I’d argue individual consumption is often more impactful than your vote. You can’t gerrymander a dollar.

The chart measures household food waste. So yes. That is explicitly what it did.

I mean, China’s per capita waste is similar to that of the United States or Germany, so presumably they throw roughly as much shit away per person as the US - it’s just that, having four times The people, they naturally throw away four times The shit.

The UNEP estimates that in 2022, the world produced 1.05 billion tonnes of food waste across the retail, food service and household sectors. The average amount of food waste per capita that year is estimated to be 132 kg, of which 79 kg was household waste.

Fascinating to note, despite all the inefficiencies in capitalist food distribution and how horrifying entire dumpsters full of stale bread or “spoiled” vegetables are, roughly 60% of all food waste occurs at the household level, that is, because of the decisions of individual consumers on how they handle their own food at home.

The next time someone tries to argue “individual consumption doesn’t matter” I’ll have to cite this chart.

IIRC Reddit lets individual subreddits opt out of appearing on r/all if they feel the exposure will do them more harm than good. I think Lemmy only has the option to defederate from specific instances, and that’s not the right tool here.

The obvious question to me is, what did he do with his money?

He sold his house for $300k when he moved into the governor’s mansion four yars ago, but he didn’t keep the money from the sale? He has an upper middle class salary, but no savings?

Either he’s got a bunch of credit card debt to pay off or a drug habit, or he keeps his savings in cash under his mattress. But money doesn’t just vanish like that.

Mineral oil is a petroleum distillate, a byproduct of fossil fuel production. I’m not saying it’s necessarily unsafe or unethical to use, but calling it “all natural” is a bit of a reach.

Full disclosure: I don’t have the time or patience to watch a thirty minute video, and perhaps the OOP discusses this point somewhere in the video. I don’t know.

But I believe vegan activism doesn’t require anti-capitalist activism. Or even opposition to capitalism in general.

I agree that capitalism is inherently anti-vegan. The logic of capitalism sees both animal bodies and human bodies as objects to be owned and used for their masters’ profit.

I think it’s more ideologically consistent for vegan activists to also oppose capitalist systems as a whole.

But vegan activism doesn’t require ideological consistency. We’re not trying to change the entire world economic system. We don’t need to change the entire world economic system. If abolitionists could oppose slavery without opposing capitalism - and win - vegans can oppose the slavery of animals without opposing capitalism. Vegans can win victories and have protections for animals written into law without opposing capitalism. We can and we have.

And if you can be a vegan activist and still be a capitalist, you can certainly just be an ordinary vegan and still be a capitalist.

Frankly, absolute ideological consistency is for heroes in an Ayn Rand novel. Vegans can work with with anybody who puts the animals first. And anybody who puts the animals first can be a vegan.

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What is the source of your quote? I can think of quite a few places where I’d want to share it 😆

I deleted most of this comment because it wasn’t as civil and understanding as I wanted it to be and it’s probably better off lost to history 😆

But let me summarize my thoughts: your mother, and presumably you, eat a lot more meat than the average person. The 10% of human foods that aren’t plant-based and can’t easily be made plant-based are overrepresented in your meat heavy diet.

And meat heavy diets are bad for your personal health and for the health of the planet, for reasons we both know very well.

Which is to say: you are universalizing your personal experiences. It’s not difficult to go vegan. It’s difficult for you to go vegan, because your diet and lifestyle are so heavily focused on animal products. That’s not an indictment of veganism; it’s an indictment of the Western diet, and big agriculture, and capitalist food science that studied what flavors and textures trigger dopamine release so they could pack food with them and sell more product, and the whole vicious capitalist PR mechanism that convinced Westerners to eat a meat heavy, highly processed, unhealthy diet and convinced Western governments to subsidize it. And, to a much lesser extent, it is an indictment of your personal choices.

It’s difficult for you to go vegan. But that’s not on veganism. That’s on you.

Frankly, I think your comment exemplifies how correct this article is.

“Cooking vegan is hard” - no, it isn’t. 90% of non-vegan recipes can be made vegan by leaving out or substituting non-vegan ingredients. You don’t need any different cooking methods to make pasta sauce without meat or fried rice without eggs. Dairy is slightly more complicated because milk does very particular things to the texture and chemistry of food but you can find guides to non-dairy replacements in literally 30 seconds on Google.

“I will be a social pariah/I can never eat out again” - that’s catastrophizing. If you personally live in a food desert where no vegan food exists, or you personally have relatives who will emotionally abuse you for eating vegan food - I’m not saying this doesn’t happen, in the age of Trump there are some conservatives who think eating tons of red meat (and smoking cigars and rolling coal) virtual signals their loyalty to conservatism, and I hope they enjoy the heart disease they’re giving themselves - then eat non-vegan food in public. That’s okay. Veganism is about avoiding animal products as far as is reasonable and practical.

