Seen a lot of posts on Lemmy with vegan-adjacent sentiments but the comments are typically very critical of vegan ideas, even when they don’t come from vegans themselves. Why is this topic in particular so polarising on the internet? Especially since unlike politics for example, it seems like people don’t really get upset by it IRL
What privilege? Meat is the most expensive food out there. Eating rice and beans isn’t really showing privilege
Those aren’t the vegans that most people are talking about. Being poor and having to eat vegan is different from being vegan because you want to stand out from everyone else with your vegan black bean soy burger with vegan cheese on a vegan sprouted whole wheat bun. If you can afford the overpriced “vegan” versions of typically non-vegan foods, and complain about your struggles being vegan, that’s privilege.
When you’re poor, you don’t advertise the fact that you’re eating vegan. You just make rice and beans because it’s the absolute cheapest food available. You’ll take meat and non-vegan when it’s available. But at the very least, you’ll survive on rice and beans. It’s generally not something that people are proud of.
This. When I was poor af and regularly using the food bank they’d give venison periodically, and that was my favorite part of the boxes. That and this rice and seasoning meals went together amazingly and would last me like a week of meals.
You’re making a big assumption here by saying that all vegans are buying vegan substitutes like Beyond Burgers. And I mean very big, since all the vegans I know don’t eat that stuff or buy it occasionally as a treat, or at a restaurant. Most of my meals are simple with rice, noodles, curry paste, and some vegetables. They can even be frozen or canned to reduce preparation time.
They explicitly said that he was only judging the people only being vegan to be vegan so they could act like that
The implication is that this is common. I don’t think even one vegan is vegan just to show off some kind of privelege. This is just a childish and unrealistic caricature that does not exist in reality.
Which is a non-existent strawman.
You’re going to have to quote me what I said, we are too far into the thread.
I don’t doubt what you said, I just don’t know what I said. lol
I didn’t say that. I said if you’re buying the vegan substitutes and advertising that fact, that makes you privileged. I’ve seen it many times. There are even some in this post. People that eat vegan because they have limited choices don’t advertise it. People that want to feel superior over others will express how much of a vegan they are.
People aren’t vegan through limited choice. It’s a conscious decision. You might eat a plant-based diet because you can’t afford meat, but that doesn’t make you the same as someone who is choosing not to eat meat on purpose. You’re comparing someone who wants to be vegan with someone who doesn’t and saying one is superior/less annoying. They’re two different people.
Congratulations, you’re finally getting it. They are two different people. There are people that eat vegan because they have no choice. Those people are not privileged. There are people that call themselves vegan and make sure everyone knows they are vegan. Those are the vegans the original comment was talking about, which someone took offense to. That’s why I pointed out the difference.
It took a little effort, but at least you got there.
Am I privileged if I can afford to eat Beyond Burgers every night but I eat rice and beans instead? What if I can’t afford those things, still eat rice and beans, but I tell people I’m vegan to avoid awkward social interactions? You’re making up a caricature of vegans in your head, comparing them to poor people who happen to not be able to afford meat, and then saying the latter is somehow a better person.
The option you presented is a poor non-vegan person vs. a wealthier vegan person. There are people in between these two things.
But would you? Would you really turn down free food simply because you’re vegan? Would you really tell people you’re vegan to avoid an “awkward social interaction” when offered free food? If so, that makes you privileged. Being able to pick and choose food makes you privileged, whether it’s vegan or not. That’s the difference.
Yes and yes because I’ve been there.
Everyone is more privileged than someone. It’s obviously more privileged to be able to eat fresh vegetables vs. people having to eat bark in occupied countries. But most serious vegans will also tell you that if you’re on a desert island and your only way to survive is to kill and eat a pig (as ridiculous as the scenario is), you should do it, because we acknowledge self-preservation is real and valid.
