I understand this argument, but it doesn't apply to all meat I suppose. Conversely, eggs/dairy also often involves cruel treatment.
Not to say your choice is wrong, I'm just wondering what's the most rationale way of dealing with these aspects.
Cows are identical to human women when it comes to milk production. They are therefore forcibly impregnated (in hardware called "rape rack"), then they carry their child for 9 months and the calf gets taken away in first 24 hours - as they'd "steal" the milk we want to sell. Cows visibly grief when that happens. If the calf was a boy he's sold as veal, slaughtered in his 6th week of life. If the calf is a girl she follows her mom's path. Lastly when dairy cow is spent - can no longer produce milk after 5 or more pregnancies - they are slaughtered and their meat is used for pets (dogs and cats) food.
There are rarely dairy farms that avoid some of those actions but none that does not do any.
As for eggs, to produce hens we need to breed chickens. Statistically half of them are cocks and are useless for most of the industry so they are macerated (blended alive) as soon as they are born and turned into pate or pets food. Traditionally hens have been able to lay one egg per month. Using selective breeding, feeding methods and artifical light they now do it nearly every day. The process is very painful and impacts their health a lot. It's similar to period of a human woman. Imagine having that every day.
So in short, if you dig a bit all animal exploitation we do is abhorrent, especially when we now know it's absolutely unucessary and done for pure pleasure. Any other abuse wouldn't be treated so leniently by so many people.
Apart from the obvious cruelty / environmental impact etc... What I like about being vegetarian (or mostly veggie) is that I started to eat a lot of different food, a lot of ingredients I would have never touched before. Constraints drive creativity and it's true in the kitchen too.
In a world of food abundance, I enjoy the restrictions of a self-imposed diet. Having those rules helps me eat healthy food.
Remember that fries and soy mayo are vegan. Nobody will call that healthy though.
I have been mostly vegan for a while and I don't think my bike riding has been affected, but I can tell you it definitely affected me when it came to weight lifting. For the first time in my life I just wasn't improving at all from session to session (and this is in the early stages when you just start lifting again after time off when gains come easy).
I know there are vegan weightlifters out there but from what I know getting all of your protein requirements from plant-based protein powder is a big undertaking.
It's not enough to make me go back to animal products but definitely something I miss from my meat eating days.
You didn't mention this either, but if you want to avoid protein powder, it may be harder to find lean protein sources. I just looked up nuts (peanuts specifically), that have 27% protein but also 51% fat. Chicken breast also has 27% protein, but only 8.7% fat.
I'm not a body builder and haven't investigated how to go about it in detail as a vegan though the full cycle of bulking and shredding, but if you just want to gain strength getting enough calories and protein shouldn't be a problem. I've also read that most body-building magazines completely overestimate how much protein you need, citing numbers four times what sports science says.
You have first-hand experience in this situation and I'm clearly speculating, but perhaps you didn't get enough calories rather than enough protein? Of course it all depends on what you're eating. When some people say vegan food, they mean raw food or mainly vegetables, while others include a lot more legumes, nuts, and seeds.
This is because he of the food chain is deprived and in case of D and B12 these really are not available in plant sources only.
Eggs are between 6-7g of protein each, which isn't a lot.
Depending on your goals, and where you fall between being sedentary and an athlete, you should be aiming for 1.6 g/kg/day and 2.2 g/kg/day [1].
Add to that the satiating affects of protein in a diet, particularly through ghrelin secretion [2], and you've got a stronger incentive to increase your protein intake.
In fact, the growing field of plant behavior strongly suggests that those assumptions are wrong. That plants aren't unthinking, unfeeling at all, but every bit as alive and aware of their environment as animals. It's a really fascinating field of study.
They've found evidence of an analogous nerve system (that appears to send pain responses), evidence of non-genetic memory, surprisingly advanced communication (tobacco plants communicate using over 3000 chemical compounds that mean different things), environmental awareness (you can perform pavlov's experiment on pea plants using wind for the bell and sunlight for the food), kin recognition, and more.
It's a lot harder for us to recognize the signs of awareness, pain, even - maybe - intelligence of a sort, because plants are completely alien to us. They communicate with chemicals, move by growing, live at a different speed.
For example, most of us would immediately recognize and empathize with any animal screaming in pain or fear. Most of the animals that scream to communicate are social animals. The scream serves as a warning, "I'm hurt or afraid, there's danger, watch out!" Grass plants, when cut, release a chemical that cause other grass plants to raise their defenses. It serves pretty much the same biological purpose as a scream, "I'm hurt, there's danger, watch out!"
