I'm not sure what you base this statement on. There are many people whose initial motivations for going vegan were ethical, either to avoid funding animal abuse, environmental degradation, or both.
That was why I went vegan 23.5 years ago, and why I'm still vegan. I eat mock meat and non-dairy cheese because these taste like foods I liked before I went vegan. I didn't stop eating meat and cheese because I thought it tasted bad! I loved it, but I hate what went into its production. Now I can have the foods I like without the negative externalities. That's perfect!
That said, my palette has expanded hugely since I first went vegetarian, and I also enjoy all sorts of things I used to really dislike, including more whole foods type dishes, and even raw food.
Not to pick a fight, but I don't get the basic argument that 'all animal husbandry = unnatural exploitation' given the symbiosis between species like ants and aphids etc. which I can just go and observe in my yard at this time of year.
The question of whether abuse is inherent is largely academic at this point. The fact of the matter is that almost all of the animal products we consume are the result of optimized industrial processes that result in shortened, low-quality lives for those put through them. Whether an animal could, under the right circumstances, be humanely raised for resource extraction or slaughter doesn't really apply in modern consumption.
It's inherent. Cows, like all mammals, need to have given birth to produce milk. This means dairy cows are impregnated and give birth roughly yearly. It's entirely uneconomical to raise all of the calves, since it would effectively triple or more the cost of producing milk, which is already barely profitable, even with government subsidies. So the calves are killed and sold as veal.
Wrong. Humans don't need to be pregnant or give birth to produce milk. Lactation can happen with medication or stimulation, which becomes easier as women age. If a woman is not inducing lactation with hormones, she must stimulate the breasts several times a day using hand compression or a breast pump. This is how adoptive and foster mothers breastfeed their babies. Lactation can also occur in men because they have milk glands, which is the reason they too can get breast cancer.
Now extend that train of thought towards other beings.
Perhaps you need some remedial reading comprehension.
If you are having difficulty ascertaining this point, you definitely need remedial reading comprehension.
Putting that aside for the moment because it is a rabbit hole, there is a continuum of what people think constitutes animal abuse.
One the worst side of the spectrum (IMHO), are CAFOs: Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations. These are the first things you read about when you research animal cruelty. They're the videos of hundreds of thousands of cows standing kneed deep in their shit their whole lives and pumped full of antibiotics. And yet, some people look at this and go, "Yeah, I'm cool with that."
On the other side of the spectrum, we have vegans who do not use any products derived from animals.
In between we see efforts to mitigate the cruelty, such as: free range vs. constricted cages where movement is impossible; feeding them diets of foods they would find in nature (instead of feeding cows ground up chickens); not forcing them to grow so much meat they cannot move (chicken breasts; growth hormones in cows); not forcing them to produce so much milk their udders tear and become infected so they are injected with antibiotics, etc.
For example, there is a cattle farm 10 miles from my house that has about 20 head of cattle, and you can purchase one as part of a co-op a year in advance. You can go visit the cow. You can see how it is raised and its conditions. This makes me feel a lot better than buying plastic-wrapped package from a Save-Rite supermarket. But that's me: some people might laugh at me for being "fancy pants liberal simp" other's think I'm still keeping animals from doing what they would do in nature if we weren't harvesting them.
My point is: this is not an easy answer, and in my opinion how we treat animals that we capture and cage matters. Why? Since reason is a social construct, I can go deeper if you push, but it is my choice to not make animals suffer more than they have to.
There is no economical way to do it otherwise. I honestly don't care that much about animal abuse (I do think that animal agriculture is often environmentally unsustainable), but you can't really play pretend about "some milk not involving abuse"
Personally, I am fine with it as long as no extra, unnecessary suffering is caused, but some activists may call it inherent animal abuse.
I certainly am not so arrogant as to believe I understand why each and every person eating a vegan diet has made that choice.
However, I don't think it's at all unreasonable to claim that a non-trivial number of people make the switch for health reasons, and that these plant-based substitutes are marketed based on claimed health benefits.
As to whether the plant-based substitutes are healthier, they probably are when compared to the thing they're replacing in nearly all cases. But if you want to optimize your health I'd expect a plant-based diet based on less processed foods would be much better.
> A nut is soaked and then blended with water to create a milk base, to which a culture is added. The cultured milk is left to ferment, forming a curd. After the curd is drained through a cheesecloth, it is molded into whatever shape the cheesemaker desires.
