Can Meat Eaters be Easy to Offend?

[Jadedvet]

One woman who was the absolute worst -- always teasing me, literally waving meat in my face, etc. -- she later "switched sides" and became the preachiest, most obnoxious vegetarian I've ever met.

In case any of you missed it, Nohorsetown answered the thread right there. Obnoxious people will be obnoxious regardless of what they eat or which side they are on.

 

[Politrukk]

It's simple.

Vegans wish to convert others to also become vegan.


Those others are meat eaters.

Erm... what? Vegans don't eat meat and dairy (and apparently honey which I find rather over the top)
Since when does belonging to a group automatically make you a . This sounds about like "gay recruiters" style thinking to me.

You could argue that ethical veganism implies that making others eat less meat is a good thing but this is going to depend a lot on how you justify your exclusion of meat from your diet and how you consider moral responsibility to work... that is not a simple issue.

Even if there is the intention to convince others (which is not an unusual or automatically negative thing for people with a particular moral belief) this won't automatically be a smug, obnoxious "Sigh, how silly you are, let me set your thinking straight" kind of exercise. That assumption (and the occassionally over the top reaction to it) by meat-eaters is exactly the thing that this thread was asking people about.

I actually don't know any vegans who don't have that attitude, heck you may be telling me this you may also be telling me fairies are real.

As we speak I have a big long post in my timeline on facebook doing just that.

 

[K12]

It's simple.

Vegans wish to convert others to also become vegan.


Those others are meat eaters.

Erm... what? Vegans don't eat meat and dairy (and apparently honey which I find rather over the top)
Since when does belonging to a group automatically make you a . This sounds about like "gay recruiters" style thinking to me.

You could argue that ethical veganism implies that making others eat less meat is a good thing but this is going to depend a lot on how you justify your exclusion of meat from your diet and how you consider moral responsibility to work... that is not a simple issue.

Even if there is the intention to convince others (which is not an unusual or automatically negative thing for people with a particular moral belief) this won't automatically be a smug, obnoxious "Sigh, how silly you are, let me set your thinking straight" kind of exercise. That assumption (and the occassionally over the top reaction to it) by meat-eaters is exactly the thing that this thread was asking people about.

I actually don't know any vegans who don't have that attitude, heck you may be telling me this you may also be telling me fairies are real.

As we speak I have a big long post in my timeline on facebook doing just that.

Do you ever get messages listing all the vegetarians who aren't writing big long posts proselytising their vegetarianism? This is how these kinds of biases work. Loud and annoying people are clearly part of the sub-group that they're arguing for (and are also memorable and noticable) and people who don't bring up and argue for their minority opinion (or sexuality or culture or whatever) are assumed to be part of the majority by default.

Any easily offended, vegetarian-haters you know probably have never had a reason or opportunity to reveal that part of themselves to you. I recently shared a veggie christmas recipe on my facebook that I remember making last year and it was really nice. Aside from positive comments I have a handful along the lines of "why don't you just eat real food"/ "the vegetarian option is you can fuck off"/ "you are an idiot"/ "eating meat is natural"/ "why do you think you're better than me" variety as a response to it.

 

[Lightspeaker]

It's the same mentality that results in people responding with "I'm gonna carry a pistol into Starbucks to spite you" to criticism of open carrying. Who says something like that unless a nerve has been touched?

It's essentially "how dare you". A defense of something seen as sacrosanct.

Except that's not how it works. Spite is not the same as sarcastically winding someone up either. Its rather unnecessarily childish, but its nothing to do with spite; you might do better viewing it as a more unpleasant form of teasing. Goading perhaps. Trolling if you wish. Looking for a reaction is the point I'm trying to get across here.

