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I am seeing more and more folks go veg simply because the price, and that’s great! Build a culture of veg meals and normalize the epic curries, chillis, soups, stews, spreads, and tofu / seitan/mushroom dishes
I really like Derek Sarno’s YouTube channel for this reason. I feel very welcome watching his content because he doesn’t browbeat folks who aren’t fully vegan, he just presents an epic mountain of some of the most mouth watering vegan food I’ve ever seen.
Instead of purity tests to keep folks out, we need more people like Derek who hold the door open for everyone, so they can smell the amazing food cooking inside.
Can’t upvite this enough. I’m not really vegetarian, but I love the fact that it is gaining traction, since it’s just so much better food. If there is a vegan option of anything, I’ll go for that.
The best burger I’ve ever eaten had a giant mushroom as the main thing in it, sterotypically served by a trans girl at a street food vendor in the gay quarter of Amsterdam.
It literally ruined burgers for me, I’m still chasing that high. I think if you want to be a vegan activist, learn to cook well and open a restaurant. That’s how they got me.
Gatekeepers are the fucking worst. Every time I start reading up on something there’s always a handful of miserable condescending shitheads being nasty to people because they’re 'not ‘doing it right.’
Most vegan threads I come across usually has some of these, insulting anyone that’s not 100% on board even if they’re trying to get into it. Audiophiles are pretty much on the same level as hardcore vegans when it comes to being obnoxious (recently saw someone ask why the op was bothering setting up a music system if they didn’t have thousands of dollars to spare, for example). Linux users on support threads is a coin flip of whether they’ll be helpful or insulting.
Let people ease into things, stop demanding perfection right out of the gates!
I think that knowing the definition of veganism is the bare minimum. Gatekeeping is one thing, but you should at least know what the thing you’re trying to join is. If you’ve done zero research, that’s on you.
What I would say to folks is that they should do whatever they want. If they want to eat a 99% plant based diet, then they should do that.
It’s not gatekeeping to say that you aren’t vegan if you eat bacon, but at the same time, veganism is more about ideology than diet.
I think I understand the complaint. It’s shitty when a word with a clear definition gets literally co-opted by the masses. Then you have to go find a new word for something that was already solved.
That being said, I’d rather we dilute the term vegan if it means getting more people to eat less meat. You can invent new words faster than you can convert people.
The problem is when said research runs you straight to a bunch of nasty people over and over. Really dampens enthusiasm when trying to get into something. Veganism is not something I personally want to get into (I’m not opposed, I just read threads to get other perspectives on things in general), but I observe the same behaviour in vegan threads as I do in other communities with die-hard enthusiasts for things that I am into. The same behaviour is also in Linux communities which makes me hesitate to recommend it to people, because it has a toxic shithead problem.
Kinda like when you look up a problem and the first thing you run into is a guy telling the op that they’re a moron and to just google it
You don’t do research into anything by asking random scrubs on the Internet.
Read a book, read a book, read a motherfucking book.
Why is it that when libs talk about “imperfection” it seemingly is about mass murder? This is how they tried to sell genocide joe, then bomber harris, and now this treatbrained bullshit.
That’s quite an escalation, and you demonstrated my point excellently. You’re not gonna bring more people to your point of view by being nasty, you’re only driving them away.
This also applies to renewable energy btw. Some people seem to think we can’t start with the energy transition before we’ve figured it all out, including storage for the winter and at night.
Let’s just build solar panels and wind mills and see how far we can go with that :D much more productive that way.
And electric vehicles. Series hybrids with 30-50 miles of range of battery and a gas engine for further (Prius Prime, Volt, Clarity) were disliked by gas car people (usually being ignorant about how it works at all, and all made up EV problems), and also disliked by EV purists (not a real EV, hauling around a whole engine, still uses gas, etc)
The volt was awesome for its time (aka. Opel Ampera in the EU). Even with quite a lot of highway driving we got 1L/100km (~235mpg) with it over its lifetime around 2014. That’s with charging at home of course, but still, it’s at minimum a fivefold reduction in fuel consumption. And that with a 15kWh battery pack, which is a lot smaller than full EVs, making it less resource intensive.
I’ll admit to being one of those EV purists, but your comment snapped me out of it. Hauling around a whole engine isn’t bad if your electrical grid is clean enough.
Dont get caught up in labels. If you want to vegetarian but don’t want to give up bacon just do it. Doesn’t matter what you label it it’s just a diet.
I eat more veggies and less meat than ever
That’s down to iterative changes.
If the only option was a hard-line cold-turkey (lol) approach, I’d very likely have never changed a thing
It’s definitely easier if you do it one format at a time.
This is such a conundrum for me because I absolutely support people eating less animals and animal produced products but veganism is not a diet it is a philisophy. You are not vegan if you do this and you should not call yourself vegan. Dilution of the term IS harmful. At its core veganism is the belief that animals should not be exploited for anything under any circumstances. They have every right to this earth as we do and it is our responsibility to insure their lives are not harmed by us.
