One thing worth noting is that regardless of one's personal reasons to be vegan/ vegetarian , being 90% vegan WILL almost always be 90% effective for said reason.
This is not to dispute anything from the article. Just a reminder that if you sympathize or relate with any cause to reduce animal product usage, you don't have to be "vegan" or "vegetarian", just try to reduce your consumption to the point where it starts to inconvenient you.
I wanted to cut meat for environmental purposes, so I've started only eating it on holidays - turkey on Thanksgiving, fish on Christmas Eve, a burger/barbecue on 4th of July, buffalo wings on my birthday. I don't describe myself with the "V" word, and usually just say I "avoid eating meat".
People are usually critical when I opt for vegetarian options, and then completely lighten up when I describe that I do eat meat. It's strange how defensive people get about eating meat, and how quickly they lighten up just because I eat meat 5 times a year.
> It's strange how defensive people get about eating meat
Not so strange, when you have been the repeated recipient of either the "meat is murder" or "I'm obviously better than you because I don't eat meat" comments from militant vegetarians.
Basically, there's prejudice and justification on both sides of the divide, and it's too easy to respond to the constant hate with your own hate.
I'm sure those militant people exist, but I've yet to encounter one.
I can speak from the other side though. After someone realizes that I don't eat meat, I usually (as in way too often) get follow up questions about the reasons etc. I'm not sure if this is because of attempted "small talk" or other reasons, but after a while, I just got tired of it.
I generally try to avoid long follow-up discussions on the topic, because I simply don't think it's worthy of attention (at least in this context).
I'm not sure why people get defensive, but my guess it at least has a little to do with that most people recognize that at the very least animals had to directly die for the food (they would be uncomfortable with doing that themselves, or seeing it up close), and that there is a growing awareness of the many negative effects of animal products (environment, over antibiotic usage, poor working conditions, ...). They suddenly feel the need to defend their "decision," when really most people do not really take an active role in deciding that they will eat animal products. (This is by design by the industry, romanticizing animal agriculture and hiding the reality of how that food is produced.)
> It's strange how defensive people get about eating meat
Maybe it's not about eating meat but about sanctimonious folks that feel it necessary to call those around them names and denigrate them because they do not follow the person's favorite fad. Once people learn you are not one of those, nobody has a problem with your food choices per se.
That said, I've never felt defensive around people I know that choose to eat vegetarian or vegan (yes, I enjoy meat, if you didn't guess :). But they never felt the need to somehow make a debate out of it either. If people respect each other's choices and accept them without judgmental attitude, there's no place for contention and defensiveness does not arise.
If you think than being non-judgmental and polite is a fad and commenting on somebody's behavior after the fact is the same as giving uninvited insistent advice to random people, then yes. Otherwise, no.
Today, literally an hour ago, long after I wrote the above comment, I've read a complaint from one of my friends online, that their online community was invaded by preachy vegans (the community has nothing to do with nutritional advice and didn't initiate the discussion on the topic) who proceeded to lecture everybody about how they should give up meat immediately and how they should feel bad if they don't do so. And from what she is saying, it's not the first time it happens in that community. That's exactly what I am talking about.
I think commenting on how this looks like is not the same as what those vegan activists were doing. Not even close.
Black-and-white behavioural change is almost always easier than quantitative change, because the cognitive burden of a prohibition is far less. Counting calories is rational but time-consuming, complex, error prone and open to self-deception; an absolute prohibition on starchy carbs is arbitrary but much easier to stick to. Not drinking at all on weekdays or drinking only with meals is cognitively much easier than restricting yourself to 14 standard drinks per week.
Most religious laws are absolute prohibitions or absolute mandates - no foods are mostly kosher or halal, no foods become haram or treif merely because of quantity. None of the ten commandments are quantitative or subjective. Being a frummer is burdensome and inconvenient, but it's also remarkably straightforward. Strict and absolutist behavioural rules are easy to understand and apply.
Is this really true? I was a vegetarian for 10 years. It was easy. Meat was verboten. Full stop. I never had to negotiate it with myself. But, now, at any individual meal I can convince myself that it's no big deal to eat a little meat. Crucially, I can convince myself of that for several days in a row.
If the end goal is less meat, then, for me, the results were clear: black and white thinking was far more effective.
Agreed. I am normally a very nuanced person who tries hard to see all sides of an issue... but with my vegetarian diet, I find total abstinence to be the best thing. Eating a little bit of meat requires will power to not eat too much... and I have a limited reserve of will power which I want to save for other things in my life.
Far more effective for you as an individual, but has it been far more effective in the reduction of the absolute amount of meat that has been eaten world-wide?
I've wrestled with it, and settled into prioritizing humanely-raised meat. I have far more qualms about the inhumane treatment of most farm animals than I do about the concept of raising and slaughtering animals for food.
The heuristic I apply is I only eat antibiotic free meat. It has nothing to do with animals taking antibiotics per se, but rather that large farms abuse them as it's cheaper to pump a pig full of antibiotics than it is to provide remotely sanitary living conditions, nevermind the environmental issues around creating antibiotic resistant superbugs.
When I started out with veganism (went "100%" immediately) I thought I would eat animal products when eating out with friends if it was easier, or on occasions when it was something special. While I still go more vegetarian than vegan while traveling for several reasons (ease, health because of available food, etc.), in the end I found it surprisingly hard to make the exceptions. It was easier for some reason to just stick with it.
Meat, dairy and eggs are over. It's only a matter of time. Yes, your shoes and your belt might still be leather, but the rest of your outfit is probably plant based or synthetic. Your diet will soon be the same because it will be cheaper. CRISPR is going to eat your lunch
The title seems misleading to me. According to the article:
>A third-of people abandoned their animal-free diets in three months or less, and more than half abandoned it within the first year.
Are you really a vegan or vegetarian if you break in 3 months? In 1 year? Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that 1 in 5 people who attempt to go vegan/vegetarian succeed?
I'm a vegan and I'm active in my local vegan/vegetarian community. There are two camps: people who do it for ethical reasons and people who do it for for health. People who do it for health usually give up and move on to whatever fad diet becomes popular. People who subscribe to the ethics rarely quit. We have a saying: there's no such thing as a former vegan. Just someone who tried the diet.
Long time vegan here. While I think that saying has some truth to it, there are also those that sympathize with the ethics, try it out for a short while, but find the pressure of social backlash too costly. The biggest problem isn't nutrition; It's ingroup/outgroup policing (predominantly by the vast majority of non-vegans).
I can believe that the social piece is harder. I am not even vegetarian, but I eat less meat than I did growing up. Yet, I have had my meat-and-potatoes family of origin label me vegetarian because not all meals contain meat these days.
However, I do think one reason vegetarians, especially vegans, get so much social flack is because they typically position themselves as morally superior to meat eaters. I know one incredibly toxic vegan whom I wish would just make the world a better place by kindly dropping dead. In addition to being high handed, she is inconsistent, hypocritical and generally assholish to the max. She is the vegan version of the hellfire-and-brimstone Christians I knew growing up in the Bible Belt who made me feel like "If my choice is to sit next to you in church or go to hell, I will take hell." On top of all her other BS, she isn't even a committed vegan. She is a convenient vegan who promptly adds cheese to her diet periodically for REASONS, all while looking down her morally superior nose at everyone around her.
If you want to be vegan, cool beans. Good for you. But you might get less social flack as a group if you took a different approach (as a group) to how you talk about that choice and how you treat other people who aren't vegan.
I totally hear you on that, though I'd add that the overly zealous are invariably new to it. In-group policing among vegans tends to moderate that vitriol within a few months.
I wonder (now that I'm thinking back on instances of "the new and the loud" I've known in my decades) whether some adopt veganism /specifically/ to have an issue to be loud about. When that behaviour is rejected from both the in and out groups, they move on to some other issue. Certainly lines up with some I've seen... I dunno, just spit-balling here.
Maybe not specifically to be loud about, but I do think it appeals to some people specifically to be able to claim or feel a sense of moral superiority. I was molested as a child and spent some years wanting to be vegetarian in part due to wanting to find some means to feel "pure." I am hardly unique in having grown up with a lot of emotional baggage. Most people are raised with either a shame or a guilt model. I think trying to find some resolution for having had that hung on them is a big motivator for a great many life choices in the world.
This isn't limited solely to vegetarians/vegans. Any diet that goes against your social group is difficult. Take keto/low-carb diets. It's amazing how snacks and foods I've been offered from friends and family that are just pure sugar.
I think that's true, but the same statistics of people on diet can be found, and I think (without any statistics of my own) that culture and group mentality plays a role there as well.
I'm a vegetarian and have found the "policing" isn't bad, but that's because vegetarianism is comparatively easy for everybody to accommodate through horrifying amounts of cheese.
