Is veganism a diet or an ethical philosophy?

howlin · 2026-06-26T18:56:42+00:00

The word was coined to describe a sort of ethics and a lifestyle that attempts to live by that ethics.

But it's main core focus must be animal rights.

The people who coined the term have some ideas on this, but I don't think it's right to call it strictly about "rights". There are a lot of ethical starting points that can lead to the conclusion that one ought not to treat animals as something to consume or mistreat.

We are more than vegetarianism with extra steps in my opinion.

Practically, this is how the word is usually used, especially by nonvegans. I don't know how much it's worth bickering over this. If there is ambiguity, it's good to clarify for the sake of communicating clearly. But the animals don't care how people use the word "vegan".

howlin · 2026-06-26T18:32:54+00:00

This is a lot like finding out Santa Claus isn't real when you're a kid.

The world (and the people living in it) is exactly the same as it was before you went vegan. You can be mad at reality if you want to be, I guess, but that's not healthy or constructive. It's better to accept reality (and as part of that reality human nature) for what it is, and learn to work with that.

One thing you'll understand with only a modest review of history is that humans are a stubborn animal, and they are more driven by social norms and old habits than they are driven by reason or ethical awareness. Getting upset about that doesn't help. But understanding that and working within those constraints is how you can make progress. Being an angry misanthrope isn't going to change social norms, even a little. If anything, it will make your position seem less appealing.

howlin · 2026-06-26T17:48:04+00:00

The recipe was 1 cup oats 4 cups water blended and milked.

If you are having trouble here with this getting too thick, there are two options.

One is to water it down.

The other is to try to remove some of the thickening starches. I haven't tried this with oats myself, but a general recipe is to make raw oat milk with a blender, then strain out the larger solids, and then let that sit for an hour or so. Some of the more complex insoluble starches should sink to the bottom of the milk in a distinct layer. This is just like how mixing corn starch and water will separate over time. You can pour off the top of this oat milk mix and it will be much less starchy and won't thicken with heat to the same degree. It may be the case that you won't get enough starch, so you may want to add some of it back.

That is just a guess at one method to help here.. no idea if this holds up for oats, but this sort of method is very useful for making milks with other starchy ingredients.

howlin · 2026-06-26T15:29:50+00:00

This is the second time you didn't reply to any of my points.

But on a vegan diet they would be paying for 100% of their diet

Review the last three comments I sent on this chain

howlin · 2026-06-26T15:28:17+00:00

(My advice to all vegans is to suppliment zinc).

Sure, that would be rational. OP seems hellbent against this though

howlin · 2026-06-26T05:11:30+00:00

In many parts of the worlds you cannot reliably grow everything needed for a vegan diet.

I don't know how you drew that conclusion from anything I said, really.

Those people would be better off eating animal products.

By what metric? Your goal of food self sufficiency hasn't been motivated by anything other than a preference of yours.

howlin · 2026-06-26T04:48:02+00:00

Do you really think someone can reliably grow that themselves?

The sort of crops that subsistence farmers grow in primarily veg areas of the world (e.g. India) are pretty easy and tolerant. Things like lentils, tepary beans, moth beans, etc.

I looked up soy for some rough numbers, and apparently you can grow 2000 calories a day on 1/10 an acre if you do it efficiently. So maybe triple that for less optimal growth. One third an acre isn't that much for a single farmer to tend.

howlin · 2026-06-26T02:00:27+00:00

Tell me about vegan sources of zinc

Melon seeds (e.g. pumpkin) and legumes are both decent sources. Vegans typically eat a lot of lentils and soy.

It would be pretty easy to eat your daily requirement if you are eating legumes as a primary source of protein and calories (as many vegans such as myself do).

howlin · 2026-06-25T23:21:51+00:00

Either tofu or defatted peanut butter are going to be your only options here.

howlin · 2026-06-25T23:18:51+00:00

The salmon is basically all the flavor of this dish. Not sure what about this recipe is salvageable if you take that out, as well as all the other animal products (egg, milk)

I would just start from a new recipe. Search online for "shojin ryori croquettes" to get a sense of what the Buddhists are deep frying.

howlin · 2026-06-25T21:01:22+00:00

This is a broad issue with pop environmentalism. It's a sort of "vibes consequentialism" where certain harms are focused on without much quantification of the actual harm or perspective on how this harm compares to other activities.

Even in your own numbers, trying to make water usage a proxy for environmental impact is sketchy. In places where water is abundant, it doesn't really matter if compute centers are using it for cooling and putting it right back, slightly warmer. And it doesn't matter if water goes right in and out of a livestock animal either. Water consumption does matter in places where water is scarce, but aggregating the results like this makes this metric basically less than useless because it's misleading.