I think the root cause of your confusion here is that you're missing an important distinction here with your comparison and that is the reason for the reaction. There are genuine fears among gun owners of "THEY'RE COMING TO TAKE MAH GUNS!"; so the reaction caused by criticism of open carry (or any criticism of guns at all) is rooted in that fear. There are political and social efforts to try to make that happen and other countries have successfully imposed effective firearms controls that make it a genuine possibility of it being tried. So people go nuts over it and make aggressive statements, because indeed a nerve has been struck.

In comparison nobody is genuinely scared that eating meat will actually get banned, so the subject gets ridiculed rather than feared. The response doesn't come from any kind of offence, it comes from 'oh look at this silly vegan, lets see if I can provoke them a bit more' or alternatively 'I disagree with this person's life choices and I think they're an idiot so I'll make that clear to them'. Its from a fundamental position to either wind up or judge the person. If there was a huge vegan lobby pushing for meat eating to be outlawed then you'd see an actual, genuinely offended reaction which would be far more aggressive.

 

[Dizchu]

Are you a vegan? You're not saying so here, but you sound like a friend of mine when he was vegan.

I am not, no.

Do you really not care if people eat meat or not? Is that truly a matter of indifference to you?

I care if people eat meat or not the same way I care if people use fossil fuels in everyday life. I can't really criticise every individual that uses fossil fuels because it's such a necessary part of many peoples' lives, but I can criticise the over-reliance on fossil fuels, the lack of funding into renewable energy, the rampant pollution that developed nations produce.

What people eat is their own business and I don't intend to interfere with that (because I know first-hand how frustrating having someone look over my shoulder and judge what I eat is).

If you believe that what you're doing is right/good, does this not mean that you believe people who aren't doing what you're doing are doing wrong? Do you really disassociate your own moral values from how more people should behave?

It's not quite as simple as that. I believe what I'm doing is more in line with my own values and as a result makes me a more honest person. While I think a reduction in meat consumption and fossil fuel consumption would do the planet (and humanity) a lot of good, the species relies so heavily on these industries that it'd be unreasonable to fault every individual.

Don't confuse being willing to accept some pain in animals with being ignorant of it. Your logic wouldn't explain the vast majority of human history where many of us slaughtered animals we caught for survival.

Of course, the natural world is full of suffering. It's the whole "circle of life" thing, organisms have to die to provide sustenance for others. But intensive farming on the scale we have today is no comparison for hunting for survival. It's not sustainable for the environment, it's not comparable to other predator-prey interactions because it's a highly industrialised process. If I were to completely dismiss the animal welfare aspect, I'd still be left with the environmental aspect. It takes a ridiculous amount of water, energy, transportation and land to keep up with current demands.

It is erroneous to think that these factories are doing a poorer job than we've ever done in the past. The main issue we see now is in the living quarters of the animals.

Exactly, and that's what my personal issue with the industry is. Not how animals die, but how they live. Well that, and the unsustainability of the industry at its current state of growth.

Would you be willing to pay for and/or eat that meat? Or is the humane treatment irrelevant to your personal consumption of meat?

Personally that ship has sailed, though I do endorse that method of farming compared to the alternative. If I still ate meat and it came from sources like that, sure I'd feel a lot less cognitive dissonance. I don't think humans necessarily should have to abandon meat, we did evolve to be omnivorous after all. If there were a way to supply the demand in an environmentally sustainable way, and as ethically as is realistically possible then yeah I wouldn't have a problem with it. I can't say the same for others that don't eat meat, but personally it's the excess of the industry, not its mere existence that I take issue with.

Except that's not how it works. Spite is not the same as sarcastically winding someone up either. Its rather unnecessarily childish, but its nothing to do with spite; you might do better viewing it as a more unpleasant form of teasing. Goading perhaps. Trolling if you wish. Looking for a reaction is the point I'm trying to get across here.

Well "spite" means to deliberately offend or annoy someone, typically as a response. "Trolling" generally involves an exaggeration of a certain point of view that the "troll" may or may not have to get a reaction. "Baiting", essentially. This is entirely a semantic issue, but the difference relies on who takes the bait.