But the point of this is literally don’t let perfect be the enemy of good. There’s a rather large subset of the population that hears “oh no animals products at all? Forget that.” And they commit to no animal product reduction at all. So then the question is harm no animals, or harm less animals?
I absolutely support people eating less animals and animal produced products
Just don’t call it veganism because that is not what it is
There’s a rather large subset of the population that hears “oh no animals products at all? Forget that.”
Then they aren’t getting the message. The answer to that is not to give up the message. It’s to find a way to communicate that message so that it’s understood.
Give them the gateway to veganism.
trying to wean myself of genocide one bit at a time
the issue here is that it frames veganism as someone trying to become better by denying themselves treats, when in reality it’s someone becoming less of a monster by not denying others the right to life.
vegans are not good people because they’re vegans, veganism is only about not committing evil. It’s literally the absolute minimum. Carnists are evil, but it is so normalized people don’t see it that way.
vegans are not denying themselves cheese, we simply are not denying a baby the right to live.
The focus in veganism, like with every liberation movement, should be on the oppressed and not the treatlerites trying to be a bit less brutal. And that’s my issue with this tweet. Babystepping is for libs and people don’t get a pat on the back for no longer being part of the cow genocide. Either you have solidarity with the oppressed, in which case you’d be horrified at the thought of eating bacon, or you’re still looking at yourself and what you’re ““sacrificing””. Centering once again the humans when its about non-human animal liberation.
Either you have solidarity with the oppressed, in which case you’d be horrified at the thought of eating bacon, or you’re still looking at yourself and what you’re ““sacrificing””. Centering once again the humans when its about non-human animal liberation.
Oof. I want to print this out and frame it.
After being vegan for several years, it just hit me one day. I was thinking about how when I was a carnist, I felt like I had a right to eat a cow or a pig if I wanted to. That sense of entitlement to someone else’s body is insane!
But you’re still “the crazy one” for pointing it out. And don’t you dare break the norms of civility pointing out the mass murder and enslavement that is animal ag.
Fewer.
When the vegetarian option becomes cheaper and tastes just as good though, continuing to eat the meat version is an explicit choice.
I think there is also a cooking skills gap no one acknowledges. For example tofu is way different than chicken/beef/pork. Scares a lot of people away because poorly cooked tofu is 100x worse than poorly cooked meat.
Our family eats about half vegetarian because the cost difference is still minimal and variety is fun. Animals are also way more evil than most people realize. Cows are basically the only one that won’t eat it’s friend when they are bored. Not saying it justifies earing them, but I’ve never understood why vegans put animals on a pedestal.
I don’t put them on a pedestal. I would still be vegan even if I hated animals. You don’t have to love or even like somebody to not want them to be tortured and killed. The conditions that chickens, pigs, and cows live in aren’t something I would wish on my worst enemy.
The meat animals are selected for tastiness, not friendliness.
That, and their magical ability to convert things humans can’t eat (grass) into things humans can (beef, milk). This is fundamentally why"food" animals were domesticated.
I think tofu is just an acquired taste. When I first started cooking it, I did all the things. Pressing, freezing then thawing, brines, breading, sauces, air frying, etc.
But the more eating it became habit, the less all that stuff mattered. When I’m preparing it now, I usually take it out of the package and immediately crush it with my hands into rough chunks into whatever I’m cooking. I actively crave the stuff enough that I will pretty much always eat a raw chunk as I’m crumbling it.
Sometimes it tastes better. The last 10 years has been really depressing, because I’ve discovered that there are quite a lot of people who are unwilling to change even in the face of pandemics and environmental collapse.
Nope! Change is bad. Always. Just cross your arms and dig in your heels.
I might add health concerns to that list along with cost and taste. Allergens and sodium content, for instance. Also a concern about being “highly processed”.
Not that that’s not an issue with animal-based foods. But Impossible is still “new and different” and if Impossible turned out to be terrible for you, it wouldn’t be the first time something new and different (even something new and different that was touted by some as being better for you) resulted in a public health crisis. (I’m referring to trans fats in particular here.)
I don’t get why you make such an effort to avoid meat only to seek out vegetables prepared to mimick meat dishes. I’d argue that’s not what vegetables are good at. There’s plenty of vegetable dishes that are delicious without needing to pretend there’s meat involved. Indian cuisine has a ton of them.
It’s already cheaper it’s the tastes just as good part that is expensive. The faux meat is still expensive but vegetables have been cheap. If you didn’t care about variety you could eat chicken soup with a Costco chicken for a whole week for like $8
It’s already cheaper
for some people
Vegan restaurants and tiktok chefs do infinitely more for veganism than posters.
Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly
“We do this not because it is easy, but because we thought that it would be easy.”
Not something I want to hear just before going under for my surgery.
Yeah but if you were in the middle of nowhere and just broke your leg, would you rather have a lazy doctor or no doctor at all
Unless someone is a on a serious carnivore diet, then we probably eat “vegan” more than we realize.
