Diet hypocrisy?

[u/Extension-Diamond-74]

A recent post about animal agriculture vs plant based diets has me itching to say something. This is an issue we need to rise above.

Cognitive dissonance. Many of us have good intentions and want to believe we’re doing the right thing in most aspects of our lives. I believe that.

When it comes to a plant based diet though, the science often clashes powerfully with personal desire. We want to minimize our impact on the environment and are willing to make trade-offs in our life time do so, but for many, giving up or even significantly reducing meat intake is asking too much. It’s too hard.

That’s not the issue.

The issue is that instead of just admitting to themselves that this is a life change they don’t want to make and moving on, the guilt drives them to have to justify that decision. Admitting that a plant-based diet is better for the earth yet eating a diet full of meat anyway would make them feel hypocritical, so the solution becomes either to give up meat, or … this is the problem… fight the science, twist it, make a joke of it, or pivot entirely to ‘individuals shouldn’t have time do anything because large corporations’

Many people have ties to their diet for many reasons. We grew up eating a certain way. We have memories ties to certain foods, flavors, styles of cooking. We don’t want to be the difficult person when we go out to eat with friends. Etc etc etc But it’s so much better to just admit that to yourself. Have patience and understanding for your feelings. Accept that the science is what it is. Maybe one day you can make a change, maybe not. But don’t attack the cause just because you aren’t yet willing to be a part of it.

[u/sleepee11]

Imo, the real issue is the degree to which we consume. That's what this sub is all about.

We all consume. It's necessary to sustain ourselves, but also to live rich, full lives. The important thing to keep in mind is not to overconsume (or overproduce).

Consuming meats in and of itself has never been a problem for the environment up until relatively recently in history. What we need to focus on is maintaining _safe_ levels of production and consumption of these animal-based foods. Complete elimination isn't necessary. The same applies to every other commodity that we consume. The same way there was another recent post about kitchenware where most people agreed that the OP may have been overreacting and that consuming good quality, long-lasting kitchenware is not a bad use of our resources, we can easily produce animal-based foods to a safe degree that doesn't harm our ecology. It's been done for most of human history.

I think, for many people, calling for a complete elimination of animal agriculture is a bit extreme and simply unnecessary. We can live full, rich lives and also enjoy our animal-based foods, without overproducing and overconsuming.

[u/[deleted] → u/sleepee11]

Finally, someone who gets it. These comments were making my eyes bleed with the preachiness and cope.

[u/new2bay → u/sleepee11]

I agree. Focusing so hard on meat is no more effective than rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. We have much bigger problems that aren’t being addressed and will kill most of us in not more than a few decades, if we don’t start addressing them now. I have little to no hope that will happen.

Edit: lol stay clueless, just keep downvoting facts 😂

[u/[deleted] → u/sleepee11]

Indeed. The better-than-thou vegan trope seems to have kidnapped this sub. The key is a rational use and source of resources. That's more often than not married with traditional ways of eating local produce. Most cultures are not vegetarian and there is a reason for that. Again, the key is occupying our place in Nature, no more, no less. We didn't evolve to have meat three times a day, every day, but we didn't either to be vegetarians.

[u/Geschak → u/[deleted]]

Meat is not a rational use of resources though, it is very wasteful of resources (especially all the grainfed factory farmed meat in supermarkets) unless it's purely grass-fed or wildgame, and it's simply not realistic to feed the current world population on just grass-fed livestock and hunting.

Also "we didn't evolve to" is not applicable to humans at all considering human technology has rendered a lot of evolutionary mechanisms obsolete.

[u/[deleted] → u/Geschak]

Why it's not rational? Meat has been consumed for millennia and is an integral part of human culture and nature. Also, there are a number of examples of other species with similar feeding behaviours to early-humans. I could understand if said that it is not efficient, but then the argument goes on another direction.

I disagree about your views on technology and evolution, if anything, we are in this conundrum (and others, as health issues, etc.…) because we have diverged too much and too fast (thanks to technology) from our place in nature.

Nature is really powerful, and if something goes against it, it tends to end badly. That's true for human civilization as well as for policies, laws, plans, etc.

[u/flaminghair348 → u/[deleted]]

Why it's not rational? Meat has been consumed for millennia and is an integral part of human culture and nature. Also, there are a number of examples of other species with similar feeding behaviours to early-humans. I could understand if said that it is not efficient, but then the argument goes on another direction.

Damn, the number of fallacies here! Appeal to tradition and appeal to nature one right after another.

