I agree that there is a point in the belief that it is unethical to kill animals. That's not the most unethical thing that is happening in the world, there are a lot of things to argue about, but in general, I agree that in an ideal world, we should not do that.
The environmental concerns, I only buy half-heartedly. I don't really believe that land-owners will transform their pastures or soy cultures into rain forest instead of another profitable exploitation, I'd rather have states force responsible production and norms.
It is just not practical for me to go full-veg, where I live I would need to cook one hour a day for it, and I am a lousy cook, I have neither the inclination or the motivation for it.
But I reduced my consumption more and more. It was surprising to see how my taste changed. I used to be a huge meat eater and now I find eating even a small steak a bit nauseating. I almost eat no beef anymore, little pork but mostly chicken and fish, and even these I eat little.
I'm just going to refer to the factory farming article from 80000hours:
https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/factory-farming/
Considering that "Each year, 50 billion animals are raised and slaughtered in factory farms globally. Over a billion animals live in factory farms at any point of time in the United States. Most experience serious levels of suffering.", I would argue that it's hard to find anything comparable in magnitude to that tragedy if one allows that farmed animals are even a 1/100th fraction as conscious as humans.
I would... probably not enjoy being proven wrong this time :S
Wild animal suffering is a different beast altogether.
Your last question is on the point though. Do the animals raised for meat have lives worth living?
No. For the same reason that murdering your 4 year old is not ethically equivalent to using birth control.
It's not about taking suffering away. Animals born in the wild live their life naturally. Animals created by us in farms are raised for one thing, for human consumption. If an animal wants to run away in wild and do it's thing, it has that choice. In captivity, we force the choice humans made for them.
Basically if we have slightest amount of empathy for our pets and are willing to apply that to other animals, eating meat doesn't look enticing.
How did you come to that conclusion?
I don't think it's anywhere close to "unquestionably".
Not necessarily more in every case but they do suffer in many different ways. Nonhuman animals in the wild are routinely exposed to: starvation, dehydration, disease, injuries, predation, parasitism and extreme weather conditions:
> The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored.
– Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life
> It's not about taking suffering away. Animals born in the wild live their life naturally.
A "natural" life does not necessarily mean a good one.
> Animals created by us in farms are raised for one thing, for human consumption. If an animal wants to run away in wild and do it's thing, it has that choice.
The choice to do what? The vast majority of nonhuman animals receive no help with their suffering. There are exceptions of course like when we help by rescuing trapped animals, vaccinating and healing injured and sick animals, caring for orphaned animals etc. But the general rule is a very short life (most nonhuman animals in the wild don't live to adulthood) with far more suffering experienced than happiness.
> Basically if we have slightest amount of empathy for our pets and are willing to apply that to other animals, eating meat doesn't look enticing
No disagreement here, but the same empathy should be given to nonhuman animals suffering in the wild and we should help to reduce their suffering as much as practically possible. Widespread interventions aren't practical now due to a lack of knowledge and resources but our future descendants may well be in a better position to make an effective difference.
Further reading:
* https://foundational-research.org/the-importance-of-wild-ani...
* https://www.animal-ethics.org/wild-animal-suffering-section/...
* http://www.olemartinmoen.com/wp-content/uploads/TheEthicsofW...
As to the second question, that is an active topic of research:
https://foundational-research.org/the-importance-of-wild-ani...
with some info on Wikipedia as well:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_animal_suffering#Ecology_...
From my perspective, the conclusion seems to be wrong, and thus I deny the first premise.
Or, is there an amount of happiness that outweighs some amount of suffering? Among utilitarians, that's one of the major differences.
Your argument is valid and has been made before, and the answers are varied:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_utilitarianism#The_be...
The debate between living vs avoiding suffering has very important implications for artificial life, artificial consciousness, artificial intelligence, and even space colonization and curing aging.
And, it raises an interesting question about the moral gravity of preventing existence.
