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it’s all stars maaaaaaan
Not directly related to the post, but what is it with people getting all pissy when they find out you’re vegetarian/vegan? More than once I’ve had someone act like I told them I punch babies for fun when they find out I don’t eat meat. I don’t bring it up unprompted, it’s always in relation to a dietary concern. For example, I ordered a veggie dish at a restaurant, and they brought me the meat equivalent. I politely let the server know I ordered something else (apologetically I might add, because I feel like I’m being difficult to a service worker even though it’s about a dietary restriction), and she acted like I was out of line. Rolling eyes, huffy, and asked me if I wanted her to take it back (um, obviously?).
This has happened to me or friends in various social settings, and I just don’t get it. I even attended a cookout once where the host got mad at me for not eating his burgers. After I responded to the dietary restriction email. And brought my own dish. People act like you’re being a bitch for not eating meat! I’ve never once pushed my diet on anyone or brought it up out of necessary contexts, but people still talk behind my back like I’m being dramatic for not eating things I don’t want to.
I think it partially has something to do with the internet brainrot propaganda against veganism/vegetarianism
I hear you. I was raised vegetarian (mom is awesome) and have flip flopped between that and veganism my whole life. Growing up meatless and male has been a weird experience, with countless people telling me I’m not manly be cause I don’t eat dead animals. Wtf.
Sadly, I’ve also received the opposite, telling me I don’t really care because I’m not vegan enough (sigh)
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Because your lifestyle choices are an affront to their lifestyle. In many places in the world eating meat is an important part of the culture. Saying that you don’t eat meat is seen as a rejection of the culture. And they will immediately label you as “the other”.
It’s like if a person says they are an atheist in a country where everyone is religious and religion is an important part of daily life. Even when the atheist isn’t judging anyone the atheist will receive negative reactions and even violence.
It points out how shameful and lazy meat eaters are to their face, and people don’t like having their poor choices pointed out to them.
It is the same when telling people that you dont drink or take other drugs…
Hugs.
This is why I don’t bring it up to other people.
The BBC has a good article on this concept
The tension that results can make us feel stressed, irritated, and unhappy. But instead of resolving it by changing our beliefs or behaviour, it’s quite normal to blame these feelings on something else entirely – all without realising we’re doing it
In the case of eating meat, Rothgerber suggests we have a number of strategies – around 15 – which allow us to avoid facing up to the meat paradox. These include pretending that meat has no link to animals, imagining that we eat less of it than we really do, wilful ignorance about how it’s produced
[…]
Unfortunately, most of these are derailed by the presence of vegans.
According to Rothgerber, people tend not to think of meat eating as an ideology. The dominance of meat eating around the world helps the omnivores among us to avoid the idea that it’s a choice – it’s just what everyone else is doing. But when a vegan turns up at a dinner party, suddenly we’re bumped out of the comfortable “mainstream diet” category and into the unsettling “meat-eating” category. By their mere existence, vegans force people to confront their cognitive dissonance. And this makes people angry.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200203-the-hidden-biases-that-drive-anti-vegan-hatred
I mostly eat meat when it’s served to me, but if making my own food or eating out, it’s mostly vegetarian. At the same time, though, I fish and eat the fish I catch.
A friend of mine makes faces at me when I mention fishing and says stuff like how she feels bad for the poor fish. When I point out she is not a vegetarian or vegan, she just straight up says she tries not to think about it. But “poor fish” when I look at my kill directly and gut it with my own hands. 🤷🏻♀️
I’m a lot like you, I make vegetarian food myself. But if I’m visiting someone and they serve meat, I’ll have a slice.
My exception is game, as a large chunk of my family are hunters
Yeah, people much prefer the far away abstract violence compared to a softer violence they have to face
I have so much more respect for hunting for food than industrial agriculture. But in some ways there’s a stigma that hunting carries in a way industrial agriculture doesnt, even though the way it treats animals is infinitely more horrifying
…or in some cases it’s much simpler: some of us have conditions that make it impossible for us to survive or to thrive on a vegan diet and we’re sick unto death of vegoons pushing Evangelical Veganism and acting like we don’t exist or we’re making it up to justify the moral failing of eating meat. And there’s the constant push to normalize veganism, which just expands the number of places I can’t eat and/or people I can’t eat with.
If that type of vegan didn’t exist I wouldn’t immediately start side-eying vegans until I find out of they’re safe or not.
What do you mean “can’t eat at”?
Do you have an allergic reaction when you consume non-meat foods?
the number of places you can eat at went from like 99% of restaurants to like 97% because of vegan places opening up. youre not a victim here.
