I say this as someone with a great deal of sympathy for veganism, who has been progressively cutting more and more meat out of his diet, but this video that I’m seeing so many people rave about is bad. Bad arguments. Bad ideas. Ick. Made me want to kill a cow and eat its heart raw (no, not really, I’m still committed to vegetarianism as a personal choice).
The naturalistic fallacy is always a fallacy, and that’s where this thing goes wrong. The first half is entirely an appeal to a false idea of what is “natural”.
All the natural animal eaters in the wild kill their prey using what they are biologically given. He presents them with a thought experiment: if he brings in a live pig, could the audience kill it with their bare hands? That they can’t (actually, they probably could, but it would be messy and ugly and people would be hurt, too) is evidence that killing animals isn’t “natural”. Nonsense. Hominins have been using tools for millions of years; we have physically co-evolved with tool use. When the Trumpopocalypse comes, and civilization collapses, what are the survivors going to do? They’re going to sharpen sticks and pick up rocks. It’s what we “naturally” do.
We are not effective predators. Well, fuck, that’s just stupid. Ask all the animals we’ve hunted…oh, wait, you can’t, because they’re all dead.
Are you going to eat the raw meat? No, I’m going to cook it. We’ve been using fire since the days of Homo erectus, and the consumption of processed foods has almost certainly contributed to our morphology — our small teeth and faces. Fire is “natural”. In the rubble of the Trumpopocalypse, people will be rubbing two sticks together so they can roast the cockroaches they catch.
Are you going to eat the organs? All that nasty stuff? Uh, yes? It’s not nasty. I’ve eaten livers and pancreases and intestines and brains and hearts and tongues. It really depends on what cuisine you’ve been brought up with whether you find it repulsive or not. Again, he’s mistaking a conditioned cultural response with what is “natural”. I once saw my grandmother bring a bucket of leftover scraps from a slaughterhouse into the kitchen. She could make good meals out of offal. Offal isn’t awful if you’ve been brought up with it.
When people see these parts of animals, they always say “it puts them off their food”. Oh, it’s yucky and bloody and unfamiliar. It’ll make you nauseated. I sympathize, a little bit. People are all different, and it depends on what you’ve been brought up with. Most of us don’t experience the whole gory splatterfest of processing dead animals, so you get freaked out about it, and that’s OK — but it’s not about what’s natural, it’s about what you’re acculturated to.
This is really just an appeal to the emotions.
One of the reasons I do most of the cooking at home is that my wife does not want to deal with blood and dead animals. Once, when we were first married, I had a plan to cook some Cornish game hens for dinner, and I got held up late at work, so I called my wife and asked her to get them ready and into the oven, and gave her instructions. I came home to find her in tears and practically gagging, and obviously with no appetite at all. I’m comfortable with blood and guts and the “nasty stuff”. I’m not bothered at all. (This argument is irrelevant now that we’ve mostly switched to vegetarian meals, but it continues out of historical precedent.)
If you were naturally meant to eat animals, not only would you be able to watch them being killed, you’d be able to kill them yourself. OK, then: I have killed animals. I’ve gutted them afterwards, cooked them, and eaten them with great pleasure. I guess by this argument that I am naturally meant to eat animals. Maybe I should introduce him to Ed Brayton, who not only has no qualms upon seeing an eviscerated hunk of cow, he starts drooling (it could be he’s an atavism.)
I’m also living out in farm country. These are people who are accustomed to the idea of going out to the chicken yard with a hatchet and coming back with dinner. They look at these kinds of arguments for vegetarianism like the speaker has suddenly grown two heads…this just makes no sense at all.
Now once this guy leaves his “natural” argument, I think he starts making good points. I agree with what he says next.
You see a pig abused, killed, and beaten in front of you. Do you object? There is no justification for abuse. So let’s take that off the table. Can we justify killing a large mammal like a pig for food? I could turn the “natural” argument right around on him: that’s what our ancestors have been doing for millions of years, so to argue suddenly that in these last few generations our past behavior has become abominable is “unnatural”. In the ruins of our crumbling civilization, the ones who will survive are those who can slaughter a squirrel or the family dog for a meal.
But also, I can respect the personal decision that no, killing a conscious animal is immoral. Making an animal suffer so we can extract milk or eggs from it is immoral. We’re starting to get on tricky ground here, though, because you could argue that our existence, especially in our current numbers, is totally immoral, because we sustain ourselves with the suffering of other organisms. I can see that, but I have to make a moral compromise, and make an effort to minimize harm, while aware that I can’t totally end it.
Let’s say that pig being abused in front of you is now being abused behind a wall, where you can no longer see them. Does that now make it moral? Oh, these damn philosophers with their tricksy questions! No, it doesn’t make it moral, and if your moral framework says that killing and eating animals is wrong, you should be working to end all kinds of farming and slaughterhouse practices. You go, guy! I’ll just ask that you stop making dishonest arguments for your cause.
Now as a vegan I eat all the foods that I used to enjoy, but now I do so without harming animals. This is true. There are many vegan alternatives that you can turn to, and you don’t even need to use meat substitutes — plants taste good. Especially when you use “unnatural” practices like cooking them, and did you know that if you gave an audience a bushel of wheat that they wouldn’t have the slightest idea how to extract the protein to make seitan, and if they did, they’d need to use tools?
Going vegan encouraged me to reinvent the ways that I cooked. Yeah. I rediscovered spices when we started making vegetarian meals. And also fire. Did you know that raw potatoes taste terrible? It’s true! Our distant ancestors did all kinds of artificial processing of those tubers they were gathering out on the savannah. Every culture around the world has developed techniques for improving the flavor of those natural foods they collect, whether it’s a vegetarian curry or a Texas barbecue.
He does not make one argument that I find important: meat-eating is not a sustainable practice. There are so many of us on this planet that simply skimming off the top of the food chain is wasteful and inefficient and damaging to the ecosystem.
That’s a terrific article PZ.
As I posted the other day, reducing the amount of meat eaten is a wonderful goal. This video shoots itself in the foot because when refuted as PZ has done, it basically gives the thumbs up to meat eating.
Actually I believe I know how to make a bucket of wheat edible. Put it in water and soak it for a few days and then change the water and heat it to boiling. There you go – edible and tasty if you have somewhat odd tastes. Of course, hunger makes everything taste good.
If you’re happy to buy grain and vegetables grown with energy-intensive artificial fertilisers and contribute to climate change, then yes, you’re not harming animals because they’re no longer being raised for food. But if you want to be able to rely on natural fertilisers then you’re basically requiring animals to be raised so that their manure can be used to fertilise the soil, at least until we’ve fully converted to the use of humanure in farming and for some degree of energy generation. If you’re not willing to wait or see those animals raised to serve you at all, then you’re looking at lower crop yields and at more hungry people around the world. That’s the impact of a widespread adoption of veganism and (to a lesser degree) vegetarianism. It’s never as simple as you might wish.
I guess that having vitamin B12 is unnatural as well for the idiot who produced that video.
Or perhaps, since humans cannot synthesize B12 on their own, humans are unnatural or something.
Humans evolved from hunter-gatherers. That means, for many hunts, what was killed was what was eaten and animals are pretty good at evading hunters, so a fair number of meals would’ve consisted of what was gathered, alongside of whatever smaller animals were killed. Go out hunting some time and learn how well animals can smell you coming, hear you coming and see you coming and successfully evade you.
