VeganMania

[BomberPat]

1 minute ago, David said:

As much as I can sympathise with their views, it's simply not how things are done. Animals all throughout the ecosystem kill each other for food. It's how it goes.

As much as people like to pretend we aren't, we're as much a part of that ecosystem as all other creatures on this planet.

Yes, and animals shit where they stand, too. An appeal to nature is a weak argument.

[Bellenda Carlisle]

8 minutes ago, Carbomb said:

An interesting point I discussed with a vegetarian friend recently as a thought experiment: would a vegan or vegetarian whose diet is based purely on principle eat roadkill, or meat from any animal that's died via an accident (assuming the carcass isn't contaminated with chemicals)? 

 

Yes carbomb, I'm a vegetarian purely for ethical reasons, I wont eat a steak but I would just love nothing more than to tuck in to a dead fox that got hit by a car and I'm sure every other vegetarian would agree with me.

[tiger_rick]

6 minutes ago, Bellenda Carlisle said:

Yes carbomb, I'm a vegetarian purely for ethical reasons, I wont eat a steak but I would just love nothing more than to tuck in to a dead fox that got hit by a car and I'm sure every other vegetarian would agree with me.

😂

[David]

Just now, BomberPat said:

Yes, and animals shit where they stand, too. An appeal to nature is a weak argument.

Not all of them do, and regardless of how weak an argument you consider it to be, it is a valid point.

If anyone is looking for a world where close to the majority, never mind everyone, doesn't kill and eat animals, then they're deluded in my opinion. There are parts of the world where this practice simply cannot be replaced by a trendy restaurant with menus made from recycled paper, and eco-friendly straws.

As I've said, we can certainly clean up our act a whole lot by being more aware of the type of meat we eat and where we buy it, but the practice of eating meat isn't going away any time soon.

[BomberPat]

George Monbiot (is this the second time I've referenced him this thread? Weird.) ate a roadkill squirrel on Newsnight, and made a bit of a point of it as an ethical food source, but is otherwise either vegetarian or vegan. If it's purely an ethical decision based on objections to the meat industry, then it's a rational choice, but not one I'd make. No interest in eating something that's been hit by a car. Though, for the record, I have no interest in lab-grown meat either.

A colleague of mine has eaten in Road-Kill Cafes in the US, but he's not vegetarian.

 

To be a bit less pissy on my "appeal to nature" point - and, sorry Carbomb, but I'm going to lean a little into the "we'd have sharper teeth" point - but most animals that eat meat are either equipped with the necessary tools to chase down, hunt and kill their prey, then tear it to bits and eat it raw, or else have digestive systems rigorous enough to scavenge their meat from rotting carcasses. We have none of that. You could make the argument that the fact we can still eat meat in spite of all that is a sign of human ingenuity, but it contradicts your "other animals do it, it's perfectly natural" argument. And, again, if you base acceptable behaviour on what other animals do, we're in a whole mess of trouble.

 

I'm also not really on-board with the "ethical omnivore" idea of only eating meat that's been "humanely killed" and well looked after. Maybe just me, but I don't feel any happier knowing that an animal had a lovely happy life before being bludgeoned and killed by its primary caregiver, that doesn't sound particularly humane to be. Nor do I think the people who claims that's all they eat live up to their own morality - do you really check at every single pub, restaurant, and takeaway whether the meat was ethically sourced? Do you eat fish? Because that's the one animal you can guarantee died horribly to make it to your plate.

[Carbomb]

13 minutes ago, Bellenda Carlisle said:

 

Yes carbomb, I'm a vegetarian purely for ethical reasons, I wont eat a steak but I would just love nothing more than to tuck in to a dead fox that got hit by a car and I'm sure every other vegetarian would agree with me.

No need to get sarcastic. I'm not talking about actually eating it; I'm talking about the basic principle of "are there any scenarios in which you wouldn't have moral objections to eating meat"? Someone's already mentioned the possibilities raised by lab-made meat.

EDIT: Besides, you're not the person that question was aimed at. You've already said that you're vegetarian for both health purposes and ethical reasons.

Edited September 25, 2018 by Carbomb

[BomberPat]

The other argument on sustainable food, circumstances on which you would eat meat, is that insects are likely to be a growing source of food in the future. That most (Western) people turn their noses up at the idea, to me, just reinforces the idea that a good 90% of people's commitment to eating meat is purely cultural.

 

[Carbomb]

8 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

George Monbiot (is this the second time I've referenced him this thread? Weird.) ate a roadkill squirrel on Newsnight, and made a bit of a point of it as an ethical food source, but is otherwise either vegetarian or vegan. If it's purely an ethical decision based on objections to the meat industry, then it's a rational choice, but not one I'd make. No interest in eating something that's been hit by a car. Though, for the record, I have no interest in lab-grown meat either.