I disagree. It would be, if one got Scottish nationality upon declaration (and then half abandoned it within 6 months).
Many vegans/vegetarians would accept you to their "club" only after being on probation for a year or two.
It's analogous to saying "most martial artists quit in less than a year". For some definition of "martial artist" that may well be true, but it wouldn't be a definition acceptable to those who actually practice.
You will not be accepted as a programmer until you've written some code; or as an athlete until you've done some nontrivial athletic stuff. Why should othe categories be different?
I think I agree with your diagnosis. A counterpoint: when I went to Singapore I heard that the Chinese community distinguished "temporary" vegetarianism from "full-time" vegetarianism, both normally for religious reasons. (I imagine these are translations of Chinese terms.)
From what I understand, many people may make a religious vow or commitment to eat vegetarian for a specific period of time (for good luck or out of gratitude for a benefit they received) and then commonly eat meat again after that period of time has expired. I wouldn't be inclined to say that these people "are vegetarians" in my western sense, any more than I would say Eastern Orthodox Christians "are vegetarians" when meeting them during their fasting days or seasons.
The Scotsman fallacy would apply if we considered a guy who tried to emigrate to Scotland but then couldn't get citizenship and then went home to be a Scotsman.
Is it, though? I mean, I can see the similarity, but ethical veg*nism does exist outside of the dietary practice. You don't need to subscribe to the ethics to partake in the diet. We lack the words to distinguish between and ethical vegan and a for-health vegan, but that doesn't mean they aren't distinct groups.
What difference does it make if someone who's been a vegan for 3 months calls themself a vegan? Are they "harming the movement" by doing so? If partaking in the diet doesn't require you to subscribe to the ethics, as you say, then the label should just be a label: someone who doesn't eat animal products. No time frame or reasoning attached.
It does matter. It's the same with Jews, for example. You can be religiously Jewish but not ethnically, or ethnically Jewish but atheist, or you can be both. But they remain distinct concepts.
And yet you managed to convey that information with just one extra qualifying word. Unless you consider one of them isn't really a Jew, shouldn't both share the title equally? If more information is required, use more words.
Exactly. I've been a vegan for thirty minutes. In fact, I'm vegan almost all the time, with the exception of a few minutes per day!
I honestly think it's reasonable to attach a minimum time frame to a word like this, otherwise it gets a bit hard to know what people mean when they speak. Whether one year is a good choice I don't know, but a minimum is required.
Can you expand on this? If there are two people in front of you, one who has been a vegan for 20 years, the other for 2 weeks, what is the real difference between them, how does that time difference change your interaction with them?
To put it another way, why does one word have to apply to one and not the other because of some inherent time requirement? English, in particular, as a language is inherently vague, and we rarely make this time requirement distinction for other words that describe people.
If I just graduated from the police academy I'm a "cop", just like how the 30 year veteran detective sergeant is a "cop". No, we aren't the same, since the latter has far more experience, but that doesn't mean that only one deserves the title. It just means we use additional qualifiers ("30 year veteran detective sergeant") to elaborate on what type of cop he or she is.
So then what do vegans call themselves before that point? "Vegan in training"? "Vegan junior"? "Planning to be a vegan"? "I don't eat meat or animal products, but I'm not a vegan because I haven't put in the hours yet"?
I'm being pedantic on purpose here because the idea of some minimum time requirement to call yourself a vegan is one of the most pedantic things I've ever heard, and supports the stereotypical characterization of vegans being overall pains in the ass.
I'm inclined to agree with you regarding this not necessarily being a no-true-Scotsman fallacy. I think there is a meaningful difference between proclaiming to be veg*n, and proclaiming to be trying it.
I wonder what proportion of the cohort here were in each group.
No, it's not. Vegetarianism describes a specific set of well-defined behaviors. If you don't adhere to the schedule of those behaviors, then you're not a vegetarian. "No true Scotsman" is about "changing the definition in an ad hoc fashion to exclude the counterexample."
That doesn't apply here.
We're starting and ending with the same definition.
and the 4th camp - minimalists. I find making what I call "healthy cutbacks" incredibly empowering. 2 years ago I stopped eating fish and meat and it was surprisingly easy, so I had to find another challenge. Then I heard about Wim Hof, (the Ice man) and I stopped having warm showers. I have to admit, I don't look forward to those icey blasts every morning but I feel great after I get out and have a coffee. A few months ago, I stopped having lunch during the week, despite regularly running and swimming during the day. I often eat nothing for 12 hours and feel much more alert and in control. Instead of having a couple of beers after work, I now only drink one glass of wine (a fine one). But god help me if I don't get that one glass after a hard day of self imposed deprivation! Recently I decided to learn a new cross-platform programming language, perhaps no surprise - I chose ANSI C.
Quitting smoking has an incredibly high failure rate, but the overall smoking rate has declined massively. Most smokers repeatedly relapse before eventually quitting for good. I'm not suggesting that meat is addictive, but I think it's dangerous to assume that relapse is a sign of failure rather than simply an intermediate stage on the path of behavioural change.
For me, an almost-always vegan who eats cheese or meat in social settings, it was a general despair that the moral argument for veganism is so simple. It's easy to intellectually coast in this area for a while, because all the arguments meat-eaters present in favor of eating meat are so astonishingly and universally dumb - we evolved to eat meat, meat gives me pleasure (ignoring consequences of that maxim), some distinction between humans and animals which falls apart under scrutiny or has consequences for treatment of the mentally disabled, etc. I've seen even very intelligent people put these forward. Converting from meat-eating to veganism carries with it a component of acknowledging an underlying personally-applicable horror in the world which is similar, I would say, to becoming atheist. It's thus nearly impossible to reason with reasonable people here, simply because the psychological consequence of losing the argument is so strong. PETA recognizes this, which is why their videos focus on the graphic ugliness of the meat industry to provoke an emotional reaction.
Anyway. I originally really liked the moral arguments for veganism as forwarded by Peter Singer, which of course is very similar to his argument in Famine, Affluence, and Morality - it's pretty much impossible to accept one but not the other. I have more problems with the consequences of the FAM argument - that we inexorably ought to use all our life for the benefit of others if we profess to care for others at all. This, to me, is such an absurd consequence as to throw the entire enterprise of morality as a chain of material implication following from axioms (very attractive to a computer scientist!) into doubt. Which, I've been told, casts me out into the great despair of postmodernism where we don't have access to any meaning or oughts at all. I'd love to talk about this with someone who knows more about it, since my philosophical education pretty much comprises a single ethics course in university, some existentialist literature, some SEP reading, and a whole lot of PEL episodes.
> It's thus nearly impossible to reason with reasonable people here, simply because the psychological consequence of losing the argument is so strong.
I'd dispute the characterization of these people as reasonable, but given how common it is, I suppose I'm descending into pedantry a bit here. It may seem enormously childish (and it is), but I know very few people who seem able to acknowledge that an action of theirs may not be the optimally moral one. Almost universally, this baseline of ethical maturity is replaced with twisted, desperate contortionate reasoning as to why their actions are actually in the morally superior one.
I personally still eat meat; I tried vegetarianism a few years ago but started weightlifting shortly after, which tends to have a pretty profound effect on my appetite and dietary needs. The difference is that I acknowledge that this is a moral failing of mine: I'm not a morally perfect being.
I am not sure you get to claim any points for acknowledging your own moral failing. If anything, this kind of ethical "living in sin" is even worse than contortionist justification because you debase your own ethics, turning them into something that can be cast aside when convenient.
You have two options - change your morals (accept and embrace that your desire to lift weights outweighs your concern for other beings). Or change your behaviour (stop either lifting weights or eating meat).
I think this desire to feel like you are living a morally perfect life is strong in most people but incompatible with an honest observation of the world from just about any ethical standpoint. There are an endless number of Very Bad Things in the world and an endless number of things you can personally do to improve them. Really improving how your life reflects your ethics will necessarily involve a huge amount of failure, false starts, and half measures. The best results possible will never get you that far on an absolute scale.
Even when a better path is fairly clear, human beings rarely make lasting changes in behavior instantly; there tend to be a lot of details and that need to be worked out and new movement patterns to learn. It is not clear from a brief message on the internet what a person has or has not done to make such changes. Even without intentionally making changes over time, you can recognize things that other people do that are better than what you do and be more likely to copy them or otherwise be inspired from them.
> I am not sure you get to claim any points for acknowledging your own moral failing.
I get where you're coming from philosophically, but have a couple major points of disagreement.
1) I don't consider willful ignorance and dishonesty to be preferable to honesty
2) I'm speaking specifically of people whose actions contradict their own stated moral preferences. An ethical system that's brittle enough to fall apart with a couple pointed questions barely meets the definition of an ethical system.