You may disagree, but I think responding to animal rights activists with "well meat is awesome so shut up" is a defensive position. When people respond to videos of pigs being treated as pets with "bacon is delicious", that seems to me to be a lazy response to their views being challenged. "Pigs are for bacon, aren't they? Better reinforce this fact!" As if people aren't aware that pigs are eaten?

Or maybe my standards for trolling are too high, who knows?

 

[Dizchu]

Vegan is the future, only someone really blind can't see that

I think that's a big stretch, but not entirely false (kinda). It's like saying renewable energy is the future... I mean it depends on how you look at it.

What I can say is that our current methods of farming are unsustainable and at some point in the 21st century it'd need an overhaul. Maybe this would be achieved with synthetic meats? I mean if you can grow a steak in a lab that means you don't have to farm any livestock. Will people make this switch because of ethical reasons? Hell no, they'll do it because it's cheaper.

If such a change happened, even then I don't think everyone will get on board. There'll still be a market for "organic meat", but that market wouldn't be as enormous as it is today. It wasn't that long ago that meat was considered somewhat of a luxury, you couldn't just walk into a McDonald's and walk out a minute later with a Big Mac.

I do think proudly declaring that veganism is "the future" is a bit excessive.

 

[Politrukk]

It's simple.

Vegans wish to convert others to also become vegan.


Those others are meat eaters.

Erm... what? Vegans don't eat meat and dairy (and apparently honey which I find rather over the top)
Since when does belonging to a group automatically make you a . This sounds about like "gay recruiters" style thinking to me.

You could argue that ethical veganism implies that making others eat less meat is a good thing but this is going to depend a lot on how you justify your exclusion of meat from your diet and how you consider moral responsibility to work... that is not a simple issue.

Even if there is the intention to convince others (which is not an unusual or automatically negative thing for people with a particular moral belief) this won't automatically be a smug, obnoxious "Sigh, how silly you are, let me set your thinking straight" kind of exercise. That assumption (and the occassionally over the top reaction to it) by meat-eaters is exactly the thing that this thread was asking people about.

No but there's an obvious difference between a veggie hamburger recipe and the weekly/monthly propoganda pieces I see.

I personally don't mind it as much, but the activism
I actually don't know any vegans who don't have that attitude, heck you may be telling me this you may also be telling me fairies are real.

As we speak I have a big long post in my timeline on facebook doing just that.

Do you ever get messages listing all the vegetarians who aren't writing big long posts proselytising their vegetarianism? This is how these kinds of biases work. Loud and annoying people are clearly part of the sub-group that they're arguing for (and are also memorable and noticable) and people who don't bring up and argue for their minority opinion (or sexuality or culture or whatever) are assumed to be part of the majority by default.

Any easily offended, vegetarian-haters you know probably have never had a reason or opportunity to reveal that part of themselves to you. I recently shared a veggie christmas recipe on my facebook that I remember making last year and it was really nice. Aside from positive comments I have a handful along the lines of "why don't you just eat real food"/ "the vegetarian option is you can fuck off"/ "you are an idiot"/ "eating meat is natural"/ "why do you think you're better than me" variety as a response to it.

It's simple.

Vegans wish to convert others to also become vegan.


Those others are meat eaters.

Erm... what? Vegans don't eat meat and dairy (and apparently honey which I find rather over the top)
Since when does belonging to a group automatically make you a . This sounds about like "gay recruiters" style thinking to me.

You could argue that ethical veganism implies that making others eat less meat is a good thing but this is going to depend a lot on how you justify your exclusion of meat from your diet and how you consider moral responsibility to work... that is not a simple issue.

Even if there is the intention to convince others (which is not an unusual or automatically negative thing for people with a particular moral belief) this won't automatically be a smug, obnoxious "Sigh, how silly you are, let me set your thinking straight" kind of exercise. That assumption (and the occassionally over the top reaction to it) by meat-eaters is exactly the thing that this thread was asking people about.