A colleague of mine has eaten in Road-Kill Cafes in the US, but he's not vegetarian.

Thanks for that; like I say, it was purely a thought-experiment, nothing more. I'm not expecting anyone to dine on Hedgehog áux Tyre-Tracks or anything.

8 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

 

To be a bit less pissy on my "appeal to nature" point - and, sorry Carbomb, but I'm going to lean a little into the "we'd have sharper teeth" point - but most animals that eat meat are either equipped with the necessary tools to chase down, hunt and kill their prey, then tear it to bits and eat it raw, or else have digestive systems rigorous enough to scavenge their meat from rotting carcasses. We have none of that. You could make the argument that the fact we can still eat meat in spite of all that is a sign of human ingenuity, but it contradicts your "other animals do it, it's perfectly natural" argument. And, again, if you base acceptable behaviour on what other animals do, we're in a whole mess of trouble.

I'm not making the nature argument, that was David. What I was getting at with that is what you were saying earlier: that an appeal to nature is not a strong argument, and it cuts both ways. We do have sharp teeth, which are designed to tear flesh from bone, but that shouldn't be an argument for eating meat, because of the above. Conversely, it's a shit argument for veganism, because we clearly do have sharp teeth, they're clearly not designed for anything else, and it's just being either dishonest or self-deluded to make a case for a dietary choice for which there are plenty of infinitely more valid arguments.

8 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

I'm also not really on-board with the "ethical omnivore" idea of only eating meat that's been "humanely killed" and well looked after. Maybe just me, but I don't feel any happier knowing that an animal had a lovely happy life before being bludgeoned and killed by its primary caregiver, that doesn't sound particularly humane to be. Nor do I think the people who claims that's all they eat live up to their own morality - do you really check at every single pub, restaurant, and takeaway whether the meat was ethically sourced? Do you eat fish? Because that's the one animal you can guarantee died horribly to make it to your plate.

That's absolutely fair, and an argument I can certainly get on board with. 

[Keith Houchen]

Fuck knows where that went.  Here is a TED talk about Weekday Vegetarians.

https://www.ted.com/talks/graham_hill_weekday_vegetarian?language=en

 

Edited September 25, 2018 by Keith Houchen

[Carbomb]

Fixed.

Edited September 25, 2018 by Carbomb

[Cousin Jim Bob]

2 hours ago, Carbomb said:

This is kind of it. In addition to the point I made about the developing world, there are also countries like Japan and the Koreas in which the average person didn't traditionally eat meat until they became at least partially Westernised. And in Japan's case, it's become a cultural thing: their dairy and meat industry has become something of a point of national pride for them, because it's something they see as being a Western thing that they've adapted to and now can do as well as anyone else. Look at the market for Kobe beef; there's no way they're giving that up in a hurry.

I don't think meat consumption will ever truly stop, though. It may be greatly reduced, but you'll always get people hunting or fishing.

 

My wife is South Korean and I have been over there alot. No way in the world would that country become a majority vegan culture by 2030. There would be riots in the streets. 

The most popular restaurants there are Korean barbecue places where you order the meat and you cook it yourself on a grill at your table. Vegetables are served as side dishes for free as part of the meal. The meat is the star and what you are paying for. Like Japan they are very proud of their best quality meat by regions like say Jeju Island is known for the quality of their pork, Busan for seafood etc. The number 1 takeaway food is easily fried chicken as well.

South Korean people tend to think vegans or vegetarians are odd and in most restaurants outside Seoul you would be lucky if there is a vegetarian option let alone a vegan one. As Carbomb mentions there is huge social economic reasons to this. For periods of their history, meat was a luxery for many. This is recent history too, it was the 1970's/80's when South Koreans economic boom really kicked in and they recovered from the Japanese occupation and the Korean war. So they are very proud in the South that they can eat as much meat as they want relatively cheaply now. Trying to change that mindset which is ingrained into their culture would be incredibly difficult and face huge opposition there.

[BomberPat]

2 minutes ago, Carbomb said:

I'm not making the nature argument, that was David. 

Aye, the apology was purely for having to rely in part on an argument you'd already (rightly) called out as being flawed. 

 

To drag things in a slightly different direction, someone mentioned that they were finding personal stories interesting, figured I'd try and remember why I went vegetarian in the first place.

 

I was still a kid - end of primary school, beginning of secondary school, around that. I remember being on a school trip to Robin Hood's Bay and Whitby, and the place we stayed having no idea how to cater for vegetarians, so ended up eating Bird's Eye vegetable "fish fingers" every night for however long we stayed there. 

