I’m gonna pull a Rogan and mention how many other sentient beings are massacred while plowing a field. Rodents, insects, snakes, birds, etc. Is that a myth?

What is the answer to feed everyone during these budget constrained times? It can’t be tofu, can it? There are just too many of us.

In the meantime, the US is overrun by dear and boars, and I’ve been learning archery.

> What is the answer to feed everyone during these budget constrained times? It can’t be tofu, can it? There are just too many of us.

You are very wrong here by order of magnitudes. The US produces about 5 billion bushes of soybeans. 1 bushel is around 60 lbs. Having made tofu myself, depending on the type of tofu you make 1 lb of dry soybeans is anywhere from 1.5 to 2 lbs of tofu(remember we are adding water to the mix so we increase weight). If 1 bushel is 60 lbs and we produce 5 billion then we have 136 million metric tons of soybeans which makes 272 million tons of tofu which is enough to feed the entire US several times over.

I'm not suggesting we actually do it but to answer your question of "is tofu the answer," it could be. The vast majority of our soybean crop was sold to other countries until Trump tariffs made China switch from us to Russia. I'm not sure what the current status of our soybean production is but we have the crop production to feed the entire US.

Thanks for the math. Obviously not everyone will go for Soyfu, but I'll attempt to integrate it into my diet. I've had it, it's an acquired taste, but what isn't really. I remember hating black caviar growing up in Ua.

Tofu is amazing when it's used for things tofu is made for instead of as a sad meat substitute. Miso soup isn't miso soup without tofu, and mapo tofu is one of the most amazing flavors in existence. (It's sichuan, so it's not for people who can't tolerate flavor.)

I'd recommend checking out Serious Eats for Kenji's "Vegan Experience" recipes. He has some tofu recipes for omnivores that I really endorse. His tofu banh mi is divine.

I just want to chime in and say it's a rather nice to see an earnest and pleasant response like this.

To your first point about the small animals in the fields that are harmed by agriculture, I think that's worth having concern about overall, certainly. But many of the animals that people currently consume are fed large quantities of crops that incur that same cost. The average beef cattle is eating such things for 18 months prior to being slaughtered, breeding sows do the same for 3-5 years, and their offspring 5-6 months on average.

If there are advances in things like cultured meat that can be produced in a sort of industrial setting at a competitive price it might be possible to drastically limit both the conscious and inadvertent harm to animals.

> mention how many other sentient beings are massacred while plowing a field. Rodents, insects, snakes, birds, etc. Is that a myth?

Loads of small field animals are killed when eating vegan. Loads more are killed when eating omnivore, because you have to plow even more field to also feed the factory-farmed animals.

> In the meantime, the US is overrun by dear and boars, and I’ve been learning archery.

Assuming you stick with it, I think that could be a good idea.

The deer are full of Chronic Wasting Disease and we've half given up trying to stop it. Many states have stopped their targeted culling programs because they're ineffective once incidence is above 5%. You're suicidal if you eat meat that you know comes from an animal with a prion disease.

I've never hunted (yet). Have fished plenty but that doesn't count.

I lived for a year in a suburb of Charlotte NC a couple of years ago, and there were herds of whitetails on my dog walks.

I'd like to learn more about "Chronic Wasting Disease" if you have any resources, because on podcasts or r/Archery and the like, "harvesting your own food" is par for the course. Thank you.

Decent overview from the US CDC https://www.cdc.gov/chronic-wasting/about/index.html in one study, Rhesus monkeys were infected by eating CWD infected meat. There's no cure or mitigation of prion diseases so that'd be enough for me to stay away from hunted deer in any county with reported incidence of it. And deer range and roam, and not every place in the country is as on top of testing for it as everywhere else. Maybe I'm Chicken Little, but I don't like the odds.

Thanks. Wild stuff, pun intended. Even though the article mentions “The disease hasn't been shown to infect people”, just the thought of a “maybe” is deterrent enough. But then, who knows what’s in the meat I’m getting from Costco. Perhaps the fish are next and the Soylent future is upon us.

There's a case to be made for wild/hunted meat. But the majority of meat production worldwide relies on feeding those animals farmed plants, and that entails a lot more plowed fields than farming plants for direct human consumption does.

> What is the answer to feed everyone during these budget constrained times?

It's much more efficient to use land to grow food crops for people to eat directly than it is to grow food for livestock and then have people eating the livestock.

It's one of the reasons that I've been pescetarian for a few decades - it's unsustainable for everyone to eat substantial amounts of meat and there's a lot of deforestation just to sate people's desire for burgers.

You say that like it's mandatory to kill sentient life to feed people. It isn't.

aren't plants also sentient?

