I’m gonna remember this thread for the next time everyone starts going on about how:
“The average person is doing the best they can! Climate change is all the government’s and corporation’s fault, we literally can’t do anything!”
Meanwhile, a post on a vegan community got several people to go out of their way to talk about how cool they are for eating meat. And they got upvoted for it too!
Reminder that:
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meat production is one of the largest producers of CO2 (beef is the biggest, and pork after that)
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most greens are cheaper than meat, pretty much everywhere
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the average person in a western country is typically overweight
“But there’s nothing we can do! Don’t you see? It’s the governments and corporations who have to take action and force me to stop eating meat/insert-other-thing-I-can-do-but-choose-not-to-here! Also, vote for Biden/a-centrist-from-your-country!”
What does being overweight have to do with whether or not people eat meat? Eating excessive calories makes people overweight, and you can sure as hell do that with potato chips.
The average person in America is overweight. Stands to reason an average omnivorous anatomically modern human who is overweight and eats excessively probably eats more than the average amount of meat. Fast food is built around protein staples like beef pork and chicken. Most people eat meat every single day.
As the commenter above you mentioned, meat has extremely negative impacts on the environment and is among the most wasteful things people consume. In particular beef, which is well known to increase risks of cancer and heart disease, is extremely resource and energy intensive to produce. Factory farming and mass beef production have vast consequences for the environment and for our health. Not to mention the many morally objectionable practices that happen in these places.
Ok, let me put it this way: Assuming that an overweight person must eat meat is a logical fallacy.
One of my friends in high school was a vegetarian and was probably around 300 pounds.
High fructose corn syrup is a hell of a drug.
Yeah, I feel like a lot of people often aren’t consciously aware of how many calories they drink. A case of mountain dew and a bag of chips will go a long way toward making a person fat.
Per this study from 2021 around 74% of Americans consume red meat. Per CDC statistics 73.6% of adults are overweight, and that was for the year 2017-18. Per this statista piece somewhere around 30 billion pounds of red meat was consumed in 2021. Per 2020 data gathered by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations Americans consume a large amount of meat even in proportion to other nations, averaging per person around 124.11 kilograms a year.
Roughly 74% of Americans consume red meat, and a pretty similar proportion are overweight. Around 30 billion pounds of beef were consumed in 2021 in America. Americans in general eat much more meat than the rest of the world.
The data is pretty clear on this front. The beef industry in America is absolutely massive. And the consequences it has on both the people who consume it and the environment of the world are absolutely massive.
The meat isn’t why those people are overweight though. It’s correlation, not causation. If a person eats a meat only diet, more than likely they’ll reduce body fat and gain muscle mass due to the macros they are consuming. It’s all the easy calories and lack of exercise that makes so many people overweight.
I appreciate the time it took to link all of that, and I’m sure that there are a lot of meat eaters who are also overweight. The only point I was trying to make is that you can absolutely be vegetarian/vegan and be overweight.
Assuming that an overweight person must eat meat is a logical fallacy.
I wasn’t assuming that.
You’re hyper focusing on one detail and missing the forest for the trees.
Premise 1: The vast majority of people eat meat
Premise 2: The majority of people are overweight
Conclusion: A very large portion of the population can stand to eat less meat.
Add in that some meat (beef) is a lot more caloric than anything green, and the likelihood of an overweight person being a vegan is quite small (which doesn’t mean there aren’t cases of it).
I’m not trying to shame people for being overweight, I struggled with it for a long time myself, I’m simply pointing out the majority of people can definitely afford - both money and health wise - to eat less meat than they do.
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Yeah bro I heard dog ribs are better. Go check that out bro! I dare you! Make sure you post it on Facebook!
Meat is meat. If the dogs are raised and slaughtered humanely and in a sanitary way then there is no reason to not eat dog.
slaughtered humanely
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Yes we are currently doing an aggressive leaflet campaign to promote crushing baby pigs testicles before we eat them. Occasionally I punch one, too.
Want to know someone eats meat? Don’t worry, they’ll tell you.
The post is cringe, the reply was a mock and now you added another layer of cringe.
That goes for anything that people have a passion for.
Yeah all those preachy meat eaters ooh they’re all up in your face with their minding their own fucking business about what other people eat.
