They put chemicals in everything now. I heard they even put dihydrogen monoxide in the water!
So I’m a vegan. The 2 types of vegans I see are these:
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The terror vegan: “Everyone who isn’t 100% vegan is a genocidal nazi and I’ll make sure to tell them constantly.” aka the ones that give veganism a bad name.
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The normal vegan: “When it comes to pollution, the mega corps are at failt. But when it comes to animal product consumption, the consumer is the driving factor. I can’t expect everyone to become a vegan, but it would already help a lot if everyone would start to consume a bit less. Like once or twice a week no meat. But if you won’t I wouldn’t hold it against you, we’re still friends after all.” aka the vegan I’d like to be.
Sadly there’s extremism in every field.
I don’t think I’ve met #1 in real life, besides knowing more than a few of #2. The first one just gets really loud on the Internet.
Oh I’ve met plenty. And I try to stay clear of them
I’m a meat eater. I like meat. I consider myself someone who eats meat regularly. That means I eat, like, one slice of ham and 5 köttbular in a month. And I might treat myself to a salad with chicken breast in a restaurant when I manage to quiet down the voice in my head complaining about the chicken most likely not being farmed very well. Whenever I read a sentiment like “try to not eat meat 1 or 2 days in a week” I am reminded that there are really people out there who just, like, buy meat every single time they are in the grocery store and cook it daily. That seems so nuts to me.
Depending on the location, I’m pretty sure the norm is meat every day. In the Midwest, it’s not just meat every day. It’s meat every meal.
That’s crazy but I also notice that amongst people eating crazy amount of meat there is a lot of people that only eat a few types of meat (pork, beef, chicken, turkey and always the same cut).
I eat meat once every 10 days plus on party days. But I eat so much more diversity than these canivorous eaters. What about lamb, veal, mutton, duck, rabbit? What about tongues, giblets and so on? They say they love meat taste but it is like it is only when the taste is mild enough.
I actually had a super chill vegan patient the other day who was aging remarkably gracefully into trailer-trash (my own cultural roots), complete with 40 pack-year smoker’s voice and skin that belongs in a cancer PSA. They told me they aren’t completely married to the idea but that they do their best and would like to be able to read the labels on what they get if possible. They pointed out that their breakfast tray arrived with biscuits and sugar and commented that the biscuits were almost certainly made with eggs and butter, and that the sugar was probably bleached using animal products (not sure about that one). I definitely didn’t have anything decent to say about the biscuit thing. For them it was definitely more about the animal welfare thing than the chemical thing. They were pretty frank about not being too fussy about the chemicals that went into their body.
To me it’s 3 things why I’m vegan (although I do eat cheese sometimes, there’s no proper substitute and I’m a Dutch cheese head).
- Animal cruelty
- Health
- Enviroment
So I prefer to substitute meat with beans for example, instead of heavily processed fake meat. Although sometimes a proper vegan burger, like the BeyondBurger, is nice (unhealthy) comfort food. Also on holiday to Cambodia I did eat some meat as I wanted to experience the original Cambodian cuisine. That was the first time in 12 years I ate meat and it got me food poisoning which resulted in a heavy stomach infection. Worth it though, the Cambodians know how to cook!
I don’t think the consumer is primarily responsible for determining how animal agriculture operates. Even the demand for meat and dairy was and is coercively and artificially manufactured.
(Small example: a Tyson executive uses university ag programs to setup chicken farming in rural parts of Africa, and the locals there do not eat chicken and are forced to eat chickens under the contract as a condition to get access to the capital - the goal is to setup the whole market, generate both demand and supply for chicken meat in this rural part of Africa.)
The US government uses taxes to buy up dairy and meat that was not purchased based on demand, nullifying individual vegan boycotts and artificially propping up those industries.
Veganism is not primarily helpful by reducing the demand on the individual level, but instead has found the greatest successes from lobbying governments to pass animal welfare laws and organizing protests to generate pressure and support for those laws.
The US government uses taxes to buy up dairy and meat that was not purchased based on demand, nullifying individual vegan boycotts and artificially propping up those industries.