But we would never recognize the smell of fresh cut grass as a scream.
Plants have but a resemblance of a nervous system if any, and they don't have a brain.
Does anyone really think that slitting the throat of a cow can be compared to harvesting corn?
I think the ethical argument has a good ground. If it's not necessary at all to have good health to engage in slitting animal throats, shooting male calves at birth for milk, grinding male chicks alive etc. then why keep doing it?
Especially with the impact on climate change of most crops that are mostly meant to feed livestock, the methane produced, the excrements produced, plus it's linked to all sorts of diseases.
So to me, the ethical aspect more than the lives of animals is also about the lives of humans. This abuse of the environment and this diet is causing disease and climate change which is impactful for humans as well.
Think about what's required for pavlov's experiment. They took pea plants and turned on, by turns, a fan and a light from one of two opposite directions. In the control group, there was no correlation between when they turned on the fan and when they turned on the light. In the experimental group, they consistently turned on the fan an hour or two before they turned on the light.
Pea plants will grow towards light pretty actively. In the experimental group, they would consistently grow in the direction of the fan - expecting the light to follow the wind.
Think about what's required for that. You have to be able to sense your environment. You have to have an awareness of light and wind. And you have to be able to associate the presence of wind - something that normally has nothing to do with the presence or absence of light - with the later coming of the light.
That pretty strongly suggests there's some level of sentience at work here.
My point isn't to say "Don't eat plants." It's to question whether eating other sentient beings is really avoidable for us as autotrophs. And if it is unavoidable, where does that leave us ethically?
For me, it leaves me trying to treat everything I eat with care and respect and an awareness that my life comes at the cost of other lives.
And then primarily examining the health and sustainability impacts of my diet, rather than using an incomplete ethics.
Yes.
>Pea plants will grow towards light pretty actively. In the experimental group, they would consistently grow in the direction of the fan - expecting the light to follow the wind.
You don't need sentience for that.
If you grow cattle, you have to put more crop/hay calories in then you get meat calories out. Which would mean, by eating less animals (best none) we would reduce the overall pain on all plants, as we don't need to cut so many of them.
I believe that plants do react on cuts and their environment, but comparing it with killing living, conscious beings, is just rude.
The studies of plant "neurology" (if you can call it that) are all very interesting, but the argument that anything that has a nervous system is holy and untouchable is decidedly fringe.
To compare the awareness of a tree with the awareness of a cow or a pig or even a chicken is clearly asinine.
- rodents die in wheat field during harvest
- recently there was an article on HN of olive harvests killing hundreds of birds
- entire forests are destroyed with wildlife by burning to grow palms for palm oil
Same with exercise: still pulling in a < 30m 5k run twice a week, cycling... hasn't affected anything. Vegetable based proteins are fine. And it turns out the average person even at my level of fitness doesn't need to eat protein like an Olympic athlete.
In respect to your concern for B12, an Indian Medical Council study from a few years ago found very few cases of clinical B12 deficiency in the country. This, despite the average Indian diet being deficient for B12 by European & American standards. It was one of the reasons for reducing the suggested daily intake for Indians to 1 mg, as recommended by the WHO, substantially lower than in Europe or the US.
First off, nice job quitting meat. However,
> eggs/dairy
Just wanted to point out the amount of cruelty going on with eggs/dairy production is also absolutely harrowing. I'd recommend researching that as well and giving it up.
I'm not sure where you are, but there are some lovely snack bars in the UK called 'nakd' that are cold pressed fruit bars in a variety of flavours that often do the trick when I want to snack. If I'm not wanting any of the former, crisps are always a way for me to feel full quickly though they're hardly a 'healthy' option.
Most supermarkets even do ranges of Vegan cookies and other snacks now too!
We have these in the US too, they are called Lara bars and RX Bars.
I try to reduce sugars, though -- they've got an addictive quality -- which takes out fruit and most snack bars and cookies.
If you know something I don’t, though, please do tell.
But it really didn't affect things, and I find myself unable to justify the cruelty of meat production.
One note: I did notice that it's tougher to control carb intake while eating veg, because meat is a great way to feel full without spiking blood sugar. When that's not an option and you're feeling like snacking, you're faced with a ton of unhealthy options. So I'm probably 10-15 lbs heavier than I would be if I ate meat.