JustinCEO Topic

I looked up the full definition on the Vegan Society page:

"Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of animals, humans and the environment. In dietary terms it denotes the practice of dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals ."

So assuming that all your reasoning is correct, I think it’d be fair to say that you would be excluding cruelty “as far as is possible and practicable”. However, it seems like the vegan people built into their definition an assumption regarding the achievability and practicality of a vegan diet, since they say that “[i]n dietary terms it denotes the practice of dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals”. In fact, they built that assumption into their very selection of terminology, given that they went with “veganism” and not “anti-cruelty-ism” (or some more elegant term capturing the same idea.)

If true, the post would mean that mainstream nutrition/health science is willing to offer strong advice and push drugs that are actually dangerous/harmful/counterproductive to people’s well-being. It would also mean that there is some major suppression going on of scientific studies that disagree with that advice.

Nope.

I looked a bit and didn’t find anything great. I found stuff saying e.g. people with other things contributing to their longevity can manage with higher cholesterol (proceeding on the premise that high cholesterol is bad, obviously), and so you shouldn’t assume from looking at some long-lived people with high cholesterol that high cholesterol is okay. That seemed like a reasonable point to make from that premise. But the blog article raised a lot of points (including corruption of science issues, which I find the most problematic).

Fair point.

Thinking about it more, I think the correct way to do the math would be something like figure out how many animal deaths per 1000 calories of each food there is, and then compare those rates and figure out what you can eat to get the lowest death toll.

1000 calories of beef has something like 1/600 of a cow death. And if you got it from a climate where it could eat only fresh grass from natural grasslands all year – no hay or silage – and you didn’t use any pesticides on the grass, that is going to reduce a lot of deaths. I don’t know if you still need to do some amount of machine grass care, or if it is possible to just let the grass grow naturally, rotate the animals to different pastures, and have no direct human-caused deaths in the grasslands that the cows are eating. If that is possible, then the cow would be the only death that is human-caused, which would make it better than a crop-based diet, for minimizing animal death and suffering.

I tried to find if there was any information about the death tolls of various foods, and it is hard to find anything reliable. You would think this is something the vegans should be interested in! If some vegan foods have lower animal death tolls than other vegan foods, why not try to get people to eat those? Or if some crop management techniques have lower animal death tolls, why not push for those?

I searched PETA for information about this, and I found a page about people burning the Amazon rainforest for soybean crops. Their point here is that the soybeans are mainly being planted to feed cows, so the problem is actually meat eating. They are accusing ALL meat-eaters of being responsible for this, which is ridiculous. They do not seem to want to admit that their are different types of meat eating, and it is completely possible to eat a lot of meat without eating any meat that ate soybean crops.

They also have a page about animal deaths from plant harvesting. Again, the assumption they make is that the majority of crops are used to feed livestock. They keep talking about how inefficient meat is, the water use of beef, etc, but everything they say is based on the assumption that you are feeding the beef grain and soybeans. Why do they ignore the existence of grass fed and finished beef?

I found this post “debunking” the idea that vegans kill more animals than meat eaters through crop deaths. They are replying to some stuff from the Joe Rogan podcast, which I don’t doubt is also biased. But their main argument also seems to be that most crops go to feed animals. And the figures they are using don’t make sense to me. They say that crops kill 7.3 billion animals per year, which seems way too low to me (that was apparently the figure the anti-vegan person gave).

They state that “more than 9.5 billion land animals are killed directly for food in the US each year”. That seemed high to me, so I clicked the link to see what the breakdown is: over 8 billion of those deaths are chicken. I looked it up somewhere else, and apparently the average American eats 23 chickens a year. I didn’t realize people ate so much chicken. We could eliminate a lot of deaths by pushing people towards beef instead of chicken. One thing that is interesting is that it is health authorities and the anti-saturated fat people that have been pushing people towards chicken and away from beef. But beef would result in fewer direct animal deaths.

