vegan

I found out she's vegan through checking out her profile having the Ⓥ in her display name and her bio literally says (cut and paste):

"be kind to animals or I'll kill you"

end speciesism

Despite this, she is accusing me of anti-Semitism because I made a comment staunchly condemning Zionism, and when I wrote this comment that you see in the image, she didn't give a proper rebuttal. All she fucking said was:

of course you stalked my page 💀

The skull emoji is really telling.

It's like your average Instagram user is a bot produced in a factory where their brains have logic, reason, and reading comprehension skills extracted out of them.

I got into Veganism about 8 months ago now, and it was much easier than I thought it was going to be. Where it got difficult for me was when food was getting wasted. I have always been really good about not wasting things, and even eating other people's food if it was going to waste. Problem is nobody else around me eats vegan. At first I would eat the food anyway, and just continue eating plant-based as I normally would, but I've reached a point where I don't even want to eat animal product at all, so it goes to waste. Has anybody else had, or have, this problem, or is it just some autistic "quirk" I have involving inefficiency and waste.

(also happens at restaurants on the rare chance that I actually go, get something, and they get the order wrong)

Vegetarians who say this shit say they enjoy getting encouragement from vegans, but they actually just want a pat on the back and brownie points from susceptible vegans, not actual encouragement.

This is the greatest encouragement I can give them, but because it's in an "aggressive" tone, they love to say "You're the reason why people shy away from going vegan!"

Sorry to tell ya, but if some harsh words promoting the very ideological foundation of veganism are enough to discourage you, then you clearly don't have a plan to "transition" to veganism to begin with.

Imagine telling someone "You really need to stop being fucking racist." and then they say "Ugh! I'm working on it! You being so pushy makes me want to be more racist actually!"

The cheese rots into their brains apparently.

I got told today I shouldn't raise kids because I'd purposefully raise them in a vegan household, without animal products of any sort. I was told this would be dangerous and unfair to the kids.

It was a weirdly direct thing for this person to say to me (one of my coworkers). It's stuck in my head. I was told I should let my potential children choose what sort of morals they have, even though this person is raising their kids Catholic. Their advice to me was to allow my potential kids to choose every night between a meat-based meal and a vegan meal (???). And several other coworkers agreed. Where do they come up with this? No carnist raises their kids like this.

So is anyone raising vegan kids or does anyone know about what it's like? Or was anyone here raised in a vegan household?

I am fed up, I am disgusted, and I am disappointed.

This account I formerly followed (huge emphasis on the formerly) on Instagram made a series of "Are you two friends?" memes. This was one of the slides, and I, as a black vegan, am extremely uncomfortable with how the owner of this account, a queer and polyamorous woman of color who is, in fact, a carnist spoke on a commenter's concerns about this slide in the picture.

First of all, as you can see, the very first responder, @petitearisu is doing the whole "Veganism is classist." or "Veganism is inconsiderate of BIPOC struggles." excuse to further their own funding of animal slaughter, which makes them carnist trash the same way, but it's @decolonizing.love's response that I want to get at the most.

I am a poor, black vegan. If you all have seen my posts about my struggles, you all know that I've been unemployed and relying on mutual aid support to get by for a bit. Not fucking once, did it occur to me that I'd ever have to fund animal slaughter to feed myself during these trying times. If I wanted something cheap, legumes, rice, pasta, mushrooms, vegetables, and fruits always had my back. None of that stuff is even remotely expensive, but as far as @decolonizing.love goes:

FIRST OF ALL, LET'S TALK ABOUT THAT WHATABOUTISM!

Because you are so upset that people show concern and moral agency for the cruel way animals are treated for the sake of human sensory pleasure, clothing, and convenience, your first response is to divert to making this about trees? What makes this whataboutism worse is that it's a false equivalence, and even then, it fails as a "dunk" on vegans.

False equivalence because respect for trees doesn't necessarily have anything to do with respect for sentient life, and it fails as a dunk or accusation against vegans because many vegans are extremely environmentally conscious, and as a matter of fact, you could argue that they're the most environmentally conscious. Animal agriculture is causing more harm to this planet than so many of the other dangers that performative environmentalists pretend to care about, but let's push this aside because this is just a small fraction of your pitiful comment. What I'm primarily concerned about is:

THE "MORAL RIGHTEOUSNESS" ACCUSATION

This is a classic carnist excuse. You accuse vegans of being pretentious to make yourself feel like they're not actually making a material impact to liberate animals. This is cope. This is just you coping with the fact that you cannot own up to your own shortcomings in the way you abuse animals for absolutely no damn good reason. It doesn't even solidify as an actual argument or any form of coherent rhetoric against veganism as a philosophy. It serves as ad hominem at best.

As a black vegan, your point about how BIPOC can "perpetuate white veganism's hypocrisy" concerns me. Just so you Hexbears know, I didn't respond to this comment on Instagram itself because I didn't want dozens of performative leftists dogpiling me over this shit. If I, as a leftist of color ever disagree with any of these people on anything, they'll accuse me of just what they're saying vegans of color can do: "perpetuating white hypocrisy". They'll call me a bootlicker and say I'm simping for white people when I'm fucking not. As a matter of fact, this association of "moral righteousness" they tie to being explicitly for white veganism is something I'd be the first to speak out against, and you know why?