I don't even attribute the same value to life of different species. I don't think that worm farms are as bad as cow farms.
I tend to buy organic/free range animal products. I think factory farms are terrible, I would not mind seeing them gone, but imposing free range would be terrible for the environment.
Free range ones are not too unethical as they provide to animals close to the best they could hope for if they were free.
It would have to be coupled with other measures to limit resources depletion, but it's the right thing to do imho. It would raise the price much higher, factoring in humane treatment. Sales would drop due to this higher price, there wouldn't be as many farm animals as now.
That's why I wish we solve the environmental issues first, as well as the food security of the whole population.
I agree that factory farming isn't ideal, but it seems to me that it is less ideal from the perspective of the animal for their entire bloodline to be terminated. To make a strong argument against factory farming, you have to provide a feasible alternative that IMO doesn't exist.
The question really comes down to whether or not you consider the opportunity to experience life, even a particularly difficult life, as a blessing.
A life born of slavery, torture, and slaughter is not a life worth living. An animal doesn't really have the idea of a bloodline or legacy (just the primal urge to reproduce). The rationalization that a life of suffering is somehow doing the animal a favor is just asinine.
I understand that this isn't a philosophy that I share with everybody but you should still be respectful of it.
Just how shitty of a life do you need to have to not be worth living? People who spend their lives in prison don't usually kill themselves. You can read stories about people captured as prisoners of war who have no hope that they will ever escape, but they don't attempt to kill themselves. Are they being "asinine"?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Frankl
> After enduring the suffering in these camps, Frankl concluded that even in the most absurd, painful, and dehumanized situation, life has potential meaning and that, therefore, even suffering is meaningful.
I think comparing it is a false equivalency. Also Godwin's Law.
After reading a little bit about meaning, it seems that it's something that has to be found first
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meaning_(existential)
so even if there's meaning in the most miserable of lives, it's not guaranteed that it will be found. However, I haven't found anything suggesting that meaning makes life worth living, only a passing mention of it bringing happiness, which doesn't square with my understanding of torture or concentration camps. Am I misunderstanding what meaning is?
At least they'll have a life that they wouldn't have had otherwise.
Under His Eye. Blessed be the fruit.
And when I say generally immoral, it obviously becomes nuanced when rape or young age is involved.
My parents lived for years with the guilt that had been instilled in them by their religious upbringing. It was one of the hardest decisions they ever had to make so they could give their future offspring the best life possible.
Research has shown that abortion laws lead to lower crime rates, lower poverty and a higher educated populous. My sisters and I are living proof of that.
Similarly, I think it is immoral to use force to get other people to do what you want. But that quickly becomes a nuanced argument when you start taking public safety into account, or crime prevention. Life doesn't take place in a vacuum so I'm not trying to pass judgement.
This seems to be an extreme pro-life point of view. You could ask exactly the same question about contraceptives.
I would accept that in the general case, but since you let your utilitarian views slip, I have to ask: what's the difference?
When something is immoral, it means it has a negative utility, and therefore it should be avoided. When something is moral, it has a positive utility, and therefore it's something that should be strived for, barring any other activity with greater utility. In my eyes, that makes every moral thing a utilitarian's moral imperative, with the only gap being things that have no moral value.
How does my view differ from yours?
I can think of a number of activities that would provide greater utility than attemting to impregnate as many women as possible.
I'm not a pure utilitarian and I see a distinction between the concepts of morality and utility. Mostly because I'm not capable of gauging utility all the time, so I can fall back on broader moral principles.
The difference is that I don't mind calling even the smallest, least important actions, which have the least chance to be the best thing to do at the moment, prerogatives.
I think if you compare the utility that livestock farming provides, with all the externalties and all the suffering it produces is indeed unethical.
Side note: in my time in kitchens, I learned that the art of storing/reheating food is just as important as from-scratch preparation.