The privilege is being able to choose to eat that way out of a sense of morality or fashion rather for the reason that it’s literally all there is to eat. The privilege is being able to turn your nose up at perfectly edible food for no other reason than that it’s got a bit of egg, honey, or butter in it without having to worry about starving to death. The privilege is also having access to such an abundance and variety of food that you can maintain a vegan diet year round and not have to fear that you won’t meet all the calorie, protein, and vitamin requirements you need to stay alive and healthy while much of the world is in a constant struggle to scrape together enough calories of any kind to stay alive.
that’s great, but most vegans you speak to will tell you that we aren’t telling the people who lack the privilege we have to go vegan. we’re asking our neighbors, our bosses, our friends - people in similar if not the very same life circumstances as us - to walk a couple aisles over from where they buy the meat in the grocery store and buy some beans instead.
people love to bring up the privilege thing, but i would argue that it is entirely irrelevant. the entire point of veganism is to do what is reasonably possible and practicable. not to tell people who don’t have the privilege to be so discerning about their diet that they are going to hell or something.
Thank you for saying this in a way I was unable to muster.
Maybe they mean privilege wrt education? As i understand it, it takes a non-zero amount of knowledge about nutrition to substitute meat completely and not be deficient in something. But I’m a life-long omnivore so I may be wrong
There’s also the privilege of living in a location where vegan alternatives are readily and frequently available, vast swaths of the US are in what’s known as “food deserts”, locations where “residents’ access to affordable, healthy food options (especially fresh fruits and vegetables) is restricted or nonexistent due to the absence of grocery stores within convenient traveling distance” (https://foodispower.org/access-health/food-deserts/) these locations also tend to have high obesity or diabetes rates due to the fact that the only food easily and cheaply available is high in sugar. Add in things like the increased price for even simple vegan foods (like rice and beans) and you might be starting to see the picture, as much as some people would LIKE to be vegan it is literally not possible for them without either taking on substantial additional costs or completely upending their life.
A lot of the reason people who are otherwise pro-vegan (like myself) tend to dislike online vegans is that they will, consistently and smugly, while in a location and economic position where its easier to get vegan options, berate people for eating animal products without ever considering the possibility that its MUCH harder to get non-animal product based foods in certain areas
A lot of people online will also point to food deserts in other parts of the country as a reason they, living within 20 minutes of 5 different grocery stores, personally won’t make any changes.
Food deserts aren’t just places where there aren’t grocery stores, they also include places where there are abundant stores but fruits, veggies, and other vegan or healthy options cost drastically more, for example, there are parts of New York City considered to be food deserts because all the healthy options are too expensive for someone on a low income to reliably afford, forcing them to go for unhealthy, but cheaper options. This is something that, to the credit of whoever is in charge of the NYC health department, the city has been working on solving, doing things such as incentivizing “Green Carts”, food carts with affordable healthy options like vegetables and fruits.
Also consider, you don’t know too much about that person’s life, maybe they live in a non-food desert location but have to travel frequently via car through food deserts, maybe they have to move a food desert in the future, maybe they have a dietary restriction preventing them from accessing several of those healthy vegan options, so they have to supplement their diet by using animal products.
Also, in my experience, most ‘anti-vegans’ tend to have no idea what a food desert is, the normal excuse is nutrients or iron intake, most of the non-vegans I’ve talked to that even know about food deserts have either tried to go vegan and found it too hard to do while also keeping up with their health and finances or work in an industry directly combating food deserts, just something to consider.
Well, that’s getting into the difference between veganism and vegetarianism.
That aside, although meat is expensive from a cost and input perspective, it is a very efficient and dense source of calories and protein.
Outside of a first world or industrial agricultural setting, they also have the advantage of being able to convert food sources humans cannot eat into one we can, while to a great degree being able to tend to themselves.
Goats, sheep and chickens can have large numbers managed by a few children with sticks, and also produce non-vegan animal byproducts which can be sold for cash.
This is also before hunting is considered.
While vegetarianism and veganism can be practiced outside of a first world context, and indeed have been for thousands of years, they do come with sacrifices that are significantly easier to make with more money or in a post agricultural region.
Eschewing cheese, eggs and honey is not a difficult thing to do for me if I wanted, but there are places where that’s just leaving good food uneaten, or money unearned.
That’s I believe what’s being referred to when it’s called a privilege.
Except meat is the least efficient protein source. You need land to grow animal feed, which largely could be used to grow crops to feed humans. You put in like 100 calories to get 1 calorie out.
Not all land is suitable for crop cultivation, which was the point I was making. In subsistence or low tech farming areas, animals forage on land unsuitable for crop production and eat food unsuitable for human consumption. They’re not eating feed, they’re eating wild weeds and grass we can’t. They’re eating insects, miscellaneous seeds, small plants and whatever they find.