Most of the time I go out hunting, I don’t even load the damned rifle. First, there was archery season, then black powder season, finally large bore season.
Even deer are quite intelligent. I’ve literally walked up to a doe during buck season and she didn’t spook off, she knew that she was safe, along with her young fawn beside her. So, we admired one another.
Pity that I didn’t think to have brought a camera along.
I do recommend eating meat – as much meat as you can catch with a knife. That, by definition suggests a portion size that’s small. That’s enough to get animal sourced nutrients required to survive and also includes enough plant matter to get all of the nutrients one requires.
I also recommend substituting ricotta cheese with tofu, for a less gritty, higher protein filled dish that’ll take up the flavors of the spices and ingredients that are cooked alongside it. Makes for an excellent lasagna ingredient.
Evolution has given us two interesting things – 1 – the ability to eat and digest just about anything. Obviously helped us survive. And 2 – the ability to choose not to eat anything and everything. We’ve been excluding things (usually for religious reasons) for millenia. Still thriving.
Having said that, from a moral perspective I think that veganism is us becoming more aware of just how close we still are to other life on the planet. Empathy toward other sentient beings is a driving force behind the philosophy of veganism.
Eating anything and everything is quite natural, but is not necessarily ‘right’ – and that’s the only argument we vegans should be making.
Veganism has issues as a movement. A lot of money is collected by groups giving their stamps of approval to meat processors for making slight adjustments to treat animals more humanely before killing them. A lot of people are adopting a vegan diet for health/weight reasons. But in the long run the only sustainable philosophy is based on just not harming or killing animals, as counter-intuitive as that may sound.
Good article, just one tiny thing I think you missed about humans as meat eating hunters. Persistence hunting. Given the pig example, the easiest way to kill it with little effort would be to stuff it into a bag, hang it from the rafters and allow it to die of dehydration.
Sorry for that image. But in his scenario it’s the best way to draw a parallel to how our ancient ancestors actually hunted. Not with bows and spears, but by simply singling out a weaker member of a herd and tormenting it until it dies from exhaustion.
It wasn’t a huge step for our ancestors to go from following herd animals and scavenging the dead ones, to hunters who simply pursued animals to death. Persistence hunting turned out to be a spectacularly successful strategy that didn’t require much in the way of weapons. It also shaped our ancestors to develop the highly efficient bi-pedal gate we have today. That’s probably only one example of dozens of examples of how our ancestors went from gather, to hunter gatherer.
Just the first thing I though of after reading the article.
Not much to say about the stupid arguments. They’re stupid. Others aren’t. Maybe those would be interesting, important, helpful, etc.
That’s a rather mealy-mouthed way of talking about it. Think of murdering, lying, cheating, stealing, whatever examples you like — in what sense is it supposed to be a “personal” choice/decision that these things are wrong?
Do you live in a world where dishonesty is (typically or generally) harmful to others? Yeah, you sure do. It’s not as if we live in different worlds, such that it could be the case that me being dishonest to others in my world is bad, while you doing the same to others in your world is not. We’re pretty much in the same boat, in that sense. We’ll certainly be in different situations, have different perspectives, have different goals/needs, and so on. But that doesn’t mean we need to take seriously the idea that my choosing of honesty over dishonesty is a “personal” thing (presumably, this means independent of anything other than me), which genuinely expresses what is and isn’t moral, while others could make a valid/correct choice (in favor of dishonesty) that would contradict this and does the same job just as well. That’s not going to work, if the goal is to say something about it that’s relevant and coherent.
Offal is awful! Delicious.
Charles Lamb neatly made the point on pig.
Good article! Thanks. No, I’m not a vegetarian or vegan–now. I was a vegetarian before I got my first hip replacement in 2000 when I was 47. I don’t know why I started craving meat (by which I mean chicken or fish or occasionally bacon) after that surgery. I’ve asked my various doctors and they don’t know why either. So I guess it was just a weird side-effect. I do cook bacon for one of the neighborhood cats, who politely comes on to my porch when he smells bacon in the offing. So it’s an opportunity to do something for a friend, who shows his thanks by purring.
Rich Woods@2,
Ruminants – which produce the vast majority of animal manure – contribute to climate change by producing methane. Nitrates can be produced by growing legumes, which fix atmospheric nitrogen – ever hear of a new-fangled technique called “crop rotation”? Most phosphate and potassium are still mined, and you can’t get more of either out of a cow than you put into it.
Extremely dubious, (a) because a considerable proportion of the current crop yield, particularly maize (corn) and soya, goes to feed livestock, and (b) because people very rarely go hungry because there’s an actual shortage of food: they go hungry because they can’t afford to buy what’s available. True, there are some areas only suitable for growing stuff we can’t eat, but most of those can’t support high livestock densities. The best case for the necessity of animal exploitation to feed people is the use of cattle of various kinds to pull ploughs and other farm implements – and the animals are generally too valuable to be eaten until they become incapable of work. Manure is then a bonus, as are milk products. Overall, there really is no doubt that a considerable reduction in the consumption of meat and dairy products would enable more people to be fed. So those who want to keep on eating them should thank the vegans rather than sneering at them*. (For information, I’m a vegetarian, and have recently cut my cheese consumption considerably, but am not a vegan.)
*As opposed to sneering at ridiculous nonsense such as that in the video – but on Pharyngula, I see considerably more ridiculous nonsense from meat-eaters than from vegans.
I’d like to point out that, baring toxins, parasites, or pathogens present, raw meat can be more easily digested than many raw plants. Many plants require quite a bit of processing before they can actually be eaten.
KG, #10:
Just want to add that we also don’t need to think all areas of the globe must be used for supporting the human population. We don’t have to colonize the whole damned thing anyway. If what we have are some areas which can’t sustain large numbers of people — deserts, mountains, the poles, the ocean floor, etc. — then this isn’t by itself a problem. They are just places where we don’t have people (or not many). Big deal. That doesn’t mean we’ll have any trouble supporting ourselves in a sustainable way.
“savannah”? In South America? I thought that was pampas or something???
Anyone who claims that veganism and eating only plant matter happens without any animals suffering has done insufficient research, or do they also think that mice, rodents and other creatures that are exterminated to protect crops don’t count?
And also given the extreme selfishness of the human race, if we did, for whatever reason, all convert to veganism, then that would probably lead to the extinction of most of the domesticated animals we use for food in some way or another. Do you think we’re going to keep feeding them? Provide somewhere for them to live? With nothing in it for us? Especially if we’re expanding croplands.
The insufficiency of a complete vegan diet has already been mentioned.
We can still try to be as humane as possible in our treatment of these creatures we’ve domesticated, in such a way that they have very little chance of life without us. But there are no perfect solutions.
Potatoes taste terrible raw. I imagine whatever tubers our ancestors gathered in Africa had a range of flavors from nearly inedible to delicious plucked right out of the ground.
It’s not! I love raw potatoes. Not crazy about the skins raw, but peel them and I’m there. Whenever my mom made scalloped potatoes, I was always stealing the raw slices out of the bowl before she could add anything else to them. Now that I make my own, there will still be slices that don’t make it into the dish. And if I have to eat a plain potato cold, I prefer raw to cooked.
Likewise, carrots and cabbage. Like them raw, but cook them and you can keep them. Just the smell of cooked cabbage makes me gag. Fire doesn’t make everything better.