Before that, I'd grown up in a mostly agricultural village. My Grandad on Mam's side had been a farmer most of his life, though had retired by the time I was born - he was born in 1905, so would have been in his 80s/90s at this point - and my Grandad on Dad's side had been a mole catcher and, later, general dogsbody on a few farms in the area. My older brother works in wildlife and environmental management now, so still hunts rabbits, pheasants, etc. - before he had kids, the only meat he ate for years was from animals he'd caught and killed himself, and I have a lot more respect for that than for buying prepackaged, vacuum sealed stuff from a supermarket that's going to bin off twice as much as it sells. I still wouldn't do it, but if that was the only context in which meat was being eaten, I'd be much happier with it.

So I grew up around farms and farming, that was the only real social context I knew until I was around 11 or 12, really. I sometimes hear criticisms from rural types that veganism/vegetarianism is a "metropolitan urban elite" sort of a lifestyle, but for me it was the opposite, it was growing up in amongst that milieu that put me off meat altogether. I knew farmers, knew butchers, spent much of my time around animals, and I couldn't, even as a kid, rationalise how I was able to keep pets, look after them, and care for them, yet it be perfectly fine to then go off and eat meat that came from an animal not dissimilar to them. Especially when I'd go for walks around the farms, see pigs, cows, sheep, goats, and so on, and then go home to Dad cooking burgers and sausages. It didn't add up. 

If there was a tipping point, I can remember seeing a butcher carrying a dead pig - I think it was in York - and that being the exact moment when I thought, "I can't keep eating this stuff". It took me a little while to convince my parents I was serious, but after that, I've never looked back. It's been so long now that it doesn't even feel like a choice, it's just second nature that I don't even consider meat an option.

In later years my mentality around it was refined a little from "I don't want to eat animals" to also account for things like food wastage, environmental concerns, personal health and, for a couple of years as a teenager, religious reasons. But at no point did I ever consider that going back to eating meat was an option, and at no point have I ever looked at meat and been tempted. Save maybe a Scotch Egg.

 

As I mentioned earlier, I've been moving closer to veganism, having dropped dairy for health reasons. Morally, I've found it hard to justify not being vegan for a while, so this is likely the push I needed to get me there.

[David]

48 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

To be a bit less pissy on my "appeal to nature" point - and, sorry Carbomb, but I'm going to lean a little into the "we'd have sharper teeth" point - but most animals that eat meat are either equipped with the necessary tools to chase down, hunt and kill their prey, then tear it to bits and eat it raw, or else have digestive systems rigorous enough to scavenge their meat from rotting carcasses. We have none of that. You could make the argument that the fact we can still eat meat in spite of all that is a sign of human ingenuity, but it contradicts your "other animals do it, it's perfectly natural" argument. And, again, if you base acceptable behaviour on what other animals do, we're in a whole mess of trouble.

But we do have the necessary tools to chase down, hunt and kill prey? We've done it for God-knows how many years, haven't we? 2.6 million or something?

Our biggest tool is our brain and ability to out think our prey.

Lots of interesting info found here.

In fact, here's a good article based on the information on that site I linked;

Quote

 

Science doesn’t give a hoot about your politics. Think global warming is a hoax or that vaccines are dangerous? Doesn’t matter, you’re wrong.

Something similar is true of veganism. Vegans are absolutely right when they say that a plant-based diet can be healthy, varied and exceedingly satisfying, and that—not for nothing—it spares animals from the serial torments of being part of the human food chain. All good so far.

But there’s veganism and then there’s Veganism—the upper case, ideological veganism, the kind that goes beyond diet and lifestyle wisdom to a sort of counterfactual crusade. For this crowd, it has become an article of faith that not only is meat-eating bad for humans, but that it’s always been bad for humans—that we were never meant to eat animal products at all, and that our teeth, facial structure and digestive systems are proof of that.

You see it in Nine Reasons Your Canine Teeth Don’t Make You a Meat-Eater; in PETA’s Yes, It’s True: Humans Aren’t Meant to Eat Meat; in Shattering the Myth: Humans Are Natural Vegetarians. (Google “humans aren’t supposed to eat meat” and have at it.)

But sorry, it just ain’t so. As a new study in Nature makes clear, not only did processing and eating meat come naturally to humans, it’s entirely possible that without an early diet that included generous amounts of animal protein, we wouldn’t even have become human—at least not the modern, verbal, intelligent humans we are.

It was about 2.6 million years ago that meat first became a significant part of the pre-human diet, and if Australopithecus had had a forehead to slap it would surely have done so. Being an herbivore was easy—fruits and vegetables don’t run away, after all. But they’re also not terribly calorie-dense. A better alternative were so-called underground storage organs (USOs)—root foods like beets and yams and potatoes. They pack a bigger nutritional wallop, but they’re not terribly tasty—at least not raw—and they’re very hard to chew. According to Harvard University evolutionary biologists Katherine Zink and Daniel Lieberman, the authors of the Nature paper, proto-humans eating enough root food to stay alive would have had to go through up to 15 million “chewing cycles” a year.

