861–870 of 947 posts
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Seems a heck of a lot easier to motivate people to feed their cows on land nobody wants anyways than to invent "vegetarian meat".
Unfortunately not. There is simply not enough land to replace all beef with grass-fed beef.
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The difference is again in whether there is a good reason to do something, or not. There is no good reason to toture e.g. someone's house cat, so it would cause unnecessary suffering. There is a good reason to kill another animal to eat it: to eat it. But again that does not justify torturing the animal before eating it.
I think that still leaves open the issue of humans hunting animals for sport. For example, if someone enjoys hunting lions, is that "a good reason", in the same way that someone enjoying torturing a house cat is "not a good reason"? Fortunately I think there is a simple resolution to this question, in that torturing animals is heavily associated with (if not predictive or causative of) a tendency to harm humans too,…
I honestly don't think so. In the same way, I don't think it's a good reason to rape someone because it would give the rapist pleasure.
There has to be a balance, right? Killing an animal to eat it makes sense, because you can't eat it without klling it. But causing pain and suffering beyond what's absolutely unavoidable (you're killing the animal so it is going to be in at least some distress for some time before it dies) is madness. Only maniacs enjoy watching another living being in suffering.
And I do believe that people who enjoy killing animals, for any reason, are broken somewhere in their heads. Taking a life is not something to be enjoyed.
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I've read this before, and yet weirdly, there're literally hundreds of millions of people on this planet[0] who've never eaten meat once in their lives, and somehow they're not all paralyzed and dead before the age of two. I'm not a vegetarian, but maybe we can avoid obviously-false statements like this. Please? 0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegetarianism_by_country
Yes sorry. You are right I wasn't very clear and also I didn't realize that B12 actually comes from bacteria and archaea. The organisms that provide us vitamin B12 tend to host said bacteria and archaea within their GI. Alternatively supplements are provided (as I mentioned). Nutritional yeast, dairy, and vitamin pills are some of the ways in which vegetarians survive. Apparently certain beans are high in B12 as well…
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The same happens when humans switch to a largely corn diet. Corn and wheat (maybe just grains) just don't seam healthy. If I had to drop meat, I'd primarily eat beans/legumes.
That's why only Europe has its cuisine based on grains. All other regions base their cuisine on either potatoes or rice.
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The difference is again in whether there is a good reason to do something, or not. There is no good reason to toture e.g. someone's house cat, so it would cause unnecessary suffering. There is a good reason to kill another animal to eat it: to eat it. But again that does not justify torturing the animal before eating it.
That is absolutely false. Yes you can eat the animal you kill, but this is not about hunting for survival. We don't need to eat animals to stay alive and healthy. The reason we eat animals isn't even because it's good for us; it's just that we like it. We could defend torturing them with the same argument: we like it, so why not? In any case, some (most) forms of animal food indeed require torturing the animals to pr…
This is the reason we like to eat meat: because we are animals who need to eat meat to live, thrive and survive.
And plants also. We also need to eat plants to survive. We need to eat more plants than meat to surive. But a balanced diet includes some meat or animal products, like eggs or dairy.
>> It is a novel and interesting line of reasoning to pretend that the justification to kill animals is that we are "the same"; but if we extend that argument, we find that there is no reason to prefer your life over a pig's life.
I'm sorry but I don't "pretend" anything. I claim something and you disagree with it- but please don't demean my contribution of my opinion to this thread by insinuating that I'm being dishonest.
The idea that humans are different to animals has been used to defend both cruelty to animals, saying they don't have a soul and so do not feel pain and therefore we can abuse them freely; and the cessation of animal exploitation, saying that humans stand at a higher moral ground than other animals and "we should know better".
Personally, I prefer my life over a pig's life. I don't know your life.
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I eat less meat because I think quality has declined; as meat is seen as the default-superior option, quality is less scrutinised, and has thus lowered. As such, either I buy expensive, from a trusted location, I I stick to something else; Vegan options has been good quality so far, not that I don't expect this to change in the future. Right now highly processed & shaped pink slime (with added salt + sugar) is sold a…
Don't think it's just marketing though. People always reject change at first - and they are right to do so. This reaction is coded in us. I just hope vegan food items will not go the path of electric vehicles where they are forced on us without choice. (Saying this as a plant-based eater).
To be fair, it's currently heavily subsidized, and isn't taxed in proportion to the resources (land/water/carbon) it uses, so we're kinda living outside our means already - the exact same is true of fossil-fuel based vehicles..
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Field corn is hardly a byproduct. It's inedible to humans, yes, but a different crop could be grown instead.
This entire thread is hijacked by talking about "cow farts". Meat, the way it's farmed today, is far more intensive than what meets the eye. There's the land required to raise the crops that feed the animals, there's transportation of this feed and the raw material to grow the feed, there's the deforestation caused by the land requirement, and on and on. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/31/avoiding...
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You're in the minority though - there appears to be 50 billion hamburgers eating in the US every year which is about 150 per person. Meat substitutes are a transitionary item - for those used to eating meat. I've been vegan for 35 years and rarely cook with them (tempeh and tofu are the only things that come close). I get plenty of protein from vegetables, beans etc. and the thought of eating a mock meat just doesn't…
> in the US every year which is about 150 per person. Is the average person in the US really eating 3 hamburgers per week?
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"Hunter- Gatherers " There is a great deal of misinformation about hunter-gather diets: https://globalhealth.duke.edu/news/what-can-hunter-gatherers... or https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-paleo-diet-ha... (I didn't invest much effort in finding illustrative links, there are many more, and academic research). Walking around constantly and digging up/harvesting edible plants, insects, fungi, possibly carr…
The hunter-gatherer argument also fails an important sniff test for me. Evolutionarily-driven arguments fail to take into account that what may have been sufficient outcomes to drive selection (e.g. survival to/through reproductive prime) do not meet our current values and standards of acceptability. Heart disease, diabetes, cancer, etc. tend to strike after people are done reproducing but long before what we conside…
You also hint at traditional societies having much shorter lifespans than modern ones; it's true they have much higher rates of infant and childhood mortality, but lifespans for people who make it past childhood are very similar.
https://www.sapiens.org/biology/human-lifespan-history/
I agree evolutionary arguments in and of themselves will never be convincing (since there will always necessarily be a large amount of conjecture), but they are not being made in isolation: they providing an explanation for the observed fact that people living in modern societies are suffering a rising epidemic of degenerative diseases, and people living in traditional societies are not.
See also: the fantastic book "Nutrition and Physical Degeneration" by Weston Price.