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Author Topic: Veganism and Vegetarianism Thread  (Read 14076 times)

scriver

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Re: Veganism and Vegetarianism Thread
« Reply #90 on: July 28, 2020, 07:42:23 am »

Sorry if I came of as rude by the way.

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martinuzz

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Re: Veganism and Vegetarianism Thread
« Reply #91 on: July 28, 2020, 07:46:16 am »

Nah don't worry I didn't take offense.
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gamerboy3456

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Re: Veganism and Vegetarianism Thread
« Reply #92 on: July 28, 2020, 07:58:17 am »

Veganism:  Surely we should not harm other beings.  For all we know, their pain is like our pain - many of them act the same way.

Vegetarianism: There is some point between beings whose feelings matter, and those who don't.

Me: I consume the meat of murdered beings, but I do so relatively rarely.  I appreciate those who died for me, every time I eat meat.

Discuss.

I try to avoid meat as much as possible. But when I eat meat, I attach great importance to quality and above all to regionality. Fortunately I have the possibility to buy meat from a local butcher who gets it from local farmers. It is also worth paying more for it.

I do not condemn anyone who eats meat, but everyone should pay attention to where the meat comes from and not buy cheap meat from factory farms.
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Bumber

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Re: Veganism and Vegetarianism Thread
« Reply #93 on: July 28, 2020, 07:07:42 pm »

Some alcohols are also made with fruit that's been worked by slave bees. I wonder if that counts.

Almonds are particularly bad for bees, on top of the aforementioned high water usage.
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Reelya

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Re: Veganism and Vegetarianism Thread
« Reply #94 on: July 28, 2020, 07:16:28 pm »

The solution is to stop feeding almonds to bees.

Rolan7

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Re: Veganism and Vegetarianism Thread
« Reply #95 on: August 03, 2020, 09:18:54 pm »

Are US federal subsidies for meat production okay?  Do they respect the ethics of citizens who believe animal slaughter is amoral?

I still occasionally eat meat myself, but current decisions in the US say that people of faith shouldn't have to be associated with practices they disagree with.  Even at no cost to themselves, they can deny healthcare benefits they disagree with.  Wouldn't that apply to subsidizing the widespread slaughter of animals?

Our level of meat production is far from necessary.  While a lot of land is mostly just useable for grazing, cropland is being wasted on feeding livestock.  That is inefficient and many believe it's supporting a horrific practice.

If people want meat instead of the readily accessible and efficient vegetarian alternatives like eggs or plants, shouldn't that be left to the market?  Why is the government subsidizing meat?
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Frumple

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Re: Veganism and Vegetarianism Thread
« Reply #96 on: August 03, 2020, 09:48:55 pm »

Even at no cost to themselves, they can deny healthcare benefits they disagree with.  Wouldn't that apply to subsidizing the widespread slaughter of animals?
Iirc the closer equivalent to what's going on on that front would be some farm applying for (and receiving) subsidies or other benefits for farming meat without actually, y'know, farming meat. S'been how several of the religious abuses have played out, if I'm not misremembering. Plus all sorts of half-assed enforced tax shenanigans.

Also probably worth noting the practices that make eggs accessible themselves tend to trend fairly horrific. Yard grown and whatnot is definitely possible, but it also is notably more expensive than industrial stuff, from what I understand. Plenty of somewhat fucked up shit going on vis a vis even plant based agriculture, for that matter. The subsidies involved in agriculture (livestock or otherwise) are also all over the place and put in for multiple reasons, too, so you're getting into a pretty messy subject in general...

That said, lots of subsidies or tax spending doesn't respect the ethics on individual citizens at-fucking-all, their religiously informed ones or otherwise, so... not actually sure how much that's something people give much of a damn about at the end of the day, yeah? For better (LGBT kids getting what meager gov't assistance they do, ferex, or planned parenthood's continued existence) or worse (taxpayer dollars going to fucking cop black sites or funding the paychecks that have unmarked federal fucks kidnapping people off the street).
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wierd

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Re: Veganism and Vegetarianism Thread
« Reply #97 on: August 03, 2020, 10:12:28 pm »

Farm eggs (as opposed to factory eggs) require humans to collect them.

That is straight up the single most extensive source of cost that makes factory produced eggs win in the market. Factory produced eggs do not need a human to collect the eggs, because the chicken is forcibly held in a confined space over the egg collection machinery, and even primitive machine vision systems can determine if the chicken has laid an egg, and then initiate egg collection.


The second, is that cost of premises is much lower when it does not have to allow the chickens to wander around, get in and out of the building to graze/eat bugs, etc..   

It's all about the economic maxim of "Maximal product output with minimized costs to production."


This is the kind of thing that regulation is for, since without those regulations, atrocities are inevitable.  History has shown this repeatedly, and even abuses against humans are not uncommon. (See all those rug factories with children that end up with wrecked lungs.) "It's just business" is perhaps the singly most malign thing anyone can say in this century.


My answer is that regulation is a thing, it is a thing that needs to exist, and it should be utilized.  Correct utilization will fix most if not all of these ethical conundrums. 


(that is to say, I feel the ethical vegetarians should spend less time trying to food-shame omnivores, and spend more time roasting laissez-faire capitalists.  The issue is much less "the food itself", and much more "the means by which it is produced.")
« Last Edit: August 03, 2020, 10:18:06 pm by wierd »
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ChairmanPoo

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Re: Veganism and Vegetarianism Thread
« Reply #98 on: August 03, 2020, 10:27:28 pm »

Cashew nuts aren't exactly the best of nuts, economically or ecologucally, though, even if they are the tastiest nut of all. They get like one nut per square acre of tree per year. It really is a super luxury kind of goods.