There is a lot more in the post. They do at least address grass fed beef a bit. They point out that silage and hay also have harvesting deaths. They do make some attempt to discuss the issue and consider factors, but I don’t find their numbers reliable, so I didn’t spend a lot of time reading it.

I tried to look up the 7.3 billion animals killed during harvesting, to see where that number came from. This article on Anthropocene mentions what I think is the same paper, which was done in 2003 by Steven Davis (they don’t name him though).

They say this about it:

Perhaps the most extensive empirical information, write Fischer and Lamey, comes from a 2003 paper that estimated the average number of field deaths at about six per acre. That figure was extrapolated from earlier studies on rodent deaths during grain and sugarcane harvesting. Another oft-cited figure comes from an Australian finding of 40 mouse deaths per acre of grain. Wild bird, reptile, amphibian, and freshwater fish deaths are trickier to pin down but likely amount to a small fraction of the overall total, which Fischer and Lamey estimate at 7.3 billion wild animal lives.

So that sounds like they are only counting things like mouse deaths, which explains why the number is so low. There would be many more insect, worm, etc deaths than just six or even 40 per acre. They purposely apply pesticides in order to kill insects. I don’t understand why they are leaving them out of the death toll.

I also found a news article from 2002 talking about the animal deaths from crops, with the author of the above paper. (I think from before he authored the paper?) He makes the point that moving towards more beef and less chicken would prevent deaths. The vegan interviewed for the article points out that animals like coyotes and wolves are killed to protect cattle, which is something I hadn’t considered in my own analysis, but that would definitely add to the death toll of eating beef.

There are more blog posts about it, but not very many studies and not really anything that I would consider reliable or unbiased that actually does a reasonable assessment. There don’t seem to be a lot of serious studies about this, which is interesting, given that there are at least billions of lives per year at stake. Everyone keeps referring to the same 2003 study by Davis. It’s also interesting that the vegans seem to want to ignore the issue by claiming that eating animals is worse, instead of putting effort into solutions, figuring out crops that have lower death tolls, etc.

Some examples of other analysis, which I have not read through. (I am not actually trying to study this, and not recommending anyone else study it.):

Here is an analysis on a blog called Farming Truth that says that eating animals has a lower death toll than eating plants. This post also talks about the Davis study, and says he underestimated deaths because he was only looking at mouse deaths, and only during harvesting. This post tries to calculate how many animals total would live on any given hectare, and what percentage of them would die when farming the land. I did not read through it very much at all, so have no idea the quality of the argument, but it looks interesting.

Also, someone in the comments of the above blog post mentioned that animal feed is mostly agricultural waste. So that would make it very misleading to claim that the majority of food grown is being fed to animals, if we are actually growing the food for humans, eating the “good” parts, and then feeding the waste (which is the “majority” of it, since we, e.g., can’t eat corn stalks) to animals. That is something I hadn’t even been considering when reading the PETA & other vegan arguments that most crops are fed to animals.

And here is a chart that shows animal deaths of different foods, per million calories, which claims that all the plant foods are better than all the animal foods. It has a lot of plant harvest deaths for beef, I assume because it is using grain finished beef. And it also mentions the 2003 Davis study, along with some criticism of it. I did not read through the details of this one either.

Anyway, I don’t really know what is better, what causes less deaths, etc. But I don’t think the vegans know either. They don’t seem to be trying to seriously study it, they aren’t pushing for meat options that cause fewer animal deaths (like grass fed), they aren’t pushing for plant options that cause fewer deaths, etc. And I think it is at least plausible that the “carnivores” or “lion diet” people who eat only grass-fed ruminant meat, hunted meat, etc, are responsible for fewer animal deaths than would be caused by a typical vegan diet.

So using a big underestimate of 10 mouse deaths per acre of wheat (I averaged the 6 and 40 to a round number), only from harvesting, how does it compare to a cow?

We need to know how many calories of wheat are in an acre.

Answer: 6.4 million. I have no idea how good this source is.