Said the vegan, in a comment on their own post about how meat = bad!
in a community specifically for vegans
I mean, yes, it’s really common, whenever someone mentions vegetarianism or veganism a carnist has to jump in and tell everyone how delicious meat is and how much they enjoy eating meat. Even if no one asked. Even if it’s an explicitly vegan community. Even if there’s no reason to post except to insult and offend vegans. Even if the meme is not about veganism specifically but about factory farming which any sane human being recognizes is both an ethical and environmental disaster.
Carnists just won’t shut up about their moral and dietary preferences.
It’s as if they know there’s no moral justification for killing for pleasure and are so defensive about it that vegans just existing in public demands an aggressive response from them.
This is your community you know. You can ban people who are being obviously derisive of the people this community is ostensibly made for.Edit: assumed you were the mod as you were the main poster. Mod seemingly inactive?
I can’t speak for the mod but I (probably) wouldn’t ban carnists for being carnists. It’s not like fascism or racism, where open fascists and racists are a relatively small percentage of society and banning them deprives them of a recruiting platform. The vast majority of English-speaking people eat meat. “Lol bacon is good” is a typical response to anything vegan in American society. And it’s a false consciousness response - people say things like that to avoid thinking about the reality of carnism and its concordant factory farming.
And as you noticed, this is a pretty inactive instance. There’s not a thriving community of solarpunk vegans (yet) and there’s no serious debate or activism or community building to be disrupted by troll posts.
So I’d prefer to let people post those “lol bacon is good” comments, take the opportunity to ask why they found the need to post them, and maybe open some people’s minds and educate them, rather than banning them.
Want to know someone who’s vegan? Don’t worry, they’ll tell you.
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While it is nice that all the trolls come out of the wood to get banned in this thread, I will lock it now as this has really run it’s course.
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yeah i was reading this meme and the end was just cooked pig and I’m like that wasnt a very funny punchline
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The reason for the mother being put in that cage, which in reality wouldnt have ends that look to be a piercing hazard, is because she otherwise would kill the piglets by laying down on them or otherwise harm them
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Look how cool you are! Cruelty is so cool bro. Lol you got those vegans hahaha!
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If you need to guilt people into following your belief, you either lack the strength of conviction it takes to convince someone to listen to you, or your belief is complete shit.
If seeing the reality of your meal makes you feel guilty, maybe the messenger is not the problem.
If you have to anthropomorphize your argument to make someone feel guilty then your argument isn’t persuasive in the first place is it?
No one on the meat eating side “feels guilty,”…even after reading this obvious strawman post …that’s some serious projection on your part.
there are many meat eaters with ethical concerns who feel guilty. Then there comes a day when they choose not to feel bad anymore about what they eat. while eating healthier, i should add. Vegetarianism is default in so few societies and the transformation takes time. You don’t wake up vegetarian or vegan one day. You ask questions. You read. You’re exposed to the living and dying conditions of suffering animals.
if you eat industrial meat and don’t feel guilty, you are either uninformed or you’re a cruel careless person.
Aww so cute he learn a logical fallacy. Too bad he used the wrong one keep trying there bucko!
On the one hand, factory farming seems inhumane. Treating animals like a product will inevitably end up as abuse because lower standards for health and wellness makes a cheaper product. Consumers vote with their wallets, and if there is not a noticable drop in quality, they will buy the cheaper product, as the price is the main thing they can see and measure when making a purchasing decision.
On the otherhand, most things in this world that get eaten die screaming while being consumed asshole first after running as fast as they can for a few seconds.
At the end of the day, I still eat meat, but I wish there was a better way to inform the consumer of the quality of life of the animals in the products they purchase. Maybe an independent review board that sets wellness standards that each meat supplier has to post on their packaging.
Ever notice how despite criticizing the meat industry no one has been able to show how we can feed everyone without animal proteins?
Not a single vegan solution out there that scales to numbers that matter.
This study found that if we converted US farmland used to grow livestock to plant proteins we could double the number of people fed.
Every study not funded by the meat or dairy industries has found similar results.
And it makes sense, logically. Eating plants directly is always going to be more efficient than feeding plants to an animal and then eating the animal - the average animal converts about ten percent of its food into biomass, so you lose roughly 90% of the plant’s nutritive value.
“We feed animals the plants humans can’t eat” and other such excuses work for a small farm where the chickens and pigs are part of the farm’s ecosystem and return nutrition to the soil as manure. When you’re talking about modern factory farming where millions of productive acres that could grow human food are used to grow animal food, it’s nothing but bullshit.
Ever notice how despite criticizing the meat industry no one has been able to show how we can feed everyone without animal proteins?
👆 this is false