3) Consequentially speaking, lying to protect your own self-image has consequences beyond your own life. We're social animals and bullshit causes collateral damage.
You may already know both of these things, but due to your request for more info, I'll err on the side of overinforming:
> I have more problems with the consequences of the FAM argument - that we inexorably ought to use all our life for the benefit of others if we profess to care for others at all. This, to me, is such an absurd consequence as to throw the entire enterprise of morality as a chain of material implication following from axioms (very attractive to a computer scientist!) into doubt.
This line of argument is called "the demandingness objection". There's a decent bit of philosophical literature under that heading.
If one embraces the implications of FAM rather than rejecting them, that probably ends up looking something like "effective altruism". (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/22/extreme-altrui... is an article about effective altruism that seems relevant to your concerns)
For a practical moral philosophy, one in which the "enterprise of morality as a chain of material implication following from axioms" is foundational and embraced, try learning about Objectivism. As a student of Objectivism, I find it to be a powerful tool in everyday decision making.
For a quick 1-hour introduction, see this Dave Rubin interview with Yaron Brook:
Not claiming to 'know' anything, but I do have a view. I think unfortunately the post-modernist view is ultimately correct. We can have ever more sophisticated debates but the same arguments made by 18 year old philosophy students are ultimately unassailable. Similar to the way a 10 year olds athiest (as great as Richard Dawkings is) holds all the key arguments about the non-existence of god.
Utilitarianism is fundamentally rooted in the human as a platonic ideal and not just some clever animal. Once you invite other animals on to the continuum, what do we do? Bulldoze all the natural habitat to prevent predation and cruelty (whilst softly euthanasing all the animals)? Do we want to live in a (totalitarian) world with zero suffering? Is there a value on genuine diversity of thought? Do we diversity of thought - to have a robust society? i.e. past a point does utilitarianism itself provide disutility?
Utilitarianism like all ethical systems isn't wrong, it is just a limited perspective more a rule of thumb or a model that only works between certain parameters. That is it is a good system for determining train ticket prices or infrastructure planning, but less useful as a complete life philosophy. The same could be said for libertarianism. Great idea ... but you still need property laws ... and police ... and so on.
Philosophy is in many cases just a kind of intellectual accessory. One version may be right in the same sense that a certain pair of jeans look great. I think if you truly care about the truth and not social status ... etc. the valid scope of philosophy is greatly reduced. The further you look at it our true norms come practical realities and from what we grow up believing.
The same lense can be applied to programming philosophies (Waterfall, Agile ... etc.). I think as programmers (at least the experienced ones amongst us) we do eventually learn that things are never as simple as just that and so we instinctively know to moderate our observance of platonic ways of thinking. This extends to ethical systems.
>Utilitarianism is fundamentally rooted in the human as a platonic ideal and not just some clever animal. Once you invite other animals on to the continuum, what do we do?
No, it really isn't. Peter Singer is both the leading utilitarian philosopher of our age and our most eloquent advocate for animal welfare. A utilitarian calculus that includes animal welfare really isn't very complex. You simply expand "the greatest good to the greatest number of people" to include all animals. That might lead to a lot of uncomfortable and counter-intuitive conclusions, but it's not some sort of moral alchemy.
In which case it doesn't seem to allow for animals in the wild and seems to make phasing out of nature (rain forests and all that - well at least the fauna) a necessity.
That depends on the definition of well being, good and utility. Will you save whole ecosystems? Who gets the axe, insects? Which and how many?
Essentially the argument is problematic due to lack of omniscience. The typical solution to this is to adopt a stable yet flexible enough strategy (also known as a robust solution).
It is almost never too simple a strategy if you start from a complex optimization problem like this.
(Compare expectation maximization to robust decision making. Or maximin to minimax to simple optimization approaches. None win.)
Currently there is no algorithm for solving general decision problems on a global scale. Even genetic algorithms (constrained innovation and permutation) can and do produce solutions too late to matter, especially when selective pressure is low.
Human intelligence easily gets caught in local maxima too, not to mention its fallibility.
(I'd call it lossy heuristic approach with memory. Heuristics are transmitted over generations in a strongly lossy way both in number and count. New ones take the place of the old ones with only relatively low bar of improvement to pass. Actor attempts to reconstruct the heuristic by observing behaviour of other actors given its capabilities.)
I've also encountered arguments along the lines of "there's this other suffering you _aren't_ preventing".
Emotionally it has the same feel as the drowning child argument[1] by Pete Singer. That argument engenders a feeling of hopelessness for me, because I can't assail its logic but it implies a vast array of suffering for which I am morally culpable.
I think meat eaters feel similarly. When faced with the cognitive dissonance, they shrink.
Now, I mostly shrug and say, "I'm doing the best I can."
A major issue with a lot of vegetarian / vegan diets is that they try to create vegetarian / vegan versions of what are fundamentally non-veg foods. This always ends up with people finding the veg version of something just an inferior tasting version of the 'actual' thing deprived of its primary component (the meat) and seasoned with some moral righteousness.
Instead of this, people should try to design these dishes ground up, and look at vegetarian cuisines around the world (Indian would be a great place to start) for inspiration.
As an omnivore, nothing annoys me more than my well intentioned veggie friends trying to serve me the vegie version of everything. It's gross to me, and it represents what they are trying to distance yourself from. Its like christian rock. It makes both things worse, while attempting in good faith, to celebrate them. Just cook kickass food that tastes good and meets your needs.
Edit: just reread, and I sound dickish. I, of course, am flattered by their attempt at accomidation. But veggie bacon is bad, and someone needs to tell you. We still love you.
I used to feel the same way before I went vegan. I don't try to push substitutes on non-vegans because I know their palettes aren't adjusted, but if I want to make a BLT, I have no choice but to use veggie-bacon. The rest of the sandwich is already vegan.
Most vegans aren't really trying to distance themselves from non-vegan foods, just the unfortunate consequences of producing those foods. Most vegans don't have a problem with pepperoni pizza, for example. Just the source of the pepperoni (and cheese.)
One thing to keep in mind is that many vegan substitutes can vary greatly in quality / flavour. For example, discounting all vegan cheeses because you tried one doesn't really work because they are all using different methods to achieve the same end, so the result (flavour, taste, texture) is different.
It's not like dairy cheese which is all basically using the same method / ingredients (and therefore the results can be more consistently close together, even among variations on the theme).
I have a strong stomach but the vegan cheese I've tried brought me to the brink of illness because it was so gross. Maybe I could have enjoyed it if it didn't present itself as "cheese" - like an uncanny valley effect. Cheese is one of the main reasons I fell of the vegan wagon. Can you recommend any cheeze that's palatable?
I've been vegan for half my life at this point, so take my recommendations with a grain of salt (I have no idea what cheese tastes like any more).
That said - there are several brands of nut cheeses that I really enjoy, whether or not they taste like actual cheese. I would recommend Dr. Cow, Treeline, Punk Rawk Labs and Miyokos nut cheeses.
I agree mostly, but you specifically mention veggie bacon (theres probably many kinds but what I like is rice paper cut and seasoned like bacon) and that thing specifically rock! I have more non-vegan family members and friends that have asked for the recipe after tasting it than anything else. It's also a lot cheaper, a lot healthier and as crunchy as you'd like it.
Just tell them. Most of them would be proud and happy to show you what good veg* cuisine looks like but they are worried to be judged and are feeling horribly guilty about the (largely false) sense that they constantly inconvenience others so want to do anything to avoid disappointing :-)
I'm not vegan, but I have an astounding vegan cookbook that I bought because all the dishes in it are based on your comment. There's no "now add vegan butter" steps or "take 1 vegan hotdog" recipes. It's all about how to make really tasty food with just vegan ingredients. Probably the best cookbook I own, at least in terms of the food that comes out of it.
I'm also a different person, but I have found tremendous utility in Moosewood Restaurant Favorites. It's vegetarian, but a lot of recipes are vegan. My wife and I are low-meat omnivores (she additionally avoids dairy) and we cook from this book several times a week.
Or perhaps I should just eat what I like. I can make chili (a soup) with beans and no meat. But I rather like the soy crumbles, and I'll put them in. I like quorn, a meat substitute, and use it to make different versions of stuff. Some things just have no meat. You don't need to eat it.
Some of the substitutes are absolutely horrible and folks tend to forget that they need to spice the food slightly differently and make up for some of the actual meat flavors.
Vegetarian for 12+ years. I happily eat quorn or other good veggie substitutes as long as they are healthy (ish) and taste good. Being vegetarian doesnt mean i have to give up on the good elements of the food industry/convenience. I'd probably also eat lab grown meat but I'm not sure as i didn't have a chance to try yet.