So how many servings of 1000 calories in an acre? 6400. Then we have 10 mouse deaths, so that’s one mouse death per 640 servings. That is about the same as your estimate of one cow death per 600 servings.

A mouse is smaller than a cow but does it matter less morally by vegan logic? I don’t know. And anyway the wheat figures ignored everything other than mice and all deaths that weren’t during harvesting. And it ignores stuff like mice eating pesticides and suffering without dying. And these numbers are not very accurate.

But it seems reasonable to conclude that grass-fed beef probably beats wheat on this kind of metric, possibly by a lot.

And yeah vegans broadly don’t seem to care, which shows biased tribalism and/or not putting much thought into this stuff.

Oh, ok, so this does actually state that a vegan diet would not include any animal products. (That is what I take it to mean when it says “dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals”.)

Ok, that’s actually what I thought vegan meant, and what I have been using it to mean. I was only talking about the other definition because @S_Emiya brought it up:

Also, I just want to note that this reply didn’t actually engage with what I said.

I called @S_Emiya’s statement (which didn’t actually mention the word “vegan” at all) ableist. So it doesn’t make sense to say the statement itself wasn’t ableist because of what the definition of “vegan” is.

The thing he actually said was:

I was calling it ableist to call something (eating beans or lentils instead of meat) “simple” and “a small change” when it is actually something that many people cannot do for health reasons, disability, etc.

I think it would be similar to saying that walking to work is a simple change that doesn’t require much effort. Maybe that is true for some people, but just making it as if it were a blanket statement that applied to everyone, and something that everyone should strive to do, is ableist.

(And, as I already pointed out, I thought it was a particularly bad statement to make in this thread, which was literally about someone’s health problems being improved by eating more meat and fewer plant foods.)

Edit: Also, I think many many people – perhaps all or the majority – would experience health problems from a vegan diet. So the problem with the statement isn’t just ableism. There are other issues too. But that is the same with my walking example: people with certain disabilities can’t walk to work, regardless of distance, so it is an ableist thing to say. But also, many more people than that can’t walk to work for a variety of reasons that have nothing to do with being disabled.

I am not sure if you are trying to say that you don’t actually agree with me on those two points, or what. It is written a bit like a disagreement, but you don’t actually say any words that disagree. So I’m not sure.

Also, what do you mean about posting “mumbo-jumbo” in the other thread? Were you posting things that you don’t actually agree with?

Ok. Your posts came off as very aggressive and hostile to me. You didn’t start out by clearly pointing out what was an error, trying to explain your position, or asking the kinds of questions you would ask to try to understand the other person’s position. You were asking a lot of questions that, from my perspective, were not relevant to my point, and seemed to be rhetorical questions or questions with an agenda, meant to prove a specific point.

In general, I don’t recommend that on this forum, especially after someone has stated that they don’t want to get into a long conversation with you (and gives a reason). It is usually just better to try to clearly state the thing you disagree with, with quotes, and explain your own position.

If someone has an opinion you don’t understand, you can respond with actual curiosity and try to learn it. But that doesn’t work if you aren’t actually trying to learn: if you are just trying to prove them wrong, point out errors, etc, by using questions, that comes off very differently and is difficult to deal with.

I think the issue there is actually the content of my statement, and not the tone.

I did mean that I think that vegan arguments are biased an anti-human. That is not a tone issue. It is a statement of my opinion, which I tried to state clearly.

The paragraph I wrote right before that statement was:

I think that was clear that I wasn’t talking about all individual vegans. I was talking about vegan thought leaders and vegan advocacy groups. I think that individual vegans are fooled by these thought leaders and advocacy groups, and basically used as pawns to support their causes.

When I said “vegan arguments”, I meant the arguments put out by thought leaders and advocacy groups. These same argument are repeated by individual vegans. A lot of that has to do with the publication of pages of talking points for vegans to use when they are talking to non-vegans.