But what I see a lot is people saying “I can’t be vegan because there are no vegan restaurants in Kansas” when they live in California. I see people saying “I can’t be vegan because people at church give vegans the stink eye” when they don’t attend church. I see people saying “veganism is wrong because there’s tons of land useless for agriculture that can only be used for grazing” when the meat they eat comes from soy fattened factory farm feed lots. I see people saying “veganism is wrong because hunting is a traditional lifeway of Native American people” when they are not Native American.

How does a lack of vegan restaurants keep you from cooking vegan at home? It doesn’t.

Will you actually get criticized at family reunions if you bring a potluck dish without meat in it? As if there are food inspectors going through all the side dishes to make sure the required quantity of animal product is in it? Even for conservatives, that’s ridiculous.

What I see over and over again is people bringing up reasons why other people can’t go vegan in order to explain why they don’t go vegan, even though the reasons that apply to those other people don’t apply to them at all. And that is deflecting. And that’s exactly what the article calls out.

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’m going to pick this sentence specifically to respond to, because. With all due respect.

If you said “I torture animals for pleasure and I’m not going to stop” we would consider you a sociopath.

But you’re saying “I pay other people to torture animals for my pleasure and I’m not going to stop”, and we’re supposed to, what, smile and nod and agree how hard it is to not torture animals for pleasure?

Look. Torturing animals is wrong. You know it’s wrong. You are admitting it’s wrong. It hurts your feelings to be reminded that you are doing wrong.

That’s a fair and understandable feeling and I don’t care. Because you are torturing animals, and if you feel bad when someone reminds you, it’s because you should.

There is value in gentle persuasion. And there’s also value in ranting about the sheer fucking hypocrisy of carnists. This article is the latter.

The limitations of actual physical printing led to some amazing art.

But it could be hard to ever pinpoint exactly, which animals do.

So that’s why we should err on the side of caution, assume that animals who act like they have emotions actually have emotions, and give them the respect and rights they deserve as fellow thinking feeling beings?

Oh wait, no, let’s torture, kill, and eat them because we can’t “prove”, to whatever arbitrary “scientific” standard, they have the same intellectual and emotional capacities we do.

Same as when one of the big name hosting companies takes a site down. You hope it’s archived, and if it was important enough to you, hopefully you saved it to your personal server.

What you’re describing is a major benefit of federation. Any site can be taken down. But when a federated server goes down it’s because the site owner exercised their control over their own data. If Google or Amazon takes a site down, you lose your data, but they keep copies to use however they want.

Here’s the thing, as I see it. Meat eaters don’t genuinely care about the ethics of meat. They give no shits about factory farming. So lab grown meat won’t be popular until it becomes significantly cheaper than standard factory farming. And even then conservatives will insist on eating real meat for ideological reasons, just like they do today.

(I mean, look at the impossible burgers. They were damn near identical to ground beef, and at a similar price point. But similar wasn’t good enough - they didn’t get it cheaper than actual ground beef so it ended up just a brief fad.)

And lab grown meat doesn’t have the short supply chain of a live animal in a field. Even factory farming at its most factoriest is pretty straightforward - grow corn, feed it to pigs in tiny cages, pump them full of antibiotics, repeat. Lab grown meat doesn’t have the cruelty factor but the complexity of its supply chain and the amount of artificial inputs it requires, not only make it antithetical to solarpunk philosophy in a different way, but make it highly unlikely it’ll ever be competitive price-wise.

What we need is a pre-industrial-revolution attitude towards food. Our calories should be primarily vegetarian and vegan, grown naturally from the soil. Food shouldn’t be an industrial product. And there’s nothing more industrial than lab-grown meat.

Instant Pots aren’t a fad anymore, either, so you can probably pick one up used cheap or on a buy nothing group.

I don’t use my instant pot for rice because a saucepan is simpler and easier to clean, but I’m happy with it and I’m sure it would work just fine for rice.

Really? I’ve experienced the exact opposite. Oat milk in coffee tastes like oatmeal coffee to me. Which isn’t a bad thing but certainly isn’t altering the flavor less 😆

High fructose corn syrup is a hell of a drug.

I can’t speak for the mod but I (probably) wouldn’t ban carnists for being carnists. It’s not like fascism or racism, where open fascists and racists are a relatively small percentage of society and banning them deprives them of a recruiting platform. The vast majority of English-speaking people eat meat. “Lol bacon is good” is a typical response to anything vegan in American society. And it’s a false consciousness response - people say things like that to avoid thinking about the reality of carnism and its concordant factory farming.

And as you noticed, this is a pretty inactive instance. There’s not a thriving community of solarpunk vegans (yet) and there’s no serious debate or activism or community building to be disrupted by troll posts.

So I’d prefer to let people post those “lol bacon is good” comments, take the opportunity to ask why they found the need to post them, and maybe open some people’s minds and educate them, rather than banning them.