That’s taking a really short term view of it. As demand has stayed low enough for long enough, they have cut back on the amount and paid dairy farmers to not operate. These kinds of programs can only prop something up for so long
but instead has found the greatest successes from lobbying governments to pass animal welfare laws and organizing protests to generate pressure and support for those laws
Animal welfare laws do not fix the fundamental issue with these systems. As long as the industry exists in a large scale capacity, it will find the cruelest ways to operate. As long as meat, dairy, etc. are consumed in mass, factory farming will exist
For instance, US beef consumption cannot be supplied by a pasture-based system. There is only enough land to support 27% of the consumption, and that still raises methane emissions by 8% so we would need to be consuming even less if we wanted to avoid emission reductions from a move like that
Various laws and larger action can be effective though. Like putting plant-based options by default has been tested in some places, has substantially reduced demand and still kept satisfaction high. Or things like prohibiting the production of Fur, Foie Gras, etc.
I tend to agree, in the long term there has to be a cultural shift and my point is only that the hyper-individualist approach to American veganism is myopic and focused on the wrong actions and for the wrong reasons, treating the act of putting animal products in the body as the biggest sin when the harms are primarily systemic and not best tackled through individual lifestyle changes. This is like thinking you can end capitalism by just buying from cooperatives or fix climate change by not using plastic straws and recycling.
Even in terms of individual-scope action, you could make stronger arguments for engaging in workplace organizing in Tyson factories, tax resistance, and collaborating with local vegan activists to stage protests or direct actions.
Not that I’m down on veganism, just that I think the portrayal of responsibility primarily falling on you, the average consumer, is emphasized too much and makes a convenient scapegoat for the ag corporations that are making all the decisions that create the atrocities we know about. Ultimately that scapegoating is not veganism, it’s a strawman, but it is maybe how most people think about vegansim, including many vegans I know - it’s all about individual lifestyle choices and taking individual responsibility while not participating or engaging meaningfully in collective action or analyzing the problem structurally.
In addition to everything you mentioned it’s also heavily subsidized as a baseline with >38B in subsidies vs the 170.38B meat market and 74.16B dairy market. Direct subsidies alone account for 15% of the total market.
greatest successes from lobbying governments to pass animal welfare laws and organizing protests to generate pressure and support for those laws.
It’s worth noting that it’s more often the ‘type 1’ vegan which is generally more effective at this, and why they’re seen as ecoterrorists and why things like ag-gag laws “needed” to be passed.
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I’m confused. I thought veganism was about animal welfare, what does it have to do with food being made out of chemicals?
Hi Vegan 1!
The same exact compounds found in food and other products can either originate from an animal or a non-animal source. Veganism is about avoiding the animal sources. The compound itself is mostly irrelevant.
it is but it’s also hitched to “crunchy” culture, which has some weird braindead threads running through it about body purity and “nature = good”.
Literally everything is made out of chemicals. Naturaphiles are loonyburgers.
Also: botulinum toxin, ricin, lead, uranium, ebola, rabies, the fucking sun… The list of completely natural things that can kill us in the most horrific ways imaginable is almost endless.
No thanks. I only eat photons.
I think it helps to understand that when some people say “chemicals” in the context of highly processed foods, they mean “industrial additives”.
Or maybe layman shouldn’t try to hijack scientifically precise words?
“Chemical” is now used with the meaning of “ultra-processed ingredient with either unknown origin or unknow effect on your body”. It is not the first meaning of the term but I guess it is a meaning now and we have to deal with it.
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The problem with that is that it is a completely meaningless distinction. Some of the worst chemicals we often put in our foods are certain kinds of nitrates that are used as preservatives, but those same nitrates occur naturally in celery. If you just eat celery the concentration is low enough to be harmless, but it can be concentrated naturally. If you’ve ever seen celery juice or celery powder on the list of ingredients for a food it is the exact same thing, and just as bad for you.
Naturally occurring isn’t the same as healthy. Most plants are some degree of poisonous. They don’t want to be eaten, and can’t run away. That’s just how they defend themselves. We farm the ones we are well adapted to eat, but even with that and millennia of selective breeding it’s still not perfect. Ultra processed foods are bad for you because your health is not a priority for the people doing the processing, not because there is something inherently worse about industrially synthesized ingredients. They can be anything we want, and they are currently mostly addictive and only satisfying for a very short amount of time, but that is a decision, not an inherent flaw.
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I mean, the entire first point I made there was about how that was meaningless. Having the exact same chemical called a “chemical” sometimes and not others actively hurts our ability to communicate about what’s in our food. That’s not your fault, but it still bothers me.
People don’t seem to understand that even chemicals are made of something. They’re not synthesized out of thin air. It is not stupid to ask what they’re made of. The resources can be very diverse.
The “something” in question is elements. Barring the very inadvisable edge case where you’re ingesting some kind of pure metal or degenerate matter there is not anything you can eat that does not contain chemicals.
