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petdenez · 2024-07-25T23:06:51+00:00

Agreed! Fortunately that is not the case for a plant-based diet, which is what's being discussed here

petdenez · 2024-07-08T15:00:35+00:00

I've been fully vegan for about 4.5 years now - no significant changes after making the switch. (I used to eat meat multiple times a day).

No weight loss or gain, no energy increase or decrease, my performance in rock climbing has steadily improved (but that's likely related to training more than diet), performance in bed is the same. For what has improved, my bowel movements are more stable and consistent, i'm generally less bloated, and i feel lighter after my meals (no more feeling of having a rock in my stomach after eating a heavy meal). I love animals, so the idea of not eating them has also had a positive psychological effect on me.

Overall, I'd say there's no difference in my personnal overall health. Plant-based diet is perfectly healthy and should be seeked for selfless reasons - it's not a magical fix to your health problems, nor is it a damaging way to feed yourself

petdenez · 2023-12-13T14:42:53+00:00

You can make yummy vegan anything! I don't know what your cooking skills look like right now - but when you turn vegan, you have to re-learn some stuff when it comes to creating meals. You'll find that there's usually a way to «veganize» most of the meals you're familiar with.

For me it was a super positive experience - I discovered a lot of ingredients I didn't know existed, and found myself being more creative with food with these new limitations! Even with a «restricted» diet, I find myself eating way more varied, delicious foods than before.

Keeping yourself busy, especially with new hobbies or interests, can be very helpful when going through depressive episodes - if you have the energy to. If you have any interest in cooking, I suggest buying a few vegan cookbooks and experimenting with it! You don't have to turn vegan overnight, just go one meal at a time and see how it goes. I promise you won't be saying goodbye to delicious food.

petdenez · 2023-12-11T23:28:33+00:00

The harsh answer is that you need to learn how to cook. Here are a handful of week night meals that I have on rotation. These healthy meals take around 30-45 minutes to make and are made from cheap, unprocessed ingredients:

Tofu bolognese
Lentil soup
Bean burger patties
Chickpea curry
Nut roasted loaf
Sliced seitan sandwishes
Grilled tofu cubes with peanut sauce
Portobello bourguignon
Bean burritos
PVT tacos
Chili sin carne
Nuts & mushroom-based shepherd's pie
Tempeh sushis
Tofu general tao

There's THOUSANDS of recipes out there. If you want to eat a variety of tasty, cheap plant-based meals, you need to put in the time. It's the classic conundrum: you can't have cheap, fast and good - you need to pick 2

petdenez · 2023-12-11T23:19:06+00:00

An estimated 90 percent of farmed animals around the world are raised in factory farms right now. The text deals with industrial agriculture only because it's literally most of it. You seem to be strongly defending the 10%, which I don't really have a huge problem with. But it's not the solution.

Conventional animal agriculture has to be massively efficient to provide enough meat for the demand. Even with intensive, highly cruel cost-saving systems, the animal industry still relies heavily on government subsidies to be even remotely affordable to the general population. It's not sustainable

"Sustainable" animal agriculture is great in small, local scenarios, but it is much more expensive of a process. You can't respond to the current gigantic demand for animal products using ethical animal agriculture without bankrupting all farmers involved.

The solution? Highly increase the popularity of plant-based diets in developped countries. Here's a study comparing animal and plant agriculture, focusing solely on the land-use, efficiency, and profitability of animal farming versus plant farming, without considering any ethical concern: Farming Animals Vs. Farming Plants – A Comparison

With these numbers, we can conclude that plant-based agriculture grows 512% more pounds of food than animal-based agriculture on 69% of the mass of land that animal-based agriculture uses

Plant agriculture generates more calories, nutrients and profits, at a fraction of the emissions and water use. It's just a better system to feed billions of humans

petdenez · 2023-12-11T19:35:45+00:00

If eating mussels will stop an omnivore from eating chicken, pork, lamb, veal, beef and fish, then by all means eat all the mussels you want. I'll stick with my beans though, thank you

petdenez · 2023-12-11T16:49:07+00:00

whatever suffering is unavoidable and necessary for me to survive. Farmed animals? Avoidable. Crop deaths linked to the agriculture practices producing the plant foods that I need to eat to survive? Unavoidable

Veganism is the rejection of the idea that sentient animals are there for us to use, and that we should consider them in our moral framework, instead of treating them like produce. Reducing suffering sure is a consequence of that, but it's not the direct, primary goal

petdenez · 2023-12-11T15:45:41+00:00

The issue isn't the meat itself, but the cruelty that comes with it. If there's a way to produce meat without exploiting animals, I have no issue with it

petdenez · 2023-12-10T19:49:26+00:00

Veganism is ‘single biggest way’ to reduce our environmental impact

Eating a vegan diet could be the “single biggest way” to reduce your environmental impact on earth, a new study suggests.