Small point: the Inuit eat raw meat and blubber on the regular, first because they like it (muktuk is a delicacy) and second because it’s necessary for their survival: raw meat contains vitamin C.
But yes, for people who live in the Arctic, who are physically and culturally adapted to the place, a place where vegetarianism is physically impossible, hunting and eating meat are as much a part of humanity as language and thought.
One other reason: there’s nothing up there to burn for cooking in the first place, except… animals (which they do, for light.)
Veganism has a major drawback: it is bad for babies. At least during development, human beings also need B12 and such, that you can only get by eating animals or through synthetic products (so long for the “natural” argument).
Also: the “moral issue” (killing animals is bad) makes no sense. It’s not the same, say, to eat a horse or eat snails. It’s more relevant whether the animals suffer during their life.
While reducing as much as possible meat consumption is very good for the health and for the environment, strict vegetarianism is just a matter of personal choice (and veganism is actually stupid)
@4wzrd1: speaking as an italian: if you put tofu into lasagne instead of besciamella (not ricotta) please find another name for them.
Many years ago, I heard it claimed that meat-eating harms mental equilibrium due to absorbing adrenaline in the tissues of stressed animals facing death in slaughterhouses. I objected that (a) humans wouldn’t react to other species’ hormones, and (b) cooking would break it all down anyway.
The responses were (a) adrenaline = adrenaline, and (b) you dunno what you’re talking about (which latter proves true often enough to sustain it as a general principle).
So, now that the subject is again on the table, and in the presence of those who know enough to call it epinephrine, I’d like to find out: do any parts of that argument hold up in actual biochemistry?
Land use is relevant in the context of those last points:
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-us-land-use/
PZ’s description makes me think that to some extent this guy is preaching to the converted.
I was suffering from high cholesterol a few years back and decided to try and get my diet under control, to avoid having to take a pill (and possibly suffer side effects) the rest of my life for something that should be controllable through diet. At first, I started cutting back on cholesterol in the foods I bought, thinking one thing leads directly to another. Didn’t matter much. My doctor mentioned that saturated fats in the foods you eat are what lead to high cholesterol. I started getting my saturated fats under control and dropped my LDL levels by about fifty points.
What I discovered, going through the aisles of the grocery store checking nutrition labels, is that vegan foods often contain two or three times as much saturated fat per serving as the non-vegan alternative. I’m a Trader Joe’s nut and I like their frozen Indian concoctions. Their vegan tikka masala compared to the chicken alternative is a prime example. I actually found that vegan foods are WORSE for my health than an animal-based product.
Granted, I could give up tikka masala and just eat raw vegetables all the time or some kind of ramen constantly, but what’s the fun in that?
Oh gods, not another veganism thread.
We’re at the most 20 comments away from the slavery-Holocaust-rape arguments.
But yeah, I want to see this guy survive, say, December in what “nature has given him”.
Simple rule: If I ain’t eating it, I ain’t killing it. (Mice excepted.)
I have butchered a lot of critters in this lifetime. Lots of ducks, mudhens, pheasants, grouse, bunnies and squirrels, a lamb here and there. Girl up the road raised good poultry, once a month we met up and butchered. More deer than I can count. Pickled walleye, yum.
Seems to me killing and cleaning my own food is a responsible way to behave and I make no apologies.
I have no fight with vegetarians, or even vegans (though I hold that Vega will never have life-sustaining planets around long enough for any life to develop sentience). What I object to are the “in your face” and “militant” vegans. They make me bring out statements like…
Vegetables aren’t food. Vegetables are what food eats.
Vegetarians eat vegetables. I’m a humanitarian.
I didn’t fight my way to the top of food chain to eat like a rabbit.
In actual fact, due to medical conditions, I have to hold way down on carbohydrates. As a result, my diet is largely meat.
One of the things humans were ‘biologically given’ is a brain capable of working out ways of doing things, including ways of killing animals and of maximising the production of food from land.
I will eat most parts of the animals that I eat, I had lambs kidneys last night and very tasty they were too, but I also have dogs, a species we have lived with for at least 10,000 years, and they will eat anything I won’t, so between us we can certainly eat or otherwise use all of an animal. I don’t eat a lot of meat, but if you have decent land and want to do the most efficient crop rotation, both in terms of food production and of soil conservation, you include grazers on fallow land in the rotation. Especially as the supposed nitrogen benefits to the soil of growing legumes have been vastly overstated, the most recent research suggests that very little nitrogen is actually left in the soil for following crops as the legumes use nearly everything they fix themselves.
Ariaflame @14:
You mean vitamin B12? I don’t think that’s a major problem. Easy enough to get supplements.
whheydt @26:
As a meat-eater myself, I find knee-jerk (militant if you like) anti-vegans far more objectionable. And judging by these threads, there seem to be a lot more of them.
Plus, there are various foods which are fortified with B12. Here’s wiki, in a part that might be overlooked, if one is ready to jump to conclusions based on statements that there aren’t “natural vegetable sources” or what have you:
And how about that, one can even notice something significant here:
I very much doubt that clams (for example) are sentient, or at any rate, not in a way that should concern us. And no doubt many similar animals (which is not all animals) could be added to the list. An intelligent discussion about this kind of stuff would start there. But it’s obvious that many people (not you, Rob) are just aiming for any shitty excuse they can find.
Did you know that raw potatoes taste terrible? It’s true!
Maybe you don’t like ’em, but I sure do. Whenever my mother made french fries, I was always grabbing the fries before they got cooked. Give me some salt and mmmmmm, good.
“Are you going to eat the organs? All that nasty stuff?”
Ask my ex-family in law. The answer will be a resounding “yes and you’re a fool if you don’t eat all that delicious stuff”.
So with some exceptions (especially cow and chicken brains) I also tried,it. None of it was nasty, but I didn’t enjoy me either. Bowels are largely tasteless imo.
@28: “You mean vitamin B12? I don’t think that’s a major problem. Easy enough to get supplements.”
And where do they get the B12 in the supplements from, do you think?
@30: “Maybe you don’t like ’em, but I sure do”
I believe that if you hold your nose and close your eyes you cannot tell if you are eating apple or potato. Never tried it but I’ve read a number of books that claimed to do this very experiment.
@31: “Bowels are largely tasteless imo.”
Sausages used to be made with pig intestines for a wrapper. My daddy was a butcher and one of the things he did was make sausages back in the 1940’s and I have a vague and admittedly unreliable memory of him doing this. Of course all the salt in the sausage meat would possibly disguise any taste from the wrappers.
No. Where do you think? Or have you not actually thought about it, with the assumption that this method works just as well as actual thinking?
Make a guess. Do they take a hunk of meat and shove it into a pill? Is that what happens? Would it make any sense to do that, given that animals aren’t producing it themselves?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_B12#Industrial_production
So is there a point to your question?
Ed @32: These days, mostly from bacterial cultures plus fermentation.
Beaten to the punch…
Pierce R. Butler @ 20:
Another question about any hormone is does it survive ingestion? I really wish I could take insulin by mouth.
@21 anchor
Yes, that’s one of the main reasons to minimze meat consumption in human diet
(“minimize” does not mean “completely avoid”).
@30 Bonnie McDaniel
raw potatoes are mainly starch in a form that is not assimilate by human metabolism; they also contain a lot of solanine, which is toxic for humans.