I should note that technology is increasingly helping provide more options. With precision fermentation, there is a lot of ways to biologically identical proteins, enzymes, etc. For instance, you can now buy non-animal whey protein, egg white protein, non-animal heme iron, and more in the stores. It’s super cool stuff and ironically the dairy industry was a big pioneer of it in the 90s for one of the enzymes they use widely in cheese. There’s a lot more coming down the pipeline with it
Ah fuck. I didn’t know iron was derived from animals. Fuck, it’s basically blood!
A good friend of mine is vegan and has been actually assaulted (old lady slapped him, which isn’t exactly being attacked with a tire iron, but it’s still fucking assault) because of it.
Another good friend is vegetarian, and when we went out for pizza, he ordered this one fancy pizza, and told them to hold the meat (entire pizza is veggie except for prosciutto). They brought it out with prosciutto on it, and when he said “I don’t eat meat” the server replied “it’s very thin” as if that made a difference to it being meat. It was genuinely quite funny in the moment. Lol. They did replace the pizza without any qualms or attitude, but I’ll never forget that moment. It’s thing, so it doesn’t count!
… Also, I do wish they’d left that pizza instead of taking it back. It looked so good, and whenever I visit them they like to starve me to death because they’re all tiny people with caloric deficits D:
I think some cultures are entirely unfamiliar with the idea of not eating meat at all.
Like that line from Big Fat Greek Wedding. “He doesn’t eat meat? Is okay, I make lamb.”
They treat it the same way we might treat the phrase “he doesn’t drink.” Which means no alcohol, not “no consuming liquid of any kind.”
No meat is just taken to mean no whole meats, like cuts of steak. So you get “no meat in the soup, just a bit of the chicken stock for flavour.”
A token “fuck you” to the bitch that down voted you
Generally I don’t care. I prefer phrasing it as dietary restrictions. I can’t eat wheat or lentils. And a lot of fruit makes my lips tingle and itch.
weirdly ive noticed alot of behavior like this even on lemmy and even in leftist communities on here. people just get really mad when a post even mentions someone being vegan. similarly i see people demonizing people who for riding bikes and i just get so confused at why they are on lemmy (a very leftist platform) if they despise commonly leftist things
There’s a name for this in the broader sense, though riding bikes may or may not fill into this (can if it’s for environmental reasons)
Do-gooder derogation is a phenomenon in moral psychology where a person’s morally motivated behavior leads to them being perceived negatively by others. The term “do-gooder” refers to a person who deviates from the majority in terms of behavior, because of their morality
Coming off the back of an asshole vegan calling meat eaters ‘genocidal monsters’, yeah im not seeing this supposed unprompted hate on vegans.
From gains to grains.
Should be a vegan zombie movie where they eat grains.
There’s a single Real Life Comics strip about that, but that comic is impossible to search.
I know this is kind of a joke but this is legitimately one of the reasons I went vegetarian. Felt very “icky” to build my body out of other dead bodies.
I’m positive on veganism as a whole, but consuming corpses to grow stronger is kind of metal as hell
That’s also a bit of a peculiar feeling after being vegan for a while. My whole body consists out of plant matter and the occasional mushroom. I’m practically a plant at this point.
(Obviously irrational, though. Meat, dairy, eggs etc. are also just pre-digested plants. We’d all be practically plants by that logic.)
Its sunlight all the way down.
Due to how the US meat and dairy industry works, most US omnivores are largely corn based. You can have the carbon in your hair tested to verify this.
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Let’s say that plants really feel pain. How do we reduce that pain to a minimum? To get 1kg beef you need roughly 50kg plant matter. So eating only plants would be much more humane.
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We know plants can respond to stimuli, saying they feel pain is a big jump to conclusions
The evidence is pretty weak for plants, but even it that were true, it takes more plants to produce animal products than it does to eat plants. If we are concerned about plant death, it’s happen even more for animal products
1 kg of meat requires 2.8 kg of human-edible feed for ruminants and 3.2 for monogastrics
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2211912416300013
Plants can feel pain the same way a machine can learn. Which means not at all outside of marketing.
In reality they simply have mechanisms to react to damage. But that’s not pain.
Pain is the processing of injury in a nervous system. Plants lack the nervous system required to feel anything.
Just like a brain dead human, sponge or bacteria plants cannot feel pain in any meaningful way.
And what is a nervous system really? Why is it so special and different from any other chemical reaction?
It’s more the processing that’s relevant for pain. No processing, no pain.
For instance, some humans have very specific genetic mutations that do not allow them to feel pain. The peripheral nerves still send the pain signals to the brain but it cannot process them. Therefore, no pain.
There could be a discussion on whether very simple nervous systems (like in jellyfish) without a central component (brain) can process pain. But I’m not a biological researcher or philosopher so that’s outside my Lemmy paygrade.
And what makes them different from any other chemical reaction is a little disingenuous. Might as well ask what’s the difference between burning a human on a stake and melting glass? Both are just chemical reactions involving heat from a certain perspective.
