In my experience they often do go vegan overnight though. The key tends to be actually connecting the food on your plate with where it came from and accepting that animals are capable of suffering. Once that connection is made, animal products simply aren’t seen as food anymore and going vegan overnight is the only logical conclusion.
Some people may be further along the spectrum towards being vegan when this connection is actually made but regardless of if you are vegetarian, “only eat free range meat”, or an unapologetic meat eater, once the connection is made they are vegan.
Yes, that is my point. Whether someone is vegetarian, “trying to be more ethical” but still eating meat, or just a meat eater that has never even considered ethics, there is nothing that says you have to go through all of those steps to becoming vegan. In my experience, regardless of how far along you are in those “steps” once you make the connection between the food on your plate and the animals that it comes from and you realize that they are suffering for you, you go vegan. That could be meat eater to vegan, “ethical” meat eater to vegan, or vegetarian to vegan. My point is that in my experience that process does happen overnight.
I mean… reducing meat is how people would go vegan over longer period if time (as opposed to over night) though? Not sure where you were going with your original comment.
The word easier here is a choice. What is more comfortable is easier, but eating a plant based diet is very easy. It’s cheaper and widely available in most countries. What you mean by easier really refers to more comfortable, not really to there being less physical obstacles
Depends on availability. Plenty of eateries don’t have vegan options and this is especially true for locations accommodating larger groups.
Furthermore, a lot of vegans need supplements (as I’ve been told), which is also subject to availability.
Lastly, it’s easier to convince a thousand people to eat less meat – especially since they usually already have the ingredients required for vegetarian food at home – than to skip meat alltogether.
Two thousand meals a week that turned vegetarian is a lot more impact than 70 meals turned vegan.
It’s not that a lot of vegans need supplements, they’re just more aware of what the body should get, when in fact almost everyone likely needs supplements. They just don’t know it.
Maybe you are thinking of processed vegan food, like a vegan nugget or hamburger. That is completely unnecessary. beans, lentils, chickpeas, seaweed, grains, rice, vegetables, nuts… those are widely available and enough for a healthy diet.
For the rest I agree, it’s easier to convince an omnivore to go vegetarian than vegan. But that has to do with their will, not with actual physical limitations.
It is easy once you are in, know what are the good vegan meals and how to cook them etc. Most people will have animal product for each meal - they don’t know better. To them vegans just eat salads and nuts, which is obviously not enticing. If they don’t take the easy way, they will just continue the only way they know how and change nothing.
I agree with you. I guess the difference lies in that I would call that laziness. Not knowing how to eat balanced meals (or more precisely, not looking it up), it’s not a matter of it being hard or easy. It’s a matter of simply doing it. All the information is out there and at a level anyone who can read will understand
I mean, you are not wrong. In a way easy way is always the lazy way - doesn’t mean it is wrong. It can be daunting. Some people will take the fast, but hard way. Some people will take the longer/ but easy. If you end up in same destination, it’s a win in the end.
I guess ultimately the end process is what’s important, there I agree with you. However, with ethical issues, or matters of principle, you could argue time is of the essence.
For example, if the Western world had taken 30 more years in embracing the importance of LGTBIQ+ rights, we would be now at the same place as the likes of Russia or Saudi Arabia, which is a place we feel good about not being.
So in a way yes, the end result is what matters, but in the meantime it does kinda sucks to live in a society that normalizes something that will undoubtedly be considered morally wrong and unethical in the future
You will get more people to join your cause with a positive message: i.g. “Do these small steps to start” than a negative one, I.g. “If you don’t go fully vegan, you are still part of the problem.”
“Perfect is the enemy of good.”
So it is easier to convince people to reduce meat consumption, which than makes it more likely that people will go vegetarian or vegan later
And i actually feel like vegans on the internet can be too aggressive, alienating people they could get on their side
It’s kind of hard to approach this in a tactful way. I think a lot of why vegans don’t appreciate this approach is because it often doesn’t work in actual practice. I’ll give a personal example as an analogy - I used to be a smoker. I tried quitting at least 50 times over the time period I was addicted to nicotine. One of the tricks I would use was to reduce the amount I would smoke each day. It would help briefly, but what would always happen is that I would get to a point where it was too hard to reduce any further, and then after plateauing for a few days, I would rebound and smoke even more than I used to.
Reduction still played a role in my effort to quit, but there were a lot of other tricks I had to employ to make it stick, and the overarching point is that reduction as a goal went nowhere, but reduction combined with the intent to stop all together did eventually work.