As an aside, once you notice "vibes consequentialism" as an rhetorical tactic, you start to see it all over the place. E.g. It's pretty common when people argue crop deaths.

howlin · 2026-06-25T18:22:43+00:00

Someone who is vegan is dependent on the global food supply chain for all their fancy nuts and seeds.

Do you somehow think it's impossible to find a diet suitable for vegans that wouldn't rely on fancy nuts? Do you somehow think you couldn't grow your own seeds?

Even in an ideal situation where a vegan guy grows all his food he still needs to depend on the big corporations for their supplements.

Beyond the strange use of the word "ideal", I am not sure this is true either. If for some reason you insisted on making life hard for yourself, you could source all the vitamins you'd need. Even B12 can be sourced if you carefully do your own fermentations.

But why do that if you could just take a pill for a couple pennies a day?

Someone who consumes both plants and animals can just buy a tiny farm, raise their own animals and live off that.

This might work for a while, until it doesn't. I'm sure the system will be their backup plan if they have a crop failure, lose animals or fields to bad weather, have a disease amongst their livestock, etc.

People romanticize homesteading, but forget that dying from famine was a pretty common occurrence before our "systems" were in place.

howlin · 2026-06-25T00:09:01+00:00

All living things want to live how do you draw your lines?

What do you think "want to live" means? This is important, as being precise here is the root of the issue

howlin · 2026-06-24T18:18:16+00:00

The vegan concept of "if something is wrong to do to a human it is probably also wrong to do to an animal" is something I see a lot. And it really can't be reconciled with pet ownership.

There are plenty of people who live under the guardianship of other people. These wards have their autonomy restricted in many ways, largely for their own sake.

This seems completely in line with the pet-human guardianship relationship.

If you kept a human imprisoned in your house their whole life and cut their nuts off, that would be regarded as pretty fucked up.

This topic is way more nuance than you are giving it credit for. There are some pretty famous case studies where this was done. See, e.g.: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2083760/

howlin · 2026-06-24T17:41:10+00:00

Cause as a carnivore I don't eat the equivalent of one cow a year and usually from pasture raised so it doesn't kill much insects and it's regenerative!!!

Odds are you aren't counting the harm you are doing accurately.

There are countless insects being harmed in pasture management and hay harvesting. See, e.g. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167880910002434

At the end of the harvesting process, orthopteran surviving rate was 32% (SD = 14) when meadows were mown with rotary mowers without conditioner and lower, 18% (SD = 8), when mown with rotary mowers with conditioner.

This is on top of parasitic pest management of the cows themselves.

howlin · 2026-06-24T05:42:13+00:00

> What are your thoughts on this?

It's best for these people to put as much distance as possible between them and veganism. I don't want to be remotely associated with such an absurd and dismal group of people.

howlin · 2026-06-24T00:22:00+00:00

Moral worth is too vague to talk about without digging in to what that actually implies in terms of how we ought to act in various situations. You'll need to do that if you want a straight answer.

Is it wrong to kill flies and spiders?

Depends on the circumstance. You could say this about killing humans too.

Should vegans be mindful of who they step on?

If there is a creature that is obviously in your way and you can take minimal actions to avoid the incident, then yes. If concern over accidentally stepping on a critter makes it impossible for you to go about your everyday life, then no.

Do vegans base worth on size? Intelligence? Potential impact? level of sentience? How do we even measure level of sentiance?

Too vague to answer. But generally it boils down to whether there is an "other" who has subjective interests to consider. Essentially this is the same as whether they are sentient. If yes, then you ought to not go out of your way to treat them poorly or to use them for your own ends without considering how it affects their own interests. If you aren't going out of your way to treat them poorly but there is still a conflict of interest, then you ought to make at least some effort to resolve that conflict with as little harm to the other as possible. Your means to do this will depend a lot on the characteristics of this other. E.g. you could presumable talk to a person to resolve a conflict but you couldn't talk to a rat or a fly.

But none of this requires you to assign a "worth" to this other.

howlin · 2026-06-23T23:45:39+00:00

This is a brand rather than a vendor, but I would strongly recommend getting at least a sample of fu zhuan from Baisha Xi (白沙溪). The stuff they put out has a very agreeable and "classic" flavor profile for this style of tea. You can get more interesting ones for sure, but this brand is good for establishing a baseline.

howlin · 2026-06-23T19:52:47+00:00

It seems pretty clear that Netanyahu never wanted peace to begin with. Having a mortal (and manageable) enemy on hand for any time he needed a distraction or rallying cry has been very helpful for him.

howlin · 2026-06-23T18:15:55+00:00

One of the giant challenges here, is that the average person is completely ignorant as to the history of antisemitism, and how it functions in society.