For me it's an ethical argument to be vegetarian, i still love the taste and smell of meat (but contrary to the cliché repeated in this thread have never lapsed) - why give up on it completely if i can get something similar that allows me to still enjoy a bbq or spaghetti Bolognese. Most veggie substitutes taste like crap though - but that's a matter of trial and error (my advice is to avoid any veggiemeat that's egg based, they all taste disgusting and probably come out of the horribly cruel egg mass production.)
I'd be vegan but with small kids, a non-veg partner and an area that's not very veggie friendly that will have to wait a bit longer.
As a vegetarian, I find meat substitutes to be disgusting. I would imagine that a big part of the reason people have trouble sticking to a vegetarian diet is that they lean heavily on meat substitutes instead of going out of their way to find recipes that aren't built around meat.
Ive eaten plenty of this type of dish that were fantastic. Your suggestion seems just as wrong to me as the alternative: unnecessarily constraining yourself to only traditionally vegetarian cuisines means missing out on flavors and cuisines that could easily accommodate vegetarianism with minor tweaks.
I don't see how my suggestion is constraining anyone. If anything, it's liberating them.
All I am saying is that culinary traditions around the world have slowly evolved dishes around the ingredients and dietary constraints they had available to them, and it's useful to learn from them to see what all can be done with a particular set of ingredients.
This is more liberating (you have the whole world's culinary experience to pick from) rather than constraining yourself to eating regular meat dishes with the meat part subbed with tofu.
For instance, most American food just does not treat vegetables fairly. In a lot of cases, the meat is the center of the dish while veggies, well, they are just served boiled as a side or raw as a salad. If you go vegan and take the meat out of the dish, you are basically left with bland vegetables. No wonder 'recidivism' rates are high. Now go to any Indian or Thai or (even Chinese in some cases) restaurant and see what they do with vegetables.
I was responding specifically to your suggestion that "instead" of finding twists on dishes that are non-traditionally vegetarian, they should go with traditionally vegetarian cuisines. I don't see why people should constrain themselves like that instead of _both_ trying traditionally veg cuisines and vegetarian twists on cuisines they're already more used to.
I grew up on all kinds of cuisine (my mom really liked cooking), and I'm equally capable of enjoying vegetarian meals that are traditionally so as I am of enjoying well-made vegetarian modifications to non-veg dishes. Your suggestion of ignoring one a big part of the cuisine space seems like a much more surefire recipe for recidivism than keeping both options open.
strong agreement. as a lifelong omnivore, "veggie" editions of things are kinda icky. But things that are inherently veggie are pretty good. Thai and Indian cuisine, as represented in the West Coast of the US, are good examples of this.
As a personal anecdote, I was a vegetarian for ~3 years from late in high school to junior year of college. It was definitely a valuable experience that afforded me much perspective into my diet, the diets of others, and food in general.
When I started eating meat again it was under a vague condition to eat "good" meat, that is, either cooked fresh by my mother, or from a higher-end restaurant. This eroded a bit and after a year or so I was back to eating meat relatively unabashedly again.
A few days ago I spent my entire Saturday vomiting bile from food poisoning ($CMG is the top suspect), and now I'm back to my post-vegetarianism habits of being careful about the meat I consume. I'm aware of probability and statistics, so this is somewhat irrational in that sense, but I suppose my point is that I'm grateful for the experience I had of being vegetarian and I think everyone should try it for as long as they can.
EDIT: Oh, perhaps the most shocking part of the experience was how few people knew what the difference between being pescetarian, vegetarian, and vegan is, as well as dealing with all manner of assholes who couldn't fathom why anyone would do such a thing to themselves.
EDIT2: As for health, it bears mentioning that I knew a couple people who are/were vegetarians and had much worse diets than many non-vegetarians. Naively substituting a chicken breast for a block of cheese is _not_ healthy!
EDIT3: I made a point of almost never asking my friends to pick somewhere more vegetarian friendly. Almost anywhere, I could deal with. Notable exceptions were seafood restaurants and anywhere in the South of the USA. There's only so many onion rings one can stand!
> I was a vegetarian for ~3 years from late in high school to junior year of college
Observationally, this seems to be a stage that many young people go through at that time of life. At least on the surface - I've seen far too many "vegetarians" and "vegans" wolfing down greasy pepperoni pizza, blacked out at 3AM in my college days.
> I've seen far too many "vegetarians" and "vegans" wolfing down greasy pepperoni pizza, blacked out at 3AM in my college days.
Why is this still a trope? Being vegetarian or vegan does not require perfection. Think about how absurd this standard is. If you've ever done something unkind you are no longer a kind person. If you've ever written poor code, you are no longer a good programmer.
This kind of thinking is a huge deterrent to people being vegan or vegetarian. If they ever have a lapse in judgement or decision making they just give up completely because of this line of thinking.
There are people in this very thread calling for perfection and calling the vegans and vegetarians who relapse into eating meat as described in the article as "failed".
Even you're falling into the trap of labeling people as X or Y or Z.
Why can't the goal be "eat less meat" ? If you want to quantify it, make the goal "eat ~50% less meat" than you used to.
Alternatively, bring down the meat consumption to the level of Norway or Switzerland or Japan, countries just as prosperous as the US, but with even better health outcomes.
Even something as simple as "order a mostly vegetarian dish every other time you eat out" would go a long way.
I think the idea stems from the holier than thou attitudes you find from some vegans. The majority probably aren't that way but some are so insufferable that pointing out the hypocritical nature of their actions feels warranted.
Because the next morning they were back on their high horses, sneering down their noses at you for eating some delicious bacon, or bitching because you wanted to go somewhere that didn't have cruelty-free quinoa or something equally ridiculous.
I'm not saying that all veg*ans are hypocritical holier-than-thou assholes, but it's not a stereotype that was invented out of whole cloth.
The thing is, if you want to reduce dependence upon animal products and increase sustainability, you can expend 20% of the effort to go 80% of the way, and not spend another 80% of your effort to go the last 20%.
The pareto optimal curve is a real concept, and you don't need to go full vegetarian or vegan for you and the planet to reap the benefits.
Having been a semi-vegetarian for over 25 years, I agree completely. I eat yogurt and cheese frequently, eggs or poultry a couple of times a week, and the occasional fish; never beef or pork. It works for me.
This article forgets to mention that the same report says that most people who are vegetarian for 3 years or more stay vegetarian for the rest of their lives.
The "vast majority" here are probably people who tried it and stuck around for a couple of months before quitting. Just like any other "fad" diet.
I was also looking for a mention of such a statistic.
I have been vegetarian for 2+ years, occasionally cheat with sea food, but the idea of eating animal flesh grosses me out and i don't think I'll ever turn back.
I've been vegetarian for 10+ years, "lapsed" for a few months after my life was turned upside down by a series of events but quickly just went back to vegetarianism because it was easier for me. Once you get into a routine, you'll probably stick with it.
After I watched Forks Over Knives on Netflix it took me about 2 years to become 100% plant based, but I've been doing it now for over a year and I can guarantee you I'll never go back.
I work in an industry where I see the side effects of the Standard American Diet, and if you saw the health effects I see you'd switch too.
Here in Austin we have several monthly potlucks based upon the Plant Pure Nation pods idea, which makes it easier to find like minded people and new recipes. Also, Facebook groups like McDougall Friends is great for support, if you need it.
If emergency room doctors made laws, motorcycles would be illegal.
We're all susceptible to being deluded by our naive realism. Like how I think anyone driving faster than me is a maniac and anyone driving slower is a moron. The objective reality is that everybody thinks that.
That actually seems like a pretty good metaphor, because the motorcycle is probably only legal due to historical inertia, not modern analysis.
If the motorcycle were invented today, do you think it would ever be legal? In America, perhaps, but probably not in countries that are more heavy-handed with regulation and bear the costs of public healthcare. It's an insane and dangerous vehicle.
I have several friends who have survived nasty car crashes and fully recovered. The only one who had a nasty motorcycle accident... well, his heart's still beating, but I'd hardly call it life.
Cars are the dangerous thing on road. Banning them would eliminate half of all motorcycle accidents, cite below. Idiots riding without helmets and being intoxicated greatly skew the fatality statistics.
75% of accidents were found to involve a motorcycle and a passenger vehicle.
Almost half of the fatal accidents show alcohol involvement.
In the multiple vehicle accidents, the driver of the other vehicle violated the motorcycle right-of-way and caused the accident in two-thirds of those accidents.
The report's additional findings show that the wearing of appropriate gear, specifically, helmets and durable garment, mitigates crash injuries substantially
The failure of motorists to detect and recognize motorcycles in traffic is the predominating cause of motorcycle accidents.