I understand parent is not motivated to learn it, but I encourage them to rethink it, and I leave this message for everyone else. Personally, cooking has been an incredibly fulfilling and freeing life skill to acquire.
If farmers switch to other exploitative crops, it should drive up the supply and down the price of those crops, reducing the drive to clear more rain forest.
I'd rather not gamble away the rainforest to optimism about humans acting rational. It's already irrational: humans will optimize towards short term gains.
More of a light hearted example. I worked at a grocery store years ago, one summer the 4L ice cream buckets stopped having handles. A lot of people complained, they liked to use them for berry picking and other things. One day I asked the people we ordered the dairy stuff from why. Turns out, some accountant figured out they'd have a marginal gain of 1¢ per ice cream bucket if they removed the handles. In the end though, that year we ended up throwing a lot of them away, whereas the summer before we'd had trouble keeping them in stock. People really liked those bucket handles. I still wonder if the penny savings were worth the loss in sales from people that wanted buckets with handles more than ice cream.
I experienced the same, which was really odd. I guess you can learn to like (or dislike) a taste.
The other thing I noticed that concerns about suffering started to weigh far stronger for me once the environmental concerns made me stop eating meat. I think that I subconsciously ignored or trivialised a lot of the information I got about what was and is actually happening in that sector.
Why does eating meat mean you can cook less?
Before moving in, I used to think it should be easy to be vegetarian in a Buddhist country but it is not. Japan's culinary habit is that a good meal needs to have a lot of different ingredients in it. From a dietetics point of view, that's great but it often means that even in most salads, you'll have a few pieces of bacon or chicken, a shrimg or some grains of minced meat.
That still makes for a very meat-light diet and would switch to a no-meat-at-all in a heartbeat if those bentos and salads came in vegetarian versions, but that makes it almost impossible to avoid meat.
Meat's convenient in a way that vegetables aren't.
Veggies are less effort: peel some, chop into suitably sized bits. To compare like with like compare with pre-sliced and peeled veggies, or animal carcass before skinning and butchering. :)
Something like a rosti with cheese or added spinach or cabbage is cooked meat speed fast and tasty, as are a whole host of the traditional leftovers recipes that grew up to use up spuds, carrots, cabbage etc next day.
Are you treating your vegetables like wagyu beef and giving them massages or something? If not, aside from a quick wash, cooking vegetables is no more difficult than cooking meat. Sautee them, bake them, pan fry, deep fry, air fry, broil, steam, sous vide, etc...
Meat on the other hand is greatly benefited by things like marination, mechanical tenderizing, monitoring temperature as it cooks. You can whip up a steak pretty quick, but probably not any faster than you could stir fry some veggies.
Also in particular, stir frying isn't a great example of a vegetable preparation which is fast. Prep is usually at least twice the amount of time as the frying.
Peanut butter celery sticks would be a better example I think.
There are so many variables it's hard to say anything concrete, but on average I'd bet people spend less active time preparing vegetables to eat than meat.
Maybe with very thin, low quality grocery store steaks. When I eat meat I buy steaks from a butcher that are over an inch thick, and require 5-7 minutes minimum per side for medium rare. Sometimes even more for thicker cuts
>prep is less than a minute. Also in particular, stir frying isn't a great example of a vegetable preparation which is fast. Prep is usually at least twice the amount of time as the frying.
A lot of people think vegetables are difficult because they don't have knife skills so it takes multiple minutes to cut a piece of produce. With practice, prep for cooking vegetables should be just as fast. Also, even if it does take an extra couple minutes of my time, its worth it for my own health and morals by not supporting industrialized farming
Imagine if a wizard finished casting a very complicated and resource-intensive spell and the result is that every living cow, pig, chicken and turkey in the meat industry were replaced with a clone of a dog you've met. In the thousands of crowded compound pens, the millions of tiny cages, on the assembly lines facing captive bolt pistols like the one from No Country for Old Men-- there is now that dog. In that moment, what would be an example of something happening that is more unethical? Of course the answer would be different for each person; some people would have the point that we can't compare apples to oranges. For me I find it hard to imagine a war or a process of exploitation in 2019 that measures up.