Isn't all life sentient?

If not, where do you draw the line? "It has eyes and bilateral symmetry and an endoskeleton looks vaguely human-like so I can anthropomorphize it"? "Only members of the animal kingdom are conscious"?

Do you think plants achieve the same degree of sentience as say, a pig? Or would drawing even that line be too arbitrary for you?

honestly, I don't know.

Sentience is consciousness. I can't imagine what it must be like to be a plant, the plants existence is too different from mine for me to imagine it.

It would be like trying to imagine life in a 12-dimensional space - I'm a human, with a human consciousness, living in 3-dimensional space, that makes sense to me.

I can empathize, and to a certain degree imagine what it must be like to be a dog or a cat or a cow, because they're very similar to me in how they work. They move, they eat, they poop, they reproduce sexually. They have similar mammalian feelings and similar DNA (well, more similar than the plant).

But for all I know a plant, say the spinach I had a few days ago, could be just as conscious, albeit in a way that I absolutely cannot comprehend, and my ripping off the plant's leaves to eat them may be, to the plant, every bit as painful as someone ripping out my lungs to eat them.

So you acknowledge the former but can't get past the latter. Got it. I wonder how the judges will score.

sorry for the stupid question, but what is "the former" and what is "the latter"?

Did you mean I acknowledge the sentience of plants but not animals?

I believe that all life might be conscious, but life that is "very different" from me I have a hard time imagining what that consciousness might be like. For animals, especially mammals, I can easily imagine what they must be feeling and empathize with them. I can understand that a cow feels pain when hurt, because the cow is very similar to me. A plant might also feel pain when hurt (even the grass I step on might not appreciate me walking on it), but I'd have a harder time empathizing with that.

It's never stupid to clarify what someone means if they communicate in a way that's unclear to you.

'Former' and 'latter' were in reference to the two questions I posed to you.

I think that for vegans, "sentience" is a meaningless woo-woo word, like when a Christian talks about immortal souls. They use it because its origin in science fiction gives it the veneer of empiricism, but its all hollow with subjectivity.

Though it's been 10 or 15 years, Wikipedia used to have a page that listed 6 criteria for biological life (but it became politically inconvenient). The same ones we all used to learn in school. One of them was "responds to stimuli"...

If there is an objective definition of "sentience", then the only one I've ever heard is "responds to stimuli". Which plants (and even the most primitive unicellular organisms) meet. And if "sentience" doesn't mean this, then I challenge anyone to come up with another better one.

So, to make a long story short, I like eating sentient things, and I'm not ever going to stop. And it tastes even better when it seems to cause distress to vegans.

> And it tastes even better when it seems to cause distress to vegans.

Odd flex. Try not to worry so much about what other people think of you. It'll make you a better human.

No, plants, bacteria, mushrooms are obviously not sentient as they lack a brain.

I always wonder what vegans think is going to happen to all the pigs, cows, and chickens if people stop eating meat?

Demand would go down, so meat companies would reduce breeding to reduce output. Or start an ad & lobbying campaign to increase demand again.

Billions of pigs cows and chickens will stop being massacred in grizzly ways? Yours is an extremely common and unfortunately ill-informed argument that I see a lot. If I was given the choice between end all suffering by killing all factory farmed animals right now vs perpetuate it, im choosing kill all animals right now

It sounds like you don't have a problem with killing animals. Is it just the living conditions? If we replaced factory farms with more ethical practices, would that solve the problem for you?

> would that solve the problem for you?

not the person you replied to, but it mostly would for me. Factory farms are among the closest things to hell on earth.

Maybe we need a certification for ethical animal raising. I know we can buy free range eggs and chicken, and grass fed beef, but I know know if that really means anything.

Somewhat. I think we are still quite a long way from ethical practices even in the "good" cases.

I eat meat, but try to limit it to once a week and have replaced milk with oat and soy in a lot of places. I still love cheese but it does give me conflict when I spend even a second thinking about what it takes to actually get cheese. (Cows dont lactate without pregnancy). That said, my own personal philosophy is that we have likely evolved to consume animal products so I cant dismiss it fully, just reduce my own consumption. ~75% of all agricultural land is used to feed livestock, yet livestock produces only 18% of the world's calories and 37% of its protein, which just seems insanity to me.

https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets

> I always wonder what vegans think is going to happen to all the pigs, cows, and chickens if people stop eating meat?

factory farms would stop breeding animals to kill them? Did you think you had an argument here?

I can imagine this poster's chortle thinking to themself, 'they thought I meant the animals!'

Should pacifists likewise murder one person?