I am not sure if you read earlier in the thread, but this topic was partly in response to me saying that I don’t think that any laws should be changed to take away animal rights (we haven’t discussed that part much yet) and that in general humans should treat animals better than we currently do (that is the part we were discussing). I am assume that you actually do agree with me on those two points, given what you have said so far. And I think I was actually successful in persuading @JustinCEO of some merits of treating farm animals better. So it was interesting to me that you were treating me like an enemy.
I am still wary of putting much effort into replies directed at you, since your history includes asking questions or making criticisms, getting answers or counter-criticisms, and then completely disappearing or stopping the discussion. You have a history of not sticking around long enough for a discussion to come to a conclusion, and just leaving things after you receive criticism without any acknowledgment, concession, or even a clear statement that you still disagree.
I might reply to some of what you say more indirectly, or in a way that is more targeted towards explaining to other people. This isn’t meant as a personal slight. It is just me trying to act on what my reasonable expectations of the conversation are. I did want to explain this though, since you have apologized, instead of just acting on it without saying anything.
I also want to note that I thought that some of your comments in this thread were disrespectful towards @JustinCEO, whose thread this is.
This one in particular:
Part of the context of this thread was the dietary changes that @JustinCEO made, which had a major positive impact on his health. These changes included eating fewer carbs and more animal products, and I believe cutting out beans and lentils completely (along with many other carb-heavy plant foods).
I personally made some suggestions on different things he could try with his diet (like that paleo might allow more freedom of foods and have similar benefits as keto, that humanely raised animals products have health benefits, and that he might find that eating fruit is OK and doesn’t have the same negative effects as sugar). I made those suggestions taking into account his context, to try to be helpful. I have some reservations about keto in general, but I don’t know a lot about it, and I don’t want to just trash lifestyle or diet changes that have had a positive impact on someone else’s life.
You came into @JustinCEO’s thread and – either unaware of or ignoring the context – called replacing meat with beans and lentils a “small change” that “doesn’t require much effort”. But, for him, that would literally require reversing the changes that he had already stated had made a significant positive impact on his long-term, ongoing health issues.
I actually replied to that part of what you said with this:
You replied to that pointing me to another comment you had written in another thread.
That implies that you knew what I was talking about, and that you did have disagreements that you hadn’t stated in this thread, but which you had explained in more detail in your other comment. But your other comment did not address the issues I was talking about at all. (One of those issues being that it is not easy for many people take make those diet changes.)
Edit: I just realized that Animal Welfare Article link does not actually go to the comment you had written. Also, you might argue that your last paragraph did address the issue I was talking about, but I would disagree with that.
Yep, no beans or lentils (or other carb-heavy foods) for me.
Suggestions were much appreciated. Already meaningfully working on incorporating more pasture-raised/grass-fed/wild caught stuff into my diet.
In the past few days I’ve had e.g. tuna, (pasture-raised) eggs, (wild) smoked salmon, (grass-fed) beef sticks, chicken meatballs, italian deli meats (salami, capicola, prosciutto), (pasture-raised) beef bacon. I eat ground beef, pork sausage, and bacon pretty regularly. Cutting out animal proteins would be a huge change to my diet and I’m very skeptical about the health effects of doing so given my past experience.
I actually think PETA’s position here is probably closer to right. (I’m not commenting on their execution though, just their position.) I agree with what @Elliot said later in that thread, which is that cage-free is greenwashing. And I don’t actually have knowledge about this, but intuitively I would imagine that “cage-free” might actually be worse than cages. I have read things about them needing to cut the beaks off of chickens to keep them from attacking and cannibalizing each other. Them being out in the open, exposed to ALL the other chickens, but packed into a warehouse without enough space to act naturally or get any distance from each other, could make that kind of problem worse.
I didn’t see anything on that PETA page about whether they believe cage-free is an improvement over cages though. Their focus just seems to be on letting people know that it is not actually cruelty-free, and the conditions are still poor, as well as some other problems with the egg industry (including their claim that eggs aren’t healthy). I did notice that their arguments don’t apply to backyard chickens, and a lot of them don’t apply to small, humane farms either. I think a lot of their claims are basically just that many farms lie about being humane. Which they have demonstrated, for example by doing undercover work with a former Whole Foods supplier. That page also calls humane meat a myth, but the reason seems to just be that companies are fraudulent, not that it is impossible. I even went to their page about animals used for food, and in the section about ‘humane’ farms, the only two points they made against them is that animals are often mistreated on farms that are called humane, and that animals products are still bad for you because they have saturated fat and cholesterol. I don’t know if they address actual humane farming anywhere else. And you can find disagreement about their health claims in other places. I don’t know if they address that anywhere else either. I doubt that they do – they seem to just keep stating it like it is obvious fact that everyone knows.