I actually don't know any vegans who don't have that attitude, heck you may be telling me this you may also be telling me fairies are real.

As we speak I have a big long post in my timeline on facebook doing just that.

Do you ever get messages listing all the vegetarians who aren't writing big long posts proselytising their vegetarianism? This is how these kinds of biases work. Loud and annoying people are clearly part of the sub-group that they're arguing for (and are also memorable and noticable) and people who don't bring up and argue for their minority opinion (or sexuality or culture or whatever) are assumed to be part of the majority by default.

Any easily offended, vegetarian-haters you know probably have never had a reason or opportunity to reveal that part of themselves to you. I recently shared a veggie christmas recipe on my facebook that I remember making last year and it was really nice. Aside from positive comments I have a handful along the lines of "why don't you just eat real food"/ "the vegetarian option is you can fuck off"/ "you are an idiot"/ "eating meat is natural"/ "why do you think you're better than me" variety as a response to it.

Obviously I do not but I know who amongst my friends is or isn't a vegetarian, I have no problems with these people myself but their is a definite form of activism there at least in my social circle.

Your regular veggie hamburger recipe is simply that, however a bi-weekly post on why meat-eaters are such horrible people, polluters, wasters etc.

Now that's calling for a debate and a reaction no matter how you spin it.

You'd be the first (especially vegan) person I come across that did not at five minutes into a meal ask me questions about why I meat and wether or not I know how bad it is and how I could stand the harm to the animals.

Edit: look at Full Metal Bolshevik's post in this thread for an obvious example of the line of thinking meat eaters are confronted with that might possibly offend them.

 

[Senare]

...if they have such strength in numbers and they honestly believe what they're doing is morally/ethically okay then why do they have such knee-jerk, emotional reactions?

I have several candidates. Apologies if this post is poorly worded; I have so many thoughts about this and try to bring out the most relevant ones in my tired typing.



1. Emotional investment:
Food has a lot of connected memories and values inside their brain, making it more likely to be emotionally important to them than other subjects. Just think about how many times you eat and derive pleasure from your food. Would you want to risk all those positive feelings?



2. Feeling threatened:

a) Most meat-eaters have probably considered anti-meat arguments already. "But hey, who cares? It tastes good!" If that is their decision, and they have an idea of "how argumentative vegans are", bringing the topic of a vegan diet up can elicit a strong response because they want to prevent the annoyance of have their values questioned.

b) "Cognitive dissonance" (discomfort when they have conflicting beliefs) may also come into play. Because "how can you like to cuddle with your pet and then kill and grill animals?". They may think that they are honestly okay with eating meat, but the subconsciousness doesn't care because this stranger (the nerve!) is exposing conflicting thoughts and feelings in them. I am guessing that it is rare to find someone who has completely thought their dietary choices through.

c) You do not have to bring any actual argument up, because mentioning key words is enough for people to recall stereotypes and conclude that you are starting an argument. Or maybe they are so annoyed by the stereotypical vegan that they let it out on you.



3. Statistical illusions/cognitive biases: A naive thought-experiment.
The following is a thought experiment I came up with to illustrate some examples of how I imagine that statistics can be skewed either way, depending on perspective. It is by no means water-proof, and maybe totally unrealistic. But it is meant to illustrate that factors such as "cognitive biases" could potentially delude us into thinking something is more prevalent than it actually is. That is not to say that I think that the OP would be wrong in any of his/her suspicions, only that we have a risk that this is all a big misunderstanding.

Imagine that you have 100 people. 90 of them are meat eaters. 10 are not. Every 10th person is an extremist, so there would be 9 extremist meat-eaters and 1 non-extreme meat eater.

Go at it from a pro-meat perspective. You will receive 1 hostile response, and 99 non-confrontational. Because you may not know that 9 people are vegan (they won't mention it), you may think that only 2 are - thus coming to the conclusion that 50% of vegans are annoying extremists. You may further remember this episode extra well, because it stands out from your experience of what is "normal", i.e. "not a big deal". If you press anyone of who you think are the opposing group into justifying their beliefs, they become frustrated due to cognitive dissonance and being "put on the spot". Now close to 100% of non-meat eaters seem annoying.