And that’s what also happens with dietary changes. Reduction starts with halfway good intentions, but when it’s the goal it becomes a temporary self-soothe that simply ends up rebounding in the end. In fact the people who run wfpb health coaching clinics have stated in interviews that people are most successful when they go all in with the dietary changes - because it turns out that people often feel dramatic positive changes to their health within only days of going plant-based, and those positive changes reinforce their motivation to keep going.
And as this article points out, reducitarianism can never achieve justice. It’s like when suits-wearers promise to reduce their carbon emissions by 10% by 2035 or something. It’s better than nothing, but will never solve the problems that need to be solved.
Let’s assume you talk to someone from a first world country. It is aggressive to say your lifestyle is responsible for the death of children in the developmental world, you are indirectly a murderer
It is more helpful to say: try fair-trade chlothes and check for companies that you buy from
Your comment is about looking down on people… tongue in cheek or not, this is always the kind of stuff people post before complaining that the big mean vegans are alienating them… victim complex much?
Or vegans can just mind their own business and leave the rest alone. Claiming abuse and murder and yet still buy smartphones whose materials are sourced by abuse of the poor, drive around on liquefied animals and use plastics.
Which is fair enough and I can respect that. But I have no respect for assholes who think they are better than the rest and keep calling everyone murderer and animal abuser while they claim they can undo 100k+ years of evolution in a single life-time and hypocritically rely on modern medicine to keep them healthy.
Sorry to continue this on and be the kind of “but…” person.
… But … A lot of vegans I know also try to reduce the amount of medicine they use cause sadly a lot of tablets have lactose in them. It’s genuinely one of the hardest things to deal with as a vegan, because it becomes the argument of do I better my life in spite of my ethics momentarily and it’s never an easy choice either way.
The way I see it is necessary suffering. There is no such thing as living without accidentally or implicitly causing suffering to someone, somewhere, so the logical response is harm reduction. Eating meat/cheese/eggs is not necessary. You won’t die or become ill if you stop. The calculation is not the same for medicine or food from agriculture generally.
How am I being an asshole? My position from the start was that it’s your own thing to pick and choose what you eat. Am just saying preaching to others and acting smug about it is annoying.
Vegans might be a bit preachy sometimes, because they want to change something that is a problem. It’s about raising awareness. Ultimately, it is up to you what you choose, no one can force you. Ultimately it is you ignoring a huge problem which is out there and choosing to do absolutely nothing about it.
Stop using medicine and vaccines. K? Thank you. Those rely on horse shoe crabs donating blood and that’s animal abuse. Not to mention other medicine testing. Oh also, stop buying organic, since you know that’s exploitation of animals. Only veggies with good old artificial fertilizer are to be used. We don’t want you looking like a hypocrite while criticizing others.
I’d rather be a hypocrite one out of ten days, than to systematically support animal abuse and murder to feed me - which can be done perfectly fine in harmless ways.
Going vegan doesn’t mean you are saving animals. Without your demand for meat they would never get born in the first place. So not eating something that doesn’t get born doesn’t mean you saved them from being eaten. Just imagine how much potato milk I saved from being consumed, by not consuming potato milk.
Now you’re just grasping at semantics. Aside from the fact that vegans have promoted a way of life that led to the creation of animal sanctuaries, which literally does save animals lives; obviously abstaining from behavior that causes sentient, feeling, thinking beings to be actively bred into existence for the purpose of suffering their whole short lives for someone’s fleeting sensory pleasure makes a real difference. I believe I’ve already linked you to an article elsewhere, showing that even one person going vegan absolutely makes a difference.
You know, that’s kinda the point. You are reducing suffering. The hypothetical animal not born is one less animal suffering. It’s not necessarily only about saving them from being eaten.
If you can’t stop eating meat, buy from sources where they care for the animals and give them good life for the time they are alive. It’s not vegan, but you still reduce suffering. It’s not perfect, but it is a valid alternative.
Some vegans are against organic agriculture, and there currently is a huge problem where the various regenerative agricultural movements have been astroturfed by the animal ag industry with the whole free range thing.
But it ignores that conventional industrial agriculture also appears to be sending almost the entire arthropod phylum into extinction, which is still worse than organic ag.
There are a lot of reforms that need to be made to the agricultural sector, and veganic farming/gardening is one of those needed changes.
There are a lot of things that are not perfect in this world. But convenience trumps all, which is why diets reflect country’s policies and climate for the most part. USA shoves corn syrup into everything simply because of its abundance and everyone loves sweet stuff. But in the long run it’s creating a huge problem with obesity and diabetes. Meat is on the same level.