I'm open-minded, but I'll always go with the data. As Dr. Kim Williams the president of the American College of Cardiology said "There are two kinds of cardiologists: vegans and those who haven’t read the data."
>If emergency room doctors made laws, motorcycles would be illegal.
From a completely callous perspective, we'd miss all the healthy young organs that enter the donor pool. They don't call them "donorcycles" for nothing.
Austin is also home to two of the most delicious vegetarian burgers: Arlo's and Hopdoddy. Haven't found any that compare and I try one every time I see it on the menu.
> I can guarantee you I'll never go back [...] if you saw the health effects I see you'd switch too
TFA has this:
> health can be an effective “foot in the door” approach to increasing the number of vegetarians and vegans, but often not enough to keep people animal-free for the long-term.
I'm pretty sure most of the people who switched back felt like you do now. "Ever" is a long time.
I'm actually leaning towards the fact that all the starchy carbs vegans/vegetarians typically consume are far more harmful to health than meat. Just look at all of the amazing results coming out regarding a low carb diet and the positive health effects (consuming meat or not).
The amazing results coming out of a low carb diet? Just look at the recent news of The Biggest Loser trainer Bob Harper's heart attack. That's what low-carb will get you. Watch Forks Over Knives. Read The Starch Solution by Dr. McDougall. Look at any data not funded by the meat, dairy, and egg industries. It all points to the opposite of the popularized myth that starches are bad. I wish you the best of health!
I've been a vegetarian for basically my entire life although I'm not nearly as strict as vegans, these days I have adjusted it for protein availability and cruelty concerns. I eat probably 80% plant based but I eat eggs (farm raised ideally, free range and then cage free by order of priority) some cheese and some fish (though more and more I'm looking to cut that out entirely).
When anyone I know decides to try being a vegetarian they usually ask me about it (or just tell me about it) and my observation has been that a lot of people decide they want to be vegan and will do it for a few months before they drop back to just being a normal vegetarian and maybe a few months of that they drop back to just a reduced meat diet.
I try to warn people to not go from a high meat diet to vegan because a) afaik its not good for the body and b) its much harder that way but people rarely listen. The end result is OK in that they reduce their meat consumption but its much easier to do if you have realistic goals. You are not going to decide to run a marathon and just immediately do it, you need attainable goals along the way and that is what I think a lot of people miss. That and the more restrictive you are the harder it is socially (going out to eat, parties, etc) although that has gotten a LOT better in the last 10 years.
The vast amount of smokers who quit smoking eventually return to the newsagents to pay lots of money for some tobacco. However there is a second category of people that have never smoked, and are totally unlikely to do so.
Vegetarian/vegan dieting is a bit like this. There are lots of people that try going vegan and then they only last so long at it, probably boring everyone to death with their 'meat is murder' views.
Meanwhile, in India and plenty of other places, are those that actually are vegetarian, having grown up that way and not indoctrinated at a young age into the meat eating cult. For these people the logic of suddenly starting to eat meat makes as much sense as taking up smoking, after an impressionable teenage this does not happen.
Disclosure: yes I am vegetarian and I own a leather belt!!!
> in India and plenty of other places, are those that actually are vegetarian, having grown up that way and not indoctrinated at a young age into the meat eating cult
On the other hand, they are indoctrinated at a young age to not eat meat (and to look down upon those that do).
Not necessarily. There's so much variety in india wrt nutritious and tasty vegetarian and vegan foods, indoctrinitaion is tougher. The only non Indian cuisines that have some veggie options are probably Ethiopian and Mediterranean. But I haven't seen many varieties of those in US.
Meat eating is expensive (comparatively) and hence it's an another great barrier for many people to try.
I'm so pro veggie food even after consuming dairy products, chicken,eggs and occasional beef and pork. That's primarily because I grew up in India and I believe veggie food in India is way better than any other non meat cuisine.
This. Eating indian food is the only time I don't miss meat. There's delicious (authentic) meat-less Mexican food too, but it is so freaking high on carbs that I just can't.
> ...probably boring everyone to death with their 'meat is murder' views.
It seems to me that this type of attitude is a big part of why people don't stick with being vegetarian or vegan. There's a lot of direct and indirect pressure to conform and people freely make fun of vegetarians (especially vegans), turning their lives into demoralizing memes.
If only we could "live and let live". Then maybe people would feel free to make (and stick with) the choices that make sense to them.
> Meanwhile, in India and plenty of other places, are those that actually are vegetarian, having grown up that way and not indoctrinated at a young age into the meat eating cult.
Isn't vegetarianism in India at least originally a... religious thing?
I am under the impression that anywhere you can raise animals, you can grow vegetables for fewer resources. There isn't anywhere that can sustain raising animals for slaughter but cannot be vegetarian instead.
Consider it this way: the animals you're raising for slaughter still need something to eat. Work your way down the food chain and you have to hit plants at some point.
And... wrong. Historically, and presently, humans are primary omnivorous. We evolved eating meat. Moving away from it is a new thing--so to call your species' history a cult is very... odd.
> I once read it estimated that the average Jew in first-century Palestine would have probably eaten less than a pound of beef per year.
Which makes sense, in a region that was profoundly ill-suited for cattle farming...
If you want to talk about staggering quantities of low-quality meat, look at European military/naval rations from the early modern period. At least a pound a day of salt beef, pork, or fish.
"Hard to come by" in the sense that you had to hunt for your food, yes. But to use that reasoning to imply that meat eating in humans throughout history was uncommon and to deny its role in human development is laughable.
I disagree about the implication. Even when raising cattle you wouldn't slaughter one unless you had to, either to avoid waste or starvation. Few would deny that humans have eaten meat but it was definitely much less common than it is in the US today. For instance, much of America's fascination with beef traces back to the loss of the bison in the mid to late 1800s. Entrepreneurs found great opportunity in the open plains once bison were gone and made subsequent use of it, heavily imprinting beef into our culture... So yes, we've eaten meat for a long time but not to the extent we do now. Now is an abberation, and one that comes at great cost.
1) The words "vegetarian" and "zoophile" used to be synonymous (because literally "animal lover"); but 2) the modern group of that name (animal fanciers) are vegetarian or vegan with exactly the same frequency as the general population, to within the margin of error of the survey.
I'm a vegetarian. You might be surprised how often this comes up when people try to convince me to eat meat. Completely fails to convince anyone, of course.
The animal lovers who aren't at least vegetarian bewilders me. There's a woman on my FB feed who rescues unwanted guinea pigs and rabbits and fights against horse slaughter. Loves meat. I totally can't get it, but I don't need to start fights in my social circle.
being plant based these days is way easier and simpler than it's ever been (at least in North America), there are so many plant-based alternative foods one can buy in stores which makes it extremely easy to do so.
The main, major issue being plant based full time is eating out with others: if you are plant based every single meal there will be comments and discussions about how you eat, why you eat something vs something else, how your interlocutor could be eating better but they don't have time/money/... to do so and on and on.
Some former plant-based people will tell you that one of the best side-effects of not being plant based anymore is that during means you can talk about "something else".
This is magnified if you have to regularly eat out for work / with clients, where you can easily be put in the situation that you have to decide if you want to be plant based full time or plant based in private only.
To me this is the main difficulty with transitioning to a full time plant based diet: unless your circle of friends is ok with that (even better if they are plant based themselves) and unless your work situation is compatible with that and unless your coworkers are ok with that, it is very likely that in the long run you will fail due to having to decide between eating how you want, and having an easy time in your social/work life.
In my opinion this is why health-based plant based folks stick with the diet less, because unless you truly have a deep belief in what you are doing, it is really easy to say "it's not worth it" and it's a lot more likely you can have a strong belief in the ethics of being plant based than in an abstract concept of healthy eating
This is very important. India probably has more vegetarians than the rest of the world combined. If you are culturally vegetarian, born and raised in a vegetarian household, had vegetarian meals your whole life, and surrounded by vegetarians, there is little chance that you would start eating meat anytime soon. However, in the US where almost everyone is non-vegetarian, it is understandable why people who convert to vegetarianism might convert back.
Being vegetarian really changed my "biology" and "mentality". After a few years I was super sensitive to meat. Could smell it, even just broth, in food. It would make me somewhat sick if I ate it. I think you loose enzymes needed to break it down. Meat stopped being food to me. Was not hungry for it, did not think mmmmm when I smelled it. A few more years and I was repulsed by site of raw meat. When I saw chicken on bone all I could think of was muscles and bones in my own arm and how I wouldn't eat that!
I started (and ended) being vegetarian for health reasons. Somewhere along the way I concluded it was morally wrong to eat meat esp mammals. No one convinced me, it just arose from mental and physical changes. I was / am kind of shocked I feel that way.