In Europe starting this year it is allowed to sell some kind of insects as human food. I’d give them a try, but 1) once in a while nobody’ll stop me from eating a “fiorentina”, and 2) don’t want to see tiny legs sticking out of my sandwich, so I’ll go for well smashed up recipes
I suspect we should probably be eating more insects.
albz:
Ever see live shrimp? I kept a marine aquarium for a few years.
@38 “bacterial cultures plus fermentation.”
When I was a kid many years ago I was taught in school that bacteria were animals. Or so my admittedly unreliable 74 year old memory seems to tell me. A quick google search corrects this, but the point of the question I asked was not to make an assertion but warn gently (I thought) against assumptions that a supplement is not derived from an animal unless at least the product label is explicit about that.
I’ve been a vegetarian (not vegan) for nineteen years. My impetus was the idea that “it is ethical to cause as little suffering as I can, without seriously inconveniencing myself.” Does not eating meat reduce suffering? Clearly. Does it inconvenience me? Very little. Would giving up milk products, cheese, and eggs inconvenience me? To a much greater degree, so I haven’t taken that step yet.
Did the introduction of cars cause horses to go extinct?
If large-scale conversion to veganism ever does happen, it will be a gradual process driven by two things: a) invention of better and better meat substitutes that are eventually indistinguishable from the real thing (the Impossible Burger almost gets there), and b) rising prices of food production due to warming and water-related issues that make raising animals more and more expensive. If a meat alternative is cheaper and tastes exactly the same and has the same nutritional value, only rich jerks will still eat meat. Of course, rich jerks are an inexhaustible resource, so there will always be a few domestic animals somewhere.
if you hold your nose and close your eyes you cannot tell if you are eating apple or potato.
I can. At least I could as a kid. I remember messing up the “smell is the only way you can tell an apple from a potato” experiment in grade school. As for onion, forget it.
@41 robertbaden
Yes…and I love eating shrimps.
I know it makes no sense going “bleargh” on insects when you happily munch on their aquatic relatives.
Also, my friends from Korea tell me that fried or chocolate-covered grasshoppers are delicious. I admit to have cultural barriers in place here, but I think I can have a try and probably get to appreciate them.
After all, I ate and liked scottish haggis…
(I actually eat very little meat, and mostly chicken or rabbit, which have lower environmental impact. Fish I love, but we’re emptying the oceans with industrial fishing so I try to reduce it too)
Simple rule: If I ain’t eating it, I ain’t killing it. (Mice excepted.)
And mosquitos. I feel no guilt about killing mosquitos. I don’t eat them, but they did try to eat me, so I consider that fair. Actually, I’d also kill a mammal if it tried to eat me and probably wouldn’t eat them either. h
A most excellent rebuttal. I accept some arguments for veganism, such as environmental and some animal welfare arguments, but not the ones from this video. My response to some the points:
RE points 1 & 2-
It would be trivially easy for me to kill most prey animals with my hands and teeth, as well as catch them with a little bit of cunning. I’m big, strong, and quicker than I look (I even have really large, sharp teeth for a human, but we’re not really shaped for biting on the run). I also have a knack for violence that makes it easier for me to cause harm than not, which is one reason why I always move so slowly and carefully. I don’t actually want to hurt people or most of the animals I encounter, and I don’t like breaking things. I am a predator, in the sense the term is being used in here, and a pretty effective one at that.
RE point 3-
I have! It’s pretty tasty. Most things I cook, though, because food-borne illness is no laughing matter. It’s a grab-the-toilet-with-both-hands-and-pray-to-every-god-that-ever-was-whether-I-believe-in-them-or-not-to-kill-me-quick, whilst crying because vomiting brings back awful memories. Also, because I always get some in my hair.
I also cook most vegetables. I prefer most vegetables roasted, though I prefer raw fruit. However, I have a lot of dietary restrictions. I can’t digest raw greens, full-stop, which is a shame because I love a good salad (a good salad does not, IMO, include any meat or grains). I can’t really eat tomatoes or anything tomato-based, and I have to be very careful with grains, because both give me nightmarish reflux, even with my medication. I have to be careful with spices, too. I can and do eat some spicy foods, but chili-powder in particular makes me extremely ill.
Point 4-
This one reminds of the “pink slime” furor a few years back, which pissed me off to no end. Contrary to finding it gross, I actually thought pink slime was kind of neat. Not very photogenic, but since I’d undoubtedly already eaten a ton of the stuff I wasn’t bothered. If we’re going to eat animals, then we should use every part of the animal possible. Anything less is wasteful and disrespectful.
Point 6-
Been there, done that, fried them up golden-brown with some hush puppies (no canines were harmed in the making of said hush puppies). I don’t kill the vast majority the animals I eat because I don’t have to, not because I bothered by the fact that they used to be alive.
Points 7 & 8-
Abuse, i.e. torture, is always wrong. There is no acceptable excuse for abusing animals, and I’m willing to pay more for meat, dairy, and eggs that come from cruelty-free farms. However, I have no problem with killing prey animals. As I said earlier, I neither deny that I am a predator nor find it shameful. I respect those who choose to forgo eating animal products, but I don’t respect those who say I should do the same because killing is “immoral.”
I don’t agree that killing animals is de facto immoral. The how and the why are what matters to me. It’s wrong to kill for the sheer the pleasure of killing, and it’s wrong to be cruel no matter why you’re doing it. But dealing a quick, painless-as-possible death to an animal for the purpose of feeding people isn’t wrong, any more than it’s wrong for a wolf to kill a deer.
Point 9-
I enjoy meat. I really, really enjoy dairy. I could be reasonably happy as a vegetarian, but vegan? Nope. Cheese is pretty much my favorite food ever.
All that being said, I have been cutting down on my meat consumption over the past few years, for environmental reasons and because I don’t approve of the way many farms treat their animals. I still don’t think it’s wrong to kill and eat animals, and I have zero patience for anyone who suggests that everyone could go vegan (some people have restrictive diets, remember), let alone that everyone should.
This insect thing caused a weird social media hype here in Finland, with some hipster food companies jumping at the opportunity, and various people overstating how insect farming is totally going to save the world. One mainstream bakery launched a bread with a tiny amount of cricket meal mixed in the dough, just to to see how the concept would fly. It’s effectively like regular bread, except technically not vegan, and some people are buying it out of sheer novelty value.
You might see Finns online gushing about “cricket bread” like it’s some great innovation. Few people have asked what’s the culinary point of mixing fine-ground meat in bread dough. I personally suspect it’s a cynical attempt to ride on the recent “high protein/low carb” fad while appearing environmentally woke.
Insects would indeed have the most wide culinary applications when they’re “well smashed up” into a protein meal – but then it’s effectively like extracted legume protein which is still more environmentally friendly.
39 @ albz:
Not so much. Yes, solanine is toxic, but if you don’t eat any “sunburned” green parts (especially the peels) or the eyes, you’ll be fine, and even then you’d have to eat a bit, but since potatoes with high levels of solanine taste bitter, you probably wouldn’t. Most kinds of cooking don’t get rid of very much of whatever is there either. Microwaving and deep frying at over 210°C are best if you’re really worried. I know there are cases on record of people getting sick or dying from solanine poisoning, but they’re rare. You’re probably more at risk from the acrylamide formed from frying potato chips and french fries (and other starchy foods, not to mention coffee) than you would’ve been from any solanine the high-heat frying got rid of.
