Something needs to die for you to survive, what and how much is up to your individual tolerance for input/output ratio.
Death and suffering is a natural state of being in nature. I can reduce it, but I still need to survive.
I hate fishing. I don’t need to fish in my current station. If I did, I would fish.
In my experience I need to kill 1 large cow every 2 years to personally survive. That’s good, because that’s about my personal limit for how long I’m happy to have a cow in my freezer without charging it rent.
I need to kill an absolutely obscene number of avocados, tomatoes and other fruits and vegetable too otherwise that cow will not last me 2 years. Those are the screams that truly bother me. The daily cries of my vegetables going to slaughter.
You see, I’m not even sure if you’re:
- a fanatic vegan
- a fanatic meat eater
- just a troll
Gotta applaud you for that
I have been all of those things at various points in my life.
I really struggled with the vegan lifestyle. I can’t really eat bread or pasta because they upset my guts, and I hate potatoes. As a result, most of the free kicks in terms of energy density were off the table.
I’m a pretty big guy, and I have a super active job and active hobbies. I ended up having to eat an inhuman amount of roughage to get to the point where I stopped losing weight.
Further still I constantly felt as if I were actively fermenting some kind of wicked brew inside me. I could NOT stop farting. For almost 12 months I lived with this. All the time: In work meetings, in bed with my wife, in my motorcycle gear, in the work truck…farting. Worst of all was in the shower. I’d let a dirty vegan fart rip through sheer necessity, already knowing that the hot water would keep pounding it down and recirculating it through my nostrils but not being able to do anything about it. It was in the shower one day where I burst into tears from chewing my own farts at four o’clock in the morning that I decided I’d had enough.
I then went in completely the opposite direction and ate nothing BUT meat for 3 months. All of my digestive symptoms cleared up, my skin and hair looked amazing and I’d developed the ability to chase down wild game in the dead of night. Overall though I didn’t feel all that healthy and I could not stand the sight of another plate of meat so I threw that in the bin too and went back to being an omnivore.
At some point during this whole charade I hooked up with one of my rural neighbours who offered to sell me half a beast. Here’s where the 2 year thing comes from. Most people do not realise how much meat is in a cow. It is a fucking shitload.
HALF a cow easily fed me for an entire year when I mixed it with a wide array of vegetables, eggs, nuts and legumes - and I gave a heap of it away!
Therefore, I have had to accept that the cost of sustaining my life on this planet is 0.5 large cows per year. I do my best to return that value or greater to the world every year, and one of my acts of service is making confusing internet posts on forums that I don’t remember signing up for.
Factory farming is deplorable and extremely difficult to avoid when you shop at grocery stores. The fact that it has to exist as an industry at all whispers to me that there might just be a few too many billion omnivores on this planet to feed. My own personal problems stem from the fact that I’ve contributed to that issue: there are now 4 mouths to feed in my house! They don’t need as much meat in their diet as I do, but that still increases my household footprint above 0.5 cows per year.
If I look out of the window behind me right now, I can see old Bessy lounging by the dam in a paddock filled with lush green grass. Sometimes birds land on her but she doesn’t seem to mind, she’s pretty chill like that. She has a deep love of carrots but is unreasonably afraid of whole cabbages. I assume they make her fart.
I’ve watched Bessy enjoy life for the last 2 years, but come mid spring a loud report will echo off the hillside. I will have to deal with the mess, and the emotional upset of my children who haven’t quite mastered the art of passive detachment just yet.
One day when they are old enough, they will have to participate in the butchering if they want to eat meat. I expect I will raise a household of vegetarians and I’m ok with that. They don’t mind collecting the chicken’s eggs and we usually have at least 4 or 5 who survive their free range life long enough to reproduce. We don’t eat a lot of chickens because the maths isn’t very good.
That sounds like one hell of a journey.
Also I agree that factory farming is a poison we should eradicate. Everything about that process is as harmful as it can get to everything involved. The animals are in unnecessary pain from disease and lack of space. The ground gets poisoned by the sheer amount of manure if not from chemicals they use to reduce disease. Our antibiotics get less and less effective because we waste them “healing” ill animals that wouldn’t have gotten ill in the first place were they not cramped together like that. On top of that the meat usually tastes like shit because the unbalanced diet of the animals (usually manifests as “watery” meat).