Now go at from a anti-meat perspective. You will receive 9 hostile responses and 91 non-confrontational. Because you are a minority group, you will stand out and people will give you extra attention. Maybe you will get some lame jokes - because that is all some people are willing to bring to the discussion. The lame jokes may become repetitive and grating after a few times, and so they are more annoying than funny. You have met with a lot of hostile responses (9!) and a lot of dismissive, grating jokes. If you press anyone of who you think are the opposing group into justifying their beliefs, they become frustrated due to cognitive dissonance and being "put on the spot". Now a significant portion of meat eaters seem touchy about the subject, maybe all of them since - after all - you have questioned 100 people and there are bound to be a lot of "meh" responses you can dismiss.

 

[visiblenoise]

Their kneejerking probably speaks more to their individual characters rather than the fact that they are meat eaters

Hey actually, I think you can say that about all kneejerkers

 

[sXeth]

Well, I'm a vegetarian, other then in other people's homes, since I don't make a habit of telling people what to cook themselves, but let's give it a go. There's a certain amount of just plain old argumentative jacks, of course. There's also the wearied person who is sick of being preached at by a group that often times refuses to acknowledge the flaws of their own lifestyle.

While I recognize the humane issues, and the even greater problem with animal farming in terms of environmental impact as our already ridiculous population keeps spiraling beyond reason, I often find myself at odds with rigid Vegans on their insistence that its an ultimate future solution for these issues. Because plant agriculture will eventually hit all the same bottlenecks as animal agriculture with unaddressed population rise.

If we end animal farming without years of tapering it off, you've got billions of livestock suddenly free (or very dubiously that they will still be kept for a non-profit purpose) or dead. And given how livestock are currently massively reliant on human care (and medical treatment), free is probably a similar mass death. Which lends to waves of corpses and potential disease vectors.

There's also the tendency of Veganism to overlap with "Organic" diets. Which doesn't even work. The very few (two "potential", last I researched, one is a Japanese mushroom, the other is a seaweed from the Indian Ocean) organic non-animal sources of B12 for instance, are not readily cultivated, and both have to basically be fresh and raw, meaning you can't exactly stock them in grocery. A lot of the substitute foods for other nutrients are exotic fare, that only grows in a tiny fraction of the world, and you're already falling off the Vegan-as-ethos when you're shipping freighters of coconuts through the sea, spewing pollution and disrupting tropical and marine habitats.

Thats saying nothing of the fact, that anything mass-produced, processed, packaged, shipped worldwide, and marketed in the thousands(millions) that's remotely affordable on a basic income, is probably not cruelty-free, involving what many in the first-world would consider slave-like wages or working conditions.

The future is likely to be ethically harvested or even lab created meat. Most people have absolutely NO ethical quandary with the natural consumption of meat. The majority only have issues with inhumane treatment of food sources.

Vegan food wouldn't need to just get better, it would need to be able to replace the taste and texture and role of all other meat and would have to establish health benefits (believe it or not, but soy beans have their own range of hormonal health risks).

Here's a fun question for vegans and vegetarians. If labs created meat (and they already can) that tasted exactly as good as current market meat but was just formed in a lab as the muscle rather than having ever been a living creature, would they eat it? If not, why? Keep in mind that at this point it would functionally be like a meat plant had been created.

I dunno, would you still consider it meat? Its not like there's a shortage of "meat" plant based products already. For ground items like burgers or sausage, you can barely even tell them apart if they're seasoned the same way.

 

[Lightknight]

If you believe that what you're doing is right/good, does this not mean that you believe people who aren't doing what you're doing are doing wrong? Do you really disassociate your own moral values from how more people should behave?