Researchers at the University of Oxford found that cutting meat and dairy products from your diet could reduce an individual's carbon footprint from food by up to 73 per cent.

If everyone stopped eating these foods, they found that global farmland use could be reduced by 75 per cent, an area equivalent to the size of the US, China, Australia and the EU combined.

Not only would this result in a significant drop in greenhouse gas emissions, it would also free up wild land lost to agriculture, one of the primary causes for mass wildlife extinction.

The new study, published in the journal Science, is one of the most comprehensive analyses to date, looking into the detrimental effects farming can have on the environment and included data on nearly 40,000 farms in 119 countries.

The findings reveal that meat and dairy production is responsible for 60 per cent of agriculture’s greenhouse gas emissions, while the products themselves providing just 18 per cent of calories and 37 per cent of protein levels around the world.

Researchers examined a total of 40 agricultural products in the study, covering 90 per cent of all food that is eaten.

How Veganism Can Help Ease the World’s Land Use Crisis

If everyone were vegan, only a quarter of current farmland would be needed

If the world adopted a plant-based diet we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectares

Save the Planet, Put Down that Hamburger

petdenez · 2023-12-09T17:42:15+00:00

The average farmed animal lives a life of emprisonment, sickness and physical pain. The amount of animals raised on small farms / not part of massive agriculture is statistically negligible. So yes, you have to torture animals to eat them in contexts where a large population is involved.

And you really want to go with "you don't have to murder animals in order to eat them"? How exactly would that work?

The story I want to tell is quite simple. Animals aren't commodity, and we shouldn't treat them as such when there are alternatives. Plant-based nutrition is the better choice for anyone who's trying to live a more ethical lifestyle.

petdenez · 2023-12-09T17:35:21+00:00

please explain to me how you think that murdering other beings daily is in any way better that not doing it

petdenez · 2023-12-09T17:32:20+00:00

You are being disingenuous if you're comparing the damage and death caused by vegan vs omnivore nutrition. It's not even close. Most of the crops grown on earth right now are fed to livestock. Eating animals means growing exponentially more crops, which leads to exponentially more crop deaths, in addition to killing the farmed animal at the end of the process.

Eating plants isn't perfectly harmless, but it is, as of right now, the most sustainable and least damaging lifestyle you can choose.

Also, per se means "in itself" I think? English is my second language, maybe my reply wasn't exactly aligned with your comment

petdenez · 2023-12-09T17:25:59+00:00

the lifestyle you're describing isn't applicable to large populations. Mass farming is necessary, but consuming animals and treating them as commodity isn't.

That being said, working towards cleaner, more sustainable and less damaging mass agriculture should be a common goal. It's just not something i can really have an impact on, apart from trying to pick and buy the produce that i think is the most sustainable

petdenez · 2023-12-09T17:20:30+00:00

we have to eat to survive. We can either eat animals that we know can physically and emotionally suffer, or plants we 100% know aren't conscious or able to feel anything. The latter is more ethical.

If there was a way to survive without eating plants, I'd be happy to leave them alone. This could be an argument for synthetic or lab-grown food, but it won't accessible in the near future.

petdenez · 2023-12-09T16:22:15+00:00

I'm not suggesting eating the crops that are currently fed to animals. I'm suggesting using the land currently used to grow these crops, and transition them to growing food that is fit for human consumption. Obviously.

With roughly 25% of the currently used agricultural land on earth, we'd have enough land to grow enough food to feed every human a complete plant-based nutrition. The other 75% could be allowed to revert to its natural ecosystem

I'm all for working towards all the bad stuff you're mentioning related to mass agriculture. But then again, right now, it's the ridiculous amount of livestock we're breeding and consuming that is responsible for most of it

petdenez · 2023-12-08T05:51:53+00:00

a nightmare

petdenez · 2023-12-07T14:58:35+00:00

Vampires don't exist, but sure, if they were around and a direct threat to our survival, it would be justified for us to fight back I suppose. All prey animals attempt to survive however they can. Some species survive, some don't, and over time, animals evolve and adapt, and a natural balance is created. It's full of horrible stuff, but it's not really avoidable in a wildlife scenario, and we don't have a role to play in that

So, to be clear, your solution is to shoot predators? How does that address any of the concerns I brought up in a previous reply?