PETA also has a page for what to do in Go Vegan January (I assume people do this as a New Years Resolution type thing). Most of their suggestions are about trying various ultra-processed Vegan foods, and trying to convince your friends to also go vegan. They say stuff like " Swap Congealed Cow Secretions for Delicious, Pus-Free Vegan Cheese", but don’t mention that the vast majority of vegan cheeses are made of oil and starches (potato starch, tapioca starch, etc), which doesn’t exactly make them a nutritious food, according to most standards. It’s also a bit ironic, because many vegan cheeses are made with coconut oil, and then later on this same list they have an entry about helping the monkeys who pick coconuts.
That actually interested me. They are saying that you shouldn’t purchase any coconut products from Thailand, or you may be supporting the forced monkey labor. So they are seeking to hurt the economy of a country that apparently has an average salary of $435 USD per month, and has recently had its tourism industry devastated by COVID, and where many people live at a subsistence level.
Is it because the monkey labor is inherently bad, or is it because they found some abuses of the monkeys? If the issue is that monkey labor is inherently bad, what about dog or horse labor that we use here? I assume they also disagree with people riding horses and pulling carriages with them or police and drug-sniffing dogs. I am not sure their position on guide dogs and other properly trained service animals. But why are you going after another, poorer countries economy for something that we are doing here too? And a bunch of people signing these positions are actually completely hypocritical and are NOT against the “forced animal labor” we use. They are only against the monkey labor because it is so culturally unfamiliar to them.
It also seems interesting to go after monkey labor practices in a country that has bad human labor practices. What is the alternative to the forced monkey labor in a country with poor labor practices? Thailand has been found to be using human slave laborin its fishing industry. And that article also mentions the alleged child slave labor used in the chocolate industry in Ivory Coast.
I looked for a video of humans harvesting coconuts, and found this video of a guy climbing a tree. If you are in a country that already uses human slavery, and has other human-rights abuses in its labor, would something like this really be better than the monkey labor?
Is PETA doing anything to try to fight against human slave labor and child slave labor? You could say that they are an animal-rights group, not a human-rights group. But humans are animals, and one of PETA’s main points is that they are against speciesism.
I tried looking into the monkey labor a bit more, and found that mises.orghas a post against PETA’s position. They claim that many people treat the monkeys well and keep them as pets. And that, yes, they do leash them, but we do the same to our pets here. I looked up some videos of monkeys harvesting coconuts, and they didn’t look particularly terrible to me. They didn’t look any worse than normal ways that people here treat their pets or working animals. And Thailand claims this isn’t even the standard practice in large operations, and monkey labor is something that very small operations (like individuals) would use.
I am not trying to argue that none of the monkeys are abused. Of course they are: many human laborers are abused too. But some of the complaints about the monkey treatment and living conditions seemed to be culturally unaware. For example, there are pictures of the monkeys living in/around garbage, and complaints about that. But that is often also where the people live: the monkeys are often being kept at their homes. You can find pictures online of many humans, both adults and children, living in and around garbage, playing in garbage, and picking through garbage (a lot of it much worse and more shocking looking that the monkey pictures and videos that I saw).
So while they aren’t just outright lying about the monkey labor, they are looking at it out of context. People do a lot of things to try to get money in lower income countries, and this is one of them. I don’t know whether or not it is widespread, and I don’t really trust either PETA or the Thai government to give me accurate information about that. Many of the “poor conditions” the monkeys live in are actually just the same poor conditions that the humans live in (in some of the videos I found, you can see the monkeys, and the adult & child humans are all just hanging around the garbage, with the humans being wither barefoot or in sandals). It is not the worst labor practice that is happening in Thailand, and I also don’t think it’s completely out of line with how animals are treated here.
To bring this back to what I was initially replying to, about your potential project: if you want to look into animals-rights groups, you are going to be looking at stuff like this. You are going to have to look at multiple sources and fact-check everything they say. You are going to have to look for bias and misframing and dropped context.
They also don’t even bother giving arguments or reasons for a lot of their claims. They don’t actually explain very much. There are many things that they just state, as if they are obviously bad. They use videos and images with shock value, to try to get people on their side. They don’t actually talk about the nuance or the underlying principles.
