this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2023
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Memes

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[–] Jho@beehaw.org 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I'm a vegetarian.

I was, and still am, surprised by how often people will go into a long rant justifying why they eat meat to me as soon as they find out I'm vegetarian. All the while I'm just sat there, not saying anything, because I literally do not care whether or not they eat meat.

Me being a vegetarian is a personal choice for me and myself only. You do you. I don't care. You don't need to explain yourself to me. It makes me feel so awkward.

People will often ask me why I'm a vegetarian too. But it feels like a very personal and heavy question to ask someone immediately after finding out they're vegetarian... I don't especially want to talk about animals dying all the time and how it makes me sad especially to strangers.

Edit/Addition: It feels like a lot of focus is brought on how vegetarians/vegans force their views onto other people but my experience personally is non-vegetarians/vegans trying to force me into conversations about this topic.

[–] dieelt@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

This is my experience as well

[–] flamingos 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I hate that this used to be me.

[–] usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.ml 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] flamingos 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

:)

It's especially ironic considering I've gone vegan this year.

[–] usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago

Personal growth++

[–] NewDark@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

This kind of thing always reminds me of this video from innuendo studios that really nails why this is a thing. https://youtu.be/ExEHuNrC8yU

[–] cardboardchris@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

yes! I was trying to remember where I saw that. I get the combative attitude from people sometimes 'cause I don't drink, which as I recall, he mentions in that video too.

[–] usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

Ended up watching the whole series that video's a part of. Certainly rings true

[–] Marduk73@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Im about a month in eating fruits vegetables plant based whatever. Im eating eggs cheese and milk.

I'm a meat eating buddhist. I'm all over the place. I'm only doing this because of hypertension and desperately trying to loose weight.

Surprisingly not hard to do. I don't preach it. I never want to be that guy. I'm just doing whatever i can to fix my health.

I don't miss the meat yet but i do a little bit. I don't think this is permanent for me. We'll see if my numbers change.

[–] mizu6079@mander.xyz 2 points 1 year ago (9 children)

got nothing against vegans it's just when they try to force it into others

[–] DotSlashExecute 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

As a vegan myself, I completely agree! I won't tell others what to eat and they shouldn't tell me what to eat. If I were to ever get "preachy" it's purely about reducing impact on the factors mentioned in the meme and by no means forced... One less meal a week with meat in? Go you! Locally sourcing meat? Hell yeah, less environmental impact!

[–] usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

For the bit about local, it's worth noting here that the difference is substantially less than one might expect. Transport is a surprisingly small portion of emissions and environmental impact

Transport is a small contributor to emissions. For most food products, it accounts for less than 10%, and it’s much smaller for the largest GHG emitters. In beef from beef herds, it’s 0.5%.

Not just transport, but all processes in the supply chain after the food left the farm – processing, transport, retail and packaging – mostly account for a small share of emissions.

This data shows that this is the case when we look at individual food products. But studies also shows that this holds true for actual diets; here we show the results of a study which looked at the footprint of diets across the EU. Food transport was responsible for only 6% of emissions, whilst dairy, meat and eggs accounted for 83%

https://ourworldindata.org/food-choice-vs-eating-local

[–] Abel@lemmy.nerdcore.social 4 points 1 year ago

I always thought the party of supporting local wasn't transport but supporting your local economy and small producers, keeping the money within your city and raising buying power for its citizens.

[–] DotSlashExecute 1 points 1 year ago

Thank you for sharing, I wasn't aware the impact of transport was quite so small

[–] buckykat@lemmy.fmhy.ml 6 points 1 year ago

Same energy as "I don't hate the gays I just wish they'd stop shoving it in my face"

[–] max@feddit.nl 5 points 1 year ago (12 children)

Very few will force it on others, though. Anyway, I find it hilarious how people can get riled up about the idea of a person not eating meat or any animal products. I’ve seen it often that they take it personally for some reason and will “compensate by eating extra bacon/steak/chicken”. It’s bonkers.

[–] SolarNialamide@slrpnk.net 3 points 1 year ago

People take it personally because deep down everyone knows it is wrong to keep something as cruel as the meat and dairy industry alive, plus the huge environmental impacts on multiple fronts. So they get super defensive instead of confronting or accepting the fact that they're doing the wrong thing for selfish reasons.

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[–] Evkob@lemmy.ca 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What do you mean by "forcing" veganism onto others?

[–] supergrizzlybear@pawb.social 4 points 1 year ago

Eat your vegetables or I will make you eat them! /s vegan btw

[–] bulbasaur@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

Like you force your lifestyle on animals, by exploiting and killing them?

[–] arthur@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Yeah, they're always outside the Steakhouse picketing. Running at me constantly with a fork full of green vegetables.

THIS IS A REAL PROBLEM THAT I CONSTANTLY HAVE IN REAL LIFE.

[–] puppetx@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This is the sarcasm we deserve.

I've known plenty of vegans and not once have I seen them "try to force it into others"... Outside of internet rage baiting crazies.

..Now the religious on the other hand, I have first hand experience with.

