I have found that many vegans throw their dietary ethics at others the way Christians throw their spiritual ideology. If you want to eat only veggies, fine. But why the attitude? Why the hate? If you think you have an ethically pure diet, think again. In fact, your diet may worsen the environment.

Some like how they feel on the diet. Others simply don’t like the taste of meat. But most vegans I know eat that way more because of ethics than health benefits or personal taste. For this reason, veganism generally falls into an ideological “right” vs. “wrong” category for living, causing most members of the Vegan Military to demand that everyone else stop their “evil” ways and adapt vegan values. But where do these values come from? And do these espoused values actually make a change in the ways they intend?

Animist’s experience plants having feelings too. Just because you don’t hear their screams, or can’t look into their eyes when you cut them, doesn’t mean plants don’t feel pain and bleed. The idea that plants somehow have lesser value than animals comes from an un-animistic view of the world; a civilized, hierarchical view. They don’t look like us, they don’t grow like us, therefore they get cast to the bottom of the hierarchy.

I feel terrible for domesticated animals (pets included here). I feel equally as terrible for domesticated plants. I feel terrible for anything domesticated (rocks, clouds, air, ideas, etc). Aside from domesticated crops requiring domesticated bees (do vegans consider bugs lower on their spiritual hierarchy?) for pollination and farmers who routinely kill animals like rabbits, crows and coyotes who enter their fields. Crops kill wild animals too, and force bees into domestication.

In response to this, many vegans might say, “Well, I have chosen veganism to protest factory farming which causes a lot more degradation to the environment than growing crops. You don’t need meat to survive.”

It appears to me that population growth lies at the “root” of environmental degradation. “Development” wouldn’t happen if we had less people. The destructive scale of factory farming would not exist if our population did not grow exponentially. So we need to look at what makes our population grow.

When I worked at an organic food store when I ate a vegan diet I remember seeing a vegan product that boasted, “Eating Vegan helps save food resources for seven people a day.” How they calculated that I’ll never know, or believe. While most people would look at that and believe they did something to help the “fight against hunger,” I look at it and see that they’ve only just made seven more hungry mouths to feed.

Both domesticating plants and animals require deforestation. But the population explosions that form civilizations come from the domestication of grains, not livestock. The Inca’s had quinoa, the Aztecs had amaranth, the Mayans had corn, the Chinese had rice and Whitey had wheat (and now Soy). Grain-based diets cause exponential population growth. Population growth increases the scale of everything, turning small ranches into factory farms. Turning the local market into a McDonalds. Grain-based diets make factory farms possible. They make “development” possible. They make civilization possible. If everyone switched to a vegan diet, our population would grow that much faster, the destruction that much worse.

If you live in North America (or anywhere outside of the jungle), you need meat to survive outside of the grain-based diet of civilization. And so what? Humans have eaten meat for a long time and found sustainable ways to kill that honored the animals, the same as any other predator. Along with sustainable ways to kill plants that honored their lives. I think the comment, “you don’t need meat to survive,” includes both points I have made: that civilization fuels itself on wheat, not meat, and that (most) vegans perceive animals as higher on a spiritual hierarchy.

Want a diet based on anti-civilization ethics? Want to stop supporting the destructive culture? Want to stop population growth? Stop buying processed food at the super market. Hunt, gather, garden, buy/trade locally, give back to the land and quit eating the very thing that makes all of this possible: grains.

Personally, I eat paleolithically, and I don’t care if you or anyone else does. My diet works for me, but I don’t think that I have found the “one right diet” for all to eat. Though I see them, I haven’t chosen my diet for ethical reasons. I’ve chosen it because I feel good eating this way. I understand that just because I feel good eating this way, not everyone else will, as each of us have particular bodies with particular needs. If Veganism makes you feel good, by all means. But please stop promoting veganism based on false ethics of ceasing the destruction inherent in grain-based diets. I bought into it in my teens (I ate a vegan diet for 2 years), and I won’t fall for the mythology again.

The point is that the meat and dairy industry cause more greenhouse gases than,for example, the entire transport industry.

So, it is a bit of a contradiction to have meat at a 'green' market.

Autonomous agents can make autonomous decisions, do you really have to tell people what they can and can't eat?

would that be next to its Tory Party, supermarket, offsetting or car hire stalls? The fair has gone well down hill since the big green capitalist rush started a couple of years ago.

very sustainable too considering that the more human meat you eat the less human meat needs to be supported. & it's not a new-fangled fancy notion neither. ("either" would have been syntactically more apt there but "neither" suits the tone).

Jonathan Swift's 1729 "A modest proposal" - or arguments for the need to munch the poor.

read it for free  http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/1080
listen to it for free if you can't read  http://librivox.org/a-modest-proposal-by-jonathan-swift/
read about it and sound clever without wasting 17 pages of 18th century English reading or listening.
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal

Of course such culturally respected cannabilism is distinct from the type of later scientologist style Hollywood movies or even the remarkably prevelant auto-canabilism of onychophagia or trichophagia (the eating of one's nails or hair). Award winning Welsh actor Anthony Hopkins didn't kill people as a food source whilst making the popular series of Hannibal Lector movies, to the contrary his "post-humous munching" can only be understood as a fetishised need to appear sophisticated. Otherwise he would have had more than just the liver. Experts disagree whether such consumption of dead humans or their bits is reverential or degrading. Jodie Foster made her mind up pretty sharpish though and you didn't see her biting her nails. Although eating dead people whether it be a codicle appended to a murder or a last resort of survival (such as the wreck of the Medusa sailors or the people who survived the 747 that had crashed in the Andes) or the astoundingly long list of examples  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cannibalism
can't be talked about in the same moral terms as the wilful eating of the nutritious plump first worlder it does carry certain risks. Transmissible spongiform encephalopathy is thought to occur when a complex mammal eats one of its own species. You won't get TSE from a veggie but you just might by scoffing your landlord, landlady or local magistrate.

so:-
Eat the Rich and run the risks of transmissible spongyform encephalopathy!
or
Eat Veggies and lentils grown within sustainable air mile logistic distance from your dealer!