So, overall, my guess is that it isn’t a great project to work on. There isn’t any particular reason you are interested in animals rights, and it is going to require a lot of study. It would basically be a project of wading through someone else’s biased information, which will require learning a lot about the topic and looking up stuff from the other side too. If you are going to put that much time and effort into studying and learning a topic, and looking at multiple sides of an issue, there are a lot of other topics you could choose.
I do think that is a good goal. I am not sure the best way to go about it. It actually does make some sense that looking at some other people’s biased information could be helpful practice for finding biases. But many people are already good at finding the biases and flaws in the things they disagree with. They have trouble finding the biases and flaws in the things they agree with.
Thanks for sharing these insights Justin. I have also recently started working on my fitness. Do you mind if I ask what your fitness goals are? For reference, my goals are to get stronger, improve my health, and to improve the aesthetic of my body (roughly in that order).
I almost have the opposite problem. It appears to me that most people are “allergic” to rationality (when it conflicts with their beliefs) and that we live in an inadequate society. Reading Eliot’s writing (or Atlas Shrugged) is the only thing that gives me purpose and clarity.
This community is important to me because I don’t know of any other place where I could find like-minded people. I think when we share our vulnerabilities (as you did above) we can strengthen our bonds with each other. That could be an important part of laying the foundation of a thriving community.
I don’t really understand people with that kind of attitude to me – and a parasocial relationship with me – but who won’t engage in extended conversation with me about anything and also won’t offer any comment at all about most of what I make. I know some issues involved but I still find it weird.
I know I posted some mumbo-jumbo about non-universal animal “thinking” in the other thread. But I actually agree with Elliot that animals do not suffer or have experiences. You could say I don’t fully agree with him because I have some conflicting intuitions. My main concern with the treatment of animals is the effect it would have on people.
I had no intention to treat you as an enemy. I was trying to point out a potential error I saw. I could have done a better job in the tone of my posts though to make them sound less combative.
That being said, I think it would be more welcoming if you slightly changed the tone of your posts as well. For example:
This makes it sound like vegan arguments are biased and anti-human. Since I’m “vegan” (which is a subjective term that I don’t care much about either way) it seems like you’re saying my arguments are biased and anti-human. You might be right (thought I doubt I’m anti-human in any way), but you could at least point out the anti-human ideas in my arguments. Instead of making a blanket criticism without offering an explanation.
Also, other “vegans” browsing the site might be put off from your comment and not want to participate in the community. (maybe you don’t find that to be a big loss haha)
It could also be that I’m misunderstanding what you were trying to say. I wasn’t sure if “the vegan arguments” referred to vegan arguments in general.
This makes it sound like I’m especially biased compared to the average person. I’m not sure why you think that about me. If you share your reason with me I can potentially use that to fix my bias, which is helpful to me. Saying I’m biased without explaining why isn’t helpful though.
I’m not sure that you asked me to clarify my position on this issue.
Beans and lentils are a healthful, nutritious and (usually) inexpensive food. That doesn’t mean I think people with sensitivities or allergies should be eating them. Nuts are also a good food, but I certainly wouldn’t suggest them to people with nut allergies.
I could have also been more clear and just said legumes instead of “beans and lentils” because that leaves a wide variety of options for people with sensitivities or allergies. If you can’t eat lentils or black beans, you might still be fine with chickpeas or mung beans.
“Legumes are a group of foods that belong to the Fabaceae family and include beans, lentils, pulses, peas, lupin, fenugreek, soya, and peanut. Individuals with legume allergy may need to avoid only one legume or may have reactions to other legumes. People with a peanut and/or soya allergy do not automatically need to avoid all other legumes.”
Yes, I definitely put my foot in my mouth there. I didn’t intend to start a large discussion in Justin’s thread. I also didn’t read all of the previous posts before I commented.
Thanks. The video was helpful. I’m planning on going through the tree and noting the stuff I already think I have mastered and sharing that. That should help in figuring out what to work on. I’ve also very slowly been working on logic some, so I’ll keep doing that for now.
At the moment I’m just trying to improve my overall fitness. I would say overall health is my #1 goal, followed by wanting to feel stronger/faster/more flexible. Most of what I do is cardio (outdoor & indoor running and indoor cycling), though I also do strength (functional strength with dumbbells and bodyweight) and stretching regularly, along with occasional HIIT exercises.
Here is a breakdown graph of the past 6 weeks of my activity by calories burned:
As I was writing this reply, I came across a reference to this practice (see below).
Yes that’s plausible.
BTW I was checking out a Whole Foods product – bacon from North Country Smokehouse – that claims to be humanely raised. I wanted to see what I could find to substantiate/judge that claim. My research went off into a bit of a tangent and it’s still an open question for me, but I am not very happy with what I found so far.