It's not quite as simple as that. I believe what I'm doing is more in line with my own values and as a result makes me a more honest person. While I think a reduction in meat consumption and fossil fuel consumption would do the planet (and humanity) a lot of good, the species relies so heavily on these industries that it'd be unreasonable to fault every individual.

So if a person's personal values were "screw the environment" you would view them as at least internally consistent if they did things that harmed the environment and not evil or bad? I mean, I've heard of people taking "relative truth" to the next level but I'm having a hard time accepting this to be the case inside of a person's innermost thoughts. I believe some things are inherently wrong. Driving up to a farm and shooting cows in the face and then just driving off to leave their carcasses to rot for no reason other than the thrill of it: inherently wrong with no redeeming factor. Even the "joy of the thrill" is tainted.

But intensive farming on the scale we have today is no comparison for hunting for survival.

Doesn't really matter, we are omnivores and consumption of meat is biologically evolved in us. Whether we get our food from a facility that kills animals quickly and efficiency or through trial and error in the wild with weaponry it is our nature as the animals we are to pursue meat. We are no more guilty than a lion who picks off the weakest of a herd. You seem to acknowledge that fact below though. So... *high five*

The industrial complex allows us to reduce the impact on the environment per calorie produced.

It's not sustainable for the environment,

Not really true, especially regarding pork and poultry, elaborating below.

it's not comparable to other predator-prey interactions because it's a highly industrialised process.

That's because it's livestock, not prey. Livestock used to be synonymous with wealth and everyone who was anyone owned at least a small herd in addition to whatever other businesses they were engaged in.

If I were to completely dismiss the animal welfare aspect, I'd still be left with the environmental aspect. It takes a ridiculous amount of water, energy, transportation and land to keep up with current demands.

You do realize that this is an identical argument to be made against farmland, right? While beef certainly has a higher carbon footprint per calorie than any individual veggie, just tomatoes and broccoli by themselves combine to take up a higher footprint than beef. But you don't hear vegetarians call for an end to tomatoes and broccoli, do you? Despite pork and poultry both having a lower environmental impact than either tomatoes or broccoli. Cheese, yogurt, and eggs are even lower than potatoes per calorie. I really hope your diet is ultra bean/legume heavy.

People have been erroneously using kilograms to measure the emissions and have been padding the studies for years. But if you drop a kilogram of meat from your diet you don't replace it with a kilogram of broccoli. You'd have to replace it with 6.7 kilograms to maintain the caloric intake.

https://img.washingtonpost.com/rw/2010-2019/WashingtonPost/2014/03/11/Food/Images/emissionsCHART_NUupdate.jpg?uuid=g3H2xqlGEeOKe8HGhOJnHw

So I'm sorry, the numbers don't add up to any kind of case against most meat. Beef is pretty high, but it's not out of the ballpark to the point where you can really claim it shouldn't exist for environmental reasons. It also fails to account for some animals that do active harm to the planet. Deer, Canadian geese and wild pigs do active damage where they are (especially when overpopulated for the first two), eat one of those and you actually have a net-positive on the environment.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/vegetarian-or-omnivore-the-environmental-implications-of-diet/2014/03/10/648fdbe8-a495-11e3-a5fa-55f0c77bf39c_story.html

I mean, the single greatest thing you or anyone can do for the environment is not have any children. That's like, miles above any efforts what your diet consists of can do regarding your carbon footprint. To be internally consistent most vegetarians who are such on the lines of environmentalism should not reproduce.

Exactly, and that's what my personal issue with the industry is. Not how animals die, but how they live. Well that, and the unsustainability of the industry at its current state of growth.

Want to hear something funny? The industrial complex actually reduces the carbon footprint per calorie for meat. Confined spaces mean less consumption, hormones mean faster growth which means less time to emit methane, to even requiring less feed (aka fewer acres to grow their food). So which do you place at a higher premium, carbon footprint or quality of life for livestock?