And just now there’s a rash of threatened masculinity when Finnish military announced a week or so ago that they’ll make every one hot meal out of seven vegetarian. This technically affects most Finnish men, because of the conscription for basic training.
Vegetarian (possibly vegan?) food has been in recent years available at the bases as a special diet option. Back when it was introduced, one military spokesperson commented with amusing frankness, “Ethics is not our highest priority”. Now, there’s apparently an environmental drive to reduce meat consumption.
And now, one prominent conservative politician has been railing about this change based on weird vegan food stereotypes, demanding an “investigation”. Online, commenters are asking why “normal” people can be forced to eat vegetarian meals, when the opposite hasn’t been possible for a while. There’s great concern about suddenly emerging legume allergies, as if pea soup isn’t a classic Finnish military dish. Since soy doesn’t grow here, people are asking why the patriotic institution such as military isn’t bending over backwards to support our domestic animal-heavy food industry.
@20
I had to look it up.
I thought there was a reason why allergy kits had a syringe loaded with epinephrine.
This compound is also labile to air and light.
Chances are by the time you get your meat home and cook it, there wasn’t much to start with and it has all been oxidized or reacted with something else and is gone.
I believe that class room experiment has a zero percent success rate. I’ve seen it attempted a dozen times and it has never worked.
I don’t know why it never occurs to the people who make it that raw starchy potatoes have an entire different texture and cohesion than apples and eating a raw potato immediately coats your mouth with a tacky chalky substance that is impossible to ignore. And onions have burning sulfur compounds is even worse.. If you compensate for these the experiment may work (applesauce vs. mashed potatoes mixed with water perhaps) but otherwise you might as well claim with eyes closed you can’t tell the difference between sugar and sand.
Huh? Not if the food you used to enjoy was pork chops, roast beef and sweat-breads… That’s a really weird statement.
@50
The mediterranean diet we have here in Italy is on average quite well balanced, with maybe just a too much bread and pasta (but lots of fresh vegetables, legumes, fruit, and generally low in animal fats.
I’ve never been to Finland yet, afaik fresh vegetables there are (understandably) quite expensive compared to southern Europe, so probably introducing vegetarian menus for young people could be good also for the health and not only for the environment (but I repeat, I still know too little your country).
On insects: yes, here too right now they’re some kind of novelty for hipsters, but I expect them to become more and more widespread in the next years, since they’re low impact and readily available source of good quality, low fats animal proteins. Just hoping they don’t become a further reason to increment world population…
@KG #10:
Yes. Yes, they do. Like I said, it’s complicated.
Yup. Been using it for years. Now, do you understand why this new-fangled technique isn’t common in modern monoculture and why yields would fall from their present level if we returned to it? I do. Don’t think that means that I like it, but I do understand it.
The mining is energy-intensive, yes? And the original point was that animals should be saved from being raised to be subservient to the needs of humans, because that tends to lead to the maltreatment of animals, yes? My point was that you can reduce the suffering of animals but at present only by increasing the impact upon climate change. Your point is a non sequitur.
Re: eating raw food.
I do not eat raw meat, but there is this thing called “steak tartare” that some people do eat. I also do not eat raw vegetables and most salads if I do not know the exact composition,. because I am allergic to many raw vegetables (the whole carrot family for sure)..
I love apples. I am allergic to them too, as well as peaches, nectarines and many other fruits from Rosaceae family. The only way for me to eat raw apples without issues is to cut them up and mix them with yoghurt or cottage cheese (I do not know why). Or cook/bake them.
Therefore, as a rule, I avoid uncooked foods when I do not know the exact composition, because I could have allergic reaction. My whole life depends on eating processed food and going vegan would not be a help here.
Re: killing your own food.
I would bet my money that most of urban people would not know how to grow and harvest vegetables and take care proper care of the land either. That argument is moot.
Re: suplements.
If you need to eat suplements in order to have balanced diet (be it the nonsensical “all meat” diet or equaly nonsensical “all plant matter diet”) you automaticaly lose any right whatsoever to use the “my diet is natural” argument.
Re: veganism not harming animals.
This is not true. Ploughs, combine harvesters and ordinary trafic kill a lot of animals. So do pesticides and pest control.
There might be some validity to veganism minimizing harm to animals (I do not agree with that point for multiple reasons that I will not enumerate, for I have neither time nor desire to get into an in depth argument with anyone – you are free to think I am a coward or moral monster or whatever, I don’t care), but there is no such thing as zero harming animals. If you eat, mice, rabbits and even deer and pigs die so you can get your food on the table. If you are using any moving vehicle of any type whatsoever you are compliant in killing insects by dozens. Every living organism on earth competes with or destroys other living organisms for their survival.
We have some choice about how and to what degree we do this, but we have no choice not to do it at all – except ceasing to exist.
I wish I could eat more vegetarian foods. Unfortunately, I have an overdeveloped sense of bitter taste, consequently many vegetables are completely unpalatable to me unless prepared in ways that kinda defeat the point (like slathering them in butter and bacon). If I were to cut out meat, I would have to live essentially entirely on breads/pastas and fruit, and I don’t see myself doing that. I could never get behind veganism, though. While I agree with some points, mostly related to factory farming, the idea that it’s unethical to eat eggs, milk, or honey strikes me as patently ridiculous. There are certainly unethical ways to get that stuff (again, factory farming), but there is nothing unethical about the products themselves (especially honey, that one just blows my mind). And, as has been noted, there are plenty of unethical ways to farm plants as well. Personally, I think a shift to more local small farms rather than large factory farms and plantations would be a bigger step than anything else. Granted, not every area of human habitation can support that, and people would largely have to go back to seasonal foods (we’ve gotten very used to having all foods available year round), so it isn’t a simple prospect, but I think it’s a goal worth aiming at.
Category error.
The comparison you want is closer to “choosing to eat at all, even though you’re aware other people in the world are going hungry.”
No, it really isn’t. I don’t even know what you think I compared with what. Maybe you’ll read for comprehension this time…. If you said “it’s my personal choice that murder is morally acceptable,” nobody in their right mind would pretend as if such pronouncements had any bearing on real-world situations that we should care about. You can “choose” shit like that all fucking day long, and it will not change a thing. At least people whose heads aren’t stuck up their own asses will have no trouble understanding this. The alternative above is expressing something like divine command theory, without explicitly appealing to magic. So now’s the time to run the Euthyphro argument again, with all natural entities — it still goes right down the drain, as it always does, whenever you claim that right/wrong depends on the arbitrary, unmotivated choices of a particular individual, which are supposed to have no relation to things/events in the real world. And if the choices are based on the real world (such as “does it fucking harm anybody or not”?), then why not cut the authoritarian fucking middleman who’s supposedly “choosing” it all and simply talk about what’s real?
Also, the reason some people go hungry isn’t actually because I ate something. Maybe you’re failing to grok one of these: (1) there is more than enough food to go around, and (2) greedy assholes don’t want to share. We should share it with anybody who needs it, whether or not greedy assholes are happy about that. We can do that while “choosing to eat at all.”
dixonge@5–
“Veganism has issues as a movement. A lot of money is collected by groups giving their stamps of approval to meat processors for making slight adjustments to treat animals more humanely before killing them.”