So I went North Country Smokehouse’s website and they say they get their meat from some Canadian company called duBreton. They say duBreton is audited by 3rd party organizations like USDA Organic and Certified Humane ® Raised & Handled. They mention some stuff like no GMOs but they don’t say anything about being pasture-raised (though they do have a picture of some cute piglets in a pasture! ;p).
I checked out the Certified Humane people’s FAQ and it had stuff like (and I know this is about chickens and not pork but I think it’s telling about what their standards are like):
What’s the difference between “debeak” and “beak trimming” – and what are Certified Humane’s standards here?
No chicken is ever debeaked on our program, but our standards do allow for beak trimming in laying hens. This is a very quick procedure which removes the very tip of the beak when the birds are less than 10 days old. As with any physical alteration that is allowed on our program, the benefits to the animal must outweigh any discomfort or stress that they experience during the procedure.
One of the natural behaviors of chickens is pecking at each other to establish a dominance order – much like dogs in the pack fighting to establish the alpha, beta, and so on. The term, “pecking order” comes from centuries old observations of chickens, including the father of the domesticated chicken, the wild Red Jungle Fowl. When laying hens peck at each other, it’s called “feather pecking.” Simply put, more aggressive birds attack less aggressive birds. It does not matter if the hens are indoors, outdoors or both. Feather pecking is a natural behavior, and when the birds have intact beaks, it can cause serious damage and death to the birds further down the pecking order. In Sweden, where beak trimming was banned, they did a study comparing different laying hen housing systems and flock sizes. One of their findings was that regardless of housing system or flock size, the highest cause of mortality (death) in laying hens was cannibalism due to pecking. Hens literally can peck each other to death
We do not believe that high mortality due to cannibalism is humane. We believe the momentary discomfort of trimming a bird’s beak when the bird is less than 10 days old is far more humane than allowing birds to cannibalize each other.
Beak trimming (formerly debeaking) is the removal of approximately one-quarter1 to one-third2,3 of the upper beak,2 or both upper and lower beak,3 of a bird. Beak trimming is performed as part of an overall strategy to reduce peck injuries4 and death5 when raising groups of poultry.
That this practice was even a thing was a surprise to me. That “trimming” can include removing 25%–33% of a beak was a second surprise. That this practice is compatible with being “Certified Humane” was a third surprise. This site claims that consumers are frequently misled:
Probably more than 90% of the eggs sold in Australa as ‘free range‘ do not meet the standards expected by consumers. Research has shown that buyers believe the hens are not de-beaked or beak trimmed and the hens roam on pasture all day. But unfortunately that is not the reality on most egg farms. Nearly all chicks are beak trimmed at hatcheries and many farms have stocking densities well above the limit of 1500 hens per hectare set by the Model Code of Practice for the Welfare of Animals – Domestic Poultry. The Egg Corporation admits that a third of eggs labelled as free range are from intensive farms, some with 40,000 and even up to 100,000 hens per hectare.
The Certified Humane people also had something in their FAQ about space requirements for chickens:
Your standards say that laying hens are required to have 1.5 sq. feet per hen – this is a very small amount of space to confine a bird in, how is this humane?
This is a misunderstanding of how the standards for space are implemented. This space requirement is the minimum amount of housing space per bird that a farm can have – so for example, if a house had 100 hens, there would need to be 100x1.5sq.ft = 150 square feet in the house. The hens would be free to move about anywhere in the house that they like. It’s important to keep in mind that farm animals are prey animals and they generally feel safer in groups. It is perfectly normal to see hens grouped together at one end of a house, because they feel comfortable and safe in the company of their flock. We observe this behavior with wild animals all the time, and the same is true for farm animals. We rely on the top animal scientists and animal welfare experts in the world, who understand the behaviors of farm animals and what they need space-wise to move around and be happy and healthy, to develop our standards to ensure that farm animals are never living in overcrowded conditions.
This question + reply felt a bit like when Snopes picks the dumbest possible formulation of something in order to criticize it for being dumb. They built in the idea that the birds were confined to 1.5 sq feet in order to say nope, they can walk around and stuff. But one might also reasonably object that 1.5 sq feet per bird seems quite low without thinking they’re confined to a space that size. Also, there’s the issue @anonymous71 raised of a large open space possibly being worse.
I also looked a bit at their actual standards regarding the treatment of pigs (since I started on this investigation because of an interest in bacon, after all) but found that material harder to engage with. I might try again later.