After 12-14 years being vegetarian I started eating meat again. I still believe it is morally wrong. I actually went to aqurium to tell fish that I was sorry that I was going to start eating them. Guess I was resolving guilt i felt. I struggle a lot with depression. After trying many things with no success, I decided I needed meat. Can't be sure correlation, but health is better now. I feel guilty eating animals, but I'm selfish enough/depression sucks enough for me to put my health before (some of) my morals.
I recently started eating meat after over a decade of being a vegetarian. I simply got sick of the available selection of food and how extremely expensive and poor it is. If you cook very little, like me, it's very likely a vegetarian diet is less healthy simply because of the food that's available, often processed things filled with sugar. Either that, or you're spending serious money every day eating out with no guarantee that the food is nutritional either. Ironically, while leaving the US increases the quality and variety of many foods, the variety of vegetarian food available in many countries abroad is even worse. The market simply does not serve vegetarians well. Or perhaps, the market simply does not serve anyone who doesn't cook/cooks little well. I think it's probably a bit of both. These types of day to day logistical challenges of being a vegetarian are the most difficult to overcome, IMO. If restaurants with a variety of healthy, vegetarian, decently-priced food existed, I likely wouldn't have quit.
Did it just sort of happen or was it a conscious decision by you? It is no coincidence that eating rules are common in many religions, adhering to a special diet is practically a ritual, so I wonder if it was a big deal to you.
Oh, it was very conscious. I think the decision had been building up for some time, however, probably subconsciously. I first went back to eating fish for half a year (I was a pescatarian for five years before being a vegetarian) and when that seemed ok, I decided to eat any meat. This latter decision was even more deliberate as I had just moved out and no longer lived with someone who cooked delicious vegetarian stuff every day. I try to limit sugar these days, at least keeping it to one dessert a day. That was, I think, the main motivating factor. I'm in no way low-carb, but cutting out as much sugar, especially from non-dessert foods, has definitely been a huge win.
Morally, my views have not changed at all. In my moral framework, my own needs always must come first. So nothing has changed morally and therefore, it hasn't been an actual problem. I'm not saying it was totally easy and that I didn't think a lot about it both before and after, but it has been quite beneficial to both my mind set and waistline so accepting it has been easy.
Side note I think if you are going to eat meat its of value to actually kill an animal yourself for food a few times (legally). Specially something large like a deer etc. I found it sad and sobering but in a personal growth sort of way. I find its helpful to grasp the reality of animals dying so you can live. Even something like raising chickens then having to kill one can make you think.
I enjoy meat and eat it but do so less now. Actually harvesting my own meat sometimes keeps the sobering practice in mind and also keeps me very cognizant of their lives etc. I dont take the practice for granted at all and I find it helps my perspective.
Also I find I want to use every part of the animal when I do that. Keep skin if applicable for leather etc, learn to cook the organs that you may not buy from store. Even cook marrow and carve bones etc. I find it sort of the respectful thing to do if I am going to kill something so I can eat.
There's nothing so delicious as fresh backstrap, tenderloin and heart out of a buck that's been fattening itself up all summer on your vegetable garden.
I consider myself to be a "closet vegan" because I only buy plant-based groceries to prepare and cook at home.
It's when I go out that I eat meat/dairy to fit into my social circles. It sounds sad, but it's my reality: I've moved to a new city and I need friends.
I've had moments in the past when I've attempted to dive into full vegan and failed, mostly because I (a) had no idea how to cook food in the first place, and (b) didn't know the first thing about nutrition.
I feel like what I'm doing now is a good first step. Whether I become a full-time vegan or not is left to be seen.
Does this include people who grew up vegetarian? I suspect people who are vegetarian for cultural reasons (e.g. myself) would have a much lower chance of "returning" to Meat (don't know if I would even call it returning) than those who initially ate meat, became vegetarians, and then went back to eating meat. Also surprised that only 2% of Americans are vegetarian, but probably because I've lived in California most of my life.. I also wonder what percent of Americans eat meat 1 or more days / week, 2 days / week, etc..
This really ought to be at least compared to the rate people stick to other diets. Diets are super difficult to stick to, they are a lifestyle change that is more difficult to make than most people who start them are actually prepared for. I say this after having not stuck to "several" diets.
After reading the article, the title feels really click-baity. The actual national trend discussed in the article is in the direction of more meat-eaters trying out a vegetarian diet. To summarize this as veg diets failing is to mischaracterize the trend.
While I'm not technically a vegetarian (chicken stock on a fairly regular basis). I'm 35 and haven't eaten any meat/fish since I was about 12, saying a few months to a year doesn't sound like being a vegetarian. It seems more like trying out a vegetarian diet then anything else.
Personally I just find the thought of eating meat disgusting, Though I could care less if anyone else around me eats it.
Some of the comments about reducing meat consumption reminded me of a short TED talk about being a Weekday Vegetarian, which is pretty self explanatory.
My wife recently became a vegetarian (as recent as a couple months, after years of wanting to) and it is super hard. I want to support her but it is oh so hard. My guess is that it is easier in some other countries but in Mexico it is super hard, specially considering we are on a low-carb diet (I'm a type 2 diabetic).
I'm eating dramatically less meat because of this, but it made me realise that I could not ever be a vegetarian or --gasp-- a vegan. I'm not dumb, I understand the ethical implications but I had to accept that I'm a selfish bastard in this regard. I have no vices, I can't already eat sweets or cakes, I don't want to give up meat too.
when choosing when and where to eat meat, please consider the the living conditions of the animal. Free range chickens (and their eggs) and pasture-raised grass-fed beef are ways to vote with your dollar for cleaner water and healthier animals.
former meat eater, turned vegan about 3 years ago, what other vegans fail to you is... it's a trap, why you ask?
1. the constant hunger
2. need for b12 supplements
3. oh, you enjoy traveling the world, good luck finding vegan food in villages of Philippines, or Bratislava. Personally, suffered in these cities among others
4. better start liking those salads and bland pastas and pizzas without cheese, either that or fries in some restaurants here in Sweden
It is not a easy life, so I understand why some give up, quite surprised that I haven't (yet!).
P.S : Bratislava does have one awesome vegan kiosk
Vegetarians and vegans, unlike catholics, don't have a comunity of people who will call them up and ask them why they haven't been attending service. Being vegetarian and vegan is also much more involved than christianity. You can be a serial killer and still be a christian, but you cannot be a vegan if you eat meat once. We also lack a confessional culture in which sins can be forgiven and stray sheep can come back to the fold. That's something we really need. Too many people slip up once and feal that they are carnivores again.
Didn't you mean 'veal'? I don't think catholics call you up if you don't go to mass, or you can justifiably call yourself one if you are on your big spring killing spree although you might say you are a a vegan even if you had a BigMac when you were a kid. I'm not sure why it helps to conflate the two. I don't see many similarities other than eating tiny crackers. FWIW I stopped being a veggie because it was just too hard in Aussie and nearly all the veggie stuff was soya based and not much better for the environment than eating meat and I got really sick of bloody pumpkin soup being literally the only veg soup, that and bacon...
Eh, I disagree with this analysis. I consider myself vegan yet when we go out I'll surely eat some cheese, and once or twice a year I'll have a bit of meat. The "no community of judgement" goes both ways here, and honestly I don't really care what other people think anyways :)
It's unfortunate that you're being downvoted; that's a very interesting social analysis. I hadn't thought about confession operating as a relief valve for deviations from difficult social rules.
The article implied you were more likely to remain a veggie if you lived with other veggies. They also cited not wishing to stand out as a reason for lapsing. I don't think, however, it would help someone remain veggie for long if it was being imposed on them in any way. The important points raised that may help a veggie stay the course would be to educate them on the environmental and moral implications of eating meat. Freedom of choice then rather than the imposition of a culture.
> You can be a serial killer and still be a christian
No.
If you stick to what the Bible/Jesus say.
You can be a former bad person, but to get the approval of God you must repent and stop doing terrible things.
Being both is being hypocrite, and that is probably the worse of all, ie: Jesus dislike more the hypocrite than the honest sinner that acknowledge his own faults.
Most vegans I've met are "mostly vegan". Occasionally eating meat is not a big deal. The problems start when they're the main part of your diet - you start increasing your disk of heart disease, diabetes, colon cancer, etc while also perpetuating environmental degredation. All very costly to society.
> Too many people slip up once and feal that they are carnivores again.
Well, aren't they?
If you have a moral conviction for abstaining from meat, shouldn't that be enough to keep you coming back to your straight and narrow?
Humans have eaten meat for so long that it's engrained into our biochemistry. I imagine that trying to adjust to a diet that isn't based in our evolutionary framework requires some form of personal conviction and a social structure that reinforces it.