Do you think that if you’re farming to have enough food to feed your family and maybe some leftovers to sell, that you’re going to choose to produce something markedly inefficient in comparison to other options?
Subsistence farmers today aren’t stupid. They’re not wasting 90% of their food because they want a hamburger. They raise goats and chickens because they feed themselves and you let your kid who’s too young to do heavy work follow them with a stick to keep them from wandering off. They raise cattle and donkeys because they can forage, and what they can’t forage is more than made up for by using them to work the land or as beasts of burden.
There’s a reason we domesticated animals. We didn’t just immediately start giving them feed corn and locking them in cages.
It’s a privilege to be able to ignore a readily available source of food.
It’s a privilege to live in a society where we set aside land to grow huge amounts of food to feed our food.
It’s a privilege to not have to know specifically where your food is coming from.
It’s kind of ignorant to think that people who don’t have those privileges must be foolish enough to choose what you think is an inefficient option, and to not consider why they would make that choice.
Vegan: no animal products. No butter, no eggs, having to be well-informed (as others have stated) and know about the content of every bit of everything you buy, and making choices on that basis instead of on cost.
Even then, how many of the products you buy and use every day have depended on animal products for their manufacture? I’m willing to bet that a fair amount of human labor consumes and uses animal products to sustain themselves, even if there are no animal products in the thing you’re buying. I don’t think it’s fair to compartmentalize that away from purchasing decisions. The people who put your flat pack MDF furniture in a box, did they have a chicken sandwich on their lunch break? The people who are paving the roads and maintain the rails on which the products you ultimately buy, are they wearing leather boots?
Everyone depends, to some degree or another, on the use of animal products, either as food or for some other purpose. Even vegans.
Edit: Like I said above, reducing dependence on animal products is probably a good idea, but people who believe they have eliminated their dependence on animal products are patting themselves on the back for something they simply cannot accomplish.
Congratulations on synthesizing truly the dumbest argument I have ever seen in my entire life.
Can you explain what’s wrong with this argument? As a relatively disinterested observer it seems reasonable to me.
Being Vegan is a choice for yourself so it’s a fallacy to argue that others are not Vegan, and saying it doesn’t help to try to make a difference unless everybody does it is also a fallacy.
So the argument is based on no less than 2 obvious fallacies. This should be pretty obvious, so question is if you are just a troll?
I’ll say that this reaction does nothing to make me think you are approaching this with any objectivity.
The argument, to me, seems to be that it’s impossible in the modern world as things stand to actually totally avoid animal products. That would seem like an issue that Veganism should be concerned with.
I see your point, I think, about it being an individual choice. But though I have heard of things like vegan shoes, I can see how saying those are vegan when you may not control all the inputs seems problematic.
Regardless, your response was so unpleasant that I don’t think I’m much interested in continuing.
Yeah no reason to go to the moon if we can’t visit other planets yet. That’s the kind of logic you are arguing.
The vegan argument is to not contribute to animal suffering, you can’t control what other people do.
And avoiding suffering doesn’t help because there will still be suffering is about as stupid as it gets.
Veganism has never been about avoiding all animal products 100%. Only as far as possible.
To put it another way, would you feel responsible if the person who installed your solar panels drove an oversized truck in their personal life?
Because its not within any one vegans control whether a random factory worker has chicken for lunch. If there were businesses that only hired vegans and sold vegan products (there are, but very few), then vegans would obviously be buying things from there instead. If someone who isn’t vegan themselves uses this impossible purity test as an excuse not to make changes themselves, then they weren’t genuine about making any attempt in the first place.
If you’re okay with compartmentalizing that out of the production of goods and services you use, that’s a you thing.
Why is it reasonable to expect me to have any control over what a factory worker is eating? There are entirely vegan businesses, but its setting up a ridiculous goal post to claim vegans are somehow hypocritical by not having a 100% vegan production chain as a consumer, which is literally impossible in the current world. If we could, we absolutely would. But if you want to argue that vegans should handcraft and grow literally everything they use as an excuse not make any changes yourself, I don’t know what to say.
Veganism is not about completely eliminating every use of animal products no matter what. It’s about reducing animal suffering and their exploitation as long as it’s possible and practicable.
From https://www.vegansociety.com/go-vegan/definition-veganism