Maybe I shouldn’t post here because I’m not vegan, but I respect vegans for doing the obviously correct thing. Personally, I don’t have the willpower to do it, but I HAVE tried to reduce my meat consumption. That said, I get annoyed with articles like this for reasons I will describe beneath relevant quotes. I offer these thoughts as a starting point for a better way to nudge omnivores towards less cruel consumption.

Imagine you knew a way to cut your carbon footprint by more than half; it was easy, required no real major sacrifice on your part…

Depending where you live, avoiding meat, eggs, dairy, honey, et cetera is NOT easy and IS a real sacrifice. If you live in California, you can find vegan options everywhere. If you live in Minnesota, Kansas, or various other places, you are effectively saying you will never eat out again, never sample the flavors of your Church potlucks, and bring all your own food to the family reunions. This is a hard social sacrifice to take and will be accompanied by eye rolls and some negative feedback. The authors surely know this, but act like it is nothing. At the very least, the requirement that you never ever eat out again – even when you are sick or worked a double shift and now have to make your own dinner because the closest thing to vegan you can order is a sad meatless, cheeseless pizza is an effort.

“People quickly derail the topic,” she said, “and begin talking about other things, such as how they seek to avoid food waste and plastic packaging.”

Of course they do! Who doesn’t try to change the topic when someone is trying to push you into something you don’t want to do?

Cutting out meat entirely was seen as an absurd position – and one only taken by haughty stick-in-the-muds, Ditlevsen explained. “There was a tendency for them to […] scold vegans for being extremists,” she noted.

Well, yeah, when an article suggests that veganism is easy, requires no sacrifice, doesn’t take time to learn new recipes and methods of cooking, intonates that there’s something wrong with trying to talk about other things, and doesn’t then see itself as haughty better-than-thou radicals, then it is time to call that article extremist.

For a lot of people – myself included – veganism is HARD. It would be easier if vegans could sympathize with that. There’s a growing contingent of low-to-no-meat eaters that mostly cook without meat, but have things they aren’t going to give up. For me, I’m not giving up cheese. I can try to get slightly more ethical cheese, but we all know cheese means calves aren’t with their moms. It is cruel. I know. If I’d never had cheese, I’d never start eating it, and I am eagerly anticipating cheese made with lab-grown milk, but for now I know I’m contributing to animal abuse.

If you came up to me and said, “You know CHEESE is ABUSE” I would not be thankful for the information. I would be annoyed that I didn’t have lab-grown cheese yet. I’ve got beyond burgers for my beef cravings, but all the vegan cheeses I’ve tried have failed me (I want something like a St. Andre triple creme).

I used to raise ducks for the eggs. We had freakin’ happy ducks with their own pool, lots of space, and frequent treats. Most of our ducks died of old age, but we did lose some to animal attacks. We ate the remnants where we could. We are back to buying eggs maybe once a month or so, but only eggs from happy chickens we can visit.

If you tell me that isn’t good enough, I have to tell you that sometimes I want eggs.

Heck, sometimes I want fast food and can’t think of a vegan option. In fact, my company had a California/Indian Manager come visit and the first thing I was asking him was if he was vegan or vegetarian because that would matter for getting lunch. He assured us all that he’d have no problem finding lunch and to simply pick a place that could easily seat 12. Stupidly, we listened to him. He IS vegetarian and his only lunch option was off-menu buttered spaghetti because the place that is both close and has big tables is also mostly meat. They only serve spaghetti with meat sauce and the only vegan item is a side salad. The ‘regular’ salad has ham and cheese.

I’ve gone on too long. I’m just saying that the article minimizes the difficulty and encourages an attitude that won’t win anyone over. I hope the lemmy-verse is better than that and maybe we all can encourage more people to minimize animal consumption even if those people aren’t ready to go… cold turkey? You know what I mean. Don’t make Perfect the enemy of Good.

I’m pretty perpetually broke, all my family and friends eat meat, and I live in good ol’ purple state Pennsylvania (not Philly or Pittsburgh).

In my personal experience, being at the very least vegetarian IS easy, even in my far-from-ideal conditions. I want to take people at their word when they say it would be hard for them, but it’s kind of incomprehensible to me. I even still eat at restaurants! Honestly I don’t even really cook that much, 'cause I’m lazy and don’t have a lot of free time. When eating out, you just try to do your due diligence to avoid getting any hidden meat, and if you wind up with some anyway, well at least you tried. I will admit it’s somewhat harder when I’m visiting rural Alabama, but not even by that much really. More on the level of minor inconvenience than anything. It’s not even more expensive, meat costs a fortune compared to like… beans.

Three things:

First, people eat meat because it tastes good and is widely available. You can’t make it not taste good, but we can insist on better regulatory requirements that might make meat more expensive or less ubiquitous. Every person seeks validation for the behaviors they choose every day. That’s human nature, and that’s why it’s easy to false equivalences like avocados are worse than beef. People want to believe it because it’s easier than changing. We’re not going to save the planet by changing everybody. People need to be forced to change by law or by circumstance.

Second, this is terrible journalism. The author probably wanted to be a novelist, but nobody wanted to publish a young adult series about a girl who discovers she can talk to farm animals and is whisked away to a private school for animal talkers.

News articles, even editorials, don’t require suspense. You don’t build tension by slowly revealing information. This article is five paragraphs in before they get to anything resembling a point, and it’s several more paragraphs of slowly revealing the findings of the study like a detective walking through the crime scene, discovering new clues along the way.

Third, the author is exactly the sort of smarmy, “told-ya-so” douchebag that carnists assume of all vegans. “… have you considered that vegans are annoying?” Yes. You are very annoying, and it undercuts the points you’re trying to make.

We should be looking at the results of this study and trying to determine how to overcome the daily hurdles people face and disinformation campaigns of the meat industry. Calling people stupid for being fallible in ways all humans are is just mean-spirited and counterproductive.