Warning though, I am not a part of the vegan club, so it is all just opinion.
Most of the vegans I know can nutrition themselves capably using non-imitation food, but still want to be able to have a pizza on occasion.
As much as some in the hackerverse like to pretend it doesn't, eating is both an emotional and an expressive experience for some people. Expecting everyone to be a rational actor in the food world is approximately as reasonable as expecting them to be rational actors in the dating world.
Being vegan is a big change, and I ate meat for 29 years, so sometimes my body wants something non-vegan and it's nice to know alternatives exist.
I never really went vegan to be 'more' healthy anyway, so I eat similar to how I did before.
There are a million different things "processing" can mean. It can be as innocuous as just chopping something up, or complicated like pickling. Not all of it is bad.
But, as an example, the Impossible Burger notably has more fat and significantly more salt than its meat-based brethren. Sure, it may be purchased due to a perceived variety of other benefits (sustainability, animal rights, etc) totally unrelated to the healthiness of the product, but it's objectively not a healthier option.
I am not saying you are wrong, but there is a whole lot more to "healthiness" than amount of fat and salt.
Depends on the beef. I looked the numbers up before I commented, and a simple beef burger made with lean ground beef weighs in at 11% fat, slightly less than the Impossible version (though yup, I admit, basically equivalent, which is what I should've said).
> 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."
Only by extension might there be a benefit to humans.
However, I think there is a parallel misconception that vegan implies healthy. This is absolutely not always the case! I do see rational health advocates more often use the phrase Whole Food Plant Based, to denote both a non-junk-food vegan diet, and a relaxation of the rule to always dispense with animal products, especially non-food products.
I’d guess that most people would prefer to eat less pre-processed food. But most people are all too busy and stressed that they don’t have time to grow their own crops, process our their food, cook meals by hand, AND make lots of money working a full time job selling insurance or whatever. And of course, much of this preprocessing makes food deliberately tastier and store longer, so there are clear benefits. So I’d guess most people are just balancing their food priorities among their needs to, say, interact in society and eat a living while staying full and healthy.
Disclaimer: I am not a vegan
Is cheese made from milk natural? I think people only believe that because cheese has been around forever, so they consider it being "normal", while they consider the vegan cheese alternatives "unusual".
Cheese is both a pretty processed product and not particularly healthy.
It's true that there's some relation between "unprocessed" and "healthy" (eat lots of veggies and fruit), but neither cheese from milk nor from plants fits that category. Also that isn't a fundamental law, it's more a "rough guidance". There's no fundamental reason a plant-based product can't be as healthy or healthier as a similar animal-based product.
This is almost the most important technology being developed right now IMO. Meat is killing us through environmental degradation and disease jumps from domesticated animals to humans. When I hear a "horror story" in the news cycle about there being no meat in a Taco Bell taco or somesuch, I'm like "if only."
Doing a quick search seems to support that, but perhaps the trends / reasons are changing as veganism in general becomes more mainstream.
https://vomadlife.com/blogs/news/why-people-go-vegan-2019-gl...
https://vomadlife.com/blogs/news/why-people-go-vegan-2019-gl...
It's like orange juice advertised as "not from concentrate" which goes through a massive amount of processing just to satisfy that labeling even though it's unlikely any folks consuming the product really want that.
Is less processing always more healthy? It's often touted as such but adding some processing can unlock nutrients vs eating raw, right?
Spinach for example, when eaten raw, has less bioavailable iron than if it were "processed" by steaming.
There is not much evidence of this working among vegan influencers (who fill their videos with meat and dairy mimicking meals) but that could be distorted by most product placements being such foods.
I've never seen the Impossible Burger, for example, pitched as a bridging mechanism. It seems to be purely about food substitution with no expectation that someone would phase that substitute out as they adapt to a plant-based diet.
I feel like the pitch is "hey look, you can be vegan/vegetarian and not miss the meat-based foods you love so much!" i.e., you can have your vegetarian cake and eat it, too.
But that then gets back to, why switch at all? If it's about ethics, these products make sense. If it's about health, it makes a lot less sense to me.
Basically, in the quest to return to a more healthy, natural diet, some folks end up moving to foods that are more and more processed.
That's not meant to be a criticism! In my mind it's just a bit of a surprising outcome and makes me wonder how folks who consume these products square that circle in their minds.