Even agriculture sees that while organic farms produce less CO2 per acre they can have such a lower yield that the carbon footprint is actually significantly higher for them than for the big business down the road. So Vegans and Vegetarians frequently end up with veggies that might be a lot higher than normal. Kind of depressing.

Personally that ship has sailed, though I do endorse that method of farming compared to the alternative. If I still ate meat and it came from sources like that, sure I'd feel a lot less cognitive dissonance. I don't think humans necessarily should have to abandon meat, we did evolve to be omnivorous after all. If there were a way to supply the demand in an environmentally sustainable way, and as ethically as is realistically possible then yeah I wouldn't have a problem with it. I can't say the same for others that don't eat meat, but personally it's the excess of the industry, not its mere existence that I take issue with.

What about pork and poultry? Both have free range varieties and both have a lower carbon footprint per calorie than tomatoes or broccoli. Every time I consume chicken instead of eating the equivalent calories in salad I am likely being more environmentally conscious than a vegetarian is. That's a scary thought. But apparently every time I eat a chicken salad without counting calories then I'm just being a dick

 

[Lightknight]

The future is likely to be ethically harvested or even lab created meat. Most people have absolutely NO ethical quandary with the natural consumption of meat. The majority only have issues with inhumane treatment of food sources.

Vegan food wouldn't need to just get better, it would need to be able to replace the taste and texture and role of all other meat and would have to establish health benefits (believe it or not, but soy beans have their own range of hormonal health risks).

Here's a fun question for vegans and vegetarians. If labs created meat (and they already can) that tasted exactly as good as current market meat but was just formed in a lab as the muscle rather than having ever been a living creature, would they eat it? If not, why? Keep in mind that at this point it would functionally be like a meat plant had been created.

I dunno, would you still consider it meat? Its not like there's a shortage of "meat" plant based products already. For ground items like burgers or sausage, you can barely even tell them apart if they're seasoned the same way.

Plant based food items that are meant to taste like meat are hilariously bad. "Barely even tell them apart" is horribly misleading. Don't get me wrong, I like a good veggie burger when made properly because they can taste great. But confusing them or a soy burger with a beef burger would literally never happen.

If someone is giving you a burger at a party and claiming that it's a new soy burger that tastes like regular burger. Then it's someone that is pissed off that you asked for a veggie alternative at a bbq and they're really just feeding you beef.

The closest thing I've ever seen is soy strips that kinda taste like barely good chicken.

When soy and other veggie crap tries to be meat, it sucks. When it just tries to be tasty and good as what it is, then it can be great. Mmm... this is making me want one of those portabella burgers...

 

[Lightknight]

<spoiler=Click here to expand my (Lightknight) quoted post with chart included>

If I were to completely dismiss the animal welfare aspect, I'd still be left with the environmental aspect. It takes a ridiculous amount of water, energy, transportation and land to keep up with current demands.

You do realize that this is an identical argument to be made against farmland, right? While beef certainly has a higher carbon footprint per calorie than any individual veggie, just tomatoes and broccoli by themselves combine to take up a higher footprint than beef. But you don't hear vegetarians call for an end to tomatoes and broccoli, do you? Despite pork and poultry both having a lower environmental impact than either tomatoes or broccoli. Cheese, yogurt, and eggs are even lower than potatoes per calorie. I really hope your diet is ultra bean/legume heavy.

People have been erroneously using kilograms to measure the emissions and have been padding the studies for years. But if you drop a kilogram of meat from your diet you don't replace it with a kilogram of broccoli. You'd have to replace it with 6.7 kilograms to maintain the caloric intake.

https://img.washingtonpost.com/rw/2010-2019/WashingtonPost/2014/03/11/Food/Images/emissionsCHART_NUupdate.jpg?uuid=g3H2xqlGEeOKe8HGhOJnHw

So I'm sorry, the numbers don't add up to any kind of case against most meat. Beef is pretty high, but it's not out of the ballpark to the point where you can really claim it shouldn't exist for environmental reasons. It also fails to account for some animals that do active harm to the planet. Deer, Canadian geese and wild pigs do active damage where they are (especially when overpopulated for the first two), eat one of those and you actually have a net-positive on the environment.