But I grew up in the countryside, I knew some cows and goats, heard the sad cry of the cows when you take their calves away. The reason why I eat very little beef and pork now but have less problems with chicken and fish is because I do feel different about them.
See I used to be more concerned about the ethics of animal exploitation as a kid than as an adult. (My experience was with free range animals though.) One of the questions I often came back at as a kid was "Do the animals understand what is happening? Why don't they try to escape?" It puzzled me that the cattle seemed to love their captors. Food was more primordial to them than freedom.
Then I realized some things: most humans would take such a deal. Security vs freedom. If I offered you to double your life expectancy (which is basically what wild vs farm animals experience), to feed and cure you, provide a more comfortable shelter than you could be able to get on your own, would you object to me eating your meat at a determined date?
I know I would refuse, I used to think most humans would but nowadays I am far less optimistic about that, and I am pretty certain that most animals would sign in.
I still think the whole system is unethical and an ideal world should not have it, so I do limit my meat consumption, I don't participate in the boohooing of vegans. I just don't see it as the highest priority ethical concern right now.
So the question might reasonably be 'are the conditions these animals face worse than never existing?'.
Not an enviable choice, but it confounds some of the simple ethical arguments for, eg, vegetarianism.
Our goal is to minimize the amount of suffering we are responsible of. In that respect it is obviously better to not breed animals than to breed them and make them suffer.
I'm interested in food insecurity and related things, which is why I ask.
Not even morningstar farms veggie burgers in grocery stores. But that was 10 years ago, things are different now.
Whenever I go home for Christmas I'm amazed at what's available.
Before moving in, I used to think it should be easy to be vegetarian in a Buddhist country but it is not. Japan's culinary habit is that a good meal needs to have a lot of different ingredients in it. From a dietetics point of view, that's great but it often means that even in most salads, you'll have a few pieces of bacon or chicken, a shrimp or some grains of minced meat.
That still makes for a very meat-light diet and I would switch to a no-meat-at-all in a heartbeat if those bentos and salads came in vegetarian versions, but that makes it almost impossible to totally avoid meat.
This must be a marketing gimmick; eating animals is very nutritious—it's just not sufficient. However, this is the same as Avacado/acai berry/whatever.
I have heard milk referred to as a superfood quite a bit.
Might have something to do with the billions spent on marketing meat and dairy. Pretty big industries with pretty big financial contributions to our wonderful politicians, for decades now.
I would probably be fine with replacing it with a lighter version of soylent (it's too thick to serve as milk), but the idea that we drink milk because of marketing, or that they're artificially inflating the nutrition you get out of milk, is laughable.
The plant "milk" lobby, on the other hand tries to trick me into buying their product every time I'm at the damn store by redefining "milk" to mean "that white liquid".... https://plantbasedfoods.org/plant-based-foods-association-te...
> Companies selling dairy alternatives are using easy to understand, clear, descriptive, and truthful language on labels. Our members and others in this category, are using common English words that consumers understand: milk, cheese, yogurt and butter. To our members, and to consumers, these words represent functionality, form and taste, not necessarily the origin of the primary ingredient.
That's bullshit and they know it. If you ask for butter, or cheese, or yogurt at the store and they give you a vegan product you'd be right to be annoyed. They approximate the food only at the shallowest level of perception and are very different foods to work with in the kitchen.
Also, I do like almond milk—just not as a milk replacement.
What? "Got Milk"? Milk mustaches on famous people and athletes? Come on.
> plant "milk" lobby, on the other hand tries to trick me into buying their product every time
Au contraire! That pesky, evil, plant milk lobby! Are you really that confused when it says "soy", "milk", "oat", "almond" right before "milk"?