This is where meat stepped—and ran and scurried—in to save the day. Prey that has been killed and then prepared either by slicing, pounding or flaking provides a much more calorie-rich meal with much less chewing than root foods do, boosting nutrient levels overall. (Cooking, which would have made things easier still, did not come into vogue until 500,000 years ago.)

In order to determine how much effort primitive humans saved by eating a diet that included processed animal protein, Zink and Lieberman recruited 24 decidedly modern humans and fed them samples of three kinds of OSU’s (jewel yams, carrots and beets) and one kind of meat (goat, raw, but screened to ensure the absence of any pathogens). Using electromyography sensors, they then measured how much energy the muscles of the head and jaw had to exert to chew and swallow the samples either whole or prepared one of the three ancient ways.

On average, they found that it required from 39% to 46% less force to chew and swallow processed meat than processed root foods. Slicing worked best for meat, not only making it especially easy to chew, but also reducing the size of the individual particles in any swallow, making them more digestible. For OSUs, pounding was best—a delightful fact that one day would lead to the mashed potato. Overall, Zink and Lieberman concluded, a diet that was one-third animal protein and two-thirds OSUs would have saved early humans about two million chews per year—a 13% reduction—meaning a commensurate savings in time and calorie-burning effort just to get dinner down.

That mattered for reasons that went beyond just giving our ancient ancestors a few extra free hours in their days. A brain is a very nutritionally demanding organ, and if you want to grow a big one, eating at least some meat will provide you far more calories with far less effort than a meatless menu will. What’s more, while animal muscle eaten straight from the carcass requires a lot of ripping and tearing—which demands big, sharp teeth and a powerful bite—once we learned to process our meat, we could do away with some of that, developing smaller teeth and a less pronounced and muscular jaw. This, in turn, may have led to other changes in the skull and neck, favoring a larger brain, better thermoregulation and more advanced speech organs.

“Whatever selection pressures favored these shifts,” the researchers wrote, “they would not have been possible without increased meat consumption combined with food processing technology.”

None of that, of course, means that increased meat consumption—or any meat consumption at all—is necessary for the proto-humans’ 21st century descendants. The modern pleasures of a grilled steak or a BLT may well be trumped by the health and environmental benefits of going vegan—and if the animals got a vote, they’d surely agree. But saying no to meat today does not mean that your genes and your history don’t continue to give it a loud and rousing yes.

 

48 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

I'm also not really on-board with the "ethical omnivore" idea of only eating meat that's been "humanely killed" and well looked after. Maybe just me, but I don't feel any happier knowing that an animal had a lovely happy life before being bludgeoned and killed by its primary caregiver, that doesn't sound particularly humane to be. Nor do I think the people who claims that's all they eat live up to their own morality - do you really check at every single pub, restaurant, and takeaway whether the meat was ethically sourced? Do you eat fish? Because that's the one animal you can guarantee died horribly to make it to your plate.

The well-looked after aspect of it all, for me at least, is more important in that I would hope there's less chemicals and shit used in the raising of the livestock.

Edited September 25, 2018 by David

[tiger_rick]

I eat very little meat. Never have. I just don't like it. Can't claim to be morally affected at all because as much as Bomber isn't happy with David's nature argument, that's kinda how I feel. Animals have always eaten animals and humans are included in that. I can't see any scenario where that doesn't continue to be the case because it's just normal.

As said, it's just not for me. I've never in my life eaten anything off the bone and and anything remotely meaty, makes me feel ill. I can eat sausages, burgers and general shite meat but that's about it. As part of my weight loss, I've all but given up meat. Purely because most of what I was eating was utter shit (Sausage sandwiches, pasties, etc) so it's no loss.

I could probably be completely vegetarian if it wasn't for my need for the occassional Sausage and Egg McMuffin! And Chorizo.

Not vegan though. Terrified I'd become one of those people who has to mention that they're vegan every 20 minutes.

[Bellenda Carlisle]

51 minutes ago, Carbomb said:

No need to get sarcastic. I'm not talking about actually eating it; I'm talking about the basic principle of "are there any scenarios in which you wouldn't have moral objections to eating meat"? Someone's already mentioned the possibilities raised by lab-made meat.

EDIT: Besides, you're not the person that question was aimed at. You've already said that you're vegetarian for both health purposes and ethical reasons.

Sorry, didn't mean to come off as too snarky.

I actually did become vegetarian 100% for ethical reasons, I said it had nothing but a positive impact on my health but it's not why I did it, I still do loads of unhealthy shit.

Edited September 25, 2018 by Bellenda Carlisle