After 15 years of not eating meat, the past 1-2 years have been a golden era of vegetarian options in the grocery store, restaurants, and fast food.
Based on anecdotes and my social circles, the number of people completely avoiding meat hasn't changed. But omnivores adopting a semi-veg lifestyle has increased.
If I had to pick one thing, I'd say environmental concerns are the main reason my omnivore friends and colleagues are eating less meat.
For me that's a mix of ethical and environmental concerns.
I agree that there is a point in the belief that it is unethical to kill animals. That's not the most unethical thing that is happening in the world, there are a lot of things to argue about, but in general, I agree that in an ideal world, we should not do that.
The environmental concerns, I only buy half-heartedly. I don't really believe that land-owners will transform their pastures or soy cultures into rain forest instead of another profitable exploitation, I'd rather have states force responsible production and norms.
It is just not practical for me to go full-veg, where I live I would need to cook one hour a day for it, and I am a lousy cook, I have neither the inclination or the motivation for it.
But I reduced my consumption more and more. It was surprising to see how my taste changed. I used to be a huge meat eater and now I find eating even a small steak a bit nauseating. I almost eat no beef anymore, little pork but mostly chicken and fish, and even these I eat little.
Considering that "Each year, 50 billion animals are raised and slaughtered in factory farms globally. Over a billion animals live in factory farms at any point of time in the United States. Most experience serious levels of suffering.", I would argue that it's hard to find anything comparable in magnitude to that tragedy if one allows that farmed animals are even a 1/100th fraction as conscious as humans.
I would... probably not enjoy being proven wrong this time :S
Do the animals experience more suffering than if they lived in the wild? Is industrial slaughter more or less traumatic than death in the wild? Are there any benefits animals experience living in captivity vs living in the wild? Is there anything positive about more such animals getting to live in the first place due to demand for meat?
Those are good questions, but about a different topic (except the last one). The choice here is not between raising animals for eating in factories as opposed to raising them in the wild. It's between raising them in factories versus not bringing them to life at all.
Wild animal suffering is a different beast altogether.
Your last question is on the point though. Do the animals raised for meat have lives worth living?
Is it better for a being to not exist entirely than suffer? If so, then would this imply that if animals suffer even more in the wild that they should be wiped out?
Yes. If you had the choice between having a child that would live its entire life in agony, or not having that child, I think it's obvious which is better.
No. For the same reason that murdering your 4 year old is not ethically equivalent to using birth control.
why would animals in wild suffer more than in captivity? In captivity animals go through hell, tiny living spaces, shit and eat in same place, hormones injected, little freedom. Tons of videos on youtube if you feel like watching some gore.
It's not about taking suffering away. Animals born in the wild live their life naturally. Animals created by us in farms are raised for one thing, for human consumption. If an animal wants to run away in wild and do it's thing, it has that choice. In captivity, we force the choice humans made for them.
Basically if we have slightest amount of empathy for our pets and are willing to apply that to other animals, eating meat doesn't look enticing.
Many cat adoption centers won't let people adopt cats if they'll let them outside. And those cats are living a better life than squirrels. I disagree with that, but the way I'd put it is, eating wild animals (modulo overfishing) is unquestionably morally right, but with captured animals, well, you noted that they're injected with hormones. That doesn't make the animals unhappy. I think you should concentrate on what the animal's mental state is, and not get distracted by aesthetics.
I didn’t use “unquestionably” in any sense which is obviously false, like, say, some sense that would imply I’m unaware of vegans. I came to that conclusion by gut instinct.
> why would animals in wild suffer more than in captivity?
Not necessarily more in every case but they do suffer in many different ways. Nonhuman animals in the wild are routinely exposed to: starvation, dehydration, disease, injuries, predation, parasitism and extreme weather conditions:
> The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored.
– Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life
> It's not about taking suffering away. Animals born in the wild live their life naturally.
A "natural" life does not necessarily mean a good one.
> Animals created by us in farms are raised for one thing, for human consumption. If an animal wants to run away in wild and do it's thing, it has that choice.
The choice to do what? The vast majority of nonhuman animals receive no help with their suffering. There are exceptions of course like when we help by rescuing trapped animals, vaccinating and healing injured and sick animals, caring for orphaned animals etc. But the general rule is a very short life (most nonhuman animals in the wild don't live to adulthood) with far more suffering experienced than happiness.
> Basically if we have slightest amount of empathy for our pets and are willing to apply that to other animals, eating meat doesn't look enticing
No disagreement here, but the same empathy should be given to nonhuman animals suffering in the wild and we should help to reduce their suffering as much as practically possible. Widespread interventions aren't practical now due to a lack of knowledge and resources but our future descendants may well be in a better position to make an effective difference.
If avoiding suffering is categorically more important than living, then since all living things suffer, the logical conclusion is that all life should be wiped out.
From my perspective, the conclusion seems to be wrong, and thus I deny the first premise.
I find this conundrum fascinating and during a deep dive into obscure corners of Youtube I discovered there is a number of people that carried this logic throughout. They are called "life extinctionists". They indeed believe that life is suffering and thus it would be a net positive if all life went extinct. You may have thought the "Voluntary Human Extinction Movement" was fringe but this is so outrageous it becomes interesting to understand the logic. I can't find more links at the moment.
The debate between living vs avoiding suffering has very important implications for artificial life, artificial consciousness, artificial intelligence, and even space colonization and curing aging.
Not getting the connection here. I don't think contraceptives are used to prevent the existence of a child living a life of suffering. They seem most often used to avoid inconvenience on the side of the potential parents.
One could argue that billions of children have no chance to exist because of contraceptives, just as you argue that billions of animals have no chance to exist if we stopped breeding them.
Oh I see, if existence is worthwhile, even in the face of suffering, then contraceptives are preventing something worthwhile. Yes, the logic applies here too.
And, it raises an interesting question about the moral gravity of preventing existence.
You could use the same questions to attempt to sow doubt about whether or not human slavery is wrong, and I think that is the most disturbing thing about this line of argumentation.
I just don't attribute the same value to animal life than to human life.
I don't even attribute the same value to life of different species. I don't think that worm farms are as bad as cow farms.
I tend to buy organic/free range animal products. I think factory farms are terrible, I would not mind seeing them gone, but imposing free range would be terrible for the environment.
Free range ones are not too unethical as they provide to animals close to the best they could hope for if they were free.
> imposing free range would be terrible for the environment
It would have to be coupled with other measures to limit resources depletion, but it's the right thing to do imho. It would raise the price much higher, factoring in humane treatment. Sales would drop due to this higher price, there wouldn't be as many farm animals as now.
See? That's the thing. I agree that in the absolute that's a good thing, but done badly, that could just make us lose the fight against climate change by removing tons of forest to feed cattle.
That's why I wish we solve the environmental issues first, as well as the food security of the whole population.
People aren't going to start keeping the equivalent numbers of livestock as pets. If factory farmed animals fall out of fashion, most of these animals will all die without reproducing and their bloodlines will cease to exist.
I agree that factory farming isn't ideal, but it seems to me that it is less ideal from the perspective of the animal for their entire bloodline to be terminated. To make a strong argument against factory farming, you have to provide a feasible alternative that IMO doesn't exist.
The question really comes down to whether or not you consider the opportunity to experience life, even a particularly difficult life, as a blessing.
"The question really comes down to whether or not you consider the opportunity to experience life, even a particularly difficult life, as a blessing."
A life born of slavery, torture, and slaughter is not a life worth living. An animal doesn't really have the idea of a bloodline or legacy (just the primal urge to reproduce). The rationalization that a life of suffering is somehow doing the animal a favor is just asinine.
Personally, I would accept any form of life before I chose not to exist at all, because I view life itself as a blessing.
I understand that this isn't a philosophy that I share with everybody but you should still be respectful of it.
Just how shitty of a life do you need to have to not be worth living? People who spend their lives in prison don't usually kill themselves. You can read stories about people captured as prisoners of war who have no hope that they will ever escape, but they don't attempt to kill themselves. Are they being "asinine"?
Really? Personally, if I died and there was a deity that gave me a choice to either be reincarnated into a slave that would be tortured from birth to death only to be eaten by my slavers at the end or the deity would go back in time to make it so my parents never met, I'd wholeheartedly choose the latter.
