I wanted to revisit this because I think you are granting too much to the common vegan propaganda arguments.
The first issue is whether vegan diets are actually healthy and appropriate for humans.
We did already talk about this here:
I think this part of what you said was actually unknowingly accepting vegetarian/vegan propaganda.
I thought that a “balanced” vegetarian diet was considered pretty healthy for lots of people, though.
Nutritional science is really bad in general. It is mostly observational correlation studies that rely on people’s self-reported diet information.
A lot of the vegetarian research is actually done or funded by biased people, either ethical vegans (who are trying to push a vegan diet with health claims) or companies that are selling vegan/vegetarian diet products.
There is also a lot of cherry picked data, like in the anti-saturated fat studies that Ancel Keys put out. They used countries that already conformed to the pattern they wanted to show, and left out countries that were considered “paradoxical” because they didn’t conform (e.g., France wasn’t included). There are countries and populations that have high intake of animal products and saturated fat and ALSO have good health outcomes, but those populations are considered “paradoxes” and are left out of these kinds of studies.
There are a lot of people online who claim that vegetarianism or veganism really hurt their health. There are a lot of ex-vegans, and you can find a lot of their stories online. A lot of people claim to have been very hurt by the vegan propaganda, and trying to follow a vegan or strict vegetarian diet.
I don’t know how reasonable it is to think that a large percentage of people can or should be able to be long-term vegans without hurting their health. If someone wants to do that, I believe they should have the freedom to do so, in the same way that people have the freedom to smoke tobacco or drink alcohol. But the fact that people can do it and still live a normal lifespan doesn’t mean it is good or that we should push any segment of the population to do it, regardless of whether animals suffer. I don’t think we have the data to support that kind of diet being healthy or appropriate for humans.
People care about animals eating appropriate diets. For example, @S_Emiya even pointed out that:
Humans who eat meat aren’t killing out of malice either. And protecting animals from humans, by not allowing humans to eat them, involves harming humans. Why have a double standard where bears get to eat meat but humans don’t? Why care about the well-being and health of predators that are non-human animals, but not care about the well-being and health of humans (who are also animals) in the same way?
One reason for this is that people believe the vegan propaganda, pushed by ethical vegans, that a vegetarian diet is not only an acceptable, appropriate, and healthy diet for humans, but better than a diet with animal products in it.
Another issue with the vegan research is what gets counted as vegan. When I talk about “vegan”, I am usually using it to mean a diet with no animal products, only plants. This is what I think people commonly understand “vegan” to mean.
@S_Emiya talked about the definition of “vegan” here though:
I do understand that, from a moral perspective. But I think when people are talking about vegan diet or vegan food, that is not what they normally mean. If I see vegan cheese or a vegan frozen dinner in the grocery store, I expect it to have no animal products, and that is what other people expect too. And if I see research about vegan diets, I expect it to be talking about people who didn’t eat any animal products.
But, some of the “vegans” included in the pro-vegan research were not actually true vegans in that sense. And many others had only been vegan for a short time. I think this is misleading at best. And using that kind of research as a justification of the appropriateness of a fully vegan diet is just lying.
But the issue of what a “vegan” is or should be brings up another issue with your statement.
What is the best way to eat in order to minimize animal suffering and death, assuming that is a good goal?
You said:
If animals experience morally significant suffering, then I don’t see how people can think it’s okay to kill and butcher them because their meat is tasty, so long as you do it in a humane manner.
First, I am going to ignore which diet is healthiest here, because I think that is what the vegans are already doing. They decided ahead of time which diet they thought was most moral (or fit whatever their goals are), and then they tried to come up with justifications for why that diet is best after the fact.
Also, the following is just a casual thought experiment. I do not know all the details to properly do an analysis. But I don’t think the vegans know the details either, or even tried to do this kind of analysis. And the stats that they do give leave a bunch of information out, some of which I point out below.
So, for the sake of argument, let’s imagine that I really DO think animals suffer, and that I want to minimize their suffering at the hands of humans. I also think humans are animals, so I want to minimize their suffering too: I don’t want my food to be the product of animal OR human suffering. What should I do? What is the best diet to achieve this?
One thing to consider is whether I should also try to avoid extra or unnecessary animal deaths. It could be argued that a clean, quick, humane death is going to involve less suffering than most “natural” deaths. So, really, by killing animals before they have the chance to die of illness, or even to die of old age (which is really very uncomfortable for most humans, and only kind of works out because the intensive money and care we put into that: without that, most people would just starve to death, or die of dehydration or exposure or something like that, after losing the ability to care for themselves), I could be minimizing animal suffering and cruelty. In fact, many humans are arguing that they should also have the right to prematurely end their own lives, instead of waiting to die “naturally” of illness or old age. The end stage of dying “naturally” is usually not very pleasant. So I don’t see why we should just assume that keeping animals alive as long as possible, and never killing them ourselves, is the best way to minimize their suffering.
Let’s say that to be safe, I want to try to minimize both things. I want less suffering AND fewer deaths. So how do I do that?