Complaining about a food containing “chemicals” makes about as much sense as calling out the software you use for being compiled from “code”.
Yes, but what I meant was, for example, artificial vanilla flavour is a chemical, which used to be made from cloves oil, now is made from wood compounds. The processes and ingrediences needed to produce it are also diverse and interesting.
Chemicals can also be non vegan. Side note: for a long time (might still be) camera film wasn’t vegan, since it used bovine gelatin. Kodak Eastman even had their own cow ranch to supply all the bones. (Goes to show chemicals don’t have to be vegan)
Goes to show chemicals don’t have to be vegan
There is a lot of them. In the EU classification of food additif, anything under the E47 categorie can either be animal or vegetal. E471 for example could be either pork skin, beef bones, fish bones, palm or coconut oil derivative. Nicely wrapped and served in so many bread and brioche product to Jews, Muslims, Hindus, vegetarians and vegans.
And there is so many more that are straight up animal products but presented in a latin name. In France, industrials even started to used Canadian french terms to confuse people when the insect additives for colours and textures started to gross out to many people.
A better question is “is this ultra processed”
Like, is this a product comprised mostly highly refined and modified ingredients? And thus is it likely to have had important nutritional components removed?
In all likelihood, none of the actual ingredients are actively bad for you in moderation, but, it’ll be nutritionally lacking.
Me, crushing up blood-cruelty cocaine in a tiny one-cent plastic baggie: “I really hope this baggie doesn’t have PFAS in it…”
Everything is made of chemicals
The whole ‘duh, everything is made of chemicals’ argument is a corporate attempt at downplaying the prevalence of unnecessary and even harmful additives in US foods that have long been banned in the EU.
Next time you see a meme about a woman asking ‘is this ham processed?’ with a response ridiculing her about it, look up Ractopmine.
This terminology people use without knowing anything about anything is actually corporate thing. It might originated from uneducated scared hippies, but it became popular and prevalent after corpos discovered that this kind of language allows them to greenwash the shit out of their products for free. “Other ham is made of chemicals, but ours is organic!” is technically correct phrase that is insidiously lying right to your chemistry-101-failed-face.
All this bullshit just stops the conversation about corporate accountability, or about actual implications of a specific diet, this conversations are impossible to have when your starting point is “chemicals bad”.Next time you ask “if this ham processed”, remember that the only correct answer to this is yes, otherwise the ham os oinking and tries to run away when you’re trying to bite it.
I live with two junkfood vegans and oh my god dude. I’m literally broke and eating from food banks and my diet is less bad than theirs.
Junk vegans are truly majestic creatures
Okay, look. Atoms, in all their wonder make up pretty much everything known to exist in the universe. Chemistry, the science of chemicals, is just taking that understanding we have of atoms and applying it to how the atoms interact based on what atoms are there, their charges, bonds, etc.
Thus unless it’s on the periodic table, where it would be an element, then it’s a chemical.
Even assuming that instead of “chemicals”, people mean synthetic chemicals… To that I say… Who cares?
Synthetic chemicals come in two forms: a synthesized version of a chemical that is naturally occurring, where synthesis is a more commercially viable way to obtain that chemical, or a chemical that isn’t found naturally, which undergoes significant scrutiny before anyone is allowed to put it in your food and sell it to you.
We generally give “natural” chemicals less scrutiny than synthetic chemicals. And I’ll remind everyone that cyanide is a naturally occurring chemical. Though it’s natural, we don’t general add that to our food. Some food contains cyanide naturally, like cherry pits, but that’s usually a part we don’t eat.
The WHO has a whole article about toxins in food… https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/natural-toxins-in-food
So yeah, it might be made of synthetic chemicals, which have been researched, scrutinized, and peer reviewed before being approved for consumption and being put in my food. I can’t say the same for literally anything “natural”. We just ate that shit and if you died from eating a thing, nobody else ate that thing. And that was the way of things before modern science and chemicals…
So fuck you, and the horse you rode in on.
So we were talking in the car the other day about how yeast is alive (until it isn’t). How do vegans feel about yeast? Honestly asking; I don’t know any vegans irl that I can ask.
Since it’s a fungus, I would expect there is no issue, just like eating any other mushroom. Plants are alive too; that’s not the important category from a vegan perspective, I’d expect.
Which only leads to more questions, like “are 40k Orcs vegan?”
In the same way that Jesus was a communist: When viewed through a modern lens, technically yes.
Basically what a vegan explained when I asked the same
I mean, plants are alive as well
That is rather kingdom-ish of them them. I will eat things in these 3 kingdoms, but not these 2. There must be more to it, but I also no little about veganism.
Veganism is about not viewing animals as a product. It’s about taking a moral and ethical stance against the animal industry.
Plants and fungi are vastly different from animals in behavior, looks, genetics, etc. You’re creating a strawman argument here.
I was trying to be funny, not argue.
To be fair, that sounds like something a legit person would argue. Veganism as a topic is strongly influenced by Poe’s Law - people are bound to think you’re serious, because they’ve heard stupider things being argued in sincerity.
I’ve been asked which ingredient in butter comes from an animal. I’ve been offered chicken, and had to gently respond that chickens aren’t plants. I’ve been told that plants scream on an ultrasonic level when they’re cut and therefore eating plants is just as bad as eating animals (so much to unpack there.) And almost everyime, I wished I could’ve responded, “Dude, I’m just trying to eat my lunch,” but ended up having to educate people between each bite.
It’s just too hard to out-stupid reality sometimes.
I’ve had to contend with “What would cows do if they didn’t have farms to live on” multiple times IRL.
Sorry.
There are loads of different reasons that people become vegan. Some of those reasons might include not wanting to harm any living being, and if that’s the reason then yeah it is a little arbitrary to draw the line at plants or types of plant-life, but I’m not sure it’s really fair to place the expectations that vegans do not make any arbitrary choices like that.
Everybody sets those kinds of boundaries and makes those kinds of choices all the time, because it would be very hard not to, and I think making an honest attempt to reduce the harm you do to living beings is better than nothing 🤷♂️
That being said, I’m not vegan, so don’t want to talk out of turn.
I think making an honest attempt to reduce the harm you do to living beings is better than nothing
It sounds like you get it. That’s the real vegan philosophy: regardless of one’s reason for choosing the lifestyle, the point isn’t to be perfect - it’s to do the best you can to reduce harm. Sometimes we have no choice - car tires require gelatin, a prescribed medicine may contain lactose, and of course all the animals that might get hurt incidentally through production or transportation of food plants. None of us can perfectly control everything, but there are a lot of things that we can make choices about. Those are the choices that matter.
I’m pretty sure most of everything you could possibly ever eat (even “chemicals”) comes from something alive, so the alternative would be starvation.
if it’s not made from animals, plants or fungi then from single celled organisms like bacteria and slime mold.
and veganism isn’t just a blind disagreement with eating one kingdom of biology, it’s a means to reduce harm, suffering, exploitation and killing. of course other kingdoms are alive, and in case we make it and sometime in the future we can somehow find viable, plentiful, cheap dead sources of all our nutrients there might be people who want to switch to those exclusively, but right now i think it’s a fairly measured movement.
We need to bring back the /s sarcasm marker.
It’s not a question of “Is it alive?”, but rather “Is it capable of suffering?”.
Well it’s a fungus, and we eat fungi the same as we eat plants. We’re more concerned with undue human-driven suffering, which generally requires a central nervous system, and only animals have that.
Vegans on the whole recognize the biological complexity of life (i.e. multi-cellular organisms with the capacity to experience pain and pleasure through a nervous system and beyond, compared with uni-cellular or even multi-cellular organisms that don’t have such a system) and balance it with the quantity of pain and suffering throughout the world.
Basically, vegans by and large care about reducing the greatest amount of suffering for the most complex life on the planet (especially animals on the brink of extinction).
Usually we direct this goal towards rescuing farm animals, fighting elephant or lion poachers, saving rainforests, banning fishing in sea sanctuaries (or at least the use of purse seines that dredge the ocean floor), etc.
Yeast isn’t the biggest concern because 1) it isn’t considered towards the complex end of the spectrum of life as we know it on this planet, 2) we don’t have good evidence to show that yeast experiences pain, and 3) there are closer goals to achieve, like advocating for reduced animal consumption, alternative clothing to leather or fur, increased organic farming to offset nitrogen runoff in oceans, etc.
Achieving policy paradigms is one of the most impactful ways to improve animal suffering the world over, whether that’s increasing taxes on animal based products, reducing incentives for producers to make those products, capturing externalities and embedding them into businesses’ bottom lines, or straight up refusing permits and zoning to allow these kinds of economic activities.
Welcome to the world of veganism, where nuance is your best friend, and yeast is fine to eat
You always gotta check the chemicals to make sure they didn’t sneak dairy in for some reason.