So—you're saying NOBODY would drink milk if they stopped advertising after THOUSANDS OF YEARS of drinking it as adults (true with my genes!) and MILLIONS OF YEARS of juvenile mammalian existence? Extent is not the same as the sole cause. I drink milk because it makes me nostalgic for my childhood and hey, it's calories, baby! In any case, you conveniently cut out the meat of the sentence when you quoted me—milk advertises itself by being highly nutritious, which is less true of plant-based milks, which you typically gravitate to because you want milk but can't have it for reason X.
> Are you really that confused when it says "soy", "milk", "oat", "almond" right before "milk"?
It's actually rarely obvious in my experience, especially when they place e.g. Silk next to dairy. I've accidentally bought plant-based milk twice because I didn't recognize the brand and the plant-based nature was not emphasized on the packaging. This feels very intentional to me.
Partially related: I don't think I've seen a milk advertisement in years. Are they spending less or am I just avoiding the areas they're targeting (notably: video ads/). I swear I used to see them on billboards all the time. Maybe SF is just an expensive market to advertise to....
Nostalgia, huh? Is that worth the environmental damage and severe ethics concerns? Not to mention, uh, you're drinking a cow's milk that should be for its children. We're the only species that does that. It's so odd.
Soy milk tastes great, has a nice nutrition profile, and is actually good for you (and the environment, and the animals).
No, I am but a weak and flawed human that likes dairy and meat. Ideally I'd stop eating and drinking all of this today.
> Not to mention, uh, you're drinking a cow's milk that should be for its children. We're the only species that does that. It's so odd.
Life is odd. I will say that I grew up around dairy cows and they don't seem to mind what happens to their milk, so that is emphatically not a concern for me, and I would not have been able to be around cows at all if it weren't for the dairy market. (how's that for an ethical dilemma? the animals that will survive the ongoing extinction event are likely to be exploited by humans.) The environmental and humanitarian concerns (e.g. meat eating, farming conditions) are much, much larger concerns for me.
> Soy milk tastes great, has a nice nutrition profile, and is actually good for you (and the environment, and the animals).
I don't disagree with this at all. I'm not arguing FOR milk, certainly not from an ethical standpoint, I'm just pointing out the ludicrous double standard of people with clear agendas to push plant-based drinks who then talk shit about "big dairy". It's all manipulative and shitty—comparing the actual food is much more interesting.
No. It's not.
I like Dr. Fuhrman's equation: H=N/C. This equation expresses the concept that your health (H) is predicted by your nutrient intake (N) divided by your calorie intake (C). There's not a lot of nutrients in meat (all you get really is protein and iron), whereas in vegetables/fruits you get a whole vast assortment of proteins, vitamins, fiber, phytochemicals, antioxidants, etc.
Meat also has the problem of being a carcinogen, per the WHO [0].
> I have heard milk referred to as a superfood quite a bit.
Nope. It's not.
Milk has a ton of sugar, lactose is not well-tolerated by something like 80% of the population, and the proteins in milk are potentially carcinogenic. [1] Anyway, and that's just the nutrition angle - not even getting into the horrific ethics problems and environmental problems. We need to move away from meat. We can do better.
0. https://www.who.int/features/qa/cancer-red-meat/en/
1. https://nutritionstudies.org/provocations-casein-carcinogen-...
Your whole post is ill-informed, but this is particularly nonsensical. Go look up nutrition information for any muscle meat and you'll see plenty more than just iron, to say nothing of organ meat.
Regarding protein, you get a broader amino acid profile from animals, but this doesn't really matter.
Yet I've cited the WHO and Dr. T. Colin Cambell, author of the China Study. Where's your evidence?
> Regarding protein, you get a broader amino acid profile from animals, but this doesn't really matter.
Completely incorrect. Soy and pea protein are very much complete proteins with balanced amino acid profiles.
How do you reconcile the environmental damage from your dietary preferences?
I'm really tired of this form of argument. The fact that you cited something doesn't necessitate its relevance, truth or your understanding of it.