I'm not much of a philsopher, but if you're at all interested in the other side of thinking I would suggest Viktor Frankl. He was a jewish person in a nazi concentration camp and he make a much stronger argument than I can for this point of view.
> After enduring the suffering in these camps, Frankl concluded that even in the most absurd, painful, and dehumanized situation, life has potential meaning and that, therefore, even suffering is meaningful.
Not to minimize his suffering, but spending ~3 years out of his 92 year life being tortured isn't the same as a whole life of torture with no meaning or hope of escape.
so even if there's meaning in the most miserable of lives, it's not guaranteed that it will be found. However, I haven't found anything suggesting that meaning makes life worth living, only a passing mention of it bringing happiness, which doesn't square with my understanding of torture or concentration camps. Am I misunderstanding what meaning is?
My parents decided to have an abortion because they were not financially ready to have children. I probably wouldn't exist if they hadn't. Does that mean their abortion had more right to live than I?
My parents lived for years with the guilt that had been instilled in them by their religious upbringing. It was one of the hardest decisions they ever had to make so they could give their future offspring the best life possible.
Research has shown that abortion laws lead to lower crime rates, lower poverty and a higher educated populous. My sisters and I are living proof of that.
I certainly agree that there can be a lot of utility in abortions. Frankly that's the major reason why I don't support abortion legislation. I am somewhat a utilitarian and I understand that there are instances where the utility might outweigh the ineherent immorality. But I do believe that there is an inherent immorality.
Similarly, I think it is immoral to use force to get other people to do what you want. But that quickly becomes a nuanced argument when you start taking public safety into account, or crime prevention. Life doesn't take place in a vacuum so I'm not trying to pass judgement.
Just because I don't think it's unethical to produce life in that circumstance, doesn't mean that I think it's your ethical imperative to produce life. Things don't go immediately from unethical to a moral imperative, there is a substantial gap that needs to be crossed.
> Things don't go immediately from unethical to a moral imperative, there is a substantial gap that needs to be crossed.
I would accept that in the general case, but since you let your utilitarian views slip, I have to ask: what's the difference?
When something is immoral, it means it has a negative utility, and therefore it should be avoided. When something is moral, it has a positive utility, and therefore it's something that should be strived for, barring any other activity with greater utility. In my eyes, that makes every moral thing a utilitarian's moral imperative, with the only gap being things that have no moral value.
I can think of a number of activities that would provide greater utility than attemting to impregnate as many women as possible.
I'm not a pure utilitarian and I see a distinction between the concepts of morality and utility. Mostly because I'm not capable of gauging utility all the time, so I can fall back on broader moral principles.
Thank you for the answer. It seems we have the same view, but we speak about it differently: while an action may be moral or not, being a prerogative only matters in practice if it can be assessed.
The difference is that I don't mind calling even the smallest, least important actions, which have the least chance to be the best thing to do at the moment, prerogatives.
So why do we inseminate animals artificially when there is no ethical imperative to produce life? And if you think life is so valuable by nature, why do we kill them then?
The primary motivation to our livestock farming is certainly the utility, not some sort of ethical imperative. My argument isn't that it's virtuous to farm livestock, my argument is just that it isn't unethical.
Regardless of your food selection, I’d encourage you to try bulk cooking if you haven’t before. Cook 4-5 days worth of food on Sunday, takes about 2 hours. You can eat dinner afterwards and package up a plate for every weeknight. When you get home from work during the week, turn on oven, put meal in immediately, take a shower or browse HN for 20 minutes, and you’re g2g. If you start to feel more handy with a frying pan you can store each part of your meal separately in the fridge and reheat a full dish in 5-10 minutes. Microwaves and toaster ovens will also shorten the wait time.
Side note: in my time in kitchens, I learned that the art of storing/reheating food is just as important as from-scratch preparation.
I understand parent is not motivated to learn it, but I encourage them to rethink it, and I leave this message for everyone else. Personally, cooking has been an incredibly fulfilling and freeing life skill to acquire.
> The environmental concerns, I only buy half-heartedly. I don't really believe that land-owners will transform their pastures or soy cultures into rain forest instead of another profitable exploitation, I'd rather have states force responsible production and norms.
If farmers switch to other exploitative crops, it should drive up the supply and down the price of those crops, reducing the drive to clear more rain forest.
> If farmers switch to other exploitative crops, it should drive up the supply and down the price of those crops, reducing the drive to clear more rain forest.
I'd rather not gamble away the rainforest to optimism about humans acting rational. It's already irrational: humans will optimize towards short term gains.
It's not just about short term vs long term gains for the farmers: it's about gain for them vs gain for the whole human population (the second involves just a small marginal gain for the farmers).
You'd be surprised about the shortsighted things people do for small marginal gain.
More of a light hearted example. I worked at a grocery store years ago, one summer the 4L ice cream buckets stopped having handles. A lot of people complained, they liked to use them for berry picking and other things. One day I asked the people we ordered the dairy stuff from why. Turns out, some accountant figured out they'd have a marginal gain of 1¢ per ice cream bucket if they removed the handles. In the end though, that year we ended up throwing a lot of them away, whereas the summer before we'd had trouble keeping them in stock. People really liked those bucket handles. I still wonder if the penny savings were worth the loss in sales from people that wanted buckets with handles more than ice cream.
> But I reduced my consumption more and more. It was surprising to see how my taste changed.
I experienced the same, which was really odd. I guess you can learn to like (or dislike) a taste.
The other thing I noticed that concerns about suffering started to weigh far stronger for me once the environmental concerns made me stop eating meat. I think that I subconsciously ignored or trivialised a lot of the information I got about what was and is actually happening in that sector.
The animal suffering aspect kind of was the start for me. I quickly recognized the counter-arguments were very poor. The only two lines of arguments that one may defend are "Animals don't suffer" or "It is natural for humans to exploit animals". I don't hold any of these opinions and therefore I could not defend meat production ethically.
Same, I switched for environmental reasons and only then stopped poo-poohing the animal suffering. There's arguably motivated reasoning on both sides - when I was a meat eater, I was motivated not to care, and now that I'm not, I am motivated to justify my lifestyle.
I once went on a low carb diet and stuck to it steadfast for about 6 months. One of my favorite candies is Reece's Peanut Butter cups. When I came off the diet, I decided to have one. It tasted exactly the same as you would expect those ultra-low-cost off-brand peanut butter cups that they sell in budget grab bags. Took me weeks to be able to taste the difference.
Because then I can buy pre-cooked food. I live in countryside Japan where it does not cost a lot more to buy a bento than to cook one yourself.
Before moving in, I used to think it should be easy to be vegetarian in a Buddhist country but it is not. Japan's culinary habit is that a good meal needs to have a lot of different ingredients in it. From a dietetics point of view, that's great but it often means that even in most salads, you'll have a few pieces of bacon or chicken, a shrimg or some grains of minced meat.
That still makes for a very meat-light diet and would switch to a no-meat-at-all in a heartbeat if those bentos and salads came in vegetarian versions, but that makes it almost impossible to avoid meat.
In some areas, the only option is to cook 100% of meals if one wants to be vegetarian. In others, it is still possible to go out to eat. Further, the prepackaged vegetarian options are only available in some options.
Meat is remarkably easy to cook: apply heat to meat, done. Vegetables take preparation, require more-complex treatment, need to be managed well (I have no problem eating a quick meal of just a steak or chicken breast; I really would hate eating a quick meal of only carrots or just onions).
Meat's convenient in a way that vegetables aren't.
I can only assume you are buying your meat pre-boned and sliced or diced, chicken breast already removed from carcass etc, probably in some lovely single use plastic. In which case someone else did the prep for you, not sign there's less prep required.
Veggies are less effort: peel some, chop into suitably sized bits. To compare like with like compare with pre-sliced and peeled veggies, or animal carcass before skinning and butchering. :)
Something like a rosti with cheese or added spinach or cabbage is cooked meat speed fast and tasty, as are a whole host of the traditional leftovers recipes that grew up to use up spuds, carrots, cabbage etc next day.
>Vegetables take preparation, require more-complex treatment, need to be managed well
Are you treating your vegetables like wagyu beef and giving them massages or something? If not, aside from a quick wash, cooking vegetables is no more difficult than cooking meat. Sautee them, bake them, pan fry, deep fry, air fry, broil, steam, sous vide, etc...
This is the opposite of reality in my experience. Most vegetables can be quickly steamed, boiled, stir fried etc. Legumes or tubers take longer, but require little active participation.
Meat on the other hand is greatly benefited by things like marination, mechanical tenderizing, monitoring temperature as it cooks. You can whip up a steak pretty quick, but probably not any faster than you could stir fry some veggies.
If we're talking steak in particular, it's going to be faster than any palatable vegetable based dish every time. Total cook time is about five minutes, and prep is less than a minute.
Also in particular, stir frying isn't a great example of a vegetable preparation which is fast. Prep is usually at least twice the amount of time as the frying.
Peanut butter celery sticks would be a better example I think.
There are so many variables it's hard to say anything concrete, but on average I'd bet people spend less active time preparing vegetables to eat than meat.
>If we're talking steak in particular, it's going to be faster than any palatable vegetable based dish every time. Total cook time is about five minutes
Maybe with very thin, low quality grocery store steaks. When I eat meat I buy steaks from a butcher that are over an inch thick, and require 5-7 minutes minimum per side for medium rare. Sometimes even more for thicker cuts
>prep is less than a minute. Also in particular, stir frying isn't a great example of a vegetable preparation which is fast. Prep is usually at least twice the amount of time as the frying.
A lot of people think vegetables are difficult because they don't have knife skills so it takes multiple minutes to cut a piece of produce. With practice, prep for cooking vegetables should be just as fast. Also, even if it does take an extra couple minutes of my time, its worth it for my own health and morals by not supporting industrialized farming
I find the ethical-philosophical side of it interesting. In the philosophy of ethics, thought experiments can be helpful (or puzzling), like the trolley problem or the Categorical Imperative. So:
Imagine if a wizard finished casting a very complicated and resource-intensive spell and the result is that every living cow, pig, chicken and turkey in the meat industry were replaced with a clone of a dog you've met. In the thousands of crowded compound pens, the millions of tiny cages, on the assembly lines facing captive bolt pistols like the one from No Country for Old Men-- there is now that dog. In that moment, what would be an example of something happening that is more unethical? Of course the answer would be different for each person; some people would have the point that we can't compare apples to oranges. For me I find it hard to imagine a war or a process of exploitation in 2019 that measures up.
Wouldn't work on me, I have close to a hatred toward dogs :-)
But I grew up in the countryside, I knew some cows and goats, heard the sad cry of the cows when you take their calves away. The reason why I eat very little beef and pork now but have less problems with chicken and fish is because I do feel different about them.
See I used to be more concerned about the ethics of animal exploitation as a kid than as an adult. (My experience was with free range animals though.) One of the questions I often came back at as a kid was "Do the animals understand what is happening? Why don't they try to escape?" It puzzled me that the cattle seemed to love their captors. Food was more primordial to them than freedom.
Then I realized some things: most humans would take such a deal. Security vs freedom. If I offered you to double your life expectancy (which is basically what wild vs farm animals experience), to feed and cure you, provide a more comfortable shelter than you could be able to get on your own, would you object to me eating your meat at a determined date?
I know I would refuse, I used to think most humans would but nowadays I am far less optimistic about that, and I am pretty certain that most animals would sign in.
I still think the whole system is unethical and an ideal world should not have it, so I do limit my meat consumption, I don't participate in the boohooing of vegans. I just don't see it as the highest priority ethical concern right now.
Always grateful for someone sharing their experience. I think by "knew" I meant live with, as one would live with a pet dog or a cat. I see them every day, I get to know their personality at a level that I understand when they're suffering, and how much they understand doesn't matter to me. I would feel devastated if someone were to take them away from me and unfeelingly exploit them. I'm not vegan, but I guess I'm boohooing participant.
But the ethical base-case is potentially that none of those cows, pigs, chickens or turkeys are ever born. Case by case we couldn't say, but statistically a lot of farm animals are going to be reliant on human logistics, organisation and protection to survive in the numbers that they do.
So the question might reasonably be 'are the conditions these animals face worse than never existing?'.
Then I think the natural follow-up experiment would be to imagine if a dog you know was born for dogfighting, and that you can be sure it will never escape. Would we rather it just not be born? If not, we just need to argue that being bred to dogfight is preferable to, or on-par with, being bred to be trapped in a cage and eaten.
That isn't the core of the argument; the point is that there is no good outcome for most of those animals. The choice is exist, live and be slaughtered for food vs. never being born.
Not an enviable choice, but it confounds some of the simple ethical arguments for, eg, vegetarianism.
But I don't understand how it is relevant to what we should do?
Our goal is to minimize the amount of suffering we are responsible of. In that respect it is obviously better to not breed animals than to breed them and make them suffer.
I'm not sure your thought experiment is all that useful, because there are many people who feel that livestock are fundamentally different from their pets and your example is similar to "What if the wizard instead replaced every plant with a human? Is it unethical to eat plants then?"
True, but I rarely see people explicitly assert that. The more people have to explain an arbitrary distinction out loud, the less it makes sense in the culture.
Even without new vegetarian options at grocery stores, I've been okay with cooking once a week for 2 or 3 hours. Breakfast is an egg casserole/quiche with veggies and chorizo spices or hashbrown. Lunch and dinner might be a lentil "meat"loaf, bean chili, or Indian style meals which are typically vegan. Lots of easy recipe options here, but it does help that I don't mind repeating meals for a week.
What are the constraints based on where you live? I knew someone who grew up heavily on beef since she was from a small, rural country. Is it a similar reason?
I'm interested in food insecurity and related things, which is why I ask.
I grew up and lived in a rural area (southern appalachians in the US) and it was not easy. Small town restaurants often have zero options, living near a taco bell was about the best you can hope for.
Not even morningstar farms veggie burgers in grocery stores. But that was 10 years ago, things are different now.
Whenever I go home for Christmas I'm amazed at what's available.
Howdie neighbor. I lived in North GA and experienced the same woes. There's still 10 fast food restaurants per 1 wholesome restaurant. I'll know we've made it when waffle house serves veggie sausage. haha.
I live in countryside Japan where it does not cost a lot more to buy a bento than to cook one yourself.
Before moving in, I used to think it should be easy to be vegetarian in a Buddhist country but it is not. Japan's culinary habit is that a good meal needs to have a lot of different ingredients in it. From a dietetics point of view, that's great but it often means that even in most salads, you'll have a few pieces of bacon or chicken, a shrimp or some grains of minced meat.
That still makes for a very meat-light diet and I would switch to a no-meat-at-all in a heartbeat if those bentos and salads came in vegetarian versions, but that makes it almost impossible to totally avoid meat.
To me, it's less about new products and more about people's tastes. People are eating very different things now because of new popularity in some cuisines (Indian, Thai, and Mexican come to mind) and the popularity of "superfoods" (Avocado, Acai berry... ever notice there are never any animal-based superfoods?).
> ever notice there are never any animal-based superfoods?
This must be a marketing gimmick; eating animals is very nutritious—it's just not sufficient. However, this is the same as Avacado/acai berry/whatever.
I have heard milk referred to as a superfood quite a bit.
> I have heard milk referred to as a superfood quite a bit.
Might have something to do with the billions spent on marketing meat and dairy. Pretty big industries with pretty big financial contributions to our wonderful politicians, for decades now.
While the dairy lobby is 100% real, I haven't seen anything that comes close to an analogue of dairy outside the animal kingdom. The combo of high calorie sugar, protein, and fat is pretty hard to beat without explicitly enriching the food. Even after enriching it's quite difficult to hit that calorie density and have something that you want to drink/eat.
I would probably be fine with replacing it with a lighter version of soylent (it's too thick to serve as milk), but the idea that we drink milk because of marketing, or that they're artificially inflating the nutrition you get out of milk, is laughable.
> Companies selling dairy alternatives are using easy to understand, clear, descriptive, and truthful language on labels. Our members and others in this category, are using common English words that consumers understand: milk, cheese, yogurt and butter. To our members, and to consumers, these words represent functionality, form and taste, not necessarily the origin of the primary ingredient.
That's bullshit and they know it. If you ask for butter, or cheese, or yogurt at the store and they give you a vegan product you'd be right to be annoyed. They approximate the food only at the shallowest level of perception and are very different foods to work with in the kitchen.
Also, I do like almond milk—just not as a milk replacement.
> What? "Got Milk"? Milk mustaches on famous people and athletes? Come on.
So—you're saying NOBODY would drink milk if they stopped advertising after THOUSANDS OF YEARS of drinking it as adults (true with my genes!) and MILLIONS OF YEARS of juvenile mammalian existence? Extent is not the same as the sole cause. I drink milk because it makes me nostalgic for my childhood and hey, it's calories, baby! In any case, you conveniently cut out the meat of the sentence when you quoted me—milk advertises itself by being highly nutritious, which is less true of plant-based milks, which you typically gravitate to because you want milk but can't have it for reason X.
> Are you really that confused when it says "soy", "milk", "oat", "almond" right before "milk"?
It's actually rarely obvious in my experience, especially when they place e.g. Silk next to dairy. I've accidentally bought plant-based milk twice because I didn't recognize the brand and the plant-based nature was not emphasized on the packaging. This feels very intentional to me.
Partially related: I don't think I've seen a milk advertisement in years. Are they spending less or am I just avoiding the areas they're targeting (notably: video ads/). I swear I used to see them on billboards all the time. Maybe SF is just an expensive market to advertise to....
> I drink milk because it makes me nostalgic for my childhood and hey, it's calories, baby!
Nostalgia, huh? Is that worth the environmental damage and severe ethics concerns? Not to mention, uh, you're drinking a cow's milk that should be for its children. We're the only species that does that. It's so odd.
Soy milk tastes great, has a nice nutrition profile, and is actually good for you (and the environment, and the animals).
> Nostalgia, huh? Is that worth the environmental damage and severe ethics concerns?
No, I am but a weak and flawed human that likes dairy and meat. Ideally I'd stop eating and drinking all of this today.
> Not to mention, uh, you're drinking a cow's milk that should be for its children. We're the only species that does that. It's so odd.
Life is odd. I will say that I grew up around dairy cows and they don't seem to mind what happens to their milk, so that is emphatically not a concern for me, and I would not have been able to be around cows at all if it weren't for the dairy market. (how's that for an ethical dilemma? the animals that will survive the ongoing extinction event are likely to be exploited by humans.) The environmental and humanitarian concerns (e.g. meat eating, farming conditions) are much, much larger concerns for me.
> Soy milk tastes great, has a nice nutrition profile, and is actually good for you (and the environment, and the animals).
I don't disagree with this at all. I'm not arguing FOR milk, certainly not from an ethical standpoint, I'm just pointing out the ludicrous double standard of people with clear agendas to push plant-based drinks who then talk shit about "big dairy". It's all manipulative and shitty—comparing the actual food is much more interesting.
> eating animals is very nutritious—it's just not sufficient.
No. It's not.
I like Dr. Fuhrman's equation: H=N/C. This equation expresses the concept that your health (H) is predicted by your nutrient intake (N) divided by your calorie intake (C). There's not a lot of nutrients in meat (all you get really is protein and iron), whereas in vegetables/fruits you get a whole vast assortment of proteins, vitamins, fiber, phytochemicals, antioxidants, etc.
Meat also has the problem of being a carcinogen, per the WHO [0].
> I have heard milk referred to as a superfood quite a bit.
Nope. It's not.
Milk has a ton of sugar, lactose is not well-tolerated by something like 80% of the population, and the proteins in milk are potentially carcinogenic. [1] Anyway, and that's just the nutrition angle - not even getting into the horrific ethics problems and environmental problems. We need to move away from meat. We can do better.
>There's not a lot of nutrients in meat (all you get really is protein and iron), whereas in vegetables/fruits you get a whole vast assortment of proteins
Your whole post is ill-informed, but this is particularly nonsensical. Go look up nutrition information for any muscle meat and you'll see plenty more than just iron, to say nothing of organ meat.
Regarding protein, you get a broader amino acid profile from animals, but this doesn't really matter.
> ever notice there are never any animal-based superfoods?
In my circles it's tallow, A2 milk, and beef liver that are huge in popularity but I agree mainstream goes for coconut water, oat milk, etc. Those are a function of big ag ad dollars I imagine, more than decisive tastes or the actual super-ness of any food.
> Those are a function of big ag ad dollars I imagine, more than decisive tastes or the actual super-ness of any food.
Perhaps, but when you look at what's behind "A2 milk" (I hadn't heard of it before), it's basically a single company promoting their brand with largely BS statements. The Wikipedia article has plenty of details: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A2_milk
Sure, if you're looking only for foods labelled "superfoods". But there's also the popularity of low-carb diets like paleo and keto that treat animal fat as healthy.
Eh, there's a lot of "dirty keto" diets out there. I think it's more important to eat whole foods (unprocessed) and source most macro nutrients (and healthy fats) from a plant based diet + the occasional fish and chicken.
These super foods are grown in such minuscule amounts that the impact is incomparable to the soybeans from Argentina being fed to pigs in Denmark, or Brazilian soy raising billions of chickens, pigs and cows in China.
Energy wasted on growing plants that feed humans directly is feeding a 1st order process. Energy wasted on growing plants that feed animals that feed humans indirectly is feeding a 2nd order process.
Animals need to keep their body warm, grown their body, have immunity, give birth, grow offspring inside their body and then after all that they give you milk and meat.
Buy local. Takes a second to glance at the distributor location - though it's not always clear when buying fresh unpackaged fruit and veggies where they were sourced from. Personally I'd like to see more of that information available at supermarkets and online.
At least in London, there has been a big uptick in veganism in the last year or so. Helped by mainstream supermarkets and restuarants adding vegan options en mass.
The new thing is the number of ready-made meals that are also vegetarian, and directly from the distributor brand.
And for me the biggest marker is that it's now advertised on the package. Not just the small vegan logo, there is big lettering like "suitable for vegetarians" or "meat-free" or whatever. It must have become a selling point.
London was also the epicentre of Atkins, eating lots of meat at every meal. It can change overnight. You can’t extrapolate from London whimsy to any long term trend.
My stomach, ect, feel better when I eat less meat.
But: I rarely order vegan in a restaurant. I find it's much easier to do vegan at home. Why? Mostly food safety and storage. After cooking vegan for a few weeks, when I cooked meat, I realized just how much of a pain in the *$$ maintaining food safety is.
>> when I cooked meat, I realized just how much of a pain in the *$$ maintaining food safety is.
Because you live in the west. In most of the world, plants can be just as dangerous as meat, sometimes more so. Google "pork tapeworm". You can get it from eating undercooked pork or, more commonly, from poorly-washed vegetables grown anywhere near pigs. Do you wash your salads in chlorinated water? I doubt it. You can only get away with that because, in the west, we have physically separated farm animals from crops.
I'm doing the semi-veg lifestyle. Trying to avoid meat more days than not. It was totally environmentally based for me. I want to transition to full veg, but need to work on my prepping skills and planning better.
Also, health and nutrition. Among health nuts many who consume meat advocate reducing intake whilst increasing legumes and veg. Even aping the popular aggregate "blue-zone" diets and the Mediterranean diet (the most researched of all) will lead to more restricted meat consumption than the standard western diet permits.
For those who like to heavily politicize diet, this is a perspective that gets buried by absolutists who like to identify as either pro/anti-meat. Silly.
There's also eggs, which aren't 'meat' though have high levels. But yes reducing dietary cholesterol is one of the benefits. Skinless chicken breast has about 91mg cholesterol to 100g of chicken which isn't much. The daily allotted amount recommended by most guidelines is higher than that.
A lot of that has been debunked with regular exercise. Many of the plaques and fatty deposits can be linked directly to high carbohydrate and high processed sugar diets in combination with sedentary lifestyles. That's been shown with the prevalence of putting type one diabetics on cholesterol medications in their upper thirties or lower fourties, as a practice, regardless of any other factors due to free sugars in their blood streams. Dietary cholesterol hasn't shown much of a spike in cardiovascular cholesterol at all, on recent studies, to be honest.... let me see if I can find the studies and I'll try and link it, if it wasn't behind a paywall. It might have been a Johns Hopkins, and I think they are paywalled.
I take a middle view that too much cholesterol is probably best avoided but I don't think it demands being dispensed with. And just because we "don't need it" doesn't mean there aren't benefits, like a testosterone boost.
As a someone who falls into the semi-veg bucket, I would say I agree. It is mostly from an environmental concern, but I am also uncomfortable with factory farming. The thing that surprised me the most is that I don't really crave meat. Anecdotally, I now feel sluggish and tired after eating meat.
I guess I'm lucky to have grown up in an area where restaurants almost always had some vegan options just as a matter of course. Tomato pie vs pepperoni pizza, pasta places with spaghetti so good, it doesn't matter if you get pomodoro or carbonara, dry fried szechuan string beans that sounds like "just a side" but eats like a meal, tacos with chicken, pork or veggies.
Veg/vegan food was always just food to me, so all this hub bub about it is bizarre to me.
That's definitely not the norm. I'm in Seattle, and while it isn't hard to find restaurants with vegan options, you certainly won't "almost always" find vegan options if you just go into a random restaurant. I found the same thing to be the case in LA, lots of vegan options but they definitely were not in every restaurant. Perhaps you just self-select vegan friendly restaurants?
Perhaps you just self-select vegan friendly restaurants?
No. I've eaten pretty much everywhere around. Italian, Chinese and Mexican places in particular have built in vegan options pretty much by default. I'm surprised there aren't such Chinese or Mexican options in LA (although when confronted with something like "gan bian si ji dou" or even "dry fried green beans" on a menu, it's not immediately obvious if it's vegan or not).
I spent a bit of time in Seattle over a decade ago. I was trying to save money at the time, so I didn't order out much, but I do remember burritos from Taco Del Mar being fine no matter what is (or isn't) in them. There was a great place for fries called Frites which appears to be closed now and a bunch of Indian places, too. I also remember a hot dog place near the Lenin statue with all kinds of options, but any mention of that place seems to be wiped off the net, so I might have just imagined it. :)
I wasn't trying to say what is or isn't the norm, just that I don't understand why people make a such a big deal about what they, or others, are eating.
For me, the biggest reason I've become semi-veg is that restaurants actually make decent meat-free meals. Most places used to relegate meat-free options to salads and side dishes. But today, most restaurants treat vegetarian dishes as first-class options.
This has given me more ideas on what to cook without meat besides, Indian food or pasta.
I stopped eating meat at the start of this year after reading "Eating Animals" by Jonathan Saffran Foer. My primary concerns were ethical. I'm not necessarily morally opposed to eating meat, but I am opposed to the inhumane conditions of factory farming.
I am shocked at how easy it was to stop. I always pictured some long and tormented inner battle, but the book made the necessity of the decision self-evident. I eat meat maybe once per month now, a 99% reduction in intake, with no significant physical or psychological struggle whatsoever.
>I am shocked at how easy it was to stop. I always pictured some long and tormented inner battle, but the book made the necessity of the decision self-evident. I eat meat maybe once per month now, a 99% reduction in intake, with no significant physical or psychological struggle whatsoever.
I found this to be the case too. It wasn't particularly challenging to stop eating meat, and if anything I felt physically and mentally better afterwards
How much of this is changing eating pasterns, and how much of this is the re-labeling of foods?
"Vegan" is no doubt now a sales point, but many vegan foods have been eaten for centuries without that label attached.
Slapping the sticker on them now doesn't mean that anything has changed beyond how we do the count.
I also question the "vegan" label itself. Exactly what type of vegan are they talking about? Veganism isn't as simple as whether a food is vegetarian. There is no single authority or rulebook to determine whether it is kosher or not. There are various levels and judgement calls to be made.
Generally vegan meats meat-fish-seafood-and-dairy-free when you see it on a generic packaging or restaurant.
Kosher at least in the US usually comes with a symbol and you know the ones that are legit (Orthodox Union is the most common in the US, the (U) symbol Ⓤ)
Vegan can also mean food that doesn't involve the exploitation of animals. That version of veganism means no food that requires insect pollinators.
A cutting-edge vegan discussion is whether lab-grown meant can be vegan. An animal need not have a brain to be an animal. And an animal grown in a vat is still an animal.
Is a human without a brain still a human? There are plenty of people in hospitals with zero brain function, some with virtually no brain matter, that still have full rights as humans.
If a jellyfish not an animal because it doesn't have a brain? A worm? Many vegans choose not to draw lines between different types of animals.
That’s not what I was asking though. If you grew just the organ, how is that an animal? I’m vegetarian for environmental and ethical reasons, if we have a way to create a chicken breast in a lab by assembling proteins, I would definitely eat it.
> There are plenty of people in hospitals with zero brain function.
Legal death is defined as brain death in many (most?) places. I think you mean these people are in a vegetative state, but their brain is still on autopilot so the body doesn't completely shutdown.
Some don't eat anything "involving animals", nothing pollinated by bees, but others go with "not exploiting animals" and are ok with bees so long as it is natural pollination. Such vegans draw a line between natural pollination and the commercial delivery of bee hives to pollinate fields. Those hive often don't survive.
I love these doubling and quadrupling statistical figures that are absolutely meaningless when placed outside the context of the percentage of the whole.
"We quadrupled subscriptions last night" is true when going from 400 million to 1.6 billion and also true when going from 1 to 4.
I've also rapidly seen the number of popular vegan restaurants explode in the city of Toronto, where I live, over the past 3-4 years.
One note a few people are making is that you don't have to be vegan to eat vegan. This is true, and purposeful - vegan food is generally of a relatively high quality - and a lot of what it offers is the direct contrast to most other North American-favoured food.
Like they say Lucky Charms are a 'part of a balanced breakfast', followed by a picture of a table with orange juice, a banana, etc...so it is that, if I have a busy work day, and we order some greasy pizza in, I can go hit he Freshii on my way out and balance out the sausage, grease, and cheese that way.
I think more and more people are simply realizing just how unhealthy our diet is, here in North America, and as these potions become more available, and awareness of them is increasing, I think all this indicates is expected are finally waking up from a sense of brainwashing that's gone on in advertising everywhere, getting us to honestly shove the worst things in our bodies over the past few decades.
There are environmental concerns with Vegan food, particularly in transit of the more obscure and in demand things like Avacados - so I do get a giggle when people are all uppity about how ethical they're being - but obviously there are ethical and environmental concerns with the treatment of animals, as well.
Overall, it's no surprise to see this data, I'd argue in-restaurant demand, at least in this city, has similarly exploded.
It's good. It means we are collectively eating a little better, and that's something that affects both the mind and the body.
Enviro concerns. Rebellion. I feel I'm healthier barring intake of Iron.
I find it less expensive as good meat is expensive.
Meat imoho is hard to cook.
I'm put off by slaughter and the whole idea.
I feel it's one thing I can do to help the world (and prolly be a bit healthier).
I have friends who have reduced too! thats cool.
The idea of the amount of intake to output on a cow. Its high, there's an index for it.
Prolly gonna try go vegan (everything)
Screw big corps poisoning me with mass slaughter and cruelty products. Odd ingredients I have never heard of. Who is going to pay for my double bypass or kemo? Oh......me?
Call me a PETA/Hippie, whatever. I care about the future of the planet and being low impact. It feels like the right way to go about it right now. The mass consumption in the states today is pretty off-putting // disturbing.
Reduce/Recycle/Reuse. No, I do not need a new phone. This one works just fine.
I am not vegan myself, but I do appreciate the huge increase in vegan options now that I am lactose-intolerant! I do enjoy ordering a vegan option with grilled chicken or bacon added if I can.
A large percentage of people become lactose intolerant as they become adults, IIRC only a segment of people from all over the world (concentrated somewhat in Europe and parts of Africa) retain the ability to digest lactose into adulthood, east Asian here I personally started getting slight indigestion from milk but not ice cream or cheese in my 20's.
I wish I knew! I had a few minor medical procedures done (wisdom teeth, under anesthesia) and then later on in the year I started getting stomach aches all the time. I don't know if that is just correlation though. I went to a GI doctor later in the year and did the lactose test to confirm it, but I wish I figured it out sooner!
The doctor told me that everyone gets more lactose intolerant to an extent as they get older, but I unfortunately have it pretty extreme in my 30's. It does force me to eat healthy whole foods though, as most processed junk foods now make me sick! So overall not so bad.
As some other commented, lactose tolerance is more of a spectrum and not a black/white thing. You may be OK with a baked product like cake but not be able to handle a milkshake for example.
You don’t become lactose intolerant; you become lactose tolerant via genetic mutation. This is a mutation that originated in Northern Europe but not in east or South Asia.
One does not "become lactose tolerant," humans are born lactose tolerant, after all their primary food for the first few months of life is milk. A lactose intolerant baby is very rare.
Lactose intolerance happens with age in X% of the population. The ones who don't become lactose intolerance simply retain their lactase production that they've always have had.
As interesting as this is, it's just the takeaway sector.
As someone in the higher-end restaurant sector, I certainly haven't seen increased demand for vegan options. It also doesn't help that many vegans are very price sensitive, not to mention have a disproportionate amount of other dietary restrictions.
I wouldn't be surprised if higher-end restaurants end up lagging on this trend, simply because they have a bit of a reputational hole to dig themselves out of with the vegetarian, and particularly vegan, crowd. For a lot of reasons.
For starters, the options a lot of higher-end restaurants offer have a history of tending to be either really unsatisfying "twigs and berries" type food, overly rich (a lot of vegans aren't used to having their food drenched in cooking fats), poorly prepared (e.g., overcooked), or a mix of them all. So there's a long history of being charged what feels like a rather exorbitant price considering that you end up going home hungry and dissatisfied.
Second, vegetarians do notice and make decisions based on what non-vegetarian options are on the menu. If you're serving veal or foie gras, the vegan member of the party is going to be a lot more likely to try and convince the rest of their party to go somewhere else.
Also, straight-up boredom. People who eat vegan in particular tend to get really into cuisine from all over the world, and become acclimatized to eating food that's got very bold flavors. After a few years of that, the nouvelle cuisine-inspired stuff being served at a lot of higher-end restaurants is, frankly, just not very exciting. Especially after you take out the butter and cream and whatnot that serve as the gastronomic foundation of that style of cooking.
Which isn't to say that all high-end restaurants are like that. But so many are that eventually it gets easier to just use the price point itself as a heuristic.
Entirely anecdotal, but I went to a 10 course tasting menu restaurant in Portland last year that was about $300 per person and they had a vegan menu. I've seen other high end restaurants providing vegan or vegetarian menus as well in Seattle
It's an interesting anecdote, but the words that really jump out of the sentence there are "Portland" and "Seattle". I wouldn't be surprised if the percentage of people who eat vegetarian in the PNW is 10x as high as what it is in, say, the Rust Belt.
>many vegans are very price sensitive, not to mention have a disproportionate amount of other dietary restrictions
Price sensitive as in not willing to pay as much as traditional customers? In my experience vegans tend to pay more for their food, as many of them look for local produce, fair trade, organic, etc. which drives the price up. I'd also be curious to learn what other dietary restrictions they may have. Aside from a few that avoid gluten, most of my vegan friends only avoid animal products with no other restrictions
The average amount spent per person in our restaurant is over $100.
Never seen a vegan restaurant at that price point. Have had vegans complain that a $15 cauliflower appetizer is too expensive however.
Edit - vegans also tend to restrict their diets further such as raw vegans, 'whole' food vegans, oil avoidance is a thing in the community, as is gluten free.
They're not super common, naturally. The first one that comes to mind is Candle 79 in NYC, which I think is at about that price point. Maybe a little below, but I wouldn't be surprised if a vegetarian restaurant of a certain caliber is going to come out at a slightly lower price point due to lower ingredient cost.
> The first one that comes to mind is Candle 79 in NYC, which I think is at about that price point.
Nah, it's significantly lower if you consider that booze sales are ~30-40% of sales in most sit-down restaurants. When main courses are $25, typical guest check averages are more like $40-60.
> I wouldn't be surprised if a vegetarian restaurant of a certain caliber is going to come out at a slightly lower price point due to lower ingredient cost
Unfortunately labour and rent cost the same no matter what you serve.
Huh. Opposite experience here in Toronto, where I've seen 5-10 new, very popular vegan restaurants in this city pop up over the course of 4 years or so.
The statistics may present this to be takeaway only, but, for instance, the oddly named Hogtown Vegan has become one of the more popular and well-received places in the city.
May I ask what city you're from? I'm curious as to whether this is a regional thing.
Calgary. We have a few vegetarian (lacto-ovo) places that are full-service, a few vegan spots that are fast casual, but that's it. A few vegetarian and vegan spots have closed in the last few years as well.
Edit - more steakhouses have opened in the last year than veg restaurants.
Calgary, being a fairly sizeable city, may be an exception, but a lot of our beef comes from Alberta. I'd say Alberta is mostly known for beef and oil.
Heck, you guys have the Calgary Stampede - the last time I travelled out there I made sure to grab myself the nicest reasonably priced steak I could - Alberta's beef is known across this country.
Confirms what I was thinking about it being regional. I imagine other states and provinces with similarly agriculture focused behaviours would see the same result.
Of course, we do still have a metro area of ~1.4 million with a large proportion of immigrants both from abroad and within Canada. We're quite cosmopolitan. We've had quite a few restaurants on all the relevant awards lists for restaurants. Beyond Burgers sell great, every A&W here was fairly full when they came out. It just hasn't really caught on at price-points higher than fast food.
Vegetable forward restaurants are a thing, but I have it on good authority that they still sell a pretty large volume of meat and fish.
Not sure what what city you're in, but even the high-end restaurant where I live (Alinea in Chicago, about $800-1200 for two people) gladly caters to vegan preferences.
With the exception of steak houses (not fine dining IMO) there are always vegan options in my experience.
There's a difference to catering to vegan preferences (every high end restaurant does that) and actually selling a significant amount of vegan meals. Or being able to open a vegan restaurant at Alinea's price-point.
In my experience, vegan items sell fairly well, vegetable based items in general sell very well, but meals that are vegan from start to finish are less than 1% of clients. As in, serving 100 meals per day, we'll get one strict vegan per week.
Every high end restaurant is doing more vegetables; but guests still expect meat for the main course.
Complete vegan meals? Sure, I believe that. Overall percentage of people who are vegan is very small. And in a fine-dining experience, omnivores will lean toward meat.
I have an acquaintance who is vegetarian, with one exception: Michelin-starred restaurants.
Even if only a small percentage of people are vegans, you only need one vegan in a group of people to pick a place that offers vegan food. Vegan food is also a safe bet for the larger group of vegetarians. That means more places want to offer some good vegan options, which in turn makes more people try vegan food, and makes it easier to be a vegan.
I’m not a vegan nor a vegetarian, but I often find myself ordering vegan dishes because they seem more healthy for myself and the environment. There are so many types of food these days where vegan is not a compromise.
Nassim Taleb makes precisely this argument about the power of stubborn minorities. Which I think is 99% great.
Though I think the medium term equilibrium is just that more establishments will need to do better than a half-ass salad for a vegan offering. Which is 100% great.
Stubborn minorities also lead to the "Tyranny of the Minority" and cause widespread anger among the silent majority of moderates who do not foist their preferences onto others. It leads to reduced freedoms all across society.
If you frequently go to places to eat, I think it’s entirely reasonable for a vegan friend to tell you what their dietary preferences are. Other than that, it looks like your problem is with a specific person.
Eating meat is better for the environment in the long run.
If human population drops to zero due to climate change (which meat consumption contributes to), then the environment will be left alone and do great on its own! It wont even take more than 1-2 millennia for recovery, which is nothing in geological terms!
Compared to that eating vegan is just a feel-good half-measure.
Hmm. Meat eating is better for the environment because it'll see off humanity faster? Presumably along with driving the least economical car you can find, etc?
I see the point. I don't think it's the answer most of us prefer though.
Your argument is that meat is better for the environment because it will cause humans to go extinct due to global warming so the planet can recover? That's absurd
"The most intolerant wins," dynamic may explain much of it. The availability of vegan food may have grown because it is a complimentary good which lets groups that include vegans eat there. Previously, groups that included vegans either ended up in vegan restaurants, or didn't eat together at all. Other purity urges could seem to have the same property.