I didn’t actually know you were vegan. You were making what seemed to be vegan arguments, but I hadn’t noticed any clear statement about your actual diet or personal position.

My writing in this thread was more catered to @JustinCEO than it was to you. This is his thread, and I have been trying to avoid getting into long tangents that wouldn’t be of interest to him. (Which actually makes it difficult to respond to you point by point.)

I called the vegan arguments anti-human without much other explanation because I was pretty sure that was something he was already familiar with, from things like anti-human environmentalism, so I thought he would be able to see the connection.

I can see that it would be a bit confusing to have someone reply to you, but be writing their response more for someone else. I did try to tell you clearly that I was not engaging with you very much and why. That was honestly an effort to be nice, to minimize that type of confusion, and to give you usable information.

I did think some of your arguments were potentially anti-human though. For example, I mentioned something in this post, in the reply to the part where you said predators don’t kill out of malice.

I think there are basically two possibilities in that case.

One is that the vegan has never before heard that many vegan arguments are anti-human. In that case, I would expect a rational person to be interested in hearing an argument against their current position and against the advocacy groups they are following. I would expect them to be especially interested in an argument telling them that their position is actually less moral than they think it is.

This reminds me of the issue with socialism vs capitalism. Many socialists just assume that they have the moral high ground and that socialism is the more moral position. Many capitalists actually agree that socialism is more moral, they just think it is not practical enough. So I would expect an honest, rational socialist to be interested if they hear a clear statement that actually capitalism is the more moral system.

If someone is put off and decides they want to leave a community because someone stated clear disagreement with their position, which they had never heard before, I would view that as irrational tribalism and an unwillingness to learn. If I heard new arguments against important ideas, I would want to learn about them.

The other possibility is that the vegan has heard such arguments before, and they have some familiarity with the position. In that case, if they are familiar with the position and believe they have a good argument against it, I would be happy to hear those arguments. I would be especially happy if someone could provide better analysis than what I can find online.

I hadn’t really considered if it would be off-putting for someone to see an idea that they are familiar with and have arguments against, especially when that idea doesn’t have a lot of good or clear counter-arguments online. I would have expected them to be willing to have a discussion and give their arguments. If they were instead only looking to talk to people who already agreed with all of their ideas, then this probably isn’t the right forum for them.

I have nothing against individual vegans, and I am not trying to drive them away. But I do think it’s important to clearly state disagreements in strong terms. That gives people the opportunity to learn something or to share their own arguments.

Unfortunately some people do find it offensive when you clearly disagree with them. I don’t really know what to do about that. I think it commonly gets called a “tone” issue, but I think the issue really is more with the content than the tone. People don’t like strong, clear disagreements.

I think my wording here was unclear. I didn’t actually mean to say you were necessarily biased, but I can see that the way it reads implies that you are biased.

I meant something like “biased people doing behavior X, X being the same behavior that you are doing right now”. So not necessarily that you were a biased person preaching for “plant-based” diets. But that the behavior you were currently engaging in was similar to a particular behavior that biased people do in a particular way for a particular purpose.

I was not sure at that point if you were biased, but I thought you might be biased about veganism, for various reasons. (One of the reasons is just that you had been absent from the forum for something like 6 months, and then came back just to discuss this one topic, in more than one thread.)

I should have been more careful about implying you were biased. If I wanted to say something about you being biased, it would have been better to clearly state that I thought you were (or might be) biased, rather than to just say something that implies that. So I apologize for that.

BTW, I think you’re assuming that animal lives are equivalent to each other, and that seems like a reasonable way to proceed for the purpose of the thought experiment. Some people might say that some animals are worth more than others (due to their relative intelligence, say), and then that would complicate things, and you’d need some way to convert between the values of animal lives and break out which animals are dying when calculating animal deaths.

PETA seems really biased, unreasonable and agenda driven. I am not surprised.

Chicken figure sounded plausible to me. People can eat rotisserie chicken, fried chicken, nuggets, tenders, wings, chicken meatballs, sliced chicken breast etc. Really adds up.