I had an English muffin with some homemade wild raspberry jam and a banana with my tea this morning. I have already planned an Indian lentil curry and rice for supper tonight. I don’t know what I’m having for dinner today, but I could have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich I suppose.
A whole day without meat. Not that I actually considered doing that because “vegan.” But because that’s what sounds good to eat today. Tomorrow, maybe some smoked oyster stuffed venison loin chops for supper perhaps or some eggs and bacon for breakfast.
An issue with boycotts in general is that people are constantly talking about what not to do and not what to do alternatively or the specifics on how to get there. Eventually it makes you realize that literally anything you do will cause someone to get genocided or abused somewhere, and when they way out isn’t clear or straightforward, now you’re overwhelmed with thousands of things you hate that you do and have to figure out how to change on your own one by one, and those changes result in new problems that overwhelm you or turn out to also be unethical and you have to change them yet again. And in the end you hate yourself because your change attempts made you miserable while you’re still doing doing harmful things and other people hate you because you’re still causing genocides and the rest think you’re an idiot or a hypocrite for trying at all, while meanwhile everyone else around you is just enjoying themselves and not giving a fuck, and you’ll always be a terrible person anyways so you might as well give up.
I think if more people instead of saying “don’t do this” instead said “do this instead” when they talked about what to boycott and why, that would help with harm reduction a lot more.
Veganism is not a boycott. Here’s the commonly-accepted definition of veganism from the Vegan Society:
Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of animals, humans and the environment. In dietary terms it denotes the practice of dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals.
It is practically a boycott though, since a purpose of a boycott is to avoid something that is unethical. With veganism you’re refusing to purchase (or obtain in other ways, but 99% of people purchase) products that involve animal exploitation. For BDS you’re refusing to purchase products that involve Palestinian exploitation. For most others you’re refusing to purchase products that involve other forms of human exploitation like slave labor, like with the chocolate industry, battery mining, sweatshops, etc. (Nestle being a common example)
No, a boycott is withholding purchase to get a company to change. For example most people observing BDS would have no problem buying mcdonalds if they are no longer part of the occupation. The problem isn’t the product but how it’s obtained. With vegans the problem is the product and no amout of “free range” or “no chick killing” is gonna have us buy dairy or eggs.
The product is “food”, the problem is animal abuse. Would vegans have a problem with buying a vegan bigmac?
It depends on the vegan and other circumstance I suppose. I would on BDS grounds and that even a vegan bigmac still supports one of the largest cow murdering corporations there is. I don’t understand the point of a “vegan” bigmac and having mcdonalds not be part of the palestinian or cow genocide means it would functionally be a completely different entity bearing only the name due to historical reasons. Like Nintendo the playing cards company and Nintendo the videogames company.
Sure, but that more or less also goes for Israel.
Olives from pissrael or spain are still olives. A “vegan” bigmac is a different product from the “original”.
Getting a business to change is also one of the goals. It pressures restaurants and grocery stores to provide more vegan options and put less focus on animal products.
Remember this always: Try.
Do what you can and don’t regret it. It’s not on you to fix the world but if we all just try, even a little bit, we might succeed eventually. Just remember when you try, I am too and so are millions and millions of others
I am only boycotting when I have options or I really don’t need whatever is offered. Also if it is the only option and I need it, the boycott takes a back seat.
I am an activist when it doesn’t inconvenience me
essentially what the tweet in the OP sounds like, thanks for putting it so succinctly.
Moderation is my favorite word
I am very fun at parties
Duncan?
Are you referring to Duncan from Haha You Clowns ?
I think he’s referring to this:
Haha! Lovely!
Yes, that was the one. “He drinks in moderation. And he never ever ever gets rolling drunk”. My old man used to love that one, heard it constantly as a kid 😆
I support small changes for self improvement. Buying pints instead of fiths is a start.
Vegans will hate me for this but I only eat animals that I don’t find particularly cute.
I don’t eat pig or cow meat because they are beautiful, intelligent animals with great personalities. I do eat lamb because I’ve worked on sheep farms and they are dumb assholes. I eat chicken because they are basically vicious dinosaurs who would eat me if our sizes were reversed.
I’ve yet to get first hand experience with live sausages in their natural environment so I proceed with caution on a case by case basis.
Animals should be respected equally the same way humans are. You don’t disrespect ugly people, a lamb suffers as much as a cat or any other pet.
I’ve yet to get first hand experience with live sausages in their natural environment so I proceed with caution on a case by case basis.
How about game sausage? Deer are bag of rocks stupid, though harmless. But at least they get to live a natural life before walking round a corner into an rpg on the way back from the betting shop.
Deer are “overabundant” in my area. Guy I knew hunted them. One day he brings some deer meat to work for everyone to try.
It’s gross, it’s chewy, ropy, and tastes like juniper. I guess it’s free, but no thanks…
No that’s a pretty cool stance to hear as a vegan, it means you’re fine with me shooting you because I think you’re a dumb asshole. One less corpsemuncher and they actually wanted it this way.
If you ever get a clean shot on me I encourage you to take it 🙏
