cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/1574892

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I found this article on mronline.org. It claims that moving away from animal rearing for meat harvest will be instrumental in combating climate change. Some interesting excerpts:

> A systems engineering analysis of climate science and animal agriculture published in the Journal of Ecological Society in 2019 by Sailesh Rao, the founder and executive director of Climate Healers, an environmental nonprofit, backs up the claim that the majority of analyses of agricultural emissions are low. Rao’s paper found that “animal agriculture is the leading cause of climate change, responsible for at least 87 percent of greenhouse gas emissions annually.”

> In a research study led by the University of Oxford and published in the journal Nature Food in July 2023, it was found that adopting a vegan diet resulted in significant reductions in climate-heating emissions, water pollution, and land usage, reaching an impressive 75 percent decrease compared to diets containing over 100 grams of meat per day. Furthermore, the study highlighted that vegan diets also played a crucial role in reducing the destruction of wildlife by 66 percent and cutting water consumption by 54 percent.

> Beef is so resource-intensive to produce, that it requires 20 times more land and emits 20 times more greenhouse gases per gram of edible protein than beans, lentils, and peas—all commonly farmed plant proteins, according to the World Resources Institute.

> “Concurrently replacing all animal-based items in the U.S. diet with plant-based alternatives will add enough food to feed, in full, 350 million additional people, well above the expected benefits of eliminating all supply chain food waste,” according to a 2018 study by an international team of researchers published in the journal Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. The authors note that the results of their study “highlight the importance of dietary shifts to improving food availability and security.”

Of course most people who have looked into this topic know about this stuff already. But the numbers themselves are staggering. For example, moving U.S. diet to being plant based feeding 350 million additional people. I had not considered that angle before.

Ouchie my tum and my ethics

Anybody have any recent accidental non-vegan food? Do you bother to feel bad or do you just say "mistake's a mistake"?

!b12

i feel like someone did this joke before, ah well !im-vegan btw

Should I not get a cat because it won’t eat vegan foods? I could get vegan kibble, but don’t really want to create dietary issues for the cat.

That crybully spam of "remember the human" was especially slimy. Fucking treatbrained crybully.

Good morning folks, simple question for you. What sorts of egg alternatives exist out there? I'm specifically looking for something that I can make an omelette-like type of food with. Something that replicates the egg taste and texture as closely as possible.

I've been trying really hard to stick to fully plant based diet. Haven't had any dairy in weeks or eggs in months. Years since I last ate meat. But lately I've been having weird cravings for omelettes because I used to eat one for breakfast every morning.

Thank you !avoheart

Basically the title. I made waffles on Sunday and grabbed the remainder of my already opened and partially consumed package of Morning Star sausages and ended up reading the ingredients. Discovered they have milk and egg in them... Lesson learned again that plant-based doesn't mean vegan. So now I am shopping around. I'm sad because they were cheaper than others and tasted good.

So what are your gotos for breakfast sausage-substitutes?

PS: I did see an article that they are in the process of going full vegan but that was from a few years ago.

Edit: Thanks for recs so far. I'm gonna go look at the ingreds of my other Morning Star stuff because now I'm scared lol

hello cool people. i am new to cooking tofu and bought some pre-marinated teriyaki tofu that i want to try instead of the usual extra firm stuff. does my usual strat of freezing and then pressing water out also apply to this

Like something they'll be equally happy to eat that isn't weird to them. Ideally I'll order some food on the way, it's outside most people are ordering food to share. I live in a city, all cuisines are on the table.

I'm thinking maybe (non-ghee) Indian, but honestly I really feel like there's options that I'm totally overlooking.

I do have time to prepare food, but I'd really rather ride my bicycle than drive.

Any ideas?

Maybe this should be elementary: no, there are no right-wing vegans. But at least Lifting Vegan Logic has said that he is neither left, or right. Usually I would say it means he is right-wing, so I am wrong?

sosig good

Happens to me at least once a week. I'll dream I get some horrible irresistible craving and end up eating a meatball sandwich or something. Makes me feel like shit every time.

"you know how you only use 10% of your brain? thats because the other 90% is filled with curds and whey"

I'M SO TIRED OF FINDING RANDOM PRODUCTS WITH "INGREDIENTS: CRUELTY"

!