I would guess that they have an implicit hierarchy of which creatures matter that they’re taking for granted.

Yeah that’s a good point.

Yeah, seems plausible. I think the vegans are only interested in stuff that supports the outcome they want to argue for (no meat, eat only plants) so they don’t see much incentive to explore the issues you’re raising (unless the results of such an analysis happens to support their agenda). They’re not interested in seeking truth or objective analysis.

It was indeed something I understood. BTW, I would draw a similar distinction between regular environmentalists and environmentalist advocacy groups as @anonymous71 drew between regular vegans and vegan thought leaders or advocacy groups (and I imagine anonymous would agree with me on this, though I of course don’t want to and will not speak for them). That is to say, I don’t think that every environmentalist is anti-human, at least, as far as their explicit ideas and motivations goes. I judge the thought leaders and advocacy groups quite harshly as far as anti-humanism, and a lot of that just comes down to taking some of their published public statements seriously. But I do think that lots of individual environmental activists have some genuine concern for “the planet” or whatever and are losing sleep due to supposed forthcoming environmental catastrophes.

Yes, I agree.

I would also add that – much like with animal rights arguments – I think here are actually pro-human arguments to be made for some parts of environmentalism. But for some reason, many people refuse to make those arguments (both animals rights & environmentalist activists), and it hurts their overall cause.

I think a large part of the issue is that the US government has been pushing white meat for decades. So beef consumption has gone down, while chicken consumption has gone up.

The USDA has a graph of per capita annual consumption of beef, pork, chicken, and seafood over time:

Chicken consumption has increased a lot since the 1940s, whereas beef has been declining since the 1980s. On average, people are eating more chicken than any of the other three individually. (It’s pretty much the opposite for me – I eat less chicken than anything else, hence my initial surprise.)

(Edit: I said “consumption” here, but the graph is actually of “availability”, as it says on the title. They can’t actually measure what people consume, so I think they are measuring what is produced.)

I have also read that part of the reason for this is that chicken is cheap in the US, since it is basically subsidized. For example, this Huffington Post article claims that the corn and soy subsidies amount to an indirect subsidy on (non pastured, poorly fed) chicken. I haven’t actually looked into this very much, but it sounds reasonable to me.

This is interesting in a lot of ways. For one thing, corn and soy are both high in Omega-6. The government subsidizes them, so they end up in a bunch of different processed foods and also in animal feed, which increases the level of Omega-6 (and decreases Omega-3) in meat. The government has also been pushing vegetable oils over other fats with policy and official diet recommendations. So people are accidentally eating a bunch of Omega-6 in their processed food, in their meat, and in their oils (including deep fry oils, since restaurants were all pressured to switch from more stable saturated fats to less stable vegetable oils). So their subsidies and their advice are combining to really hurt people.

Also, the push for more chicken makes the “death toll” of our food a lot higher. If people were eating an equivalent amount of beef as they are chicken, it would be something like 200x fewer deaths. (I’m assuming 3 lbs of meat per chicken, and 600 lbs of meat per cow for that number.) This seems like something the vegans should at least care about.

But, instead of making any effort at all to recommend any kind of harm reduction, PETA just publishes stuff like this to push for total abstinence. They say there is no such thing as humane meat. But all their arguments are just about the fact that the industry is lying to people. The things they are talking about do happen to some animals, but not to all of them. And instead of encouraging people to seek out actual humane alternatives, they are basically saying it is hopeless, and there is no way to avoid this cruelty if you still eat meat.

This kind of argument reminds me of the abstinence-only education given to teenagers. People literally tell teenagers that condoms don’t work, in an effort to push abstinence. All that ends up doing is leading to a lot of teenagers who have sex without bothering to use protection because they’ve been told it doesn’t matter whether or not they do.

I think PETA is doing the same thing with animals. For the people who aren’t currently willing or ready to become vegan, but do care about animal welfare, they are just going to continue to buy grocery store meat and try not to think about it too much. They could get better alternatives that actually were raised more humanely, but PETA (and other groups) have told them that is a lie, it doesn’t really exist, all meat is the same, etc. So they don’t even bother trying.

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Yeah, I was assuming all animal lives are equivalent.

PETA’s front page has this image when you first go to it:

It wouldn’t make sense to try to end speciesism while also arguing that insect and slug deaths are somehow worth less than cow deaths or chicken deaths.

I think PETA is more hostile to beef than chicken because beef is the gold standard of meat.

I wonder if PETA contributed to getting beef fat out of McDonald’s french fry friers (to use harmful transfats instead).

That’s a great point. It honestly seems like the sort of thing libertarians would focus on, but I don’t recall seeing much attention given by them to this kind of thing (I briefly googled and found stuff criticizing farm subsidies on economic grounds, not health grounds).

There is stuff like this though:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-diet-farm-subsidies/foods-from-subsidized-commodities-tied-to-obesity-idUSKCN0ZL2ER

The more people eat of foods made with subsidized commodities, the more likely they are to be obese, have abnormal cholesterol and high blood sugar, according to a report in JAMA Internal Medicine.

Current federal agricultural subsidies help finance the production of corn, soybeans, wheat, rice, sorghum, dairy and livestock, which are often converted into refined grains, high-fat and high-sodium processed foods, and high-calorie juices and soft drinks (sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup), the authors write.

“We know that eating too many of these foods can lead to obesity, cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes,” said lead author Karen R. Siegel of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

This old article actually even mentions the omega-6 to omega-3 ratio issue

The current bill gives some $4.9 billion a year in automatic payments to growers of such commodity crops, thus driving down prices for corn, corn-based products and corn-fed meats. Cows that are raised on corn, rather than grass, make meat that is higher in calories and contains more omega-6 fatty acids and fewer omega-3 fatty acids—a dangerous ratio that has been linked to heart disease.

Cheap corn has also become a staple in highly processed foods, from sweetened breakfast cereals to soft drinks, that have been linked to an increase in the rate of type 2 diabetes, a condition that currently affects more than one in 12 American adults. Between 1985 and 2010 the price of beverages sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup dropped 24 percent, and by 2006 American children consumed an extra 130 calories a day from these beverages. Over the same period the price of fresh fruits and vegetables rose 39 percent. For families on a budget, the price difference can be decisive in their food choices.

So the relationship between govt-subsidized food and specific bad health outcomes has been known and talked about for years but nobody does anything.

Yeah, I think this is related to their goals being more anti-human than actually pro-animal. Beef would result in fewer animal deaths, but that’s not the thing they care about most.

Beef is the gold standard of meat because people like it best. People like burgers more than chicken. The reason chicken has gotten more popular is because people are trying to be healthy, not because they just like it better. (And also because it is cheap and added to a bunch of processed foods.)

PETA wants to attack meat eating in general, and attacking beef does that. But they are also attacking the thing people like the most, and trying to get people to eat less of the thing that they like. I don’t think that part is just a coincidence.

Jogged[1] my third 10k ever today. In November, an attempt to jog a 5k left me regretting it for 2 weeks. Really hard to overstate the significance of this dietary change on my capacity to engage in sustained cardio.

Was thinking some about health stuff during my jog. One is how difficult it was for me to lose weight previously due to dealing with serious hunger issues. I managed it (somehow) but it was very difficult. At the time, I just took that difficulty as what was necessarily involved in losing weight, and thought that basically some serious amount of displeasure/suffering was an inevitable part of the process. I now think that was mistaken. I literally lacked the frame of reference for what a “normal” level/type of hunger was, didn’t realized how diet could affect that sort of thing, and proceeded to analyze things from that limited/ignorant perspective.

Another thing is that I think I had some misunderstandings about calories in/calories out (CICO). I still think that CICO is basically true, but I think it’s a much more narrow point than I previously realized. If you have a sustained calorie deficit, you will lose weight – that’s the part I think is true. But that doesn’t say:

  1. What sort of diets will make it easiest to maintain a sustained calorie deficit, and what sort of diets will make it more difficult (by e.g. making you hungry all the time, which was a problem I had, or by causing you to have more pain and thus making exercise more difficult).
  2. What sorts of non-weight-related health issues could be brought about by certain eating patterns (cuz of e.g. how they feed the cows that make your dairy, or how they feed/treat the cattle that make your beef, or cuz of how you’re affecting your gut microbiome by eating or not eating certain things, or cuz of eating things with certain oils in them. This relates to point 1 but is separate IMHO.)

I had taken CICO as more like “just eat whatever, and make sure you have a caloric deficit, and you’ll lose weight and be fine.” I did lose weight (A LOT of weight) eating “whatever” (and calorie counting very precisely) in the past, but I don’t actually think it’s a great approach. It’s 1) hard and 2) not sustainable due to being hard.

The above is offered tentatively and may have its own misconceptions so feel free to criticize away :slight_smile:


  1. I follow a convention of treating jogging as speed between 4-6mph and faster than that as running. By that standard, I can only typically run for only a mile or occasionally two at my current level of fitness. ↩︎

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I’m consciously trying to incorporate more beef in my diet but it’s an effort. It’s not automatic or intuitive given my existing culinary habits. My diet used to be more chicken-heavy, especially in terms of the stuff I would cook. A lot of the beef I would eat would be eating out (e.g. burgers). Since I make almost all my meals at home now, I don’t get the eating-out beef (unless I’m traveling, which is rare). I did use beef some (e.g. for picadillo, pasta bolognese or tacos) but not a ton. Didn’t really buy steak much.

Some beef stuff I make at home and eat:

  • steak
  • spaghetti sauce with ground beef (simplest recipe I do is a pre-made sauce jar + beef + mushrooms). you can skip the jar and use your own ingredients and can add extra stuff including cream. this doesn’t have to go on pasta. can go on rice, quinoa, potato, cauliflower or even nothing.
  • burgers
  • mexican food
    • e.g. ground beef with taco seasoning (buy premade or use own ingredients) for tacos, burritos, nachos or rice/bean/meat/etc bowls
    • e.g. fajitas with sliced beef
    • you can cook ground beef with rice, onions, mexican spices, etc. like a one pot meal or as an ingredient with beans and some other stuff
  • chili (2 lbs ground beef, a bunch of bell pepper, some tomato, spices, optional beans. can throw in extra stuff like olives or mushrooms)
  • soup or stew. pick a starchy thing like beans, lentils, rice, barley or potato. pick a meat like beef cubes, ham, sausage or leftover poultry. add veggies like carrot, celery, onion, tomato. you can put in a ton of other veggies too.
  • beef bone broth
  • beef jerky
  • thai or indian curry (beef or chicken)
  • stir fry (most often beef)
  • fried rice with meat mixed in
  • chinese food (just find some good sauce recipe or buy premade, then meat and veggies over rice or noodles)
  • rice, ground beef, cut up bacon (optional), cream, mushrooms, onions. can use cream of mushroom soup instead of cream.
  • beef roast (can eat it as a main with some side dishes, kinda like steak, or can use it as an ingredient in some other options)
  • shredded beef
  • ribs (e.g. sous vide short ribs for 2-3 days)
  • beef + rice + kimchi (can add marinade the meat or just put on some soy sauce and/or sesame oil. you can look up korean bbq recipes and side dishes. eating the kbbq with a lettuce wrap is common. i wasn’t really worrying about keto rules but i guess you aren’t eating rice so try that)
  • meatballs
  • salad with meat mixed in (i usually do salad with no meat except maybe anchovies or bacon bits and have meat separately on my plate, but you can put meat in salad like canned tuna/salmon/sardines or steak or chicken pieces.)
  • corned beef and cabbage (and potatoes, carrots, onion)
  • sandwiches (i love pastrami but have not made my own, but stuff more like steak, roast beef or meatballs sandwiches are easier to make at home)
  • you can just take some of the ingredients from other meals and do like a “deconstructed” recipe plus leave some things out. like i’ll put bacon, avocado, tomato and mb lettuce on a plate with some mustard and mayo but no bread. that would work great with some sliced beef too.
  • i used to eat hamburger helper. i could make stuff similar to that with my own ingredients. i’m also interested in making some risotto which can be done with ground beef.

Ground beef is easy and versatile. Steaks and roasts can be done in airfryer or oven. Roasts, soups or sauces can be done in instantpot, dutch oven or slow cooker. sauces can also be done in a deep saute pan.

a lot of meals i just cook some meat (like steak, dry or wet roast, or pretty plain ground beef) and then get a starchy side like grain or root veggie and get some other veggies (often including something green). sometimes i skip the starchy part. i often make extra and eat leftovers. roasts and ground beef are often fine to reheat. steak doesn’t reheat as well but you can still make extra of the other parts of the meal.

it might help to focus less on recipes and more on just cooking meat + veggie + optional grain or starchy veggie. then optionally do a sauce or spices or some kinda topper (like grated cheese). but just meat and veggies is fine. you don’t need to make a specific thing or always have a lot of flavoring. this is looking at food in a more conceptual way of what to put on the plate, while recipes are more telling you specific examples of things that work. soup is another huge concept. you put meat, veggies and maybe something starchy in water. so it’s basically the same plus a bunch of water. soup is easy to make, easy to freeze, easy to reheat, and you can also put leftover meat in it from making something else. you should make think of soup as a more fundamental food category and make it more.

Suggestions welcome.

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Two things I do with ground beef I didn’t see on the list:

  • Meatloaf - tons of recipes for this, some I don’t like due to what’s included but easy to customize. Also it’s possible to use low-carb / Keto bread crumbs to substitute for normal bread crumbs and it seems to work fine. One thing I have done is make and cook a large batch of meatloaf, let it cool, cut into single serving pieces, put each in a vacuum-sealed bag then freeze. Easy to drop in a Sous-vide for an hour and comes out perfect. I’ve also made single-serving mini-meatloaves so there’s more outside surface to get crunchy and carmelize, but putting those in bags to Sous-vide later mostly defeats the purpose.
  • Salisbury steak - The hard part of this is the gravy, both seasoning and texture. Otherwise it’s just a ground beef patty with a bit of seasoning. I haven’t been able to get gravy to texture/thicken right with low-carb ingredients so this may be a non-starter for Justin. Or if anyone has figured out how to make good low-carb gravy I’d be interested.

Yeah I gotta incorporate steak into my diet more. Do you prepare yours a specific way?

I’ve had meat sauce + cheese or meatballs + cheese + sauce in a bowl by itself before (even before keto). Riced cauliflower seems like it’d be good compliment as well.

I actually have been eating a fair amount of beef jerky lately. It’s pretty good stuff.

I remember having problems with this before. Like the ribs got a weird smell to them after being in the sous vide for a while. Don’t think I figured out the issue. I haven’t tried it in a long time though.

I just “rediscovered” kimchi in a different context. I have been making seaweed wraps with smoked salmon + cream cheese + sliced cucumbers. I discovered that substituting the cucumber for kimchi really gave the wrap a different spin that I liked. (Separately, I discovered that I could use seaweed wrap for a keto-compliant breakfast burrito of cheese/egg/bacon, and it’s not bad. The seaweed flavor tastes a bit odd but is overpowered by the other stuff anyways. Main thing for breakfast burrito is just to have some kind of wrapper).

:+1:

I generally do tuna, smoked salmon, or chicken.

I do stuff like this sometimes with burgers or sausages.

Thanks for your post, lots of helpful ideas.