> Humans have eaten meat for so long that it's engrained into our biochemistry. I imagine that trying to adjust to a diet that isn't based in our evolutionary framework requires some form of personal conviction and a social structure that reinforces it.
I don't believe that we have any instincts for eating meat like you suggest. It's not like a human is even capable of ripping fur and skin apart with our mouth, crushing bones with our teeth and tearing fresh meat off an animal and eating it. Well, not without getting sore in the jaw, broken teeth and probably a lot of sicknesses leading to death from the uncooked (or handled in any way) meat. If you put a baby in front of a animal, the baby won't think of it as food. We are not carnivores. We have simply learned to also eat meat. There's nothing about us requiring us to eat meat as long as we can get food from another sources.
I've been vegan for 3 years. The only hard thing about it is other peoples comments and not as many vegan friendly restaurant, although already in 2017, two new places have opened in my town, and it looks like it's a trend that will continue.
There is massive anthropological and biological evidence to suggest that animals and "stuff you pick up" (seeds and so forth) are the original human diet.
On a personal note, I was a vegetarian and later a vegan for a decade and I am familiar with the sort of "I feel it must have been this way" appeals to emotion (like referencing a baby and a presumably cute little animal) of the sort you're making. Arguments like yours are simply not supported by science.
> There is massive anthropological and biological evidence to suggest that animals and "stuff you pick up" (seeds and so forth) are the original human diet.
I feel like you should post some links to all that evidence. As far as I'm aware, we've been eating plants a lot longer than we've eaten animals, and the human body also suggests that being that we look (appearance and anatomically) much more like frugivores than carnivores.
> On a personal note, I was a vegetarian and later a vegan for a decade and I am familiar with the sort of "I feel it must have been this way" appeals to emotion (like referencing a baby and a presumably cute little animal) of the sort you're making. Arguments like yours are simply not supported by science.
It's a logical as well as scientifically agreed upon conclusion as far as I'm aware. Humans don't have an instinct for eating animals like carnivores do. A lion cub has the instinct, a human baby doesn't, it has to learn it. If you have relevant science, please link it.
> As far as I'm aware, we've been eating plants a lot longer than we've eaten animals
Of course we started off eating plants, and we still do to this day. But the evolution of humans really kicked off when we started consuming meat, and even more so when we were able to start leveraging fire to make accessing those calories and nutrients even easier.
> Humans don't have an instinct for eating animals like carnivores do.
If you're under no selection pressure, that becomes the case--especially when you have Oreos (which are vegan, of course) conveniently available at a super market.
But when you're a hunter gatherer, or simply starving, you fathom ways to get energy. Hunting has the highest ROI, and you can find endless examples of this in the form of modern day tribes.
Hunting is ritual. It's not instinct, but it's part of what humans are.
You can choose to not partake in meat, and that's purely your choice, but to damn it as something that unnatural is purely, scientifically wrong.
I don't believe that article contradicts anything I said.
> Of course we started off eating plants, and we still do to this day. But the evolution of humans really kicked off when we started consuming meat, and even more so when we were able to start leveraging fire to make accessing those calories and nutrients even easier.
Indeed, more carbs were able to go to the brain instead of other parts of our body, which enabled the brain to develop.
> You can choose to not partake in meat, and that's purely your choice, but to damn it as something that unnatural is purely, scientifically wrong.
I didn't say it was unnatural. I said we have no instincts to do it. It made sense when we needed to, so we learned to, and taught our children the ways and so on to be better at survival. Today, we neither need to and it's also the single biggest contributor to climate change, animal suffering and the heart disease, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and (partly) cancer epidemic thats the number one human killer globally.
For all the talk about how meat helped us develop our brain and become intelligent, it seems exceedingly unintelligent that we have not yet stopped when it's so damning to our existence.
> I don't believe that article contradicts anything I said.
You were asking for evidence of this:
> animals and "stuff you pick up" (seeds and so forth) are the original human diet
That article directly supports the importance of meat as a foundation to the modern humans diet: "It was about 2.6 million years ago that meat first became a significant part of the pre-human diet."
> Indeed, more carbs were able to go to the brain instead of other parts of our body, which enabled the brain to develop.
No, not just carbs. Energy and nutrition are the prerequisites to the human brain--and saturated fats play a HUGE role in the health of mitochondria. Without an energy and nutritionally rich diet that is both diverse in micro and macro nutrients, the human brain wouldn't have developed.
Not to mention how carbs were rare, and how the human brain can run on both glucose and ketones for a reason.
> Today, we neither need to and it's also the single biggest contributor to [...] heart disease, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and (partly) cancer epidemic thats the number one human killer globally.
This is just flat out wrong and based on outdated science. It's well known that stress, inflammation and insulin resistance due to our modern primarily processed diet are the culprits here. Blaming meat is ill informed and just not factual.
> it seems exceedingly unintelligent that we have not yet stopped when it's so damning to our existence.
If we're talking factory farming, yes, I agree with you. But to blame meat for the methods of supporting a ballooning population is not the solution.
I have a moral conviction to not steal, yet when I was four, I stole another kid's Matchbook car (an ambulance) during recess at the Headstart program. My moral conviction isn't thereby lessened.
I used to be vegan, for three plus years. I can't recommend the diet.
It was extremely unhealthy for me, personally. Over a period of time I developed allergies to both soy protein and gluten that I never had in my early twenties, allergies that never went away after I returned to eating meat. YMMV
From an ethical perspective too, I no longer believe the hype that diets should be "more efficient." I believe humans are too efficient already, and what more efficiency provides us, practically speaking, is simply more humans and more over-population, with worse living conditions long-term for most of those new people.
India is often touted as a very vegetarian country, but I can't believe that sort of population density is a good thing. I'd prefer everyone eat a rather "inefficient" diet with lots of open space for animals to graze.
Did you try simply stopping with the soy protein and gluten consumption?
In any case, I hardly see how going back to an animal-including diet changes anything on that front. Soy is not vegan-only, and neither is gluten. You can easily live on a vegan diet without those things, and you can easily live on a non-vegan diet including those things. Seems more like a weak excuse if you ask me.
To be clear, you think it's "easy" to live on a diet without any animal products, and also without soy or gluten, and that I'm "weak" for not doing so, despite other health issues I had on the diet?
This is another aspect of veganism that really turns me off, the pervasive self-righteousness within the community at large.
Please tell me what restaurants I could visit with those dietary restrictions? And what quick lunches / fast food I can buy on that diet, on say a 30 minute lunch break, for instance...?
> To be clear, you think it's "easy" to live on a diet without any animal products, and also without soy or gluten, and that I'm "weak" for not doing so, despite other health issues I had on the diet?
This is another aspect of veganism that completely turns me off, the pervasive self-righteousness within the community at large.
Please tell me what restaurants I could visit with those dietary restrictions? And what quick lunches / fast food I can buy on that diet, on say a 30 minute lunch break, for instance...?
People don't really realize what they eat, especially when it comes to gluten and soy. I developed a wheat allergy after college (which my doctor said was caused by stress and working in a pizzaria full of wheat) which caused me to have to switch to a gluten free diet. That means your prepared meal options are massively reduced, more of your time is spend cooking (which imo is a good thing, I'm conscious about what I eat now), and if you do eat out, take on a "gluten-free tax".
People who go on these holier-than-though fad diets don't understand what people who actually have dietary needs go through. There is no wiggle room for us. If we don't follow our diets there are real and serious medical consequences. We don't just "feel down on ourselves" for not following the diet and the strictness with which we must follow our diets cause real inconveniences.
The parent seems to be suggesting that a vegan diet didn't work for them for health reasons. But countered objections to this by saying that it's difficult. (Which it is. Stupidly difficult to eat meat, gluten and soy free in my experience) But convenience is a different argument from health. Which is it? If the issue is convenience, I concede. If it's health there may be room to explore other options.
Though I admit there is nothing inherently healthy about eating vegan (oreos are vegan and I've gained weight while still being vegan while learning how to bake) I'd argue that choosing a diet on the availability of fast food choices is an indicator of an unhealthy decision.
> The parent seems to be suggesting that a vegan diet didn't work for them for health reasons. But countered objections to this by saying that it's difficult. (Which it is. Stupidly difficult to eat meat, gluten and soy free in my experience) But convenience is a different argument from health. Which is it? If the issue is convenience, I concede. If it's health there may be room to explore other options.
Why can't it be both? A diet can be both medically necessary and inconveniencing. See my own example or a diabetic diet.
Actually, v*gns -- most of whom will become violently ill if someone sneaks a little ground beef into their food -- have a good understanding of "what people who actually have dietary needs go through".
Most Indian vegetarian food has no soy and can be paired with rice instead of bread. It doesn't sound like that's a sort of food that's common in your area.