Uh, no. Vegans reject the use of all animal products, so no vegan group is going to issue approval stickers to meat producers, no matter how humanely the animals are treated.
TL;DR.
Doesn’t look like you answered my actual point, though.
And considering roughly half of your “contributions” to comment threads consist of willfully misinterpreting something someone said that was reasonable in the social context and then releasing a curious mixture of Trump-like abusive verbal diarrhea and Courtier’s-Reply-Esque attempts to use the shoptalk of formal philosophy as a club, it’s pretty fuckin’ rich for you to accuse anyone else of failing to “read for comprehension.”
Try writing comprehensibly, you big baby.
Pretty much hit it on the head, PZ. It’s good for us to eat less meat (especially processed meat) than we currently do, and the factory-farm system does some pretty horrendous things to meet demand. This guy was just making bad arguments (unfortunately, a lot of vegans make similarly bad arguments).
Being an animal means that you have to hurt other living things to stay alive. Plants aren’t lifeless, inanimate objects. They react to stimuli, they can feel something analogous to “pain” when they’re damaged, and even signal that to other plants around them.
All you can do, as a self-aware animal is to try and square away that with your own morals as best you can. “Natural” doesn’t mean peaceful, and it doesn’t mean moral. Nature is as cruel and horrifying as it is amazing.
Rich Wood, @3 and @54: As far as I know it is actually recommended to reduce meat consumption and replace with plant food in order to reduce emission of greenhouse gasses. While the production of synthetic fertilizer creates CO2 emissions, the production of feed for meat animals also uses such fertilizer. And ruminants emit methane, which is much worse than CO2 in its greenhouse effect.
See for example Dietary greenhouse gas emissions of meat-eaters, fish-eaters, vegetarians and vegans in the UK
Matrim @56:
Are you aware of all that is involved in dairy faming? Yes, the dairy cow is not killed for her milk. But in order to keep lactation going the cow must be impregnated – usually by artificial insemination, usually once a year. The calves are removed from their mother within days of birth. The males usually become veal – after being raised in very restrictive crates (to keep their muscles undeveloped) on iron-poor diets (to keep their flesh pale pink). One of the female calves will eventually replace the mother. Any cow that is found to be insufficiently economical is slaughtered.
This is just the short version. I don’t think it is all that odd to find this system morally problematic.
@64
Yes, cows have to be regularly pregnant to produce milk, but aside from that everything else you described is a product of maximizing production and profits. Calves do not have to be raised for veal, inefficient cows do not have to be slaughtered. And there are other animals that can produce milk longer, so yearly pregnancies aren’t necessary, some goats can produce milk for two or three years after birthing.
The biggest problems are a result of trying to maximize profits. That leads us to some bigger issues (no ethical consumption under capitalism, wot wot)
I’m not so sure. The next two points that you highlight:
“You see a pig abused, killed, and beaten in front of you. Do you object?”
and
“Let’s say that pig being abused in front of you is now being abused behind a wall, where you can no longer see them. Does that now make it moral?”
…fail to make a distinction between slowly, messily, killing a pig with my two hands and the same pig being slaughtered cleanly. Now it is entirely possible that the guy sees no distinction between the two, viewing it as unjustified in either case, but if so he ought to make the case for why killing for consumption is never justified. The comparison is superfluous to this.
Other points he makes are just eyeroll-inducing semantics.
“Now as a vegan I eat all the foods I used to eat / enjoy / crave, I eat mac and cheese and spaghetti bolognase [and so on]” – but with totally different ingredients and hence totally different flavours. Mac and cheese without eggs or dairy is neither mac nor cheese, and to present them as the same thing is just silly. Doubly so given that this follows on the heels of him burnishing his meat-eating credentials by talking about how much KFC he used ot eat; I’ll wager he no longer has friend chicken…
“Sometimes people tell me: veganism is restrictive. Now before I was a vegan, I had one type of milk: cow’s milk. Now I have: oat / rice / soy / coconut / almond / cashew / hazelnut milk. I cook with ingredients and foods I’ve [sic] never heard of before I was vegan.” Sure, but you already had access to those ingredients. There is nothing stopping any omnivore eating any of the ingredients he discovered as a vegan, most people simply don’t bother. And so it is the case that veganism is restrictive by definition, as it is a stance that involves cutting out certain ingredients to distinguish it from omnivory.
“When I used to open my fridge, it would look like a morgue. […] Now I open up my fridge, it’s a garden. There’s [sic] so many colours.” Is ‘Argument From Colourful Fridge Contents’ supposed to be taken seriously? And to return to his earlier subject, that of ‘natural’ eating… this guy just admitted to storing his ingredients in a fridge and cooking them. Puh leez.
“There’s such a beautiful array of foods I look forward to cooking” Yeah, like the chicken cacciatore I just had.
I think that is an excellent summary and good take down Prof.
I too am cutting down on my meat takedown, for example I use Quorn instead of beef mince for my chilli nowadays.
I do like a nice lamb shank for a sunday roast dinner. I make sure my neices know exactly where that delicious meat came from.
I personally love meat. The sight of a side of beef or a slaughtered pig ready to be roasted makes my mouth water. My wife has killed and cleaned chickens. I have killed them. She has also cleaned and cut up deer. I could if I needed to. I don’t, so I don’t.
I also love some vegetarian and vegan meals. I hate meat substitutes, though. They never taste right, and I’d rather have the dish just use the normal form of beans, etc. I love vegetarian chili, but not if it uses a ground beef substitute.
@anat #63 & 64:
Reducing meat consumption and replacing with plant sources, yes, is better for the environment. Partially because then you can eat more sustainable, grass-raised, meat. If you take the massive amounts of feed grain and alfalfa out of the equation, beef is much more sustainable. Still, pork or chicken is even better for the environment, and fish even better. That study also deals with the carbon footprint of those types of eaters in the UK. The profile for the US would be vastly different. Also, looking at the sources of the meat makes a big difference, too. There are lower impact ways to raise meat animals than factory farms. There are also lower impact ways to farm plants, as well.
As for the dairy issue, not all dairy farms feed the veal industry. It’s also common for them to be shipped to regular beef farms. My grandmother’s second husband’s dairy farm didn’t ship any calves off to become veal. Yes, underproducing cows are slaughtered, but then they are eaten by something, whether it be humans or dog food or what. You can also make criticisms of factory farming of soybeans, which make up a lot of the protein eaten by vegans. Yes, we can criticize current practices. That doesn’t mean we need to abolish meat as food, but we can make things better.
@Holms #66:
I agree with pretty much everything you said. One big criticism of this guy, especially re: the garden in his fridge, is that he was eating crap before he became vegan. My refrigerator is pretty garden like since my family eats fruits and vegetables as well as some meat. We also cook vegetarian and even vegan friendly meals! So no, becoming vegan would limit my cooking choices more than they are now.
Oh and that point about eating the same stuff? Spot on! I will not eat “vegan lasagna”. It does not taste or feel like lasagna when eating it. Make some sort of casserole that vaguely resembles it and I will probably enjoy it. Just don’t feed me lasagna that doesn’t taste or feel like it.
Also, talking about using what nature gave us to kill the pig, that means I get a knife, spear, something like that, because that is a vital part of human ingenuity. Otherwise many animals in the wild that use tools would starve. I personally can eat dinner while watching a documentary about slaughtering a pig and dressing it to eat. So pretty much all his arguments are null. Except the “offal” part. I recognize that this is my personal social construct, though. Plenty of people eat the offal bits, and I eat sausages in natural casings. I just was raised by my parents to think they are gross.
Oh and does this guy know about the problems with non-dairy milks? You’re shipping water across the country for no reason. It also is not a replacement for milk as none of the examples he gave tastes even remotely like actual cow milk. I’ve tried most of them, but none tastes good to me. I’d rather eat a handful of nuts and drink water. I’d cut milk out entirely before using almond or soy milk. They just don’t taste good to me.
You had me until you said raw potatoes taste terrible. It is one of the best natural foods out there. Just have to peel it first with a tool.
Can you imagine an eco-system where there are only vegans at the top of the food chain? What will they eat? How will they farm without killing animals?
In school biology we studied fox and rabbit populations, how a rise in the fox population would lead to a fall in the rabbit population followed by a collapse of the fox population.
We eat far too much meat but we would have to kill a huge number of animals to prevent then eating ‘our’ food when their populations boomed, or die ourselves.
#68 I wonder how much food the US would be able to produce if they went ‘natural’. By which I mean – 4billion passenger pigeons managed without rainforest fodder. Also I have wondered about Buffalo – there were reports of a herd of 50million. There were probably more than one herd so it is conceivable that buffalo managed to produce as much meat on a small area of the US again without imported rainforest. It seems left to themselves ecosystems manage to beat intensive farming into a cocked hat. The profits are lower but if feeding people is the priority so what.
Like it or not, veganism (itself a much stricter form of vegetarianism) is a choice in extant cultures. It is an extreme choice, and IMO only justifiable on ethical grounds. And it’s onerous.
So these arguments to health or pragmatism, alas, don’t hold out in my estimation.
—
One of my sisters is such a vegetarian, so that she will eat eggs from my healthy and happy chickens, but not from the shops. I also eat eggs from my chooks (obviously!), but have no qualms about eating other (chicken) eggs.
(Or, an exercise in virtue ethics rather than deontology or consequentialism)
—
madtom1999:
Yes, non-animal products, and very carefully.
(Can’t you?)
re happy chickens. Anyone who has kept or been around chooks knows when their happy clucking when yummies are to be had.
And how they will steal from each other — very feral.
(Also, I note my chooks have caught at least two field mice that ventured too far into the danger zone — their run — and were literally devoured by the chooks. So it’s not just invertebrates to whom they are death on two legs)
PS first time I saw the chooks kill and devour a mouse, I could not but think “once were dinosaurs”. And, cocks are cocky.
(Until the fox comes)
Our chooks found a nest of baby brown snakes. We have a photo of two chooks playing tug-of-war with one before eating it. Weeks later we found part of another dead snake. The final death toll was in the snakes favour with two dead to the chooks three.
FossilFishy, !
#73
Their pecking order antics during breakfast are reliably entertaining. I just wish they defended their feed against the goddamn pigeons we have here as well as they do against each other.
Admittedly I’ve never had vegan mac n cheese, but there’s no reason for the mac part to be any different—macaroni is already vegan. (Gluten-free macaroni is another story.)
By which I mean that it’s different from industrial pasta made from durum wheat, not that it isn’t vegan.
Holms @77: Pigeons can be formidable foes. I once saw a male give a decent roundhouse punch to a young gull at least twice his size, who was trying to muscle in on the breadcrumb action. The gull decided that discretion was the better part of valour.
@consciousness razor:
Obviously I don’t speak for PZ, but have you considered that calling this a “personal choice” is meant to place the responsibility where it belongs: on individual consumers who consciously choose to buy meat (at the grocers or in restaurants) rather than industrial producers who would close up shop tomorrow if there was no market for their goods?
Saying “the personal choice to eat mean is immoral” individualizes responsibility. While there’s good reason to say that the meat industry is immoral, unless you own a slaughterhouse or a ranch or something similar, the more relevant ethical question is not, “Should I shut down the meat industry,” but rather, “Should I, personally, choose to eat meat?”
I don’t find this at all an evasion of the relevant questions or an odd way of phrasing it. Yes, murders and lies are also the result of personal choices, you’re not wrong, but what, precisely is the problem with framing the problem as a personal choice from which anyone here might abstain tomorrow?
I don’t get why you jumped from “personal choice” to the assumption that PZ is engaged in minimization or accountability avoidance of some kind. Care to enlighten me?
Freudian? I leave it to my readers to divine both my consciously intended meaning as well as any implications the phrase as written might carry for my unconscious thoughts or biases.
Sometimes I’m wondering if many vegetarians and vegans simply were lousy cooks before they changed their food consumption. The number of times I’ve had vegans/vegetarians try to explain basic cooking to me is astounding. I mean, at some point in time they were omnivores. Did they eat meat exclusively? Or with every single meal? I’m a happy omnivore and I don’t. In fact, most of my cooking is vegetarian, occasionally vegan. I do perfectly well know how to cook.
Matrim #65:
This is very true. In the UK, the veal crates anat was referring to have been banned since 1990 (and these have also been banned across the EU since 2007), and there are rules regarding the minimum level of iron in the diet of the calves. This has resulted in the veal coming from the UK being viewed as expensive and not really veal, as it is darker than veal usually is. Attempts have been made to market this as ‘rose veal’, with emphasis placed on it being a more ethical type of veal, as the calves are bred free-range and on a natural diet, and this has led to rose veal growing in popularity inside the UK, though it’s still only a tiny fraction of the meat market.
Giliell: I’m thinking those born again Christians who tell you they needed the power of Jesus Christ (and a supportive church community) to stop messing their life with drugs.
albz:
Just to correct a common misunderstanding, vegetarian/vegan diet doesn’t really relate to eating fresh vegetables (or only fresh vegetables). People get this confusion in Finnish too, I see it in online comments all the time.
In vegan diet, you just replace the animal products with some plant products, usually legumes and grains and plant oils. It’s not a good substitute to add more fruits/vegetables than you’d otherwise eat, UNLESS your diet is seriously lacking in those, as might often be the case in for example traditional Finnish diet. We’ve had a decades long public health campaign telling people to eat their veggies, and it’s showing good results, though we’re not quite on Italian level yet. That was not meant to substitute animal foods, generally speaking.
Re: the world famous concept of “Mediterranean diet”
Recently, Finnish nutrition experts have been promoting something they call “Baltic Sea diet”, in a blatant attempt to make healthy eating sound both fancy and traditional. I think in Sweden/Norway they might call the same thing “Nordic diet”. It’s a healthy diet model designed within the framework of North European food production system and food culture. It’s not really traditional in the same way Mediterranean diet is.
methuseus @68: Yes, the link was to a paper specific to the UK, but I keep seeing similar outcomes. Different papers have different assumptions, yet vegan diets or the eating of plant foods keep showing up as the lowest in greenhouse gas emissions, and a recommendation to reduce meat consumption is a common one to reduce such emissions, so I don’t know how Rich Wood arrived at the claims in the above posts.
My comments regarding dairy were in response to a poster who thought avoiding dairy on ethical grounds was ridiculous. Which I took to mean there was nothing worth questioning whatsoever. It is possible to make the industry less objectionable while understanding what the objectors are in fact objecting to.
Crip Dyke, #81:
But that’s not what he said. Near the top: “I’m still committed to vegetarianism as a personal choice.”