For some climates meat comes off as a byproduct almost. Remaining plant matter from plants used for human consumption are normally used to feed cattle and other animals. Without animals all that would have been most likely burned. Even if there was a different way to repurpose that burning is the fastest and easiest thing and us humans love easy.
Take for example countries in which sheep herding is a dominant form of farming because pastures can’t be used for anything else. You can’t expect those countries to ignore local food source which would be mutton and not use wool as byproduct, and rely solely on imported goods so they can go vegan. It’s impossible combined with stupidity. Look at Mongolia. Short grass as far as eye can see. Tell them not to rely on reindeer and meat.
I highly doubt this argument about the agricultural suitability of different lands holds up under scrutiny. I’ve seen someone grow a small food forest on top of a layer of manure that was spread on an abandoned parking lot, in midwest climate conditions. We don’t need the ‘viability’ of what can be grown where, being dictated by modern industrialized monoculture agribusinesses, since those practices are part of the problem.
And again it comes down to the possible and practical part of the vegan definition. I don’t live in Mongolia, so I’ll leave it to Mongolian vegans to determine what is and isn’t feasible.
Just because they do one good thing doesn’t mean they have to live the perfect life. It’s pretty hard to live in the modern world without a smartphone, while its realy not that hard to not eat animal products.
Or you could just not support abuse and murder. Also an option.
Small incremental changes are easier to make than big ones. It is also better to have many people reducing meat than just a few full vegans.
True, but my point still stands. Most people don’t go vegan overnight.
In my experience they often do go vegan overnight though. The key tends to be actually connecting the food on your plate with where it came from and accepting that animals are capable of suffering. Once that connection is made, animal products simply aren’t seen as food anymore and going vegan overnight is the only logical conclusion.
Some people may be further along the spectrum towards being vegan when this connection is actually made but regardless of if you are vegetarian, “only eat free range meat”, or an unapologetic meat eater, once the connection is made they are vegan.
these people are by definiton not vegan. Trying to be more ethical by their choices, which is commendable - but not vegan.
Yes, that is my point. Whether someone is vegetarian, “trying to be more ethical” but still eating meat, or just a meat eater that has never even considered ethics, there is nothing that says you have to go through all of those steps to becoming vegan. In my experience, regardless of how far along you are in those “steps” once you make the connection between the food on your plate and the animals that it comes from and you realize that they are suffering for you, you go vegan. That could be meat eater to vegan, “ethical” meat eater to vegan, or vegetarian to vegan. My point is that in my experience that process does happen overnight.
Well it’s not universal. For some it does, for some it doesn’t.
I mean… reducing meat is how people would go vegan over longer period if time (as opposed to over night) though? Not sure where you were going with your original comment.
The word easier here is a choice. What is more comfortable is easier, but eating a plant based diet is very easy. It’s cheaper and widely available in most countries. What you mean by easier really refers to more comfortable, not really to there being less physical obstacles
Depends on availability. Plenty of eateries don’t have vegan options and this is especially true for locations accommodating larger groups. Furthermore, a lot of vegans need supplements (as I’ve been told), which is also subject to availability.
Lastly, it’s easier to convince a thousand people to eat less meat – especially since they usually already have the ingredients required for vegetarian food at home – than to skip meat alltogether.
Two thousand meals a week that turned vegetarian is a lot more impact than 70 meals turned vegan.
It’s not that a lot of vegans need supplements, they’re just more aware of what the body should get, when in fact almost everyone likely needs supplements. They just don’t know it.
Maybe you are thinking of processed vegan food, like a vegan nugget or hamburger. That is completely unnecessary. beans, lentils, chickpeas, seaweed, grains, rice, vegetables, nuts… those are widely available and enough for a healthy diet.
For the rest I agree, it’s easier to convince an omnivore to go vegetarian than vegan. But that has to do with their will, not with actual physical limitations.
It is easy once you are in, know what are the good vegan meals and how to cook them etc. Most people will have animal product for each meal - they don’t know better. To them vegans just eat salads and nuts, which is obviously not enticing. If they don’t take the easy way, they will just continue the only way they know how and change nothing.
I agree with you. I guess the difference lies in that I would call that laziness. Not knowing how to eat balanced meals (or more precisely, not looking it up), it’s not a matter of it being hard or easy. It’s a matter of simply doing it. All the information is out there and at a level anyone who can read will understand
I mean, you are not wrong. In a way easy way is always the lazy way - doesn’t mean it is wrong. It can be daunting. Some people will take the fast, but hard way. Some people will take the longer/ but easy. If you end up in same destination, it’s a win in the end.
