly 100 million vegans in the world my friend. We are not all the same.
Tried these Yves Mild Italian veggie sausages and I am hooked.
They have a nice dense texture but it’s not like the fake sausages you get with other brands that try to mimic the ground meat texture. More like a very firm a larger Hotdog wiener.
I like them on the BBQ with all the sides. They are fantastic sliced and put into a pasta dish. You could even throw them on a Hotdog bun.
I feel there needs to be some fake meat types to bring favorites over to and that brand nailed it with those sausages.
I hear you. I started buying lots of beyond burger patties from whole foods and I actually find them pretty delicious so I’ve typically buy them instead of ground beef. Unfortunately my wife keeps buying ground beef so I end up eating that occasionally but it’s nothing to get worked up over.
It really depends on the food, and just how much “into” food you are. We’re probably never going to have a perfect replacement for a medium rare steak. But how many meat eaters eat medium rare? 90% of the women I know, and 70% of men will happily eat a shoe sole steak smothered in cheap ketchup, or pink sludge pressed into chicken nugget form. Those things can definitely be made vegan, and those people (generally, more often than not) wouldn’t taste the difference.
But yes, meat alternatives (Tofu, Tempeh, BEANS), instead of replacements (Beyond Meat) are the better long term option.
even if it’s shoe leather, you can still tell a difference in steaks just by looking at it. As for the nuggets… I knew a guy whose job was doing chemical assays and stuffs. had a mass spectrometer and some other interesting equipment in his office. Because it was usually locked under NDA’s and stuff, he would instead go out to mcdonalds and buy whatever new thing came out on the menu and run that through. YOU DO NOT WANT TO KNOW.
And I think any one who eats meat on a regular basis is going to know an impossible burger is not beef
Tbh. I don’t get using burgers as an example. Burgers as I know them contain so much other stuff (salad, tomato, cucumber, cheese, sauce etc.) that I barely notice what kind of patty is in there. I do notice a difference on stuff that is unprocessed meat without much to hide the differences (best example would probably be that steak) but for anything that uses ground meat and/or adds other stuff (like in a stew) that just diminishes/hides any differences.
I’m with you on the other stuff though, trying to imitate something perfectly often lands you in the uncanny valley where its close enough to be identifiable what it is supposed to be, but just slightly off to be distracting. Like that one recipe you remember from your parents or grand parents that you always loved as a kid but no one can get exactly like you remember it.
When I went vegetarian years ago I hated it for the first few weeks… Because I was trying veggie/vegan versions of all the dishes I knew how to make. When I started exploring actual just veggie/vegan recipes that weren’t trying to be a fake meat version did it feel incredibly easy.
It’s exactly as you said, the fake version is never as good and you’ll most of the time be comparing it to the real thing… But meals that just happen to be vegetarian/vegan? They can be amazing on their own! I’ve never looked back since I started exploring new recipes instead of alternative versions of old.
To me the role of the “fake” stuff isn’t to replace it as staples in my diet but to let me have some old comforts once in a while, or at least something to fill the gap. When you’ve been veg for a few years a fake chicken finger can do a decent job of scratching the itch for something like that, even if you know it’s not the same
At least for me. Mileage varies depending on what you like about the original
The TLDR: Here, you need to eat these grass clippings to save the planet. Never mind every store you go to has items made-of and encased in plastic. Never mind that your fuel efficient car is made of plastic. Never mind the climate spokespeople that live in houses and fly in private jets have an environmental impact of small cities. Listen to them tell you what to eat and how to live, just don't question what they eat and how they live. If there is going to be real change, we won't have yearly cellphone upgrades. Items will packaged in biodegradable materials. We won't have same-day delivery for anything. Hospitals and medical offices will go back to glass, metal and reusables. They will sterilize instead of throwing away. Items will be repairable instead of refuse when they break. The burden has always been placed on the individual, but a company is given a pass because they say good things, not do good things.
Imo veganism, like addressing your carbon footprint, should be an individual choice and not pushed on others for the sake of the climate. It has too small an impact for the difficulty of getting people to change. That effort is better spent lobbying government.
But for me personally, I don't feel right eating beef knowing how bad it is for the climate. If someone asks me why I don't eat cow products, I explain. But I don't try to push it on anyone else.
Similarly, I pay companies to sequester my estimated personal carbon footprint because I can afford it and it helps me sleep at night. But that's not a solution to climate change.
We’re at the start of an enormous climate crisis that doesn’t have a single solution. We should definitely push each other to do much better on all fronts. Reducing meat eating happens to play a pretty important role. So when somebody tries to get you to do better, please be receptive. This needs all of us and we live in a closed densely connected social system.
If you care about the climate going vegan has the most impact one can do according to the IPCC. I am vegan and still have enough energy to fight for change on different topics. It is not that that its a excuse to do nothing else, it is just the bare minimum in my eyes.
This is one part of their recommendations, cut meat subsidies and use it for plant based food, have you not read the report? Or do you wish that they use nukes to force it?