A. Feed it to a pig and eat the pig.


I wish people would stop using crappy industry practices as a reason to turn herbivorous - you can make chicken nuggets with a free-range hen. I could point out how ludicrous it is to ship pulses from Ethiopia to fill our supermarket shelves, but that is not a reason to restrict your diet to beef-burgers, it's a reason to be more selective about what you buy.

If everyone who "cares about the planet" stops buying meat, then only the people who couldn't give a fuck will remain in the meat market and it will be their opinions that dictate practice. If you want to end a cruel farming practice, you need to buy MORE meat but buy it specifically from ethical producers. This way, the un-ethical business will lose market share to its ethical competitor and will change its ways, but if you stop buying altogether, you are no longer part of the market and your opinions are irrelevant. This is how veal production methods were changed - people refused to buy veal but kept eating steak.

Alternatively, if you just think eating meat is a "bad thing" regardless of environmental concerns, I suggest you take a good look at the natural world then STFU or hand over your incisors.

Two legs, good. Four legs, lunch.

What a revealing choice of analogies. Catholics generally don't have "fairs", they come together to worship their god-heads and brahmins, wracked with fear and guilt.

If the OP told people to eat less meat to counter-act global warming, I'd respect your opinion. But instead they are just pushing an ethical agenda without making a proper philosophical argument for it. They aren't quoting the arguments of Peter Singer for example. Instead what they (and others) are doing is disingenuously trying to take an extreme reactionary position based on two premises A) industrial livestock farming produces a lot of CO2 B) "species discrimination is wrong", we should never eat meat.

Well it doesn't follow from A) that we shouldn't eat meat at all and B) simply isn't self-evident, yet you provide no argument to back it up (like Singer's theories).

What they're doing is harming the Green movement by making it anti-social and repressive. Indeed, "Catholicising" it.

RR's letter is hardly offensive or over the top. It calls for a ban on meat being promoted as green, which is sensible. I think the "You cannot eat meat and be an environmentalist" comment title is an over simplification - eating meat that is going to decompse anyway is still green. Hunting sustainably can be environmentally friendly. It is vital for the survival of our species, and other species too, that we cut back on meat production drastically.

It is not just climate change that informs this debate, the fact is most human disease is related to animal production. Humanity evolved on a planet microbes had conquered. What we think of as disease or bugs were all around before us and remain a significant part of us, 10% of your body weight is microbes. Dinosaurs caught coldsores but zoonoses are on the increase. 61% of microbes that cause human illness come from animals. One of the main factors driving zoonoses was the domestication of animals 10,000 years ago. Many yearly global infections occur in China due to the region having being subject to intensive pig and chicken agriculture for much longer than anywhere else. Other driving factors include population density and farming methods. In the past hundred years intensive or factory farming has been directly linked to fatal zoonosis transmission from Hong Kong to Norfolk. Disease today can travel budget or first-class worldwide in hours.

niemoller flew short haul

You have been released far to early into community care.Your treatment program has failed. Request more treatment, it will help you.

What always baffles me is the amount of negative comments directed at anything to do with Animal liberation or veganism, I for one don't care about all the arguments promoting the idea that Might is Right, and that's what it comes down to.

Animals cannot defend themselves against people, so people exploit them, I will never believe that because we have more power than animals we have a 'god' given right to exploit them, we do not.

Might is never right and no excuses from people will convince me otherwise,

veganheroX

I look forward to all the negative ranting comments about what I said,
stay happy stay free.

Whatever arguments people say, lets face facts, MEAT is Murder, if you have to slit the throat of an living creature, then it's murder.

Plants don't have a central nervous system, but hey come on people look in the lambs face and tell me you would still be happy to cut her throat.

Thank goodness eating meat is going to destroy the world. I can get back to flying around it guilt-free.

Nice one Mathew, couldn't have put it better my self, pity i had to read through so much dross from the likes of niemoller flew short haul and MonkeyBot 5000 (there is some potential in MonkeyBot but niemoller is beyond help) to get to a sensible comment!

Hi Vegan Hero....well put, as ever.

As for niomeller flew shorthall....is that you TY? Headfuck as ever....are going to tell me that the Camden Lab should go ahead as it's probably a good idea that "everyone should die anyway"? luv ya really.

Yes, it's true that vegans have a smaller carbon foortprint and there is no way that meat should be sold at a "Green Fair" encouraging us to leave, um, smaller carbon footprints.

And as for the silly sentence "look a plant in the eyes"....that IS you, isn't it TY? At least I hope it is....the thought of two of you going around saying stuff like that is frightening. How do I "know" it's you? The Bees.

I can think of a good analogy, having meat at a green fair is like the countryside alliance organising a hunt sab!

what is life?

i once grew my own veggies, plucking that first lettuce which i had nurtured was difficult, it grew from seed... in my opinion it had life... as much as we do, just different

niomeller....hey bro, we are all on this planet just looking for the Gold to mend our space ships anyway....so hey who cares huh? WRONG! It aint our godamn planet and we should all fly back to our own and stop eating everyone and destroying everything on this on this one or we will never return home. Godditt?