I guess you meant to say fast but easy, or longer but hard, right?
I meant fast as in complete veganism overnight (hard) over slow, gradual change to eventually get to complete veganism (easier).
It’s not the usual way the phrase goes I guess, or I just worded it badly
Aaaah ok ye now I get it.
I guess ultimately the end process is what’s important, there I agree with you. However, with ethical issues, or matters of principle, you could argue time is of the essence.
For example, if the Western world had taken 30 more years in embracing the importance of LGTBIQ+ rights, we would be now at the same place as the likes of Russia or Saudi Arabia, which is a place we feel good about not being.
So in a way yes, the end result is what matters, but in the meantime it does kinda sucks to live in a society that normalizes something that will undoubtedly be considered morally wrong and unethical in the future
You will get more people to join your cause with a positive message: i.g. “Do these small steps to start” than a negative one, I.g. “If you don’t go fully vegan, you are still part of the problem.”
“Perfect is the enemy of good.”
So it is easier to convince people to reduce meat consumption, which than makes it more likely that people will go vegetarian or vegan later
And i actually feel like vegans on the internet can be too aggressive, alienating people they could get on their side
best is the enemy of better.
why are you giving vegans advice on how to market veganism? if the facts won’t change your mind then it’s not the fault of the vegans.
Because I want more people to become vegan and the way most people on the internet argue does not help this goal
I also want more vegans. there is no right way to change someone’s mind. attack the problem from different angles is my view.
All compassion is good compassion
It’s kind of hard to approach this in a tactful way. I think a lot of why vegans don’t appreciate this approach is because it often doesn’t work in actual practice. I’ll give a personal example as an analogy - I used to be a smoker. I tried quitting at least 50 times over the time period I was addicted to nicotine. One of the tricks I would use was to reduce the amount I would smoke each day. It would help briefly, but what would always happen is that I would get to a point where it was too hard to reduce any further, and then after plateauing for a few days, I would rebound and smoke even more than I used to.
Reduction still played a role in my effort to quit, but there were a lot of other tricks I had to employ to make it stick, and the overarching point is that reduction as a goal went nowhere, but reduction combined with the intent to stop all together did eventually work.
And that’s what also happens with dietary changes. Reduction starts with halfway good intentions, but when it’s the goal it becomes a temporary self-soothe that simply ends up rebounding in the end. In fact the people who run wfpb health coaching clinics have stated in interviews that people are most successful when they go all in with the dietary changes - because it turns out that people often feel dramatic positive changes to their health within only days of going plant-based, and those positive changes reinforce their motivation to keep going.
And as this article points out, reducitarianism can never achieve justice. It’s like when suits-wearers promise to reduce their carbon emissions by 10% by 2035 or something. It’s better than nothing, but will never solve the problems that need to be solved.
https://www.surgeactivism.org/reducetarianism
If you feel facts are “aggressive”, the problem is you, not the facts.
Of course facts can be aggressive
Let’s assume you talk to someone from a first world country. It is aggressive to say your lifestyle is responsible for the death of children in the developmental world, you are indirectly a murderer
It is more helpful to say: try fair-trade chlothes and check for companies that you buy from
Dividing society does not help better it
The facts aren’t agressive, it is the tone.
Your comment is about looking down on people… tongue in cheek or not, this is always the kind of stuff people post before complaining that the big mean vegans are alienating them… victim complex much?
Or vegans can just mind their own business and leave the rest alone. Claiming abuse and murder and yet still buy smartphones whose materials are sourced by abuse of the poor, drive around on liquefied animals and use plastics.
Vegans don’t see themselves as perfect. It’s all about doing the best you can, where you can
Which is fair enough and I can respect that. But I have no respect for assholes who think they are better than the rest and keep calling everyone murderer and animal abuser while they claim they can undo 100k+ years of evolution in a single life-time and hypocritically rely on modern medicine to keep them healthy.
Sorry to continue this on and be the kind of “but…” person.
… But … A lot of vegans I know also try to reduce the amount of medicine they use cause sadly a lot of tablets have lactose in them. It’s genuinely one of the hardest things to deal with as a vegan, because it becomes the argument of do I better my life in spite of my ethics momentarily and it’s never an easy choice either way.
The way I see it is necessary suffering. There is no such thing as living without accidentally or implicitly causing suffering to someone, somewhere, so the logical response is harm reduction. Eating meat/cheese/eggs is not necessary. You won’t die or become ill if you stop. The calculation is not the same for medicine or food from agriculture generally.
I agree
Just because some vegans are being assholes doesn’t mean you should be an asshole to everyone else and ignore the problem.