There is simply no organ comparable to the brain in plants that would allow for plant pain. That’s pretty much it.
I mean, it’s not really fair because plants don’t have any of the same “parts” we do that would constitute a body as such. When I think of growing my body, I think of organs and tissues such as muscle, bone, blood, neurons, etc. These are primary components of what would be considered nutritional intake from a dead body that would be reconstructed for use in our own body. Plants do not have muscles, bones, etc. We are using basic nutrients like cats, proteins, and carbohydrates as building blocks for our own parts. As noted elsewhere it takes a fraction of the plant matter necessary to build our own muscles than it does to feed a pound of meat to them use to build muscle from that. So even by your flawed logic, it’s still less plants to eat them directly than it is to eat meat grown from them.
Additionally, the vast majority of plant products don’t even require a plant to “die” to eat. Many fruits and vegetables are just the reproductive structure of the plant, not vital for the health of the plant at all. I am an avid gardener and the only plants I can think of that have to “die” for me to eat them are root vegetables. Even then if you’re diligent you could save, for example, the tops of carrots or bottom of onions to regrow.
They are completely different concepts and it’s bad faith to argue otherwise.
I recommend veganism to everyone - at least for a while- just because how different you can see farm animals. When I look inside the eyes of a pig I feel a connection. I know the kindness of this animal just by mutual respect. Try it, it feels great.
My cat would put me in an air fryer if she could.
Pigs aren’t vegan though. They’ll eat your dead corpse in a heart beat.
I’ve known some real asshole pigs too, though most I’ve interacted with are usually pretty chill.
Humans too are often cruel to one another, but we rightly don’t think eating them is justified
Even though humans are the only animal that could meaningfully consent to being eaten. It’s an interesting (if uncomfortable) moral quandary.
It sounds like you’re saying that they deserve to be eaten due to their personalities.
no, it’s just that calling a pig a friendly animal probably isn’t the best example to use for this argument
They are talking about the pig’s intelligence and understanding of the world. They are sentient, is the point
How’s that messed up? This is literally how the natural world works. Predators eat prey. We are the apex predator species.
Natural does not mean we should do something? Cannibalism is also natural, but we rightly find that horrible
Brushing aside moral considerations, cannibalism leads to things like kuru, so that’s a no go either way.
I have no qualms eating animals, provided they weren’t factory farmed.
On a related note, it’s worth mentioning that factory farming is the vast majority of global meat, dairy, egg, etc, production
We estimate that over 90% of farmed animals globally are living in factory farms at present. This includes an estimated 74% of farmed land animals (vertebrates only) and virtually all farmed fish.[1]
https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/global-animal-farming-estimates
We estimate that 99% of US farmed animals are living in factory farms at present. By species, we estimate that 70.4% of cows, 98.3% of pigs, 99.8% of turkeys, 98.2% of chickens raised for eggs, and over 99.9% of chickens raised for meat are living in factory farms. Based on the confinement and living conditions of farmed fish, we estimate that virtually all US fish farms are suitably described as factory farms, though there is limited data on fish farm conditions and no standardized definition.[1] Land animal figures use data from the USDA Census of Agriculture[2] and EPA definitions of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations.[3]
https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/us-factory-farming-estimates
That’s why I prefer New Zealand or Australian lamb. Just lamb living their best lamb lives out on pastures.
Can’t wait for deer season this year so I can restock on venison.
Who doesn’t love dying during childhood?
New Zealand’s pasture based systems aren’t exactly the idealistic visions people have of them. Even just environmentally, their attempts to scale them up have required huge amounts of fertilizer and lead to huge amounts of pollution. For instance for their dairy production:
The large footprint for milk in Canterbury indicates just how far the capacity of the environment has been overshot. To maintain that level of production and have healthy water would require either 12 times more rainfall in the region or a 12-fold reduction in cows.
[…]
The “grass-fed” marketing line overlooks the huge amounts of fossil-fuel-derived fertiliser used to make the extra grass that supports New Zealand’s very high animal stock rates.
Damn, guess I’ll just keep eating 100% factory farmed then.
You can always stop eating meat
I mean, there’s no rule that says that one must consider nature, as a whole, to be ethical. It’s perfectly possible to believe that nature itself is “messed up” in a moral sense and merely outside the capacity of humans to change for the foreseeable future. One’s own behavior is much easier to impact by contrast.
Hoards ravaging neighboring communities and killing everyone up to the children is perfectly natural for humans but you don’t have to do it.
It just sounds like a vegan wrote this story
I became vegetarian when I saw the “How to Serve Man” episode of the Twilight Zone in high school. It horrified me and I didn’t look back.
From the collection of made up stories.
You might underestimate the effect of suddenly thinking about something differently.
Or maybe they were just trying to be funny after going vegan?