My parents and I decided to cut down on meat consumption and instead get less but more expensive meat from a local butcher. Tastes a lot better and surprisingly we don’t even want as much meat anymore. Where previously a piece of bread had to have 2 layers of sausage on it to taste like anything now it only takes 1 layer of sausage that’s cut thinner.
Meat isn’t even the only food affected by those problems, we’ve had a similar experience with Pasta. The ones bought in stores doesn’t sate because it’s stretched with cheap ingredients, now we get it from a friend who runs an Italian delicacy store and despite the pasta costing 2x as much we run cheaper because we only need 1/4 to 1/3 as much per person.
The best argument against vegans is always the fact that plants also are living beings. Now if you are gonna create hierarchy of living beings to justify your food consumption, well…
Plants aren’t sentient though, that’s a pretty good reason to put them lower on the hierarchy of living beings that are morally ok to eat. And it’s quite likely that fewer plants die for a vegan diet than for a standard diet, as animals need a lot of feed to produce meat, eggs and dairy. Some percentage of the plant protein, fats, and carbs will always be lost along the way when we feed them to animals, so eating those plants directly is more efficient.
Sentience is hard to measure though. Also I had a weird discussion with my neighbour once who argued that in order to kill fewer sentient beings, we should eat the bigger ones as the ratio of meat per sentience was better, so we should really eat whales. Which made it pretty obvious to me that a) he was nuts and b) sentience might not be the best indicator for ethic food consumption.
/edit That doesn’t mean that I oppose the idea that eating plants is better. I’m just arguing against sentience as a good indicator.
The difference is that the fish needs to eat the other fish. We don’t need ANY animal products. So every killed animal suffered and lost their life for 10min of taste for us that we didn’t need. Being vegan is so easy in 2023.
taste
what about vitamins? proteins and other nutrients
like omega 3 fatty acid majorly found in fishes
There are plenty of plant sources of Omega 3. Flax seeds, walnuts, soybeans, and canola oil all have decent amounts of omega 3 in them. As for protein, legumes generally have a bunch.
Really, the only thing a vegan needs to supplement is B12, but even that gets added to a bunch of stuff like breakfast cereals and plant milks if you consume those.
Flax seeds, walnuts, soybeans, and canola oil all have decent amounts of omega 3 in them
They also take an enormous amount of resources to cultivate and process at industrial scale.
Wait until you learn what cattle gets fed. Spoiler: it is soy
Wait until you learn that industrial 'murica isn’t the entirety of the planet.
I am not american and I dont want to be one. The feed for animals raised for their meat in the EU and a lot of other countries that have industrial animal farms is comprised out of several plants and nutrient supplements, and a big part of that feed is soy and corn, both things that are grown mostly to feed animals.
You can take them as supplements. It’s the same for your body. Oh and you are already doing that, because they give supplements to the animals they raise and kill, we are just eliminating the middleman.
very natural
Cyanide occurs naturally. Water can be made in a lab by mixing Hydrogen and Oxygen and applying heat.
Is Cyanide good for you when occurring naturally and water bad for you when artificially synthesized?
no. But it is also not the case that nature intended for us to consume artificially synthesized anything
Natural is such a stupid argument. Is it natural for us to use a smartphone? Sit in a car and drive around? Work 8h a day instead of being with your peer group? Breed a fast growing special kind of animal, feed it with chemical ingredients and plants that don’t grow here only to eat them? Eat processed sugar? I think you get where I am going. Stop using this bullshit argument and take some supplements, your body will thank you.
I’m not saying that supplements are bad. What I am saying is that getting those things from their original source is not bad either. And no argument will get me to see it as such. You can have your supplements, it doesn’t affect me. But I will not feel guilty of doing what nature always intended me to do: i.e. eat stuff
OP will be real dangerous when he learns fish also don’t ask for consent.
Agreed, if a bear can eat a person why can’t I eat a person?!
Not sure if this is about carnivores or big, hairy gays, but hey, whatever suits you.