A carnist of color is still a fucking carnist.

This is hypocritical of them, and it is to a strong degree. So much of this account is reminding white people that even whites who are a part of a marginalized group, such as gay white people, trans white people, white women, or neurodivergent white people, need to understand that they still hold a position of privilege that their whiteness puts them in. They really want to make it clear to these people that them being marginalized in ways beyond race does not excuse them being discriminatory, bigoted, or inconsiderate towards POC within similar struggles.

I agree with this, but are they not hypocritically engaging in the same thing? She is using her position as a queer woman of color to justify another form of oppression and hierarchical domination she just so happens to be okay with: speciesism.

And the audacity she has to label any pushback to this hypocrisy as a product of "white veganism" is disgusting to my black vegan ass.

HER SAYING THAT "WHITE VEGANS DON'T CARE ABOUT ANIMALS"

As if you'd know what it means to "care about animals" when you're the one demonstrating how little you care about them. There are so many principled vegans who are white. Yes, this doesn't absolve them of the blind spots their white privilege may put them in, but as I said, you being a queer POC doesn't absolve you of the blind spots that your carnism puts you in.

Once again, this is nothing but an excuse to say that white vegans are not "truly" as morally superior as you think they think they are, but it has never been about "moral superiority" in and of itself. Veganism is something we do for the animals, and you all should do so too, especially if you give a damn about dismantling hierarchies. If you are to have an issue with this whatsoever, please kindly examine this issue internally rather than externally. Vegans are not the problem. You being unable to cease your carnism absolutely fucking is, though!

"SINGLE-ISSUE ACTIVISM"

"There are more important issues to worry about!" may be one of the most disgusting copouts that oppressors use. This is done to drift away from the focus of an important issue within the scheme of oppression so that you can seem justified in not doing anything about it! News flash! You don't have to focus on a single issue at once! I'm a vegan, and as much as I care about animal liberation, you know what else I care about? I care about women's liberation, queer liberation, and uplifting people of color on top of dismantling capitalism and other oppressive and hierarchical structures! I talk about these individual issues where it's relevant, and that includes the fact that I talk about veganism where it's relevant.

Yes, veganism needs intersectionality, as all progressive moments do! But it's shameful that you're pretending to help with that. If you are a POC who isn't vegan, you have absolutely no trustworthy foundation to give a grand statement about veganism needing intersectionality. It doesn't impact you because, no matter how many vegans of color try to speak sense to you on this matter, I know for sure that you'd still stuff your face with carcasses and feel absolutely no fucking remorse in doing so.

At this point, non-vegan leftists are too much for me to put up with at all.

Another one of my restaurants that i go to for vegan food sometimes (cooking is hard) unwittingly gave me food with meat in it. I struggle so much with cooking and long work hours, but fuck man.

When I realized how much sense this analogy makes, it explained to me full well why libs are as frustrating as they are to me these days.

A tale as old as time

Context: my friend was giving me an update about how someone at her workplace accused her of racism. As out of focus it seemed, I felt the need to address an odd part of her saying "I just prefer animals over people." in this misanthropic statement.

And Instagram comments are a mistake.

I have engaged with this commenter who specifically went to a vegan account's post to "dunk" on vegans, and this carnist is trying so hard to use an appeal to popularity fallacy. They've used this fallacy THREE times, since their original comment has been up, and each time, I'm trying to explain to them, with examples even, why this isn't sound rhetoric. All that, and they just hit me with it again, and yes, this is serving as my clear indicator that I'm wasting my time with someone who's brain has been deep fried.

The comment was put up 4 days ago, and this carcass muncher keeps trying to embarrass himself, but he's still interacting with replies. The most recent time I'm referring to? Just a few hours ago, he responded to me, "Vegans are less than 1% of the world population but you believe you are the holy and enlightened ones.".

Listen, I understand some people are really, really, and I mean REALLY bad at rhetoric, but there is no way that you can shamelessly uphold an appeal to popularity fallacy this intensely and not have any awareness of how goofy (and not in the good way) it makes you look, especially when this has been refuted each time you pulled it.

Instagram commenters tend to be like this with a lot of things, but omnis, virtually anywhere you can find them, seem to be extra guilty of this because they need to grasp at straws to justify such abhorrent practices that I feel like they, at the very least, subconsciously know are wrong. They refuse to acknowledge the wrongness because it'd make them come off as either a hypocrite or someone who actually feels more obligated to live up to their awareness and follow through with a lifestyle they deem "inconvenient".

Me: literally wishing that everyone on this planet were vegan so that animals were treated better, I'd have more people to relate to, and I'd have more people that I'd actually feel comfortable with dating

Veganism makes me feel more of a weirdo, an outcast, and reserved actually.