Maybe it is more of a sexual thing for you when you want somebody to tell you what to do? Have you been a bad consoomer? Do you need to be punished with veggies?
How weak has one to be to call for a strong ruler who forbids them to kill others for pleasure when they could chose it any day…
I’m sure shipping vast quantities of almonds and almond milk from places like California to the rest of the world produces almost no greenhouse gases /s
Not to talk about the ecological damage it does to California due to the immense water consumption.
Yes that neglects the transport though. Cow milk can PE produced locally almost everywhere. Cow milk I buy here was produced maybe 10km away from me. Almond milk was transported 5000+ km.
Sounds about right, though I’m not sure if I agree with the direct comparison of calories. Milk probably isn’t going to be a major source of a person’s calories (at least it wasn’t a major source of calories for me before I went vegan), and it seems unlikely that someone will drink 4 cups of almond milk to replace each cup of dairy milk they would have drank in order to maintain the same calorie intake from milk. Comparing by volume produced makes more sense to me, since someone switching milks seems more likely to use them as a 1 to 1 replacement volume wise, e.g. someone adding 1 cup of almond milk to cereal vs. adding 1 cup of dairy to cereal.
I dont think it is fair to discard the value of calories in a discussion of efficiency in food production.
Milk is a staple of many American diets, maybe as a result of the Got Milk Yada Yada, my point being drinking a cup of milk is going to fill you up with x calories, weather you would have replaced it with 4 cups of almond milk or not.
If you decided not to drink cow milk, and only had 30 calories from the single cup of almond milk you drank, the 90 calories you are missing will be made up elsewhere in your diet, potentially in a more inefficient replacement food.
Sure, food scarcity is not the tightest conversation in America due to the prevalence of our high calorie diets, but in terms of human dietary habits as a whole, calorie density, difficulty of obtaining, and difficulty in distribution are desperate conversations that lives depend on.
So I can eat 2000 calories in pure sugar and feel full for the whole day?
point 1 was already addressed in my comment
You said it didn't matter in America but that it does matter globally, but we're not talking about globally, because we're talking about how milk forms part of the typical American diet.
Meaning in terms of actual nutrition vs pollution, cow milk is over twice as effective.
Calculation= cal in alm milk/cal in alm milk : cal in cow milk / 2 × cal in alm milk. (2 in this equation stands for the rate of pollution multiplicity sourced from the title of this post, twice as much gasses).
Which doesn’t really matter because people don’t put milk in their coffee to add x amounts of calories. So in almost all cases, they will use the same amount in volume/weight.
And a lot of other plant based milk alternatives have an even lower environmental impact, the difference between your average milk and milk alternative will be even bigger.
What about soy derivates being used as estrogens by the body suppressing testosterone. Plus to keep soy fields you have to spray more pesticides than everything else.
You’ve missed the point. Vegans are always banging on about being vegan with the superiority complex on food that comes with it. Essentially it would make me more of a cu*t… Besides… I love meat with most meals.
I was just talking about this idea with a friend. We decided it would be political suicide in the US for anyone to suggest eating less meat.
People would literally rather see the world burn than give up their chicken nuggets.
I’m not even hardcore vegetarian. I looked at the situation and agreed it’s hard to ethically justify eating meat. So I started eating less. I’m down to pretty much just “sometimes I get a pizza slice with a meat topping if there’s nothing good without meat”. Maybe I’ll cut that out too one day.
If you could tell the average American, with 100% certainty and undeniable proof that going vegan for a month would save the lives of 1,000 children, they would go out, buy as much meat as possible and eat it smugly in front of you and ask you repeatedly if it’s triggering you.
Can’t we all just agree 8 billion people is silly? Think about how much of it is just completely redundant. The main focus really should be massive population reduction.
Edit: Also, no, I don’t mean killing off anyone, just reducing birth rates will do fine. We know even just a simple high school education reduces birth rates.
Reducing birthrates is not genocide. As long as the population continues to increase, human life will be more and more devalued as we continue to choose quantity over quality of life because of a DNA delusion.
It literally is genocide, by definition. I know you think you are correct and moral, just like everyone else that ends up thinking stuff like this, but you’re not. You need serious psychiatric help as soon possible.
Forcibly reducing birthrights is absolutely genocide. Unless you are talking solely of reducing birth rates within your own ethnic group…I wouldn’t call Chinas “one-child” policy genocide, per se, but it absolutely paved the way for systemic infanticide. And that’s not really significantly better.
Definitely not poor people. I think requiring a license to have children would not be a bad idea. I would not acknowledge reproduction as a human right, but instead as a form of rape.
I am also not bothered by infanticide as long as it is done humanely, and assuming both parents do not want the child.
I can probably fit like 10 people in my house if I tried hard enough, so I guess that’s what I should do, right? Quantity over quality, right? We just can’t have enough suffering.
Yes I guess I skipped over that, sorry. I would, however, still argue it would not make sense to have that many redundant humans, and that wellness is hard to measure since society does not allow people to express how they truly feel about things.
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