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The resistance on reducing meat consumption
- Thread starter Amnixia
- Start date
We're in a thread where people are suggesting move vegans off planet is a better option than eating 2-3 less hamburgers per week in order to preserve the environment that supports our ability to live.
We're so far past doomed.
Bullshit is it whatboutism if we're talking about individual impacts on the environment. Take care of that shit first if you really care before telling people to change their diets.
Production line, yields, demand, and subsidies.
It will go down in price once demand warrants more production. Subsidizing production of these burgers would help further the cost or at least speed of higher yields.
I definitely don't eat as much meat as I used to, but it's not an easy task to convert people who eat it every day at practically every meal.
I don't think referring to it as "passing the buck to individuals" is a fair characterization. It's taking ownership of areas you have influence and control over. And it's not an either/or proposition. We can be making personal changes and seeking to change policy at the same time. Waiting for someone else to go first will just lead to all of us suffering in the end.
I personally don't eat meat much anymore and I don't eat red meat at all but I don't control meat production so my individual choice isn't having effect on anything besides me.
I think you're selling your impact short. If you look at the effect of a single meal, yes, it's going to feel like a drop in the bucket. But take that decision and spread it out over the course of 3 meals every day for the next 10 years. It's late and I'm tired so I'm getting lazy on the math, but I'm confident in saying that it would be a significant volume of meat reduction over the nearly 11,000 potential meals you will have eaten over that time span. Then start to factor family and friends who may be influenced by your decision and it grows even more. I work for a very large food retailer and these trends get noticed and our products changed to reflect them. The items we sell today are very different than what we sold just 5 years ago. It just takes enough people to start small and go from there.
What better alternative? Humans began interacting with fire 1.5 million years ago and have been using it to cook food ever since. Between the first electric car being described in 1830 and Tesla beginning production in 2008, it took 178 years for someone to figure out how to market a greener car. If people were going to figure out how to market more environmentally friendly foods to be better than red meat, we would have done it by now.
All this theoretical nonsense does is pass the blame onto some imaginary experts and excuse people of their culpability in this.
honestly it's a bit childish but every time someone tells me I should stop eating meat I make it a point to eat a nice juicy steak
delicious
delicious
This is a really stupid post. Good friends are actually ones that would try to convince there friends of doing something that is right and its hard to do that when they use emotional reasons to ignore it.
This is why its hard to convince a conservative that their side is fucking our country up.
OP, the way I see it, you should keep trying. The issue is, you are fighting uphill here, we been eating meat for too long. While, I did reduce consumption of meat when I found out about its impact, I feel I need to reduce it further.
Granted, it isn't easy to do this, meat is cheaper than healthy greens per calorie and requires a lot of research so one can get good meals and reach their daily caloric intake.
Lol... its okay if you want to drive a big 10 mpg SUV, keep your lights and A/C on all day and night because people have personal preferences, there are other ways people can contribute.
You see the issue with your post now? You can make this argument with every single thing that cause climate change on a personal level, and delay actual actions to deal with it.
This is why, I believe humanity will not be able to deal with climate change. We will delay it until its too late because it requires a lot of change fairly quickly.
Nobody here is saying stop eating meat. Eat less meat. Even 30% less would be tremendously helpful.
What gets to me, especially in a supposedly progressive place like Era, is the blatant hypocrisy. This place expects, or rather demands, that everyone accepts and adopts their stance on gender and social issues, but when it comes to one of the most effective ways we collectively can work towards saving the world we all depend on to live, not only for ourselves, but f future generations.
Wll, then progressive Era turns into herpy derpy 4chan lookalike very quckly. It has slowly started to improve, but it's not fast enough.
The high horse attitudes often on display here (such as how quickly we like to say people are monsters, horrible people, wish death upon people, find no redeeming qualities in people because of one stance we disagree with,etc) looks to me very much like throwing rocks in a pretty sizable glass house.
Wll, then progressive Era turns into herpy derpy 4chan lookalike very quckly. It has slowly started to improve, but it's not fast enough.
The high horse attitudes often on display here (such as how quickly we like to say people are monsters, horrible people, wish death upon people, find no redeeming qualities in people because of one stance we disagree with,etc) looks to me very much like throwing rocks in a pretty sizable glass house.
It's sad to me that this is an inconceivable notion for so many people. But then we'd have 30% less "mm stake" posts.. can't afford that
Because 71% of the greenhouse gases fuckin up the planet come from 100 companies.
Now preserving fresh water sources on the other hand, yes we definitely need to curtail meat production and also the production of very water intensive crops (looking at you almonds) until the water tables recover.
Now preserving fresh water sources on the other hand, yes we definitely need to curtail meat production and also the production of very water intensive crops (looking at you almonds) until the water tables recover.
Meat/dairy consumption has always been an embarrassing topic on GAF and ERA.