🥺

On a walk home, I just took a peek at the menu of this local Caribbean place that says it has a "vegan" chipotle aioli. I looked at all the ingredients, and while it confirms that it does, in fact, use vegan mayonnaise, it said it had honey! And this place is actively labeling it as a vegan product! To be fair, at least they list the ingredients, but calling it vegan is wrong and misleading. Now, I like to read all ingredient lists on everything, but imagine a vegan reading the phrasing "vegan chipotle aioli" and thinking it sounds so good that they just glance right over the smaller details and order it not knowing it has honey. And furthermore, would it kill them to use agave or maple syrup?

This is giving me the anxiety that there could be places who do shit like this without even telling you what the ingredients are. That kind of paranoia makes me eat out a lot less to begin with which, in hindsight, is a good thing anyway.

The in-person menu explicitly lists it as vegan, but this is what the entry looks like on their website:

Excellent new video by Dr. Michael Greger with a fair and balanced analysis of the real world reasons why people are so confused about nutrition, and why there is so much food disinformation directing people away from plant based diets.

Being vegan in 2023 is extremely easy, but to me that seems like a relatively new phenomena.

So if I put you in my vicious time machine and sent you until the dim past, how far back would you be vegan?

I think I could make it work for most of the 1900s. But if I was in 1500 I'd give it up.

Now let's get to the meat of the issue. ALL human food production causes non-zero emissions, yes even the food you eat. Yes even if you grow it yourself. According to the link you provided "meat accounts for ~60% of green house gas emissions from food production." I would say, so what? Humans need to eat food and some food production is going to emit more green house gases then other food. Trying to optimize our diets to reduce our impact on the world at the expense of enjoying that world is something no one actually wants, including you. At the end of the day everyone has to eat food. So you say "But if we just cut meat production, we would reduce the green house gases of food production by 60%!" Well in less then 80years, the population of the earth is projected to be ~11billion. That is ~50% more people and thus 50% more greenhouse gases emitted from food. So now what do you now?

It's 2100ad, and we got rid of meat 80years ago, along with 10,000 years of human culinary culture and animal husbandry, and now we are right back where we started as far as green house gases (though probably worse because fossil fuels are still around). So what have you solved? What did destroying a huge part of the essence of human society accomplish? Hundreds and thousands of cultures were told that because burning coal and natural gas is cheaper and certian people will get rich from continuing to do that, those billions of people can't have certain kinds of food anymore. That's not a deal anyone will take, nor should they.

The problem is that people are mean to animals? Sorry, I don't see that as a problem at all.

We should destroy all human culinary culture and eat only what is the most efficiency use of land? Why?

Your solution to the environmental damage caused by agriculture is "eat less food." That's not a solution at all! My solution is that amazing experiences that human culture and society can provide us is 35% of the problem so let's address the other 65% because that's the shit that doesn't make life worth living. Shipping consumer electronics 8,000 miles just to throw away within a year doesn't make anyone happy. Spending 2hours a day commuting via car to some shitty office so that you can sell more consumer junk doesn't make anyone happy. These are the things that should be changed. The fact that people eat different food then you should be celebrated. Human culture is awesome and a world where we all eat the same food because it's the most efficient isn't a world worth living in.

And the grand Reddit-tier ableist carnist finale:

I suppose it's a deep seated psychological harm inflicted by your family when they forced you to eat dinner that one time. I hope you get the help you need, but unfortunately you will not find it here.

Adeiu.

This shit is dire.

I would prefer if they weren't just recipes but if they do both articles and recipes I don't mind.

I must confess I have a personal vendetta against Yudkowsky and his cult. I studied computer science in college. As an undergrad, I worked as an AI research assistant. I develop software for a living. This is my garden the LessWrong crowd is trampling.

The carnist wants to believe that they are inherently superior to any non-human animal and that this superiority gives them the right to torture and hack up their fellow creatures for their own pleasure. One reason among many that veganism tends to offend them so much is that it strikes at their ego, their belief that by virtue of their birth they are the apex of creation, and thus entitled to consume and discard those with whom they share this Earth as they please.

Personally I will not eat anything with the may contain label. I know this just means it is made in the same factory but I was wondering if I have just been overly cautious. What do you all think? Do you avoid stuff like that or do you think it is fine?

TLDR: They’re better than regular meat in nearly every metric, but beans and lentils still reign supreme.

After 5 years as a vegetarian who was willing to eat cheese so I could have a bit more food options when going out with friends, I just now realized I haven't any dairy products for like six or seven months now. Most of the local places we go to have enough decent vegan options so it doesn't feel like I'm only eating impossible burgers. Feels ffn good.

I feel like I'm losing my mind there, a lot of people struggling to comprehend a diet where "protein" isn't a category, made from animals or plants otherwise.

Btw Impossible burger etc. are not vegan, they do animal testing: https://impossiblefoods.com/blog/the-agonizing-dilemma-of-animal-testing

Yay capitalism lets us have our treats, and only a few animals had to suffer!

I went to get my free flu shot at work today, and found out chicken eggs were involved in the process (I had to answer whether or not I was allergic to eggs before receiving the shot).

I asked if they had any alternatives, and they said they didn't because they were too expensive. I ended up getting the flu shot they offered.

Do you get the standard flu shot, or a vegan variant? How much do you pay, if the latter, and where can you find it?

Carnists: "Poor people can't be vegan because meat substitutes are too expensive"

Carnists:
Vegans: