Trophic levels being a thing mean that raising cattle, which get eaten by wolves, and you eating wolf meat causes you to kill 100 times the biomass of vegetables of what you eat in wolf biomass–which would be much more focused on killing plants.
on every step you lose about 90%. That’s the reason why being vegetarian by default uses less land for agriculture than eating meat.
Raise cattle and still be vegetarian for maximum efficiency!
…aggressive veganism?..
*vegetarianism
I knew a guy in college who wouldn’t eat fish because he thought they were a stupid animal and it was beneath him to consume them.
This is why I only cannibalize noble laureates in physics.
Vegetarianism and veganism are not the same :/
It is a meme
Memes and veganism are not the same :/
Memes and memenisems are not the same.
Vegetarianism is a plant(and fungus)-based diet. This may be motivated by veganism/ethics, climate/environmental concerns, religion, and/or health.
Lacto-ovo-vegetarianism is when you call yourself vegetarian but eat mostly cheese. This may be motivated by wanting to feel like a good person or imagine that you are eating a healthy, environmentally-friendly diet.
There was a trend in the 80-90 to separate the diet and vegetable-based diets into ovo-lacto-vegetarianism and vegetarianism.
There has been a debate recently with so many “veggie” trends to revive the term in that way. With cuestionable changes to the definition of veganism implied, which like vegetarianism whose current definition comes from the vegetarian society, the definition of veganism comes from the vegan society.
The concepts have been very separated since then.
I know, I was just making fun of “vegetarians”
melts
Eche has been deflated
Oh shit, somebody get the bike pump
Couldn’t this character be considerably more effective at hating plants by say, breeding swarms of locusts?
… Would they consider eating locusts… to be eating meat?
No, hey, actually serious:
Vegans, does a locust, a cricket, an ant… does eating a bug count as eating a sentient, emotionally feeling, living being?
So, yes, bugs count as meat and eating them outright is avoided by most vegans, but it’s impossible to not eat remnants of dead bugs in produce. The agricultural process inherently involves the death of bugs, and that’s literally unavoidable.
Some vegans try to avoid the kinds of figs that require wasps to die, but most of the figs in grocery stores are artificially pollinated and don’t have wasps in them.
Personally, I’m not going out of my way to avoid produce that has marginally higher bug death. Being vegan is already a pain in the ass without putting further restrictions on “is eating X plant really vegan because it requires Y?” It’s still a way better environmental impact than meat, and I hate the purity tests a lot of online vegan spaces turn into. Most other vegans I’ve met IRL are chill and we can have reasonable discussions around that sort of thing without people getting into a fit over it.
I appreciate the answer, I expanded on my own… non vegan status and thoughts about this a bit more under another replier.
Could I ask you?:
How common is it among the vegans you know to apply the kind of, do as little ecological harm as possible mindset…
How many of them apply that to… other kinds of economic activity?
Like, how many vegans do you know who say, own and drive a car, that may be powered by oil from say, a fracking field?
I’d imagine most who are serious enough to be as ethically vegan as possible are also very much anti-capitalist as possible…
But at the same time, I’ve personally known a good deal of self described vegans who… regularly drive their own car to work, despite living near a transit line that would totally get them to work… and also, their work is for the corporate office of a highly exploitative (in many ways, of many things) corporation… like Amazon, or MSFT… and then get very aggreived when I just… work remotely, and tell them they should probably take the lightrail/bus.
(I’m from Seattle if you can’t tell lol)
do as little ecological harm as possible mindset
I’m not a vegan, but it’s probably worth remembering that different people might be vegan for different reasons. I can think of three main ones: animal welfare, environmental impact, and health. There’s an overlap between the first two, but it’s possible to be any one of those without being others. (Though I know a lot of particularly those who do it for animal welfare reasons like to claim that theirs is the One True Veganism and others are false.) Someone who’s only into it for animal welfare but doesn’t have a larger care for environmental impact would have no particular reason to not drive a car.
There’s also the simple fact that it’s impossible for most people to care about everything. It’s draining. Like I said, I’m not vegan. I’m very bad in the kitchen, and it would just be far, far too much of an imposition for me to change that. But I do try in other areas to advocate for things to reduce harm to the environment, and I try to reduce my own energy usage, for example by cycling or catching public transport. Transport and urbanism are the angle towards a better environment that I’ve chosen to focus my energy towards, and as long as someone is not actively going out of their way to cause additional harm (e.g. advocating against policy improvements in those areas) I think it’s reasonable to allow other people to focus their energy elsewhere.
For many of us, reducing ecological harm is one of the big motivators, and many vegans apply this mindset elsewhere. I’m also in the US, and it’s pretty hard to avoid needing a car outside of major cities which I can’t fault any vegans for. Many of the vegans I know are activists for public transit and one in particular has worked to improve it immensely in their city.
Anticapitalist sentiment is pretty huge in vegan spaces. There’s a leftist to vegan pipeline and vice versa. Ironically being vegan is pretty big in punk spaces now too.
I won’t pretend there aren’t plenty of people who are vegan more for the aesthetics rather than the principles because for some reason it caught on as a trend among the remnants of the “upper middle class” for whatever that means with the ever growing wealth disparity. There’s a huge supply of overpriced vegan options, but you can also eat vegan super cheap too without shelling out for the pricey fake meat options. I can make a ton of seitan or black beans burgers at home for almost nothing, but it’s $$$ at the grocery store.