Your comment is correct, except that veganism is not a "purity urge", despite popular media. It probably is for some, but for most it is an ethical, health (as in, need to avoid cholesterol/dairy/etc.), or environmental concern. There's usually an external motivator.
I became mostly vegan (also known as flexitarian) because I want to reduce my meat consumption due to climate change. I now cook vegan food as much as I can while eating meat every once in a while.
Except there's a stubborn minority on the other end - people who want a meat offering. There are a good number of people who actually want to eat meat, and there are a few who don't want to go places without it. I feel like this will somewhat bound the growth of restaurants with only these options, though those with veggie alternatives can still grow. Not every one is okay with just rabbit food, though.
> Except there's a stubborn minority on the other end - people who want a meat offering.
That's a given, and vegans have an important role in the society to counterbalance it.
> There are a good number of people who actually want to eat meat, and there are a few who don't want to go places without it.
On the other hand, (I hope) the majority actually just wants to eat delicious dishes without big negative externalities.
> Not every one is okay with just rabbit food, though.
Here, I'm not sure whether you're referring to what rabbits eat (grass), what restaurants stuck in the past offer to vegans (what's left of meat menus and salads when you leave out animal products), or a prejudice toward any vegan food.
True. I'll guess (can't access the original report) that it's something like "expressly designated vegan version of main course items".
For example, this from the Guardian: ... the owner of I Am Doner, a pair of kebab shops in Leeds and Harrogate, said his vegan kebab routinely outsold chicken, halloumi and falafel. Made from seitan, a meat substitute derived from wheat gluten, the “voner” kebab sometimes outsells the lamb alternative too.
That said, wouldn't falafel be vegan? Clearly, precision is evolving here.
*adds Voner kebab to list of things to try (handy as I'm planning to be in Harrogate this autumn and Berlin next spring (the latter apparentl having a few outlets offering the stuff).
Falafel is vegan but its widely available from a variety of different vendors whereas seitan is a much rarer find.
I frigging love falafel but I were at a kebab shop that offered seitan, I'd order that (at least the first time) because I also like seitan and I can't get that at any other falafel place.
I'm surprised by the recent popularity of seitan. Obviously you don't have to avoid gluten to be vegan, but I've always had the impression gluten avoidance is adjacent to veganism. At least for vegans who cite personal health as their primary motivator.
Gluten avoidance is nothing to do with health benefits - it’s a constraint imposed by celiac disease. If you don’t have the disease, there is no reason to avoid gluten.
It depends, many places I've been you can get a falafel based meal to be made vegan, but typically they will include sauces not vegan, thus they are vegetarian meals by default. Not hard to swap the sauce to make it vegan though.
I don’t know about “typical”... the traditional sauce to put on falafel is tahini sauce which is vegan.
Some Greek places put yogurt instead of tahini which is not vegan, but I wouldn’t call that typical. I would call it a “too common aberration” and “a reason not to eat Greek falafel”.
The majority of places I have been put more than a single sauce. I've found mediterranean places love their sauces and it's something you usually get a lot of.
Falafel themselves might or might not be vegan (I've seen recipes that contain eggs, and some that don't), but it would almost certainly be served with a yogurt-based sauce.
Can't speak for every kebab shop but here it's typically served with hummus, tahini and sometimes an eggplant spread.
Edit - also the traditional way to make falafel is vegan as it originated as a fasting food for Middle Eastern Christians (traditional fasting rules dictate no animal products).
If you call anything that isn't carnivore food as "vegan" food, then you're labelling like 90% of our food as "vegan". That's obviously ridiculous, so I think it's more accurate to call food "vegan" when it's being eaten by someone who is respecting vegan principles.
What I mean to say is that I think "vegan food" is defined by the eater, not the makeup of the food.
Edit: I would like to understand what I could have changed about my comment if you felt it did not contribute to the discussion.
Well, apples are plants, and the adjective "vegan", when applied to foods, basically just means "plants and fungi", so, by definition, yes. Trivially yes.
But an apple isn't a very interesting case. What's more interesting is what TFA is talking about: an increase in orders of entire meals that contain no animal products from restaurants. It wasn't that long ago that it wasn't even possible to do such a thing at the vast majority of restaurants in Western countries. It may not indicate an increase in the number of people who eat mostly or only vegan food, but it certainly indicates changing attitudes about what qualifies as a proper meal.
I think you have it backwards. Vegan food is meant to show not only is it free of meat, but that it's also free of animal ingredients that might not be shown on the menu, such as butter. An apple would be suitable for a vegan, so could be labelled (needlessly) as such. A vegan is one who eats food according to those standards.
If a takeaway menu picks out those options that are entirely meat free, and also free of animal fats etc. They'll label that as vegan regardless of knowing or declining if a non-vegan orders it. Maybe they just like that dish.
I quite often do order vegan dishes, Indian takeaways especially, despite remaining a meat eater overall.
Many (but not all) dietary vegans are also holistic vegans, meaning they choose cleaning products, clothing, beauty products without animal ingredients and aren't tested on animals.
Same thing as 'vegan' imitation leather products: a vegan doesn't intend on eating their wallet or belt, but they won't buy genuine leather goods for ethical reasons. Thus, a vegan belt. For the same reason, a vegan would avoid animal fat based soaps.
Still humorous though, reminds me of the bleach drinking memes.
Considering all the different chemicals used in its manufacture, it is entirely possible that an iPhone isn't vegan.
Depending on how strict you are, plastic isn't vegan. The crude oil used could be considered an animal byproduct, as it is possibly derived from prehistoric animals ;)
So if a carnivore orders vegan food at restaurant, it stops being vegan? Well does that make sense?
In my opinion if restaurant offers only apples as the "vegan option" i think it's correct to call it vegan food. But since i guess vegan is not well defined property of food, as it's more commonly used to describe the people practising veganism, i'd draw the line in "food served or prepared that adheres vegan principles".
Unless that apple is an animal byproduct, yes, technically it is vegan (as are all other fruits and vegetables). Realistically though, no one calls single pieces of fruits and vegetables vegan, it's more commonly used to refer to dishes
>I think it's more accurate to call food "vegan" when it's being eaten by someone who is respecting vegan principles.
So if I order and eat Thai food it is American food because I'm American, but if I was Thai it would be Thai food?
>What I mean to say is that I think "vegan food" is defined by the eater, not the makeup of the food.
By definition, it is defined by the makeup of the food
> What I mean to say is that I think "vegan food" is defined by the eater, not the makeup of the food.
A lot of the debate under your comment is stemming from the difference between vegan people and vegan food.
In French we have three words. Vegatarien, Vegetalien, Vegan.
Vegetalien means vegan but it's only used in the context of what food the person eats. While vegan was more about the lifestyle and not wearing leather/fur, etc. Although recently the term vegan is used for food more and more, it's simpler.
That doesn't make sense. A huge amount of vegan dishes have never been made with animal products and were never designed to be made with animal products
A vegan is someone who refuses to eat any animal products.
I don't see why all traditional dishes that don't contain animals products should suddenly be labeled vegan. They are suitable for vegan people but I don't want veganism to hijack traditional cultures.
>A vegan is someone who refuses to eat any animal products
Yes, that is the definition of vegan as a noun. As an adjective vegan is describing food using or containing no animal products
i.e. traditional dishes that don't contain animal products are technically vegan, just like all other dishes that don't contain animal products
It's absolutely not hijacking traditional culture. I'm not mandating they call that dish vegan, I'm not saying that it is an american vegan dish, I'm simply saying that there are plenty of traditional dishes that are vegan by definition. Hummus, as an example
Vegan as an adjective is a new term, or at least its use has exploded. This has happened partly for political purposes to hijack aspects of culture, and partly for marketing purposes as a result of this.
Those are unfounded assumptions and opinions. It also doesn't change the fact that that is the current definition of vegan. You can use the word however you want, but the way I'm using it is correct based on the dictionary definition
It’s interesting, under your definition whether something is vegan depends on who is making it.
If your family just happens to make a 4-bean salad without meat, then for you that’s omnivorous.
If I make the exact same salad, but my family growing up typically would have put bacon in it, then that same salad becomes “vegan food” because for me it’s a contrivance.
It’s a relativistic definition of what’s vegan and what’s not.
"Vegan" refers to people, not food. Food is only "suitable for vegans".
There are many, many traditional dishes that do not contain meat or even any animal products. I see no reason to suddenly label them "vegetarian" or "vegan".
But when people work hard to make a burger without any animal products then it does make some sense to call the result "vegan food" in that it was made specifically to suit vegan people.
> "Vegan" refers to people, not food. Food is only "suitable for vegans".
Partially correct.
Vegan, the noun, refers to a person who does not eat or use animal products.
Vegan, the adjective, means using or containing no animal products.
>There are many, many traditional dishes that do not contain meat or even any animal products. I see no reason to suddenly label them "vegetarian" or "vegan".
They are vegan by definition
>But when people work hard to make a burger without any animal products then it does make some sense to call the result "vegan food" in that it was made specifically to suit vegan people.
Perhaps that is your modern interpretation of what "vegan" means, but it is not accurate. Hummus, for example, is a vegan dish regardless of having never contained animal products, and regardless of whether or not the person eating it is vegan.
It sure is. I wouldn't call it a satisfying meal though. It's not particularly meaningful to anyone to say that an apple on a restaurant menu is vegan (if such a restaurant even exists)
Right. I looked for that info. Maybe I'll look again. Watch this space.
OK, found the British Takeaway Campaign 2017 report, https://jeweb-11431-s3.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/applicatio... - It's a pretty detailed and interesting report, but for everything in there it doesn't provide this data point. Overall, it does mention: Spending on takeaway grew to £9.9 billion in 2016, up more than a third (34%) since 2009 (£7.4 billion).
Still looking for the rankings / market share... OK, here's that, from the Mirror of all places, but referencing a 2017 report by Paymentsense, which tracks payments.
The top 10 takeaways:
Chinese - 35 per cent
Indian - 24 per cent
Pizza - 13 per cent
Fish and Chips - 7 per cent
English - 4 per cent
Italian - 4 per cent
Burgers - 3 per cent
Thai - 2 per cent
Mexican - 1 per cent
Turkish - 1 per cent
I recently adopted a vegan diet and have made good progress with weight loss. I attribute this to veganism providing me with a very simple rule that allows me to instantly reject a large number of the junk food options that cross my path, which I previously would have eaten thoughtlessly.
I miss cheese on pizza, but have otherwise not found myself lacking in tasty and nutritious options
> Vegan food, done well, is pretty great. But there's a steep learning curve with the spices etc, so I tend to eat out for it
Agreed - it took a good number of weeks of our weekly meal prep before I felt comfortable adding actual flavor to the dishes. It definitely is something you acquire quickly, though. Meat and dairy are good flavor-enhancers so becoming vegan overnight was rough from the flavor profile perspective.
Luckily there are plenty of resources to help out and I got a handle of it in no time. You learn what to swap out and how to get the right texture with things like tempeh, tofu etc and all that.
I gave the article three of my best guesses at which domains I should allow javascript for, and it failed to load anything but a blank page. Hope it was interesting.
There's no reason for them to be absolute, is there? If I eat one non-vegan meal every 20 meals, then I think it's reasonable to say my diet is 95% vegan.
> If I drink only at weekends, am I a semi-teetotaller? That's ridiculous.
I've been tee-total for over 10 years. I've sipped someones drink a handful of times to see what it tasted like, can I not say I was tee-total anymore?
The definitions are more about proclamations. If today I decide to be a vegan, then tomorrow I will call myself a vegan despite having only abstained for 24 hours so far. If I decide to eat meat a couple times a month then I'll tell people I'm predominantly vegan, they understand what I mean.
Definitions of social things are never that rigid. Was my grandmother a teetotaler? The only alcohol she ever consumed for the last 70 years of her life was a tiny bit of wine during communion every few weeks.
These definitions are rigid. Anyone can do something they are not supposed to once in a while but 'vegan' and 'vegetarian' do mean that you refuse to eat animal products or meat, not that you don't eat much of them.
> Anyone can do something they are not supposed to
What do you mean not supposed to? My grandmother wasn't supposed to drink? Her being a teetotaler was just the result of her daily choices. That's what eating vegan meals is for me.
Do you have to explicitly choose to be a vegan? If prisoners were fed 100% vegan diets and had no options for outside foods, would they be vegans? I guess I'm wondering if intent matters just as much as action, or is one or the other good enough?
There is a downside to insisting on the purity of that definition. In the wild, vegetarian fundamentalism puts people off choosing vegetarian options, because going all the way is too hard for many. Net result is more meat consumption.
Ironically, this attitude is harmful to the environment and to animals.
If we have friends over, and decide on an Indian takeaway. We might order two vegan mains, two meat, and two vegan side dishes are shared between all of us. What's your term for that?
Given the site's market and the story, semi-vegan seems a reasonable compromise to describe many takeaway orders.
You're describing an order that is neither vegan nor vegetarian. It's no different from a "normal" (for lack of a better word) meal consisting of a salad followed by a steak and chips.
Most places have a far wider, and more creative set of vegetarian and vegan options than only a decade ago. Indian takeaways have had the wider range far longer, of course.
Not that TFA mentioned either, but semi- seems a helpful shorthand to me, to describe changing habits, as we increasingly don't want meat every meal. Even if most people choosing those meals probably never think to describe themselves as semi-vegan yet. :)
Too bad that vegan food is mostly carbs and tasteless stuff like tofu. There are so many tasty and healthy vegetables and great veggie recipes but you have to cook at home because you can't find them outside.
Raw, uncooked tofu may be tasteless, but I'm not really one for grabbing a raw chicken breast either. Marinades go a long way with tofu, as does which method you cook it.
At a very superficial level to this omnivore, vegan food appears to be moving away from tofu and more towards Impossible Meat. And that's a step backwards from this omnivore's perspective. I like vegan burgers because they contain lots of tasty ingredients like black beans, corn & cauliflower. I don't want pseudo-meat because I still eat meat occasionally. Hydrolized Pea Protein is not "real food" IMO.
As for tofu: marinate in maple syrup and tamari, then roast. And I first had that at a restaurant.
Couldn't agree more. Inspite of being a hardcore meat-eater, I often enjoy authentic vegan food because of the actual plant based ingredients such as beans, beatroot and corn. The flavors come together quite nicely in an old school veggie bean patty. The trend with impossible meats disappoints me.
It sounds like maybe you've only seen what passes for vegan options at meat-and-potatoes restaurants.
The general rule of thumb is, don't eat a dish that the chef probably isn't eating themself. They probably haven't put any love, or even thought, into it.
That's the one thing that keeps me away from a lot of vegan food, as much as I do admit that vegan food has gotten way better than it used to be.
I have a voracious appetite, and the best way I've been able to prevent myself from gaining weight again is to limit my carb and sugar intake. I'm occasionally tempted by vegan food, but when I find out the nutrition info, I know I can't sustain just consuming a ton of carbs. Maybe if I didn't have a job where I have to sit down in front of a computer all day, things would be different.
Yes, that's my biggest gripe with vegetarian (and even more so vegan) restaurants. Usually most of the menu is hyper-carby unhealthy dishes. At the same time they can easily be more expensive than the normal restaurants nearby -- they're targeting the hip upper-middle-class folk.
Those "mostly carbs" you're referring to include a ton of fiber, which is something the diehard meat eaters desperately lack in their diet. And the "tasteless stuff like tofu" does as much to demonstrate your lack of knowledge on the subject of veganism entirely, as well as the fact that you've never eaten well-prepared tofu.
Well, I'm on a carb-free diet right now and believe it or not, my food is full of vegetables and greens. The only kinda tasty tofu I had was full of sause (sugars and oils), or fried. I don't think either of them is healthy. My conclusion is that if you want to eat healthy the only option is to cook your own food.
Sounds like you've never tried well prepared vegan food. If the meal you had was mostly carbs, that's the fault of whoever made the dish for not properly balancing the macros. And obviously plain, unseasoned, poorly cooked tofu will be flavorless. Boil a chicken breast, eat it with no seasoning, and let me know how it is. Properly prepared, vegan food can be just as tasty as non-vegan food
Based on anecdotes and my social circles, the number of people completely avoiding meat hasn't changed. But omnivores adopting a semi-veg lifestyle has increased.
If I had to pick one thing, I'd say environmental concerns are the main reason my omnivore friends and colleagues are eating less meat.