> To be clear, you think it's "easy" to live on a diet without any animal products, and also without soy or gluten, and that I'm "weak" for not doing so, despite other health issues I had on the diet?
Yes I do. I'm a vegan and have been for 3 years. In Denmark at least, it's easy to avoid gluten when you buy bread. If it isn't in your country, bake your own. Soy? Also easy. There are thousands of other plants.
> Please tell me what restaurants I could visit with those dietary restrictions?
Any vegan(-friendly) restaurant.
> And what quick lunches / fast food I can buy on that diet, on say a 30 minute lunch break, for instance...?
I eat pizzas, burgers, sandwiches, salats, pasta salats, cold pasta dishes, rice and curry (heated up) and so on for lunch. Anything really. If you can't buy it as take-away, cook your own.
That just means that it's easy for you. In the US, for example, wheat flour is found in pretty much everything. It's used as a breading, thickener, binding agent etc. It's even a filler in meat.
I've seen an increase in gluten-free products in the last years though, and also heard that it's been happening in the US and UK among other places too. Even in candy. Is that not true?
It is. Luckily the gluten free diet has become more of a fad here for people with money, so there are more options. However, there are no where near as many options to achieve gluten/gluten-free parity.
I guess that's one of the benefits of not living in "processed or manufactured everything" America. We have the benefit of not having to cook as much, you have the benefit of having more control over what you put into your food.
> I guess that's one of the benefits of not living in "processed or manufactured everything" America. We have the benefit of not having to cook as much, you have the benefit of having more control over what you put into your food.
I like to think that I choose to cook my own food because it's healthier than (most) take-away (except if it's incredibly fancy and expensive) and mass-produced food sold in supermarkets, and because I can't afford to go to expensive restaurants for every meal :D
> You can easily live on a vegan diet without those things
That's not true. The vast majority of convenient off-the-shelf meat substitutes use soy or seitan to replace meat protein.
Staying vegan while giving up soy and gluten means committing to a massive amount of meal-prep, and vegan food is already more labour-intensive in meal prep than the corresponding omnivore meals. It would mean basically giving up on all restaurant eating everywhere.
I'm not saying it can't be done, but you should not downplay that with "easily".
> That's not true. The vast majority of convenient off-the-shelf meat substitutes use soy or seitan to replace meat protein.
Indeed. I've seen a trend in new products using other stuff though. It's getting easier. But lets not forgot you can just buy proper whole food instead like fruit, beans, grains, vegetables, legumes and so on.
> Staying vegan while giving up soy and gluten means committing to a massive amount of meal-prep, and vegan food is already more labour-intensive in meal prep than the corresponding omnivore meals.
I think it depends on what culture you are from. In Denmark, it's normal to prepare food yourself. Sure, some buy ready-made food in stores, but I've never grown up seeing my parents do it, and I rarely do it myself.
> It would mean basically giving up on all restaurant eating everywhere.
All vegan-friendly restaurants I've been at have also had non-gluten bread and dishes not containing soy at all.
> I'm not saying it can't be done, but you should not downplay that with "easily".
I think that's subjective. If you're used to buy food that's already made, well, then, it probably isn't. If you are used to cooking yourself then it is.
Have you considered a zerocarb diet? It may help with the allergies, though if you follow zerocarb then it wouldn't matter as it excludes wheat and soy. I essentially eat nothing but meat, cheese, and eggs. If this sounds outrageous and impossible, come join us on /r/zerocarb and read the science and testimonials.
I did not make this choice lightly. For several weeks and months I got hung up on the "but you need vegetables and fiber" argument. I read and thoroughly did my research over a period of many months. My parents and I have tried many of the popular fad diets out there, including raw vegan where we would make "healthy" smoothies out of kale/spinach and some fruits (never mind that raw spinach is rather toxic with oxalates and other anti-nutrients, and the sugar content (especially fructose) from the fruits will lead us towards diabetes).
My parents are now so pre-diabetic that they cannot eat fruit anymore. A simple serving of pineapple will push my father's blood pressure over 200. Two servings and he will black out. Waking glucose level is about a 100 for both of my parents.
Then, we switched to paleo, and a few months later to zerocarb. It has now been several months eating nothing but meat, eggs, and cheese, and the results were night-and-day different to the raw vegan diet high in carbs and sugar. Now, we are keto adapted. Insulin sensitivity is slowly returning to normal. Waking glucose is improving for them (mine is normal). Lipid panels are improving. We all lost excess weight as well.
By following zerocarb, you automatically eat a FODMAP diet. You don't damage your intestines anymore from all that bulky high-fiber diets. You really don't need fiber--I have not eaten any fiber in months.
In the end, I experimented, my parents experimented, and we settled on zerocarb. There's an excellent book on this called the Fat of the Land by Vilhjalmur Stefansson. Read it with a bag of salt, but perhaps try a 60 day experiment.
>>I used to be vegan, for three plus years. I can't recommend the diet.
>>It was extremely unhealthy for me, personally.
Agreed. It was the worst decision of my life. I lost considerable muscle mass and power and it wasn't until I had blood work done that I found I was low in creatine, B12 and so forth, the usual things only found in animals. I was told by my vegan "friends" to just take supplements and that's when the alarm bells should have rung: an optimal diet for a strictly amateur athlete shouldn't need such things. I also had alarmingly low testosterone, which I later learned was because I ate so little cholesterol. But stupidly, I stuck with it for years.
Eventually I dumped it, started eating animals of all sorts like crazy, regained my muscle mass, power (a function of creatine) and healthy test levels and life became good again.
> In other words, from the advocacy group’s perspective, health can be an effective “foot in the door” approach to increasing the number of vegetarians and vegans, but often not enough to keep people animal-free for the long-term.
Not even their own health is a big enough factor for them to control their lust.
> “The latest findings once again show that a message focused on reduction instead of elimination of animal products may be more effective to create an overall decline in animal product consumption,” the report says. “Advocates would be well advised to soften their appeals to avoid suggesting the choice is all or nothing.”
I wonder if those vegetarians/vegans that returned to eating animal products returned 100%, or in a reduced manner. That's the really interesting bit unfortunately missing from the article. If people reduce their animal products usage with, say, 50% vs someone going vegan for a few months and then returns to animal products with a 50% reduction, they will ultimately have had a bigger impact than people "only" doing the reduction. Personally, all the vegetarians/vegans I know that have gone back have done it because it was too hard in social settings, but the experience have resulted in them reducing their use of animal products to "rarely" or "at social occasions" or "when it's not hard to skip on it", and that's a pretty big reduction.
As someone who grew up vegetarian, I take a bit of offense at you calling it "lust" and that those who return are "weak". That's a very black and white view of an issue with a whole lot of grey.
I'm one of those people you mention who went back because it was hard in social settings. For context, I stopped being vegetarian because I wanted to be more free to eat with my friends and family. It was incredibly hard growing up, as I could rarely have dinner at a friends house or eat meals in Boy Scouts. People didn't want to eat food that I cooked because there wasn't meat in it, so no one ate at my house. Even going out to restaurants was hard. Telling people I didn't want to go to their favorite burger joint on a road trip is challenging when you do it all the time. I had to either bow out of social situations and do my own thing, bring my own food, or not eat.
Going through that for my entire childhood definitely changed me. You have to fight against the ingrained American mentality that meat always belongs at the table. You have to make people leave their comfort zones or do extra work in order to accommodate your needs. You have to be comfortable being "that person" who isn't normal. It wears on you over time, and at some point it just wasn't worth it any more.
Now, I eat meat occasionally when I go out and I cook it for special occasions at home. Otherwise my meals are vegetarian most of the time. I enjoy meat in a limited capacity, and I personally want to keep it that way. I wish those who advocated for vegetarianism and veganism had some more capacity to see consumption reduction as aligned their cause. Black and white views exist on both sides here, and I think the solution is somewhere in the middle. Eat meat when its special. In my opinion it tastes better and you appreciate it more!
Just because something is healthy, doesn't mean its required. The human diet isn't ruled by absolutes.
I see from your comment history that you are a vegan yourself, and your behavior is exactly what turns people away from it. What's right for you isn't right for everyone. Take your arrogance elsewhere, and learn some compassion.
It's still doesn't change the fact that if you can't even control your lust for the sake of your health, you are as weak as they come.
And to that extend, it's universally agreed upon by science and all mayor and respected health organizations that a vegan diet is at least as healthy (and quite possibly healthier) as any non-vegan diet, and that animal agriculture is the single biggest contributor to climate change, and it's obviously better for the animals, so objectively, it's the superior choice.
This is not to dispute anything from the article. Just a reminder that if you sympathize or relate with any cause to reduce animal product usage, you don't have to be "vegan" or "vegetarian", just try to reduce your consumption to the point where it starts to inconvenient you.