I find that, ever since going vegan, I miss dairy more than I miss meat. Sure, there are decent-to-good vegan substitutes for most dairy products out there, but I have yet to find a vegan restaurant that offers milkshakes - which is surprising to me, since they're ridiculously easy to make. So I figured I'd post the recipe I use here.

You need:

• 1/2 cup non-dairy milk
• 1 pint non-dairy ice cream in the flavor you want the shake to be
• 1 tbsp sugar
• 1/2 cup crushed ice

Drop all the ingredients into a blender, set to puree, blend until you're happy with the consistency, pour into a tall glass.

!im-vegan

This is something I've been thinking a lot about recently but I'm still not sure what is right. My rule of thumb has been that I'll kill any bug that is infesting my house or causing a problem to my health. Like I would kill termites or bed bugs if I had those, or like a leech or a tick. But recently I've been getting a lot of flies in my apartment and while they are technically "infesting" the place, they're not doing anything to harm me, just annoy me. Is it wrong to kill them?

Also I would like to say that if I encountered any of these bugs out in nature I would leave them alone and not harm them, this is only in the context of a threat to your sanitation or home

I have somehow met a vegan CHUD and they're convinced an ancap vegan society is possible

Is birds nest soup vegan?

Would it be vegan if instead of swiftlet saliva it was just a nest made of twigs and pine straw and stuff like a robin makes?

What's your tofu press setup? I go cutting board, paper towels, tofu, paper towels, pan, then a bag of rice

Tone cops always come out of the woodwork to disparage vegans who ask carnists not to hurt animals, no matter how nicely they ask. But they'd never speak up on behalf of animals, bc they benefit from being the "good vegan" and are beloved by human supremacists for enforcing the status quo. Fighting for animal liberation is incredibly stigmatized, and pick-me's try to escape that stigma by throwing activists under the bus. This is common in all spheres of social justice.

> Respectability politics have been criticized for being "used to rationalize racism, sexism, bigotry, hate, and violence." For example, Bill Cosby "never gave voice to issues of racism, sexism, the failed public school system, health and economic disparities, mass incarceration or police brutality. Instead, he spent over a decade disparaging Black folk to the delight of white conservatives." which made him controversial in the Black community.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respectability_politics

I've said it before and I'll say it again: any challenge to the status quo will be deemed "mean" by those who benefit from it. Misogynists paint those who challenge patriarchy as mean man haters, femin*zis, uppity, unreasonable. Same thing for activists who fight against racism. Human supremacists will always paint vegans as mean bullies for asking them to stop supporting the rape and murder of nonhumans. That doesn't make their framing fair or true. They're just protecting their status quo, which causes the torture and death of over a trillion sentient beings every year. Carnists love when pick-me's favor their feelings (about being told to give up their victims' literal corpses) over the feelings of their victims (terror, grief, pain, horror) and the lives of their victims.

But change doesn't happen when you flatter power and enforce the status quo. Animals will not be liberated by throwing the people who speak out for them under the bus while protecting the people that harm them. Leftists know this already, but they like to forget when it comes to animal liberation

My child is a toddler who has been raised not consuming anything from an animal. I am very happy that my partner and I have always agreed on this and our child is healthy and happy. However, my family all eats meat. My child is very close to her grandmothers on both sides of her family. They are not so much the issue as her grandfather is. He eats meat at least 2 of his 3 meals every day. When we were visiting my child’s grandmother and grandfather he began eating chicken remarking that is was good. My child said “yummy chicken”. That disturbs me. We’ve talked with our daughter about the way we live, but it’s been limited to these like, “cows milk belongs to a baby cow, we like (insert plant milk) instead.”

I ask my father not to say these things around her but he does not care to understand or respect the ways we want to raise our child. He doesn’t listen to anything we say. We asked him not to give her old toys as we didn’t want her exposed to lead or other contaminants in older toys but he continues to. We ask him not to swear around our child but he does anyway.