What does that mean? The only description it gets is “a personal choice,” not some description that’s equivalent to “immoral.” We can both see that, and I don’t think that is open to interpretation.
He’s committed to it as a choice…. Well, alright, since there’s nothing about immorality, couldn’t that simply be saying it shouldn’t be forced on people but rather be freely chosen? I’d certainly agree with that, but so would (presumably) everyone who thinks meat-eating isn’t immoral. (They don’t want this thing they don’t take seriously forced on them, after all.) If everyone who thinks it isn’t immoral would agree with it, that tells me it’s not a clear statement meaning “it’s immoral.”
I’ll say again that nobody talks about murder, rape, theft, etc., that way. You don’t say you’re “committed to not-murdering as a personal choice,” if you want anybody to understand what the hell you just said. You say it’s immoral, clearly, if that’s what you actually mean: simply “I think A is B,” not some mangled up thing that means who-knows-what.
Later on: “I can respect the personal decision that no, killing a conscious animal is immoral”
This time the choice is “respected.” Okay. But does he also respect the opposite decision, which someone might personally choose to make, that it isn’t immoral? That’s pretty murky. He gives various arguments for “both sides” (many of them dubious), as if that was the thing to do for this post. If he had made a straightforward claim like yours, and if the context hadn’t pushed things in all directions … well, that would be another story of course.
The whole thing is also a pretty bizarre approach to take to the subject, given your interpretation. Don’t you think? Can we expect a post like “So many bad arguments for feminism” any time soon? Doubtful, because it would be irresponsible to invite all of the sexists to gripe about irrelevant shit that has nothing to do with why sexism is actually immoral. Especially when all you do to counter that is to barely express some muddled thoughts about why you have sort of have some sympathy for people who happen to choose feminism.
Besides, there are a large number of systemic changes that ought to happen (as with anti-racism, feminism, etc., each in its own ways), which don’t amount to “shut down the entire meat industry worldwide.” That’s a huge leap away from what you personally do (or buy), with plenty of other steps worth taking in between those two extremes. So endorsing only the one wouldn’t be placing responsibility where it actually ought to be.
It seems to me that the “vegetarianism is natural” people have it exactly backwards, to the point where I’m surprised you don’t see more of them making exactly the opposite argument – vegetarianism is advanced.
As PZ says, if we were all to revert to some Hobbesian state of nature, our various dietary qualms wouldn’t last a week. Under the influence of starvation, even the most committed vegans would be eating whatever they safely could (and probably a few things besides): plants, fungi, large mammals, small mammals, birds, bugs, dirt, pond scum, each other… This is our natural state, and we don’t need to look far for evidence. The Inuit and Sami eat meat and fish almost exclusively, the Sioux famously used “every part of the buffalo” (well, bison if you want to nitpick), and even in places where game is scarce, tribal humans routinely supplement their diet with meat protein whenever they can get it, whether the source be beetle grubs or neighboring tribes. I might be wrong about this but I’d be willing to bet there has never been a pre-agricultural civilization of committed vegetarians. You simply can’t forage enough food, in enough variety, to feed and sustain any decent-sized group of people.
At least as far as I’m aware, vegetarianism has only ever been widely practiced in places where civilization had advanced well into the city-state era. India, China, and Greece leap to mind as examples; places where agricultural techniques and the division of labor had advanced to the point where surplus food supply was the norm, and a significant percentage of the population was free to spend their time doing things like pondering whether some meals might be more moral than others. Vegetarianism appears not at the base level of civilization, but as it approaches its apex. Put another way, vegans could make a more coherent argument by claiming to represent progress instead of tradition; not the past but the future.
robertbaden @#38
Some do, eg oral contraceptives.
@consciousness razor:
Possibly.
This isn’t the only topic where he’s done posts before on how people with whom he disagrees have used arguments that he things are bad. I also remember quite well a discussion to which you & I each contributed in which I was critiquing fucking awful arguments for veganism and you literally told me something with the gist that it is so difficult and/or unlikely that someone would oppose the rhetoric or argument used by animal rights advocates that my opposition to certain arguments was tantamount to supporting animal cruelty.
As long as that mindset exists, I’d absolutely say that there’s still a need for bad arguments to be taken down. And yes, I’ve produced similar criticisms of feminist arguments for various policies or positions. We all agree that 2 + 2 = 4, but if someone is telling you that the reason we should agree that 2 + 2 = 4 is that god told the speaker that 2 = 3 and 6 = 4 and since 3 + 3 = 6, then that means that 2 + 2 = 6 which is the same as 2 + 2 = 4, then FUCK YEAH we should be critiquing that argument.
I don’t know, why don’t you ask him. The problem here isn’t the “personal decision” aspect of what he’s writing. The problem is the same as someone saying, “I have no problem with someone not believing an assertion that god exists,” and then someone else raising the issue, “Well, but does that mean you do have a problem with not believing the assertion that NO gods exist?”
PZ is clearly addressing one fork of a decision tree. He hasn’t addressed the other, at least not here and not somewhere that I remember off the top of my head.
Seriously, what’s your problem here? If he hasn’t made a statement on one fork of a decision tree after today, well then it would only be a concern if he hadn’t made a statement on that fork before today either.
Is failing to write about something you deem important a significant problem?
Don’t remember, and I don’t even know what it’s supposed to mean….
If I “literally told [you] something with the gist” (or perhaps not literally), and if you think this is relevant somehow, you’ll have to explain.
I’m on board with that. Fuck yeah, etc. But this isn’t what we were talking about. You apparently think I was arguing that he shouldn’t have objected to the vegan dude in the video (or any other bullshitters for that matter). I wasn’t.
(1) He didn’t fail to write about it. Seriously, what is this question for?
(2) I said he was being mealy-mouthed, muddled, unclear, etc. Do you deem it a significant problem that I said such things? (But why are we asking this?)
(3) What was he being unclear about? A moral position which he did take the time to address, with various indications that he does consider it important/significant (as moral issues tend to be). He did so specifically by criticizing others for their statements. If attempts at constructive criticism are not appropriate here, then I don’t know what would be.
I’ll go fully vegan the second they make substitutes for animal products that can eveb slightly match the originals. Until then, I’m not making my one life on earth tangibly worse for the sake of glorified meat robots like fish or bees.
Porivil:
You eat bees? (!)
@94
Non-vegans don’t eat bees. We eat bee’s vomit. And we really really like it.
albz, fair enough. Were you vegan, you’d have to stop eating vomit, which you really, really like.
@ John Morales, that of course assuming that the jar contains actual bees vomit The origin of some “vomits” is currently under suspicion…
Lofty, yeah. Capilano’s reputation is shot.
@94
Was referring to the vegan prohibition on eating honey. Though, with that said, bugs are pretty tasty. If you could de-sting them, I’d probably try them.
IIRC, people sometimes eat honeybee larvae from the comb.
Also, I just heard there’s a vegan “honey replacement” sold in the US – it’s just apple and lemon flavored syrup. The product is named Honee, which would be considered illegal deceptive marketing here in the EU.
@96
No thanks, I prefer being not-fanatic, and continuing to eat bees’vomit, cow juice and such.
Eating few meat and animal fats is good, eating nothing of animal origin is something you can do if you want, but without any rationale to it.
Also, I suspect that most people are vegans not because they love animals, but because they hate vegetables.