Well, I guess I have to try looking at the total amount of suffering and death per food option. I want to look at the world as it is today, with the current food options that are available. So, one issue to remember is that we have little control over what is happening in supply chains. Even though it is possible for various foods to be made without slavery, exploitation, inhumane animal treatment, etc, you can’t necessarily reliably access that, especially for foods that are not local to you.
First I can consider, how humane are plant products? How humane are grains, legumes, nuts, seeds, vegetables, and fruit? Anything that is planted as a crop and harvested is going to involve a lot of animal deaths. There are the deaths of many animals, insects, and worms when they soil is tilled, when the crops are planted, when the pesticides are applied, when the crops are harvested, etc., especially when it is done in large quantities and by machine.
Picking fruit off of trees would have less deaths than most crops, since the trees themselves aren’t being planted and harvested every year, so the soil isn’t being disturbed. So fruit seems like a safer food than crops.
(And eating fruit also has the benefit of not even killing the plants it is harvested from. Eating everything else involves death. Grains, legumes, nuts and seeds are all types of seeds, so they are definitely not intended to be chewed and digested from the perspective of the plant. Some non-fruit vegetables can be harvested without killing the plant, but most cannot. Fruit is actually meant to be eaten, to spread the seeds of the plant, which is why it is so naturally appealing to so many animals, including humans. This wasn’t about minimizing plant suffering and death, so I won’t use that in my reasoning. But I think that eating fruit would actually minimize animal suffering and death as well.)
There are also labor conditions to consider. Farm work is hard and usually done for low pay. Many farm laborers are exploited. Some crops are farmed by slave labor. Especially if you are getting things from other countries, there can be slavery involved with no way of you knowing. And many “vegan” foods aren’t available locally at all. According to this, there is slavery and forced labor involved with things like cocoa, nuts, soybeans, sunflowers, sugarcane, rice, and even apples. And here is a list of goods, including foods, produced using child and forced labor, from the US Department of Labor. (List starts on page 24.) There are a lot of foods on there.
The easiest way to avoid poor labor conditions is just to buy things locally from sources I know and trust, where I can visit and talk to the workers. Or to grow things myself if I am able. It seems like it is hard to buy anything from a large company, far away from myself, without risking that it is actually made with exploited or forced labor.
Looking at animal products, one simple thing I can do to minimize both suffering and death is eliminate all the smaller animals. I would need to eat way more chickens or fish than cows to get the same amount of calories, so that is immediately just going to be more deaths, regardless of the conditions. And there is more chance for suffering with more animals. Cows are large enough that you could eat just 1-2 cows per year, and that would be enough food for the whole year. So that is way less deaths than trying to eat chicken, fish, or seafood, and also less than pork.
If I get a 100% grass-fed and finished cow, I think that would eliminate lot of the farming deaths from crop planting & harvest. There would still be some deaths from the cow eating bugs on the grass, but I am not sure if those are supposed to count, since those are “natural”. And there could still be deaths from farming the grass that the cows eat. I don’t know the entire process involved, but if they are cutting some for hay or silage, that would involve deaths similar to crops. And if they have to till the soil and plant grass seed, that would involve some death too. But I think overall grass requires less care than regular crops, which would mean there would be way fewer deaths than if I were eating grains or beans or something like that.
And I don’t have to worry so much about potential poor labor practices if I am getting the cow from a local source I trust. My food would go through way fewer hands, so there are a lot fewer places for labor abuses to happen.
So, my conclusion so far is that if I really take this seriously, and I really want to minimize the death and suffering that is involved in the food that I eat, the best diet might be eating 1-2 cows per year from a small farm that I trust.
Perhaps I could also supplement with some local fruit and small vegetable crops that aren’t planted or harvested by machine, from small farms that I trust to have decent labor practices. But I don’t know if that would actually be a good idea: if I am eating the cow already, then eating some supplementary fruit and vegetables isn’t going to lower the death toll from my cow, but it would raise the overall death toll from my diet. Even if I garden myself, I am going to end up killing some worms and insects by accident. So, since I am already eating the cow, maybe I should just stop at that, instead of adding more unnecessary deaths to my diet.
On the other hand, adding some supplementary fruit and veggies would make the cow last a bit longer, so that would lower the cow death toll over time. I was thinking of the point of view of a single year, but if I add fruit & veggies, maybe that would give me one fewer cow per, say, 10 years, or whatever. I would have to compare the death toll from the local fruit and veggies to the death toll from the cow more precisely, to figure out if I should be adding the fruits & veggies.
It could also be argued that I could eat ONLY the locally harvested fruit and vegetables, but it would be very hard to get enough calories that way, and I am not convinced that would be less deaths than the cow. Cows are particularly good because the actual amount of labor, planting, and harvesting per cow – for a fully grass fed cow – is a lot lower than it is for other sources of food.
Anyway, I don’t actually know all the math and details, so I could be missing something major. This is just a guess at what might actually be the best diet to minimize death and suffering of other animals, if we are assuming that is a good goal to have.
If the reasoning here is correct, and I can manage to live off of 1 cow per year as my sole food, and that minimizes the animal death and suffering involved in the food I eat, would it be reasonable to call myself a vegan under the definition @S_Emiya gave? Would I be excluding cruelty “as far as is possible and practicable”?