I refuse to use the ridiculous term "flexitarian" for myself. I'm just a guy who eats a lot of plants. Just like our ancestors did for thousands of years before the post-WWII economy boom made everyone in the West ridiculously rich. I'm too much if a hipster for these jippo trend words.


...I must be informed, what's not vegan about alkohol?

For the record, some bottles use bee's wax and there's some other alcohol that is filtered through animal intestine or something making them not vegan. I could look ot up, but its exceptionally rare.

That might be true. Didn't think of that.

Some alcohols are also made with fruit that's been worked by slave bees. I wonder if that counts.

Same here. I am trying to eat more grains and greens for health reasons, but its not a refusal to eat meat per se
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Cruxador

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Re: Veganism and Vegetarianism Thread
« Reply #99 on: August 04, 2020, 07:45:01 pm »

The solution is to stop feeding almonds to bees.
Almonds need to be pollinated by someone. Machines can't do it, and human labor at $10/hour would bankrupt the industry. Of course, it would be ideal to have the trees pollinated by a variety of species, including indigenous solitary bees, but that comes back to the monoculture issue mentioned in the article. When half the valley needs almonds pollinated at once, you need a lot of pollinators. Other than the European honeybee, there isn't another option; you can't keep species alive in an almond orchard when the almonds aren't flowering as there isn't the nectar for them, and other species can't be transported in high numbers the same way.
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wierd

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Re: Veganism and Vegetarianism Thread
« Reply #100 on: August 04, 2020, 07:55:24 pm »

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Reelya

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Re: Veganism and Vegetarianism Thread
« Reply #101 on: August 04, 2020, 08:33:24 pm »

What about bees that shoot bubbles from their mouths?

Ziusudra

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Re: Veganism and Vegetarianism Thread
« Reply #102 on: August 04, 2020, 08:37:00 pm »

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jan/07/honeybees-deaths-almonds-hives-aoe

So if those almonds require the exploitation of - and result in the death of - bees, doesn't that mean they're not vegan?
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Cruxador

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Re: Veganism and Vegetarianism Thread
« Reply #103 on: August 05, 2020, 07:07:19 pm »

What about bubbles?

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/06/200617150033.htm
Well,
Quote
Although this approach to pollination appears promising, more techniques are still needed to improve its precision.
Also, that pollen has to be sourced from somewhere, which adds an extra step and the amount needed might be quite high. That seems like the biggest concern, to me, with potential added labor costs. A drone or other agricultural equipment for distributing the bubbles seems like the kind of thing you'd expect to pay somewhere in the low five figures for, which would pay for itself over bees pretty quickly. But if the pollen solution you need to fill it with is too expensive, then then commercial viability is gone.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jan/07/honeybees-deaths-almonds-hives-aoe

So if those almonds require the exploitation of - and result in the death of - bees, doesn't that mean they're not vegan?
Arguably, but this would apply to every insect-pollinated crop grown in a monoculture. Wind pollinated stuff like grains, amaranths, and walnuts don't have the same issue, nor hand pollinated or unpollinated specialty products like cucumbers and some designer greenhouse fruits, but the vast majority of fruit are bee pollinated. That certainly includes everything in the rose family (apples, pears, stone fruits), all citruses (unless there's some specialty kind that's hand pollinated which I don't know about) tomatoes aside from some very fancy non-commercial varieties, in general if you consider bee exploitation to not be cruelty free, fruit are off-limits. They certainly imply more harm to the bee than honey necessarily does, and it's quite common for people to consider that non-vegan.
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Reelya

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Re: Veganism and Vegetarianism Thread
« Reply #104 on: August 08, 2020, 04:45:54 am »

Are US federal subsidies for meat production okay?  Do they respect the ethics of citizens who believe animal slaughter is amoral?

The problem is in how they assess that. Those aren't meat subsidies, they're crop subsidies. It's the fact that cattle eat a lot of crops which actually causes more of the subsidies to go to meat. "end the meat subsidy" is the rallying cry of people who saw a graph saying most of the funding went to cattle production and didn't look further. There is really no meat subsidy.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/us-touts-fruit-and-vegetables-while-subsidizing-animals-that-become-meat/2011/08/22/gIQATFG5IL_story.html

Quote
Of the roughly $200 billion spent to subsidize U.S. commodity crops from 1995 to 2010 (commodity crops are interchangeable, storable foods such as grains and certain beans, and cotton), roughly two-thirds went to animal-feed crops, tobacco and cotton.

The reason so much "goes" to animal production is that they grow crops, which are subsidized, and a lot of that goes to animal production, so if you subsidize crop-growing in general it indirectly subsidizes animals. And the government leaves the decision about what crop to grow up to the farmer. That's the heart of the issue. Nobody in an office is going "oh yes, x% for meat producers, heheh, but only y% for the fruit growers! *cackle cackle*", you just fill in a form and get the the crop subsidy, and you get to decide what to grow. The reason fruit-growing doesn't get much subsidy is because there are about 26 million tons of fruit grown, vs almost 500 million tons of grain grown.

However, how are they even calculating that. Often you have a human-edible crop but when processed there's some chaff etc, perhaps making up the bulk of the crop, which then gets converted to animal feed. If they're calculating subsidies on those crops as being partially a meat subsidy then it would actually be difficult to disentangle from the subsidy for stuff people actually eat.

So say they put a restriction in that said you can only get the farm subsidy if you're growing food that's fit for human consumption. That would causes some serious distortions in the economics. Suddenly, it would be attractive to grow stuff that's nominally fit for human consumption, thus getting the subsidy, and then selling that to meat-producers anyway. It would just make things more inefficient (since there are now regulatory distortions in the type of crop you grow), and probably not greatly impact the proportion of the subsidies indirectly going to meat production.
« Last Edit: August 08, 2020, 05:17:53 am by Reelya »
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