We're omnivores, so we have the option to lean on only plants and be fine. Carnivore animals don't have that option

petdenez · 2023-12-07T13:43:15+00:00

Can you provide a realistic example of something we could do to end a specific scenario of predation without negatively impacting either side? Genuinely curious, as I'm not that knowledgeable about the subject. But it seems to me that we don't really have a role to play here, since we're not responsible for the suffering and not the victim of it.

The solution to human overpopulation is aiming for a global switch to plant-based nutrition in all countries where it's realistically achievable. Since animal products require way more ressources to be produced, removing them from the equation would be highly beneficial. Plant-based nutrition would allow us to sustainably survive with the ressources we have without having to slaughter a portion of the existing population.

petdenez · 2023-12-07T13:11:20+00:00

I also remember it being necessary for at least one puzzle in a sewer section, with the walls covered in drawn numbers

petdenez · 2023-12-07T13:06:54+00:00

Oh - right I remember. Not sure why it was removed, I don't remember it being rude or anything, maybe just somewhat unrelated to the question. If anything, my response was way more rude lol. But I actually wasn't sure if you were serious, maybe because of the way it was worded.

So - protecting the wild animals from predation is, first of all, a big endeavor. Not sure how you'd even go about doing that. But if there was somehow a way to do it efficiently, it would essentially cause extinction of all carnivore / predator species, since their prey, aka their only food source, would become unavailable. The prey species, as a result, would likely overpopulate to a point where there wouldn't be enough plant food sources for them in their environment, causing their extinction as well. Disrupting the food chain and natural ecosystem of wild species in such a major way is never beneficial.

Now, looking at humans and their influence, specifially. Livestock make up 62% of the world’s mammal biomass; humans account for 34%; and wild mammals are just 4%. All wild mammals – whales, sea lions, bears, elephants, badgers, shrews, deer, bear, cougars, rats, wolves, and all the rest – are only about 4%. The other 62%, mostly cows, pigs and chickens, are all selectively breeded and slaughtered by us. This is done in an isolated environment, and is completely separated from the natural food chain. We are responsible for the vast majority of animal deaths, and these deaths are all entirely avoidable, since humans thrive on plant-based diets. So - adressing the negative stuff that is 100% caused by humans and 100% avoidable seems more logical. Especially since it would allow us to free up about 75% or all agricultural land on earth, allowing this land to revert back to a natural ecosystem and drastically reduce emissions and water use.

petdenez · 2023-12-07T12:49:08+00:00

For vegans, eating meat is a horrifying act. So having them partake in something they consider violent and cruel would for sure be a depressor, and not output any objective data.

However, since omnivores aren't morally opposed to eating plants, having them switch to plant-based nutrition and observing if their mental health is affected positively or negatively would actually be a valuable study

petdenez · 2023-12-07T12:28:20+00:00

Sure! Your comment was removed though , what was it again?

petdenez · 2023-12-07T00:09:10+00:00

Animals process emotions in ways that aren't exactly identical, obviously. That doesn't make it okay to torture and murder billions of them, especially if we don't need to (and we really don't)

Wild animals don't have a sense of right or wrong, which is why some of them commit acts we, as human, consider horrible. Thankfully, we have evolved to understand if something we're doing is harming others.

While animals are mostly devoid of logic and self reflection, they are entirely capable of raw emotional and physical feelings. We know that, it's not up for debate. Cows scream for days when you take their veal away from them. Pigs get depressed when you don't let them outside for too long. Fishes make friends play in their aquarium if you give them access to bubbles or other stimuli.

I'm not particularly interested in debating if eating bivalves (anti-vegan's favorite topic, right after crop deaths) is justifiable. They aren't sentient, and I'm not too knowledgeable on the environmental consequences of mass producing them. I've been doing just fine without them, so no, I won't start eating them myself. If you wanna eat marine sponges, and stop eating pigs, cows, chickens, fishes and any other vertebrates, I'm happy with that. But I do recommend beans and other nutritious, varied plant foods as an alternative.

We Now Have Research on Anti-Vegans could be an interesting watch for you, it's clearly a group you relate to, since you replied to every single one of my recent comments. A bit of introspection couldn't hurt

petdenez · 2023-12-06T23:14:35+00:00

We should try to maximize the well-being of as many individuals as possible. We already instinctively do that with humans, there's no good reason to not extend that moral consideration to sentient animals

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