Man... that one article basically messed up everyone's understanding of the problem. Yes it's oil and coal companies that are responsible. But they're the energy/resource providers for everything, including our farms/factory farms. The agriculture GHG emissions are those emitted directly from the animals. The water, the food, the processing, logistics of animal agriculture is huge.
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It's like that for everything. No likes reducing or taking away something we enjoy or get value from. This is food, clothing, transport, and even taxes. When you start taking something away, even progressives become conservatives.
I am not vegan. Not even vegetarian. But I do try to eat with as little impact to the environment as possible. I eat very little meat. Once a month if for example I am visiting someone and they serve meat. I don't cook it at home.
I try to eat as much marked Ecological. Same as Organic? Or whatever you call it. Also I don't buy vegetables shipped from the other side of the globe.
It seems it is a very hard step to get away from the thinking of a meal always having meat. Growing up that was how a meal was done. Potato, pasta, rice whatever and some kind of meat. Always. Well maybe not always but close.
It was not until I moved out and started college I started eating meals without meat.
I try to eat as much marked Ecological. Same as Organic? Or whatever you call it. Also I don't buy vegetables shipped from the other side of the globe.
It seems it is a very hard step to get away from the thinking of a meal always having meat. Growing up that was how a meal was done. Potato, pasta, rice whatever and some kind of meat. Always. Well maybe not always but close.
It was not until I moved out and started college I started eating meals without meat.
One of the highest tenets of progressive ideology is being proactive towards climate change. By continuing to consume massive amounts of meat, you're doing the very opposite of what a progressive person should be doing.
Is it guilt tripping when the whole planet is dying because of it?
It's selfish to assume everyone else's lives are the same as yours and they can make the same choices as easily
And I doubt anyone would hold it against such people if they cannot reduce meat consumption. However I think a large proportion of posters on this forum do not face large barriers in making that choice, outside of habit and taste (which are not easy to overcome I completely understand).
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It's just really weird that meat consumption is overwhelmingly the most talked about topic (not that it wouldn't be good to talk about it too). It pops up constantly and the threads always get long. There's probably more threads about it than there are about other ways to reduce personal carbon footprint overall. There's so many things people could do, yet we focus only on one thing. I know that beef especially has really big effect on the enviroment. But I don't think I've ever seen a thread about only (or preferring) buying local or organic products. Or threads about not using dryers but line-drying instead. Not buying fast fashion, or not always buying electronic devices (well any product) as new but used. Are people who are excited in those threads for new phones not progressive if they consider buying those at launch, rather than just holding off if their old phone still works or getting used phone instead.
We even had a thread about dumpster diving once, with way too many people shaming those who would do that.
It's a culture change, plus they might not like the Vegetarian/Vegan food they've had? Not that hard to understand.
Personally I have meat for two meals a day but the expense of it means that in the lunchtime salad it's bulked out with beetroot and I have a greek yoghurt to make me feel more full, and in dinner I tend to cook a lot of mushroom in with the meat/stock so it feels meatier than it really is. I maybe use about 1-1.5kg of meat a week (Mostly Pork and Turkey) and have absolutely no plans to cut that back further.
Meat eating is one of the touchiest subjects on the planet. Bringing up the idea of even mildly reducing, not cutting, meat consumption is met with the most hilariously overblown reactions. I think part of it is because people know that cutting meat by a third would actually be incredibly doable in 9/10 cases, and when faced with what is essentially just their own laziness and stubbornness, they just retaliate. It's kind of the perfect example of everyone pretending they care about the environment until forced to actually act.
Just before people pile on me, I feel I should mention that I'm a meat eater.
Just before people pile on me, I feel I should mention that I'm a meat eater.
I don't know if I already posted in this thread but its possible I've posted it in another thread like this one.
I suffer from migraines and going keto saved me from those awful headaches. I'll eat plenty of fish and white meat as possible to avoid eating too much red meat though.
I suffer from migraines and going keto saved me from those awful headaches. I'll eat plenty of fish and white meat as possible to avoid eating too much red meat though.
I don't drive and I don't (and wont) have kids but the fact that I eat meat leads to bullshit like this, which is exactly the type of thing people are referring to when they complain about obnoxious vegans. This attitude is fine if one is only interested in patting themselves on the back and thinking of themselves as superior to others, but counterproductive if one actually wants people to change.
Ultimately though the problem with your line of thinking is that your starting point is that meat eaters are eating too much meat when in reality you have aren't going to have any idea how much any individual person is eating. You're insisting they need to cut back without knowing whether they do or not. You can't be so aggressive and then act surprised when people get defensive.
Yeah I'm sure all the people who already eat little meat are the ones going "lolno" /s
There's no need for critical thinking when one can simply be sure of their assumptions.
Eating meat is just cheaper to do then being vegan in some areas. Also asking someone to change their lifestyle is extremely hard thing to do for most people. Habits take time to change, and most people are resistant to change.