[–] Orygin@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago

Even worse is the anti-vegan that will berate you for not eating meat, or that say they will purposefully eat twice as much meat just to counter your efforts... And yes, I have met a few of them, generally they blame vegans for their behaviour too 🙄

[–] Galven@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago (10 children)

You joke, but there have been cases of steakhouses and butcher shops having troubles with protestors. It's not an everyday thing, but we are talking about a small, crazy portion of an already fringe group.

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[–] drolex@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)
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[–] Galven@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's not them not eating meat that I have a problem with(even though it's not healthy), it's the self-righteousness of it.

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[–] mister155@lemmy.fmhy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

Good for you. Although your choice doesn't befit me, I understand and respect your decision as long as you also respect mine.

It is sad some people need to belittle others over stuff that literally doesn't even personally affect them. I mean, unless they're the cook, I guess.

[–] candyman337@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

While the initial reasoning is respectable, veganism is t without it's flaws, several plants are not ethically sourced and either cause a lot of pollution, destroy habitats to be grown, or are grown via slavery, or a combo of all 3. The real issue is the systems that are in place across the food industry, plant and animal based.

[–] usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago (3 children)

That being said, they still come out ahead in comparison to animal-based foods due to the fact that you need to grow massive amounts of feed crops to raise other creatures. It turns out that pretty much every environmental metric comes out ahead

Transitioning to plant-based diets (PBDs) has the potential to reduce diet-related land use by 76%, diet-related greenhouse gas emissions by 49%, eutrophication by 49%, and green and blue water use by 21% and 14%, respectively, whilst garnering substantial health co-benefits

[...]

Plant-based foods have a significantly smaller footprint on the environment than animal-based foods. Even the least sustainable vegetables and cereals cause less environmental harm than the lowest impact meat and dairy products [9].

https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/14/8/1614/htm

In terms of workers, the meat industry is arguably worse on that front. It's one of the most dangerous industries anywhere for workers

US meat workers are already three times more likely to suffer serious injury than the average American worker, and pork and beef workers nearly seven times more likely to suffer repetitive strain injuries

[...]

Amputations happen on average twice a week, according to the data

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jul/05/amputations-serious-injuries-us-meat-industry-plant

And there's great risk of PTSD from the workers that you don't see for harvesting crops

There is evidence that slaughterhouse employment is associated with lower levels of psychological well-being. SHWs [slaughterhouse workers] have described suffering from trauma, intense shock, paranoia, anxiety, guilt and shame (Victor & Barnard, 2016), and stress (Kristensen, 1991). There was evidence of higher rates of depression (Emhan et al., 2012; Horton & Lipscomb, 2011; Hutz et al., 2013; Lander et al., 2016; Lipscomb et al., 2007), anxiety (Emhan et al., 2012; Hutz et al., 2013; Leibler et al., 2017), psychosis (Emhan et al., 2012), and feelings of lower self-worth at work (Baran et al., 2016). Of particular note was that the symptomatology appeared to vary by job role. Employees working directly with the animals (e.g., on the kill floor or handling the carcasses) were those who showed the highest prevalence rates of aggression, anxiety, and depression (Hutz et al., 2013; Richards et al., 2013). https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/15248380211030243

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[–] Stovetop@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Almonds are a big one that I know of. The vast majority of the world's almonds are grown in California, a state that has been facing severe drought for years now (though maybe not so much this year), but somehow still finds hundreds of billions of gallons of water yearly to keep almond farms irrigated.

And eating almonds is one thing, but processing them into milk is an order of magnitude more wasteful. It takes about 400 almonds to make a half gallon of almond milk, and each one of those almonds requires a gallon of water to produce. So that's 400 gallons of water spent to produce a half gallon of almond milk. A single almond tree can make about 30 gallons of almond milk per harvest, so we're looking at 24,000 gallons of water consumed per tree, which yields a full shelf of Almond Breeze at a single grocery store.

And as farms keep expanding and conditions become drier and drier over time, it's going to destroy the ecosystems of the state. And all so that people can have a decent milk alternative to have with their morning coffee and cereal.

[–] usernamesAreTricky@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The majority of California's water usage is going to beef and dairy. They are large producers of animal feed which are heavy water users. Per liter, dairy milk requires 628.2 L of freshwater vs almond milk requiring 371.46 L of freshwater. And if you use something like oat milk instead that gets you to 48.24 L

https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impact-milks

One graph even has California's animal feed water usage so large it actually goes off the chart at 15.2 million acre-feet of water (it is distorted to make it fit as it notes). For some comparison, the blue water usage of animal feed is larger than all of almonds water usage of ~2 million acre-feet of water

https://pacinst.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/ca_ftprint_full_report3.pdf#page=25

This is true across the American West as a whole

Correspondingly, our hydrologic modelling reveals that cattle-feed irrigation is the leading driver of flow depletion in one-third of all western US sub-watersheds; cattle- feed irrigation accounts for an average of 75% of all consumptive use in these 369 sub-watersheds. During drought years (that is, the driest 10% of years), more than one-quarter of all rivers in the western US are depleted by more than 75% during summer months (Fig. 2 and Supplementary Fig. 2) and cattle-feed irrigation is the largest water use in more than half of these heavily depleted rivers

https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1064&context=wffdocs

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