How am I being an asshole? My position from the start was that it’s your own thing to pick and choose what you eat. Am just saying preaching to others and acting smug about it is annoying.
When every comment you posted is down voted, maybe it is time for some self reflection.
If their argument had any sense, yes. Something being popular doesn’t mean it’s right. Perhaps it’s time to give up od hypocrites and move on.
Check the language you used for starters.
Vegans might be a bit preachy sometimes, because they want to change something that is a problem. It’s about raising awareness. Ultimately, it is up to you what you choose, no one can force you. Ultimately it is you ignoring a huge problem which is out there and choosing to do absolutely nothing about it.
Or animal abusers can just mind their own business and stop abusing and murdering innocent animals?
Stop using medicine and vaccines. K? Thank you. Those rely on horse shoe crabs donating blood and that’s animal abuse. Not to mention other medicine testing. Oh also, stop buying organic, since you know that’s exploitation of animals. Only veggies with good old artificial fertilizer are to be used. We don’t want you looking like a hypocrite while criticizing others.
I’d rather be a hypocrite one out of ten days, than to systematically support animal abuse and murder to feed me - which can be done perfectly fine in harmless ways.
10 out of 10. You just think you are not.
No, the data definitely doesn’t support your position. Going vegan absolutely makes a hell of a lot of difference, even from just one person doing it.
https://thehumaneleague.org.uk/article/how-many-animals-can-you-save-by-going-vegan
Going vegan doesn’t mean you are saving animals. Without your demand for meat they would never get born in the first place. So not eating something that doesn’t get born doesn’t mean you saved them from being eaten. Just imagine how much potato milk I saved from being consumed, by not consuming potato milk.
Now you’re just grasping at semantics. Aside from the fact that vegans have promoted a way of life that led to the creation of animal sanctuaries, which literally does save animals lives; obviously abstaining from behavior that causes sentient, feeling, thinking beings to be actively bred into existence for the purpose of suffering their whole short lives for someone’s fleeting sensory pleasure makes a real difference. I believe I’ve already linked you to an article elsewhere, showing that even one person going vegan absolutely makes a difference.
You know, that’s kinda the point. You are reducing suffering. The hypothetical animal not born is one less animal suffering. It’s not necessarily only about saving them from being eaten.
If you can’t stop eating meat, buy from sources where they care for the animals and give them good life for the time they are alive. It’s not vegan, but you still reduce suffering. It’s not perfect, but it is a valid alternative.
Some vegans are against organic agriculture, and there currently is a huge problem where the various regenerative agricultural movements have been astroturfed by the animal ag industry with the whole free range thing.
But it ignores that conventional industrial agriculture also appears to be sending almost the entire arthropod phylum into extinction, which is still worse than organic ag.
There are a lot of reforms that need to be made to the agricultural sector, and veganic farming/gardening is one of those needed changes.
There are a lot of things that are not perfect in this world. But convenience trumps all, which is why diets reflect country’s policies and climate for the most part. USA shoves corn syrup into everything simply because of its abundance and everyone loves sweet stuff. But in the long run it’s creating a huge problem with obesity and diabetes. Meat is on the same level.
For some climates meat comes off as a byproduct almost. Remaining plant matter from plants used for human consumption are normally used to feed cattle and other animals. Without animals all that would have been most likely burned. Even if there was a different way to repurpose that burning is the fastest and easiest thing and us humans love easy.
Take for example countries in which sheep herding is a dominant form of farming because pastures can’t be used for anything else. You can’t expect those countries to ignore local food source which would be mutton and not use wool as byproduct, and rely solely on imported goods so they can go vegan. It’s impossible combined with stupidity. Look at Mongolia. Short grass as far as eye can see. Tell them not to rely on reindeer and meat.
I highly doubt this argument about the agricultural suitability of different lands holds up under scrutiny. I’ve seen someone grow a small food forest on top of a layer of manure that was spread on an abandoned parking lot, in midwest climate conditions. We don’t need the ‘viability’ of what can be grown where, being dictated by modern industrialized monoculture agribusinesses, since those practices are part of the problem.
And again it comes down to the possible and practical part of the vegan definition. I don’t live in Mongolia, so I’ll leave it to Mongolian vegans to determine what is and isn’t feasible.
This is just basic whataboutism.
Just because they do one good thing doesn’t mean they have to live the perfect life. It’s pretty hard to live in the modern world without a smartphone, while its realy not that hard to not eat animal products.
That’s all understandable and fine, but they don’t have the right to call others murderers and abuse condoners.