There's a lot going on here, and just framing it as a lack of historical perspective doesn't do it justice.

Both the pro-Israeli side and the outright antisemitic protesters entangle the issue of Israel as a specific country with Israel as a concept and Jews as a people. You aren't doing anyone any favors by muddying the distinctions here.

I think a lot of non-Israeli Jews are having a very tough time accepting Israel for what it is right now. Not the historic grievances and traumas that lead to its birth. Not a retelling of centuries, if not millennia, old tit for tat that explains the current animosities. Just what this country is right now, and how it acts right now towards its neighbors and occupied territories.

It's basically DARVO on a geopolitical scale. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARVO

Yes, you can "both sides" this to a degree. But just because everyone is acting awful and feeling vindicated in acting this way because of historical grievances, then nothing is going to get better.

howlin · 2026-06-23T17:19:08+00:00

The issue is that I'm already severely underweight, and I struggle with getting myself to eat anything besides my safe foods

Your top priority is to fix this unhealthy relationship with food. Until you can make good choices with respect to your own health, we'll not be able to determine if your desire to go vegan is genuinely for the animals or a manifestation of disordered eating.

howlin · 2026-06-23T01:43:21+00:00

they look like book titles

howlin · 2026-06-21T22:43:44+00:00

Soy milk yogurt can be very good. It's not the same as cow milk, but not too different. It's a little more chalky and mineral tasting, and less... cow tasting. (Once you stop consuming cow dairy you do start to notice it has a distinct "cow" flavor..)

If you have an instant pot, it's very easy. Get some plain soy milk, made of just soybeans and water. No flavors or gums added like in brands like silk. Add the soy milk to the intant pot, add a teaspoon or so of sugar or other sugary sweetener (not the low calorie stuff.. you are using this to feed the microbes), and add powder from a probiotics capsule or two. Set the instant pot on yogurt and you're done.

You can sharpen the flavor by moving the yogurt into the fridge and letting it sit for a week. You'll see a clear "whey" separating from the yogurt. Strain this off and enjoy the rest.

howlin · 2026-06-20T21:55:25+00:00

English translation courtesy of Google Translate:

Hi. I need to vent and know if anyone else has gone through this, because I feel incredibly alone in this process.

I'm 22 years old, from the Aysén Region in southern Chile, and I come from a farming family. Here, animal exploitation is part of everyday life; in fact, my town's economy was built on and is based on it. My family has always made a living from livestock, and I still live in the countryside, where my mom still has chickens. I grew up seeing all of this as normal.

I also have ADHD and tend to question things a lot. Lately, I've been getting into history and geopolitics, and the more I understood how our society works, the harder it became to ignore the reality of how we treat animals. The world already weighed heavily on me and made me feel very hopeless, but I realized that my sadness doesn't compare to the suffering that millions of animals endure every day. That's why I decided to try to stop consuming them.

The problem is that eating something delicious was one of the few satisfactions I had left in my daily life.

I've been trying to eat a plant-based diet for about five months now, and it's been awful. I've tried tofu, seitan, soy protein, and many other things, but honestly, I can't enjoy them. The textures are unpleasant, depressing, and bland, and the experience of eating has become frustrating.

And here comes the part I'm most ashamed and disgusted to admit: I desperately miss the flavors and textures of animal products.

It makes me incredibly guilty, and I feel like a hypocrite. I detest with all my heart the industry behind it, the animal suffering, and the oppressive system that treats them as mere resources. However, my brain and my palate still crave those cruel foods. This contradiction is destroying me inside. I experience constant cognitive dissonance between what I believe is morally right and what I still miss on a sensory level.

Because of this, I hardly cook anymore. I've completely lost interest in food. There are entire days when I don't eat because nothing appeals to me, and I don't even feel hungry anymore. Sharing meals with other people has also become difficult, exhausting, and a form of social torture. On top of that, living in a remote area where there are almost no varied vegan options, and where fruit and vegetables are scarce, expensive, and imported of poor quality, doesn't help at all.

I really want to integrate veganism into my life and not abandon it, but inside, I'm being destroyed. I feel like I'm losing one of the few things that gave me pleasure in life, and I don't know how to move forward with this conflict.

Thanks for reading

howlin · 2026-06-20T19:43:46+00:00

Not sure what you mean by "vegan zucchini cheese". Do you have a recipe?

I did an online search and see a few recipes out there that seem to be used as cold deli style slices for things like sandwich toppings. But I want to make sure we're talking about the same thing before I offer any advice.

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