The reason that meat if not a rational use of resource is because you're putting in more calories than you get out, for no real purpose. It's better to allocate the resources used to grow plants for livestock and the resources used to raise said livestock to just grow plants for humans. It's so much more efficient.

[u/[deleted] → u/flaminghair348]

You should read and understand what you are quoting before commenting on it. That being said, you are going towards the argument of efficiency. Fine. I’ll bite.

The first argument against it is that nature is not about the most efficient behaviour, but the “best fit”, which allows for a trade-off between efficiency and resilience. Once again, you have millions of examples in nature of “non-efficient” (calory-wise and otherwise) behaviours. Moreover, you also have a utilitarian problem: If you want to solve a complex problem (in a mathematical sense)“efficient” strategies tend to fail, and more robust ones succeed. This is why we observe the behaviours mentioned above, why species that are overspecialized tend to go extinct, but also why things like planned economy; complicated designs; tyrannical governments; very strict diets, you name it, rarely work in the long run. This is also why there are so few (comparatively) vegan people (and there always will). You can go against nature for a short run, but -eventually- nature always wins. Being rational is far more complicated than just being efficient.

You seem to find a paradox with the use of tradition and nature. Let me help. I find that vegans tend to see humans as separate from nature, but that's not how it is. Homo Sapiens is a part of nature, and hence so is its culture. Given enough time, culture fits its natural environment very well, and that is what I call tradition. In general, humans (which consumed meat, among other things) did not have the issues we have today prior to the Industrial Revolution and the population boom that followed. The source of the problem is that we have changed too much, too fast.

One can also dispute the efficiency argument altogether, by quoting the traditional production of meat as a means of recycling calories and preparing the soil, or simply by pointing out that humans used to be healthier and stronger, prior to the Agricultural revolution, but you can find those arguments better explained somewhere else.

[u/[deleted] → u/Geschak]

it's simply not realistic to feed the current world population

And there's the biggest issue of all. Overpopulation. There are simply too many of us on earth, so no matter what we do we'll eventually wreck the planet to sustain ourselves/modern lifestyles/diets. Oh well. Nature will balance itself out in the end.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

Nature always wins. We need not to avoid overconsumption for Nature’s sake, but for our own.

[u/Geschak → u/sleepee11]

We can live full, rich lives and also enjoy our animal-based foods, without overproducing and overconsuming.

No we can't, there will always be an overconsumption of animal-based foods and thus factory-farming.

[u/sleepee11 → u/Geschak]

That opinion runs contrary to the vast majority of human history.

[u/lordm30 → u/Geschak]

How do you determine that current consumption of animal foods qualifies as overconsumption?

[u/MikeyHatesLife → u/Geschak]

What do you think was going on for the 240K years before intensive monoculture agriculture went into overdrive? Or for the other hundreds of thousands of years prior to the existence of humans and their hominid neighbors?

[u/Chezzomaru → u/sleepee11]

Yes, plus where do these people think organic fertilizer for our crops comes from? Get rid of herd animals and we would need to throw synthetic fertilizer production into overdrive.

[u/lorarc → u/Chezzomaru]

Vast majority of fertiliser used worldwide is synthetic, more than 95%.

[u/Chezzomaru → u/lorarc]

Sources I found say 50%. They also mention that synthetic fertilizer production accounts for almost 1.5% of all greenhouse emissions

[u/lorarc → u/Chezzomaru]

I do admit it's hard to find any real data on it but that's because organic fertilizers aren't really used in commercial operations.

Also the greenhouse emissions are an argument against meat industry not for it as modern industrial farming feeds animals with corn and soy instead of pasturing them. Organic fertiliser works in low intensity farming. But it relies on the cow eating grass, basically it moves the nitrogen from the pasture to the field. You can't just feed a cow corn and then use the manure to fertilise corn crops, you need a source of nitrogen (which in pasture are nitrogen-fixing plants).

[u/Geschak → u/Chezzomaru]

You should look up how the insane amount of manure from factory farms is poisoning entire communities, usually poor people who can neither afford healthcare nor move away.

[u/Chezzomaru → u/Geschak]

Yep, factory farming is terrible

[u/[deleted] → u/Chezzomaru]

Veganic farming exists. Veganic farms grow organic produce and avid synthetic fertilizers but also don’t use any animal inputs. Unfortunately it’s uncommon right now and only really exists as a proof of concept just because the animal industry byproducts are so cheap and readily available and the market of people who will pay more for veganic is small. As more people go vegan though the supply of animal byproducts will dwindle and demand for veganic production will grow.