Wait, does that emissions chart take into account the Calories the Chickens/Pigs/Cows have to intake? Okay, so that chart doesn't cover corn, so for the sake of argument, let's say chickens eat broccoli <_<

Emissions from you eating 1,000 calories of broccoli, compared to you eating 1,000 calories of eggs, does that count the emissions produced by the chicken from the broccoli it had to eat in order to make those eggs?

Because when it comes to food trees, I think the general trend for caloric efficiency as you go down the predator-prey ladder is x10. Given that, 1k calories of egg would require the chicken to consume 10k calories of broccoli.

The study already included full cradle to grave footprint including the carbon footprint of the feed (I also provided the link to the article which had the link to the original study). What you're thinking about is how much energy is passed along to each step in the food chain. You obtain about 10% of the energy of anything you eat and if something ate you then it would obtain about 10% of your energy. That doesn't really relate to this in that the amount of energy converted doesn't change the carbon footprint of the items put into the system. If a cow on average requires X pounds of grain then the carbon footprint of X pound of grain is added to the cows overall footprint. Energy conversion tables simply don't play into it otherwise.

"To assess climate impacts, EWG partnered with CleanMetrics, an environmental analysis and consulting firm, to do lifecycle assessments of 20 popular types of meat (including fish), dairy and vegetable proteins. Unlike most studies that focus just on production emissions, our assessment calculates the full ?cradle-to-grave? carbon footprint of each food item based on the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions generated before and after the food leaves the farm ? from the pesticides and fertilizer used to grow animal feed all the way through the grazing, animal raising, processing, transportation, cooking and, finally, disposal of unused food. The analysis also includes the emissions from producing food that never gets eaten, either because it?s left on the plate or because of spoilage or fat and moisture loss during cooking. About 20 percent of edible meat just gets thrown out (EWG/CleanMetrics analysis of 2011 USDA data) - See more at: http://www.ewg.org/meateatersguide/a-meat-eaters-guide-to-climate-change-health-what-you-eat-matters/#sthash.gjOIdjnu.dpuf"

This is literally a study designed to help meat eaters eat more environmentally friendly meat if they're going to do so. If you're thinking this is a pro-meat study then you should look elsewhere because it's only the followup article that used their own data to convert it into the more meaningful emission per calorie metric. Anyways, yes, their feed is a large source of the reason why cows are around twice that of tomatoes in emission. Chicken is far more efficient at converting feed into meat and pork has a weird kind of niche farming market around it that does a good job.

I... frankly... have no idea why goat is so much higher. Maybe because they're so much less efficient at producing meat than cows are?

 

[Gengisgame]

You know what lesson people should take away ftom this.

Saying "easy to offend insertgroup " has always been a good way to troll irrelevant of group views as long as the group is big.

 

[Lightknight]

The study included full cradle-grave footprint including the carbon footprint of the feed"

Okay great that's quite useful then, I'll be bookmarking that site.

The only beef I usually have is Ground Beef for Beef Tacos and Meat Loafs, and Chuck Roast for Pot Roasts, and I only eat one of those once every 1-2 weeks. Mostly I eat chicken, turkey-ham, turkey-sausage, and pork chops.

Broccoli is my favorite vegetable.

Well, keep in mind that beef really isn't that far above other food types when considering emission per calorie. I mean, one beef calorie is just under double that of a calorie of tomato or broccoli? Not really that bad or at least it's not something that we really know what "bad" is yet. Maybe all of these numbers are perfectly acceptable where emissions are concerned and we're just comparing one low number to another low number?

I personally haven't been eating much meat. I've been missing dinner which was my main meat consuming meal time. I've been eating a lot of chicken and fish but I do love a grilled ribeye once a month or so.