You've also ignored the specific bit of your post I called out as more importantly inaccurate, so I'm really not interested in engaging any further.
In my circles it's tallow, A2 milk, and beef liver that are huge in popularity but I agree mainstream goes for coconut water, oat milk, etc. Those are a function of big ag ad dollars I imagine, more than decisive tastes or the actual super-ness of any food.
Perhaps, but when you look at what's behind "A2 milk" (I hadn't heard of it before), it's basically a single company promoting their brand with largely BS statements. The Wikipedia article has plenty of details: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A2_milk
Energy wasted on growing plants that feed humans directly is feeding a 1st order process. Energy wasted on growing plants that feed animals that feed humans indirectly is feeding a 2nd order process.
Animals need to keep their body warm, grown their body, have immunity, give birth, grow offspring inside their body and then after all that they give you milk and meat.
Incomparable.
We have numbers from actual research on that:
https://plantproteins.co/vegan-plant-based-diet-statistics/
https://animalcharityevaluators.org/blog/is-the-percentage-o...
So, yes it increases, and quite fast even.
And for me the biggest marker is that it's now advertised on the package. Not just the small vegan logo, there is big lettering like "suitable for vegetarians" or "meat-free" or whatever. It must have become a selling point.
But: I rarely order vegan in a restaurant. I find it's much easier to do vegan at home. Why? Mostly food safety and storage. After cooking vegan for a few weeks, when I cooked meat, I realized just how much of a pain in the *$$ maintaining food safety is.
Because you live in the west. In most of the world, plants can be just as dangerous as meat, sometimes more so. Google "pork tapeworm". You can get it from eating undercooked pork or, more commonly, from poorly-washed vegetables grown anywhere near pigs. Do you wash your salads in chlorinated water? I doubt it. You can only get away with that because, in the west, we have physically separated farm animals from crops.
I keep seeing this. Where are people picking this up from?
ect. | Common Errors in English Usage and More https://brians.wsu.edu/2016/05/25/ect/
For those who like to heavily politicize diet, this is a perspective that gets buried by absolutists who like to identify as either pro/anti-meat. Silly.
I take a middle view that too much cholesterol is probably best avoided but I don't think it demands being dispensed with. And just because we "don't need it" doesn't mean there aren't benefits, like a testosterone boost.
Veg/vegan food was always just food to me, so all this hub bub about it is bizarre to me.
No. I've eaten pretty much everywhere around. Italian, Chinese and Mexican places in particular have built in vegan options pretty much by default. I'm surprised there aren't such Chinese or Mexican options in LA (although when confronted with something like "gan bian si ji dou" or even "dry fried green beans" on a menu, it's not immediately obvious if it's vegan or not).
I spent a bit of time in Seattle over a decade ago. I was trying to save money at the time, so I didn't order out much, but I do remember burritos from Taco Del Mar being fine no matter what is (or isn't) in them. There was a great place for fries called Frites which appears to be closed now and a bunch of Indian places, too. I also remember a hot dog place near the Lenin statue with all kinds of options, but any mention of that place seems to be wiped off the net, so I might have just imagined it. :)
I wasn't trying to say what is or isn't the norm, just that I don't understand why people make a such a big deal about what they, or others, are eating.
This has given me more ideas on what to cook without meat besides, Indian food or pasta.
Especially in progressive cities and circles, meat and oil are in the same class. It's hip to eat veg, socially conscious.
But if you dig on vegan food
Well come over to my work
I’ll have them cook you something
that you’ll really love
It's always been trendy in certain circles, I think the expansion now is partly environmentalism and partly "mainstreaming of hipsterness".
Based on anecdotes and my social circles, the number of people completely avoiding meat hasn't changed. But omnivores adopting a semi-veg lifestyle has increased.
If I had to pick one thing, I'd say environmental concerns are the main reason my omnivore friends and colleagues are eating less meat.