Overall, my impression from looking into things a bit was that birds were treated with greater harshness than I would have expected, and Certified Humane was less picky than I would have expected. Certified Humane definitely seems a lot less picky than the pasture-raised people I just bought some pork products from at the farmer’s market, at any rate. I need to look into stuff more and learn more about this stuff, though.
That seems biased of them. They shouldn’t pretend humane farmers don’t exist. I guess they really want to push veganism though, so reality takes a backseat to pushing an agenda.
Yeah I doubt that they’ve done any independent thinking on the topic.
Tangentially, I’m starting to generically doubt most of the “standard” health advice in light of my own recent experiences (which involve following a diet that is very strongly counter to lots of typical advice and improving because of it) and in light of reading about various criticisms of the standard views.
Vegan/vegetarian alternatives to “normal foods” seem like some of the worst stuff to me from a whole foods type perspective. They’re down there with Cheese Whiz for me (that’s my standard example of a hyper processed food). Fake “meat” seems especially bad.
I agree there is hypocrisy and that people are against it cuz it seems weird. I noticed in PETA’s video that they mentioned the monkeys are kept on barren, dirty farms, but what sort of conditions are the people in a country with average income of $435 living in?
Good points.
Intuitively, using monkeys as labor doesn’t seem like the sort of thing that would be very efficient or scale very well.
Yeah. They’re blinding themselves to the reality of crushing poverty but selectively paying attention to it in order to advance their agenda.
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”?
I’m not even sure how anybody can consider that “science”. Just leave out the apparent counterexamples? That’s just so absurd. Mainstream health advice you find online is still very anti-saturated-fat too. Some stuff doesn’t even really acknowledge there is a controversy. Other stuff will acknowledge there is a controversy but still confidently dispense advice on the premise that saturated fats are bad. It creates a culture of fear around stuff like saturated fats that is both unwarranted and potentially counterproductive for people’s health.
Conceded. I was being too credulous as you’ve indicated. I still don’t think I understand how bad the state of nutritional science is but I have a bit more of an inkling than I did before.
I had a thought that there was a double standard here when I initially read @S_Emiya’s statement.
I can imagine a couple of objections someone might raise to your point but I don’t think they’re correct. One is that humans are smart enough to figure out how to feed themselves via means other than meat, whereas animals just have to go by their instincts. But based on the stuff I’ve been reading (a lot of which has been linked from this forum), it seems like people have potentially made various serious mistakes in trying to be clever about eating. Given that, it could be better to eat a “simpler”, less processed diet involving meat. Another point someone might raise is that some animals are carnivores and literally need to eat meat, whereas humans can eat plants and stuff. But again, as we’ve been discussing, the state of nutritional science doesn’t let us conclude that eliminating meat entirely is wise. Certainly humans should eat some plants, but that doesn’t mean they should eliminate meat. The ideal for nutrition could very plausibly be some mix.
Yes, that is my understanding as well. Vegetarian allows animal products such as dairy and eggs (and occasionally fish, which I find a bit funny) but generally no meat. Vegan is the more purist thing.
I agree with all this.
Yeah I agree. If you’re advocating for a vegan diet based on research involving people who were eating e.g. eggs and dairy, that is lying. And if they were newbie vegans and you used them to say veganism is fine, that’s a bit like looking at the lung condition of a new smoker to say smoking is fine.
Then ask yourself if it’s true, then what does that say about mainstream nutrition/health science?
Then ask yourself if you know it’s substantially false.
Consider ways that, if it is false, you could find out. If you search, can you find any article, video or book refuting these claims? Is there anywhere you can bring this up and get good answers to these concerns, like a subreddit or stack exchange? Are there any informed people who will debate it?
Note: Views like these aren’t original to this blogger. E.g. you can find similar ideas in the book Grain Brain, which advocates eating more cholesterol and saturated fat, and eating less grain.
Animals don’t just have to eat based on instinct. We could feed kibble and various other vegan foods to animals. A lot of them will eat it and then kill other animals less. (This is ignoring how many animals die when we produce “vegan” foods like grains.)
Not necessarily. Be careful with assumptions. See the carnivore diet and lion diet. And basically all plants (except the ripe fruit) are evolved (with partial success) to harm anything that eats them.
Yes, good point/full context analysis. Reminds me of considering the environmental impact of mining rare earth elements when judging the environmental impact of different energy sources, or the energy use involved in making and cleaning a reusable bag when considering the environmental impact of reusable vs disposable bags.
I had a thought that there was a double standard here when I initially read