I’m just so terrified that our child will ask to eat whatever he is eating. It makes me want to visit my mother less because of how much my father actively goes against what we say. My father has many other issues I won’t get into, but it is so frustrating to constantly be on edge around him. I want to explain to my child more but I don’t know what more she can understand at this age of what is appropriate. I know there will be immense societal pressure on my child to eat meat and she is already different in so many ways including religion, ethnicity, etc. I want her to have vegan friends her age but it’s so hard for me to make friends and I want her to have vegan examples aside from her parents. When her own family is normalizing the consumption of animals it worries me that she’ll push back in the future. I know I need to prepare my self for this but it causes me so much anxiety.

Thank you for reading.

The constant harassment and abuse from speciesist reactionaries is what drove us off. But mentioning that part would ruin the narrative that vegans are the bad guys

Reminder: https://archive.ph/Xl1Kd

fuck baby steps

This isn't a moral argument. It's a tactical one.

If you are a white vegan arguing with a carnist and that carnist brings up indigenous meat eating to associate veganism with colonialism, you may appear to be in a double bind. It is extremely difficult if not impossible to go on the attack without associating the vegan movement with colonialism and thus damaging it. But if you back down without fighting, then the carnist's point goes unchallenged, strengthening their position and weakening that of veganism.

That doesn't mean you don't have options, though. Think of the carnist's argument as a heavily fortified military strongpoint. You don't attack such a position head-on. You infiltrate. You hit it from its blind spots. You attack the weaker flanks and encircle it.

Instead of attacking indigenous people who eat meat, point out how cattle ranchers drove bison to the verge of extinction to force Native Americans to become dependent on their product. Talk about how commercial overfishing threatens the food supplies of coastal indigenous communities. Ask them about the vast portions of the Amazon being cleared for cattle grazing. Remind them of the exploited immigrants getting PTSD from their work in slaughterhouses. In short, confront them with the fact that carnism does far more to harm indigenous communities than veganism ever has or (owing to carnists having vastly more political power than we do) presently could.

All of this, of course, assumes that the person you're talking to is not indigenous. If they are indigenous, there's a good chance they'll already be sympathetic to some of your views. In fact, indigenous communities have actually been at the forefront of fighting some of the worst excesses of western carnism, such as when the Inuit got Canada and four other countries to ban commercial fishing in the Arctic. It's important to recognize that they're probably closer to our position than an average westerner, and that they're doing meaningful work to advance goals that align with our movement. No, most indigenous cultures aren't 100% vegan as we define the concept, but as Lenin said, you can't make a revolution in white gloves.

Sometimes, we eat during meetings - or rather, they eat. I can confirm from the food served and their willingness to eat it that very few, if any of them, are vegan. I always decline food but don't say why, but eventually, I'm sure someone's going to ask.

And that's the moment I've been dreading. I've been on Hexbear since it first went online. I've seen, firsthand, how much non-vegans - even the communists here, who have better politics than 99% of the people I know - fucking hate us. I'd go so far as to say at this point that I'd be more comfortable telling an average lib I'm vegan than I would a communist. At least the lib will probably just see it as a strange personal choice rather than accusing me of being a fifth columnist.

But it's the vegans who are shoving their propaganda down our throats 😒

I put this up in the news mega, but figured I'd post it here too since it would be good to see this comm more active again.

> Rep. Claudia Tenney on Thursday called on FBI Director Christopher Wray to investigate alleged “criminal activity being promoted” by a vegan activist group in upstate New York. In her letter to Wray, the New York Republican alleges that California-based group Direct Action Everywhere has been using her home state to fundraise and recruit people to “actively disrupt farms” in rural communities in Empire State and elsewhere.

> "The threat of theft and trespassing posed by this vegan activist group is completely unacceptable. It is the absolute last thing our farmers should be facing right now as they struggle through a labor shortage and soaring costs,” Tenney said in a statement.

> “Our local law enforcement agencies have responded swiftly to protect our farmers, and now it is time for federal authorities to do the same,” she said. Tenney wrote that in the last year farms in Niagara County have reported several instances of animal theft and trespassing activity. She noted that recently the Niagara County Sheriff’s Office has asked farmers to be vigilant for trespassers on their property.

> “Basic constitutional rights must be upheld, and basic property rights must be protected. The promotion of organized criminal activity in our community by this out-of-state group or any other cannot be tolerated,” Tenney added in her statement.

Those crazy vegans challenging property rights again! :porky-scared: